Sorry, I know it has been a few weeks since I have done a newsletter and to be perfectly honest, even though I couldn’t make the time to make one, I enjoyed taking a small break from it.

But I am back at it again following the yamas as part of the 8 limbs of Yoga. Last time we looked at non-violence/ Compassion, this week our theme will be on Truth.

The yogic practice of satya (truth) focuses on carefully choosing our words so they do the least harm—and most good.

Speech is perhaps the most human of all our activities. Parents eagerly await their children’s first words; paradoxically, before long they can’t wait for them to be quiet. The spoken word has the capacity to inspire, frighten, and delight. It is used to announce birth, mourn death, and dominates most of the waking hours in between.

The world’s great spiritual teachings all acknowledge that what we say has profound power to affect our consciousness. Buddhism, for example, teaches Right Speech as one of its main precepts. In this context, Right Speech means speech that is nonharming and which has the intention to support all living beings. In the Yoga Sutra (Chapter II, verse 30), Patanjali presents to yoga students the concept of satya (truth) as a similar teaching. But he offers a slightly different slant. Satya is one of the five yamas, or restraints, that practitioners are to incorporate into their lives. (The other four are ahimsa, nonviolence; asteya, nonstealing; brahmacharya, sexual continence; and aparigraha, noncovetousness.) Because satya is presented as a yama, Patanjali’s teaching on the subject has mainly been associated with restraint rather than with action—with what we should refrain from doing rather than with what specifically we should do. The teaching of satya is not presented in this manner as an accident or oversight. In most ways, the practice of satya is about restraint: about slowing down, filtering, carefully considering our words so that when we choose them, they are in harmony with the first yama, ahimsa. Patanjali and his major commentators state that no words can reflect truth unless they flow from the spirit of nonviolence. And here Patanjali is exactly in harmony with the Buddhist teaching of Right Speech. It is clear that Patanjali did not want his readers to confuse satya with speech that might be factually accurate but harmful. Your dress may be the ugliest one I have ever seen, but it is not necessarily practicing satya to tell you so.

Read the original article here