SANTOSHA AND RADICAL ACCEPTANCE
The month of August has challenged my resolve to stay grounded in santosha. Santosha, a yogic tenet of the Niyamas, encourages us to cultivate contentment within ourselves. Santosha has shown up regularly this month as I have continually moved through multiple spaces of discontentment. COVID-19 has forced me, along with millions of others, to shift and evolve in order to support my livelihood. Before COVID forced a country shut down, I had just reached levels in my career as a massage therapist that I had been striving toward for 5 years. My business just had it’s two year anniversary, I was booked out with clients 6 weeks in advance, and I was in a comfortable financial position for the first time in my entire life. COVID brought all of that to a halt, and in moments I had lost all my income. As we collectively progressed through the complete unknowing of this virus, my colleagues and I all tried to make the best decisions we could with very limited information available. As we continued to support each other through the transition, it became clear that we all might have to make very difficult decisions for our own well-being and the well-being of our families. Eventually we came to a collective decision to close and move out of our offices in June. The grieving that followed has been intense, as I poured a lot of myself into that practice, and it’s end left me feeling a bit lost. I’ve spent the last few months deeply feeling the agony of growing pains. But with each arriving challenge, pain, discomfort, I am trying to trust this process.
I met with students this weekend for Community Yoga and many of us came to our practice with a range of emotions on the heels of a week in which social, political, and systemic violence was garishly on display without apology. Many of us have had weeks emotionally charged, our hearts breaking at the physical, verbal, and emotional violence so easily distributed in our country. Many of us have had weeks filled with fear, stress, and uncertainty concerning our jobs, our health, our safety, and the safety of our families as we move through this pandemic. We are all experiencing a deep collective transformation, which has left a lot of us overwhelmed. When considering what we all are going through, how do we possibly practice santosha in circumstances so disturbing?
In contemplating that question, I am reminded of the practice of radical acceptance and how it can support the journey back to santosha. Radical acceptance means that we look at the present moment, accepting it as it is, without judgement. When we practice radical acceptance, that does not mean that we condone negative or unjust circumstances. Instead we look at them from a logical framework, understanding our current circumstances are a result of a chain of events. The current moment can only be the way it is because it was preceded by a number of other moments that predetermined it. Therefore, the moment is complete exactly as it is. When we review circumstances from this logical framework, we remove the emotionally charged intensity that accompanies the moment. We do this to prevent ourselves from getting stuck in our emotional or trauma response, which can often render us feeling helpless.
So how do we cultivate santosha amidst challenging and traumatic experiences? According to the niyama of santosha, the answer lies in gratitude. I don’t know about you, but to me gratitude has always felt inaccessible. Perhaps it's because we live in a culture that has framed gratitude as a state of achievement rather than a practice. Perhaps it’s because we have been fed messages that gratitude is only for the blessed few and not for regular folks. Maybe we’ve received messages that if we are to be grateful, we can’t have room for our other valid emotions like fear, anger, and sadness. Or maybe it’s because we’ve received messages that if we are not consistently practicing gratitude, we are doing it wrong. Maybe it’s all of these. But as I continue to show up for my daily practice of yoga, I’m participating in the unlearning of these ideas and deepening my understanding of what a gratitude practice can actually look like.
Gratitude is not a one-size-fits-all practice. Your expression of gratitude will be different than mine, and that’s exactly as it should be since we are different people with different experiences. For me, I find gratitude immediately accessible when I break it down into appreciating small and immediate moments. These are some examples of immediate and accessible thoughts of gratitude that have worked for me:
I am grateful for the ability to breathe.
I am grateful for the ability to have awareness of myself and the world around me.
I am grateful for the ability to pause and reflect.
I am grateful for the ability to cry and have an emotional release.
I am grateful for my ability to listen, receive, and deepen my knowledge of myself and the world around me.
For me, these gratitude statements allow me to move into a space of santosha and remind me there’s always opportunity to shift our response. Will we always get to santosha? Maybe not, and that’s okay. It’s a practice, and as with any other practice, requires consistency and discipline. Will we fail at times? Most certainly. But as we practice more, we begin developing habits that support an easier return to santosha.
When we work on introducing gratitude into our practice, we also need to make space for, and honor other emotions that will arrive. We will inevitably feel fear, anger, sadness, frustration. Those emotions are naturally part of our human experience, and completely normal to feel in our current circumstances. It also becomes increasingly important not to judge ourselves as we navigate these natural responses. I like to look at emotional responses as little alarm clocks for myself. When I get angry, that’s just an alarm reminding me it’s time to get up and take care of myself. I know that I will mess up, and I give myself grace and space to mess up. And each time I mess up, that’s just another opportunity to work on my practice. So as we move into September, a month of continued transformation and evolution, I want to encourage you to be gentle with yourself, show yourself grace, allow yourself space to be a human being, and play with the idea of practicing gratitude. We will become discontented, that is inevitable. But we can always return to a place of santosha, even if only in little moments of practicing gratitude.