8/27/26 Live Session Recording
This week we discussed the Niyama of Santosha (Contentment) and explored the 7th week of introducing a new program, focusing on the Integration and Relaxation phase of sequencing.
Kindly share what resonated with you or feel welcome to review the following suggested prompts:
- How might you incorporate discussions of the niyama of Contentment in spaces where contentment may not feel accessible to participants?
- What is your personal relationship with rest and/or integration of new learning or topics that you might share to support participants?
Niyama of Satosha (contentment)
I started to have a great interest in yoga philosophy. I have been doing yoga quite a long time but it was only asana and breathing. Yes, I had learnt the theory a little bit before but I thought it was kind of boring to me at that time and I was more focused on achieving a good looking posture. Didn't really realize yoga is so much beyond that.
Finding contentment in a discontented world. That sounds like tremendous of practice, dedication and on going discipline which I kind of lack of and I have to admit those are my weakness that I need to work on. Contentment is from the connection to yourself, unwavering trust in self. A lot of individuals have difficulty of trust in self including me. Is it meant to be hard? However listening to affirmation and talking to myself in front of mirror every morning helped me a lot to overcome this self trust issue. For a long time, I let my ego control myself. I still hear my ego telling me whatever it wants to say but the difference now is that I do not let my ego to dictate myself. Today I can observe it and kind of know how to gently separate it from my true self. I found out this practice is not one time practice. This is the practice that I have to do every single day just like we need to injest food and sleep every single day. When I miss this practice several days, I know immediately I am going back to my old self. So our mind needs to be nourished as much as our physical body, definitely.
I enjoyed listening to the story of going to the wood and live there for 27 years. Maybe not 27 years and not completely alone by myself but I would love to live in the wood without the connection to the outside the world for 6 months. That has been always my dream. But at the same time I also try to be contented wherever I am at this moment and feeling gratful of what I have right now because there are happiness everywhere. Everyday not might be happy but there is a happiness in every day if we know how to perceive it.
Watching this week’s recording on Santosha felt pretty validating and comforting to be with my fellow “recovering perfectionists” and overachievers. I couldn’t help but think that it makes a lot of sense for folks in this class to relate to that, because we are literally all enrolled in a class that no one forced us to be in simply for the sake of improving ourselves and becoming “better” humans in service of others. A little ironic, lol.
In the module reflection assignment for this week, I talked a lot about how I have spent most of my life always striving for the “what’s next.” From getting into the “right” college, to landing the “best” internship, to finding the “perfect” job, it just felt like a never ending cycle of needing more and never fully celebrating or being satisfied with the work it took to get there. So contentment feels like a super salient and resonating topic for me.
I feel like contentment is both a practice and an innate knowing or feeling. It is a practice in the sense that I have to consciously slow down to notice and appreciate what is already here. I practice gratitude for the life I have built, the people I have in my life, the experiences I have had, etc. Santosha reminds us that we don’t have to be continuously chasing the next thing, and that we can be grateful for what we currently have in the present and recognize that it is enough. But I also appreciate how it doesn’t equate to not having goals or wanting to be better. Those things can and should still exist simultaneously.
I also think contentment is a knowing or feeling. For me, it feels like a genuine trust that I am exactly where I am supposed to be, even when where I am feels difficult, uncertain, or different from what I imagined. This connects to some of my previous reflections about learning to trust my own inner knowing rather than getting caught in the endless “what ifs” and “maybes” of my mind. Santosha feels like an invitation to trust and find contentment in knowing that I can navigate life without having everything figured out. It’s like true contentment with self.