Happiness in yoga philosophy or let’s call it santosha which or contentment is a form of self discipline, it can be a skill and practice that not everybody have. Some people feel not happy with their live, grief, divorce or financial strain and they bring it inside their mind all the time and at the end it will affect people around them. Happy people simply just more grateful for what they have and prefer to be content with their lives all the time.
Santosha or contentment is one of the Niyama in Patanjali’s eight limb of yoga, it is a positive relationship towards our inner self. We observed ourself and begin to acknowledge what is inside us to accept every single thing around us, and it won’t stop only at accepting things and be passive but look deeper into it and find the cause within.
Happiness is not something that you can looking for, you have to brought it yourself inside you. It will be very difficult to come up if someone is always not happy with his own situation. It won’t appear if someone is always disappointed and blamed it on fate as why he/she was born with that situation. Many people have this kind of problem nowadays and thanks to the social media because we will always look at other thing instead of looking at our inner self. There is no gratitude some people life because their ego is so big that overshadowed their judgement.
When you come up at yoga place and you want to find your happiness, it’s hardly possible. There is no fancy pose, enlighten style of yoga, superb book or maybe fantastic guru that can manufacture or create your happiness. It definitely come into you and there is different process for everybody. The feeling of contentment only can be come up if you cultivate gratitude in your life, just start with very simple thing like we grateful for life we have because you don’t know what might happen tomorrow. Grateful that we can practice yoga daily and maintain our body healthy so that we will appreciate everything in our life.
Santosha will only appear when someone is always grateful for everything that happened in his life. How bad is the problem or how big or even if he/ she feel the pressure they will think that everything has a reason. This kind of people will train their mind that nothing can beat them except themselves. This mind exercise can be done in our daily lives and we can start with small things such as in our daily chores that we challenge ourselves to be better, to be more compassionate towards other people and so on.
Most of people not happy with their lives and they tend to blamed it towards outside reason. Thousands of reason will come up, and for each for every reason is always from outside of their self, for example the people around you makes you not happy, the weather or sometimes as simple as the coffee that you drink this morning can makes you not happy. Some people just simply see it as fate that can not be changed, or it is a Higher Power will that it won’t change no matter what. But it can be change because every human being have mission in this world be it grand or just a small, all is matter if it can make different for other lives.
One thing that we always remember is that there is a reason why you are born in this world, every human being have mission. According to Aristotle human being reach their peculiar function if they good at their rational activities and happy with that.Find your function or mission in this world and happiness will sprout out as other people respect you not because who you are but more to what you can do for other people around you.
Happiness is like a magnet, who will pull other happiness around them, the positive energy will radiate and reflect to your lives and people in your circle. Same as if you feel sad or sick, the energy also trigger other people around you, the glummy face you showed to others will back to you and you will see it as why people do this to you instead you see it as reflection of yourself. Happiness will not come out if you not make it happen, it within you buried deep inside you, and same like onion it has to be peeled of to see their inner self.
There is no other thing to cultivate santosha or happiness rather than exercise it into our daily life, try to count your blessings daily, be grateful with every single things that happen to you and try to look it in a positive way. Enjoy it every single minutes and let it flow as life is too precious to waste it with negativity.
Ingelin Parlina
YTTC August 2017