(This is part of a year long series, in which I’ll be personally diving into each of the yamas and niyamas. One per month. There are 10 so that leaves me with 2 months to review. The main text I’m using is this. I’ll be checking in over the month with thoughts, explorations, practices. I would love for you to play along.)
I’m just starting the chapter on Satya. This is not easy stuff, is it? I’m only a few pages in and already… ouch. Challenging, to say the least.
We all like to think of ourselves as basically honest and then we read something like this:
“When we are real rather than nice, when we choose self expression over self indulgence, when we choose growth over the need to belong, and when we choose fluidity over rigidity, we begin to understand the deeper dynamics of truthfulness and we begin to taste the freedom and goodness of this jewel.” (Adele, p. 44)
You can begin to see, too, how this grows from and builds back into the first jewel of ahimsa, nonviolence.
You can begin to detect the way that we then convolute all of these things and become trapped by those twists and turns.
How, for example, do we not hurt someone’s feelings and remain truthful? Sometimes it seems those things are not possible together.
But is it hurting someone’s feelings to tell them something that is necessary to their own growth? Nope. Not as long as we watch how we are doing it and why.
I’ve definitely been choosing nice over real when it comes to a personal situation that has created boatloads of shame and stress for me. Someone has stolen a significant amount of money from me and I remain quiet about their treachery. Is this right of me? I’m certainly not helping anyone who might be taken in by their lies and deceptions in the future.
Am I valuing my own sense of pride and privacy over truthfulness? (I don’t have the answer to this one yet but I’m sharing here as a first step.)
I’ll leave you with a quote from the very next page of the text:
“What is driving you to distort yourself or silence yourself?…Or as Carl Jung would ask us, what is so dangerous in the moment about the truth that you are choosing to lie?”
Like I said, ouch.