How to Practice Santosha this week
*** This comes from the last round of Yoga Philosophy Challenges. If you’d like to stay current with the Yoga Philosophy Challenges, be sure to sign up here and get them straight to your inbox to participate ***
Santosha means contentment, and it’s the second niyama (yogic practice) according to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.
In “The Heart of Yoga,” Desikachar describes Santosha as “modesty, and being content with what we have […] instead of complaining about things that go wrong, we can accept what has happened and learn from them.”
Many of us may already have a practice of counting our blessings, but how many of us also count our disappointments as blessings?
It’s been proven that we can rewire our brains to change our outlook on life.
I’ve used this analogy many times before, but it works so perfectly: if you’ve ever been out on a beach cleanup or out on a mission to pick up litter, you’ll find A LOT of trash–and even when you stop “looking,” you’ll still find yourself noticing every little piece of trash around, possibly even for hours after the job is finished.
The same is true of complaints. If you are the kind of person who always has something to complain about it, it’s because you’re always looking for the negative. You can start looking for the positive instead.
Imagine if we tried looking for flowers instead of trash? (Metaphorically speaking, of course–you should still definitely clean the beaches <3 ).
This week, in the name of santosha, challenge yourself to write for 15 minutes each night about all the things you
‘re grateful for that day.
I say “15 minutes” rather than “list 5 things” because sometimes, forcing ourselves to sit down and write for longer than we normally
would allows us the time to really search for blessings. You may have listed all the obvious things in 5 minutes–now you have 10 more minutes to try to find the
positive even in the tiny, normal, or difficult moments of your day, to train your brain into seeing even those moments as blessings.
If you like learning about yoga philosophy and want to become a yoga teacher, join me for a 200hr yoga teacher training in Bali in 2020!