It never occurred to me until I was at the Colorado conference that learning new Sanskrit could also include Sanskrit terms –not just poses. I certainly want to keep learning the names for poses, but during some of my sessions at the conference I was struck by how beautiful and meaningful some of the Sanskrit words are and how they can have such impact on our lives. So today I was thumbing through 1,001 Pearls of Yoga Wisdom and stumbled upon Santosha. Santosha is the peaceful happiness that develops as you learn to accept and love yourself. What a beautiful word! And isn’t that what many of us are trying to do in life: learn to accept and love ourselves?
I thought it was particularly appropriate to talk about in yoga class when many people are experiencing body image issues or may not be happy with how their pose compares to someone else’s. And then I found an article online called “Santosha: The Ease of the Heart” and was struck by the author’s description of Santosha as contentment and how contentment is a necessary condition for enlightment and happiness. Swami Shraddhananda writes: “Contentment is a requirement for peace of mind, yet we live in a culture that fosters discontentment. We are bombarded by advertisements that make us feel inadequate and promote a continual grasping for material wealth and sensual experience. We are taught to seek superficial gratification with no regard for future consequences for ourselves or the world. We become attached to things and people to avoid our personal discomfort. We are led to believe that satisfaction of our cravings, as well as our egos, will bring happiness.”
He continues with, “Contentment is serenity, but not complacency. It is comfort, but not submission; reconciliation, not apathy; acknowledgment, not aloofness. Contentment is a mental decision, a moral choice, a practiced observance, a step into the reality of the cosmos. Contentment/santosha is the natural state of our humanness and our divinity and allows for our creativity and love to emerge. It is knowing our place in the universe at every moment. It is unity with the largest, most abiding, reality.”
While learning Sanskrit names for yoga poses is pretty much something only used in yoga classes, Santosha is meant for outside the yoga studio. It’s for the conference room and business meetings and at home with your family. Santosha isn’t just for yoga. It’s for our life.
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