Back to Yoga - Week 3 - Asteya - Non-Stealing
Patanjali's Yoga Sutra II.37:
asteyapratisthayam sarvaratnopasthanam
When abstention from stealing is firmly established, precious jewels come.
In Deborah Adele's Book - The Yama and Niyamas: Exploring Yoga's Ethical Practice, she writes that "Asteya, or non-stealing, calls us to live with integrity and reciprocity. If we are living in fears and lies, our dissatisfaction with ourselves and our lives leads us to look outward, with a tendency to steal what is not rightfully ours."
I like how Deborah breaks down a few concepts regarding each jewel so that some light is shone on it in a new way, maybe a way we have not thought of before.
For Asteya Deborah has written about Stealing from Others, Stealing from the Earth, Stealing from the Future, Stealing from Ourselves, Shifting Our Focus and Building our Competence. I'll only elaborate a bit on a few of these so please read her book to delve more into these ideas and also more of the Questions for Exploration at the end of each chapter.
Stealing From Others
Deborah writes, "An outward focus leads us to compare ourselves to others and send our energy into their lives in unhealthy ways. When we compare ourselves to others, we either find ourselves lacking, which makes us feel somehow cheated, or we find ourselves superior, which leaves us feeling somewhat arrogant."
This comes from a place of unhappiness with our own situation. When we genuinely care for others we can find ways to be supportive and uplifting.
Stealing From the Earth
Daily we steal from the earth in a way that is becoming irreversible. I like how Deborah puts it, "You wouldn't go to a friend's house for dinner, complain about the food, leave your trash lying around , and walk off with the candlesticks because you wanted them. And yet this is so often how we treat our world."
She goes on saying, that we are visitors to this land, to our bodies, to our minds. "The ownership of things is steeped deep in our language and culture and makes it hard for us to appreciate the extent to which nothing really is ours.
"Imagine wheat would happen if each time we took something, we gave something back."
Stealing From the Future
"We are not only stealing from the earth, we are stealing from the future and from our children and their children in such massive proportions ..."
"We have lost our sense of gratitude. Our focus seems to be on what we don't have or what we might not have in the future, rather than on the abundance right before us."
To me this truth seems a bit grim. I think to many of us we feel small and wonder how can we help, so we continue to get caught up in the cycle of seemingly not caring. I think it does take just making some small, but valuable changes to how we want to be treated and then we will begin to treat the earth in this manner.
Deborah writes that we must take the time to reflect and contemplate so we no longer steal from others, the earth or ourselves.
Some ideas Deborah gives to journal and reflect on:
-Notice when and how you steal from others through time, attention, "one-upmanship", power, confidence, and not being able to celebrate others successes. Notice what is happening in you that prompts this stealing. Try to counter this with ways that will uplift the other person in your presence.
-Notice where you are stealing from the earth and stealing from the future.
-Try and live as a visitor
With peace and gratitude,
Pam
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