Living and observing us, humans, oftentimes reminds me of this anecdote: A missionary travelling to a place where there used to be cannibals and asking a local if they had finally got rid of this atrocity. “Yes”, the local cheerfully answers. “There are no cannibals left. We ate the last one yesterday!”

This topic has been fascinating me for a long time – the irrational behaviour of homo sapiens. Irrational both on and off the yoga mat. I would like to write about satya which means truth or truthfulness in Sanskrit. It is one of the five yamas or in other words, ethical rules for yogis. Like ten commandments but condensed into five. Don’t be disillusioned that yoga has a simpler moral code than Christianity. In addition to 5 yamas or “don’t do this”, there are 5 niyamas or practices of “do this”. And in addition to yamas and niyamas there are six more limbs of yoga. Yoga consists in total of eight limbs. It has a special relationship with number eight. When you turn eight lying on the side, it turns into infinity. But today I want to write about satya which means being true to oneself, being consistent with reality.

If people were practically minded and would not accept the distortion of the truth, Hollywood would be bankrupt of would not even exist. We would throw books with fairy-tales to the bin. So why do we rather believe in fairy tales than the truth? We know that our experience is dependent on our mental state. Even the most analytical of us slip from time to time and enjoy moments, films, you name it which are larger than life.  And not only this but why our five senses – seeing, touching, tasting, feeling, hearing – can lure us and distort reality? As the five senses have evolved together with us, the fact that they trick us on daily bases should evolutionally have a competitive edge. It is just that after all those years of existing and researching, we still do not know exactly why it is OK that we do not see or feel things the way they really are.

On the other hand, perhaps this gave us the edge that has made us the most dangerous and dominant species on earth. We are the most adaptable of all species – put a baby chimp and a small child together and the child soon masters the chimp ways, not vice versa. As children, we learn by playing, by combining a reality with different alternatives to it. So perhaps, when we get older and stop playing, we start fusing play and reality. We start to live in a bubble, an alternative to the reality. We may call it our personal reality if we like.

Truth is challenging. We lie constantly. To ourselves, to our dearest ones, to strangers. We lie in FB, we lie in newspapers. People with power and money lie to the whole nations. Lying is embedded in what we do and I guess there is none in the world who has never lied in her/his life.

And then these people meet on the yoga mat. And…. keep lying. Just by switching the reality, we cannot change our nature. A very easy manifestation of not being able to follow satya is that often people hurt themselves when practicing yoga. They go too deep and approach yoga practice as if it were a sport with the primary aim to test one’s limits. The idea of yoking disappears in this mental battle where the mind tells the body to shut up and just perform. What I am trying to say is that there is real balance and there is the illusionary balance. People usually start to practice yoga in search of a balance. But  they end up chasing the illusionary balance, another bubble to hide in.

Social media has done a lot of good things, I hope. But the way yoga is popularized in the social media, is not about sharing the yoga passion but rather about marketing, ego tripping or promoting consumerism. And none of it really matches with the idea of satya. If I buy new yoga mat, how does it improve my yoga experience? If I take a yoga retreat – will I be able to be this better and balanced person after I come back to meet my prosaic life? Yoga is not entertainment but like with most of the things in the social media, we have started to treat this amazing phenomenon like a product we can consume. The difference is that the products we consume wear out whereas yoga, when practiced regularly and with eight limbs, fortunately improves over time.

When I direct my attention towards myself, I realise how little I know. And I painfully realise how all I know about the world and the things around me are put to a test. But when I add yoga as a coefficient, I start to come out of my bubble. The reality becomes less distorted and the world, beyond our limited understanding, starts to make sense. Yoga is a way to glimpse satya, the truth.

When I teach yoga, I focus on the positive. But the truth is neither positive nor negative. The balance is neither + nor -. Whatever is your truth, whichever bubble you live in, I hope that you did not eat the last cannibal yesterday…

 

Further reading:

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