When I first became a yoga teacher, the training was mesmerizing. It’s a cliché, but it changed my life.
So after taking a few more workshops, I followed my teachers into the United States and took workshops and trainings week after week in different states. By the time I completed my second advanced trainings, I had quickly accumulated 1500+hours of trainings and a college tuition sized debt.
I don’t regret it. It got me where I am and I had a unique experience because of that. I was intensely trained and mentored to become a yoga teacher training facilitator, to be a part of teaching staff with the people I still believe the finest, and I was able to open my own training school in mere 3 years of graduating from the advanced training.
At the time, a Pyrenees sized debt was justifiable as I could hide behind the idea of being a humble student. I NEEDED to take workshops to be a student. But now I look back, what was lacking in my practice was Contentment, in Sanskrit, it is called saṃtoṣa.
We live in the world of accomplishing, achieving, constantly seeking for something better. Take iPhone. New phones show up and they sell out even the older models are still perfectly fine.
We would not have new inventions, new technologies if we are content as we are forever. But constantly seeking new sensations, new things, new certifications would not only burn us out but also we become slaves to the new stimuli of the society, and enter the cycle of endless dissatisfaction.
Once I completed a bunch of trainings, one day, I asked my teacher what the next training should be. He said, “I don’t know. Why don’t you sit with that?” and I said, “for how long?” Then he said “I don’t know but maybe you don’t need to do anything. Maybe this is it. And while you’re at it, keep teaching classes.”
After 16 years of teaching yoga, I can finally see what he was talking about. It is not the specific pose or the mantra but the delight in practicing the same thing over and over to see the small changes in our inner landscape that makes a difference in the way we live. In fact, it’s the small thing that is actually big. Observing our inner landscape and enjoy the process of observing, that’s contentment. Nothing to change or improve. Just as it is.
You wake up and do your thing to delight in the life’s small things. That’s contentment. Contentment keeps us on the path. Path of entertainment and constant stimuli would eventually burn us to ashes. These things like entertainment and excitement are not bad. But once we get attached and addicted to them, there’s a problem.
As a child, we learn to get bored so that we can use our creativity (wrote an article on this, you can read here.) to entertain ourselves. As we grow into puberty, life, once again, becomes a chaotic drama filled routine, then it calms down finally into adults but if we didn’t learn to be content, we fill the emptiness with other things. Some enter into another relationships, some travel to fill the void they feel in mundane life, some buy phones or sleep with Netflix on, or whatever else they might find entertaining. Until all of that wears off and we go again and again. Life, becomes an up and down road of consuming more and more.
But we can learn to practice contentment. And in order to learn contentment, we need to stop, focus on one thing, move slowly and observe until you can find a small shiny sparkle in every routine. Multi-tasking is too overrated. This is the reason some people practice mindfulness. When your activities become mindFUL, you do not need to fill with anything else. You are satisfied, content, pleasantly full.
Is it through the age that we learn to be content? I believe so, but it’s also possible to practice zooming in to one’s experience and find the practice of contentment.
Contentment keeps the sparkles in life. Not excitement nor new things. Beautiful mundane offers lifetime of sparks and shines.