Satya – Finding Truth in Your Yoga Practice
Satya is a wonderful element to apply to your Yoga practice.
When adding this element during your Yoga class, a greater purpose to each asana (Yoga pose) occurs. Even though you are performing Hatha Yoga (physical practice of postures), you move yourself to a powerful place of observing and awareness.
Satya is one of the key Yamas, or observances, applied in the Eight Limbs of Yoga.
Satya, or truthfulness, is the Yama that is about living a truthful life without doing harm to others. To practice Satya, one must think before he speaks and consider the consequences of his action. If the truth could harm others, it might be better to keep silent. This observance can also be taken inwards by being Truthful with one’s self. Satya in a Yoga practice is crucial in that it prevents the Ego from taking hold and moving the postures into a state that is goal driven and forceful.
Being Truthful in a Yoga class is a state where you observe and respect that you have gifts and strengths along with limitations and weaknesses. We change moment to moment, practice to practice, which requires us to shed our past practices and not try to achieve what was attained in previous Yoga lessons.
Equally important is to observe that the future has no relevance in a Yoga posture. Why think about trying to place your foot behind your head within 3 months when you are clearly experiencing resistance now?
Satya can be powerful in that one can see the strengths and limitations as simply being as they are. It is what it is. Nothing wrong, nothing right – just is. We stop judging our “performance” in the practice and in fact the concept of “performance” dissolves.
We practice purely for the sake of creating positive inner flow so even more awareness of self and existence can occur. Rather than solely practicing with this physical shell, we allow questions to constantly come to the surface. We move from the limitations of the physical and ego to observing ourselves from a new array of levels and dimensions.
The more we move into higher levels of Hatha Yoga (Ashtanga Yoga or Power Yoga), the more we need to allow Satya to saturate our inner gaze. This will act as a tool for us to not send judgments and burdening expectations inwards or outwards.
The practice of Hatha Yoga, then, becomes a gateway towards oneness/connectedness in our life’s experiences.
About the Author
How to Use the Yoga Sutras to Tame Your Anxiety
The Yoga Sutras Were Perfected, Passed Down, and Finally Written
The Yoga Sutras is the first official yoga textbook that offers the complete sequential system of yoga (also known as Samkhya) as prescribed by the Sage Patanjali himself more than 2,000 years ago. To understand the lineage, keep in mind that this system had been passed down orally from student to teacher for 3,000 years prior to the penning down of The Yoga Sutras. By the time yoga reached the Sage Patanjali, generations of devout practitioners dedicated their lives to the study of yoga, which would later be enumerated in the yoga sutras. Why were they so committed to this practice?
Back in the Day, There Was No “Medicine”
Yoga was first created and propagated at a time when psychotherapy and Western medicine did not exist. Yet anxiety and suffering did. Humans have always been anxious because that is how our brains developed evolutionarily in response to predation and threat. That is why humans have a negativity bias. We remember all that went wrong and focus on all that can go wrong in order to survive. But we are no longer just surviving.
Anxiety is a crucial component to our ability to remain alive in order to be able to procreate, protect and raise young, and ultimately keep offspring alive until their sexual maturity. Imagine what the outcome would have been if people just relaxed in the face of danger? That response would have opened people up to predation and death. Without anxiety, the nervous system would fail to become aroused. In turn, stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline would not be released and humans would not have been able to run and escape danger. They would have been hunted to extinction.
