Yama II: Satya

Satya is truthfulness. And as with ahimsa, satya begins in your own mind. We have to be honest with ourselves, first and foremost. We have to be authentic........

That was how I began my post on satya last Sunday. To be truthful, it sucked. Satya, like all of the yamas or niyamas, is not a "have to" kind of game. It starts softly and quietly, in the space where we can admit the truth about ourselves to ourselves. And that doesn't just mean me being able to say to myself, "you're a procrastinator." It also means owning what we love about ourselves and if we have trouble identifying those things, committing to finding them. Then we practice "owning it," as they say, first with ourselves and then with others.

Once we fully possess the knowledge of our truth, we can go about the process of living it. This is the hard part. Being honest with ourselves and others is a call to action. It requires us to step into conflict sometimes, and to make tough decisions sometimes. It can mean making ourselves vulnerable by sharing who we are with others, dropping the act of the role we think we need to play. But, if we start from the inside, nourishing and nurturing our truth internally first, then the process of living it becomes much easier.