8 Limbs of Yoga BOARD #1: YAMAS- The No's- LauraGyoga

Transcript

[Music] from there [Music] hi yogis Welcome to our new series about the eight limbs of yoga we're going to do eight different videos talking about each of the limbs individually and I've already gone through the yamas and the niyamas by themselves in a little bit more depth but the first two videos we're going to talk about these as a collection so our first yoga board for the eat limbs of yoga we're talking about the yamas and the yamas are ethical guidelines that create the foundation of everything else that we're going to do in what is Yoga as a holistic practice so that's the key word here yoga in all of its eight parts and I think it's interesting to look at the way that the eight limbs are ordered because most of us myself included come to yoga practice through asanas through postures that was the first thing that I ever learned of as being a component of yoga and then all these other things that are underpinnings of yoga kind of came on later especially once I went through teacher training then I really started to learn what those things were but prior to that I think I might have had a slight awareness if anything at all that these other aspects of the practice existed but when you look at the eight limbs in order these are actually the things that are supposed to come first before we start to do the other parts of our practice and doing postures especially and there is a very specific reason for this and we can talk about that later on but we'll start to dive into exactly what these five yamas are so the yamas are different things that we want to try to avoid and we call them the nose of yoga so the yamas are telling us things that we don't want to do and the first one possibly the most famous aspect of yoga philosophy is a himsa it's something that we talk about a lot during practice and ahimsa is non-violence sometimes you'll call ahimsa or relate ahimsa to the practice of compassion compassion toward yourself compassion toward others making sure that you're not doing things or saying things or making decisions that are going to harm yourself or harm anyone else around you and this is also the reason why many people who practice yoga choose to either be vegetarian or vegan because we see the choice of eating meat or eating animal products as something that causes harm to the animals and we have a choice to eat things that don't require something for us to die to have a meal so a hamster is a big reason that you're going to find that a lot in the yoga community but you'll notice that the phrasing is non-violence um making sure that you're avoiding things that are violent on every different level so violence in your thoughts we can say really harsh things to ourselves sometimes in our speech so the things that we actually say outwardly to other people and the behaviors that we choose to take part in the decisions that we make such as dietary decisions or the things that you wear this might be classified in that same kind of category of not wearing leather some people choose not to wear leather because they see that as something that causes violence the animal has to die for you to create that leather product and that ripple effect that it has of causing harm to that animal would be incongruent with the ideas of living by the yamas so there's a lot of different ways that people interpret these and you can obviously take it to different levels but I'm just trying to kind of show you some of the ways that this finds its way into the lifestyle perspective of being a yogi the next of the yamas is Satya and Satya means truth or sometimes you'll see it as non-lying um and non-lying obviously is just being able to represent things the way that they are in the way that you speak to yourself in the way that you speak to others and the decisions that you make being truthful in all of those things and a lot of times we will have stories that we like to tell ourselves or we can talk ourselves into things at one point I had talked myself into the fact that a certain job was going to be good and that I should take this job offer even though it involved getting up really really early in the morning and if I was being truthful with myself I would have said that that was probably a bad idea because I don't enjoy getting up early in the morning it's something that is a big struggle for me and in fact after I had worked there for about three months I think I was quite unhappy with the whole process of getting up extremely early in the morning and ended up leaving that job so I had kind of lied to myself in the beginning trying to fit myself into that position even though deep down I think I knew it was wasn't a good fit so had I been truthful I probably could have saved myself some suffering but um it was a good experience in self-study because now I know that that's that's really a difficult thing for me the next Yama is astaya and astaya means non-stealing not taking what isn't yours and in the video where we talked about austella there's some very interesting ways to put this into effect so if you are somebody who is chronically late you're constantly taking time from the people who are waiting for you that's one of the ways that you can think about stealing even though you're not walking into a store and grabbing something that you haven't paid for and sticking it in your pocket there's little ways of stealing that sometimes we won't even be aware of so this is meant to shine that light of awareness on those subtler aspects another aspect of non-stealing is our process where we tend to steal from ourselves more than anybody else really if you're not taking care of your health you are stealing time and enjoyment from your future self and from the people who love you and they want to spend time with you when you are older they want you to be healthy so that you're around to do things with them um but along the same lines if you're forcing yourself to do things that you really don't enjoy doing because you feel like you have to do them you're stealing the enjoyment of that from yourself because you feel like you have this obligation so there's a lot of different ways that stealing can creep into our life even when we're not actually taking money or taking possessions from people around us that don't belong to us the next one is a very interesting one which is brahmacharya and brahmacharya you will often see associated with celibacy and some people translate it to be restraint from sexual interactions as a way to contain your own energy and I tend to lean more toward the translation of brahmacharya being the practice of continence incontinence being that we have a certain amount of energy in our body and we have this ability to make decisions about where we put our energy to what we put our effort toward um where we let that energy go to and if we were incontinent with our energy we would be drained we would have our energy being pulled all different directions and we wouldn't have any energy left over for the things that we feel like we need to do it's like when you get burnt out and you've been working too hard and you feel like you have all of these obligations and all of these things that you have to do your schedule is too busy so your energy is just being depleted through those things maybe you have people around you who are very negative who are too demanding of you and that is depleting your energy so brahmacharya would be the practice of recognizing how you can contain and regulate your personal energy and then consciously make a decision about where you want that energy to go and some of that is going to be setting up boundaries and specifically in a work environment sometimes you might be asked to stay late for work and you might have to say no because you don't want to put that energy toward earning more money you would rather put that energy toward spending time with your family or doing some sort of a self-care task for yourself so that would be an example of deciding where your energy is going to go through the practice of brahmacharya that's just one way of looking at it so then one of my personal favorites is a paragraph and you can go into the video where I talk specifically about a party girl hunt in depth but a paragraph is translated as um non-hoarding or non-greed not having more than you need mostly in physical possessions and money and things not having excessive amounts of wealth and goods not having an excessively large home or a huge closet full of clothes having just what you need to survive and be content and be safe so that there's enough resources to go around for everyone to be safe and to have shelter and to have food and have water this becomes a big issue on a few different levels on the level of the environment of making sure that you're not consuming so much gas and so much electricity that you are taking more than your fair share for the nine billion people on the planet right now that's a lot of people and there's a lot of places that need to distribute food and water and things like that so thinking about if you are taking more than what you really need um the reason that I like a paragraph so much is because this is something that I really took to heart when I made the decision to downsize my living space from 1400 square feet to 192 square feet when I moved into a tiny house and I got rid of maybe about 90 of my possessions my physical possessions and I paired down my wardrobe to the absolute favorite things that I wear and you'll see me even in these videos wearing the same things over and over and over because I have a rather limited wardrobe so I tend to just wear a few key pieces and I've gotten rid of the huge closet that I used to have with just a an unnecessary amount of choices for things to wear so it was a process of paring down and experiencing and thinking about what the most important things are to me and what the most useful things are to me what gives me the most enjoyment out of my life and what gives me the most freedom because when you have that excessive amount of physical things it creates a burden because you have to take care of them and you have to clean them and you have to um pay for their upkeep things like cars and houses take a lot of time money and effort to upkeep so all of those things we have to make choices of what physical things we want to have in our life and how much is enough how much is enough for us to be able to do what we need to do you'll see in a lot of different practices whether it's yoga or whether it's martial arts or meditation or Zen training many of those practices follow minimalism where if you want to truly Focus your energy so think about brahmacharya instead of your energy being dispersed out to many different things simplifying paring down and then when you have that simple living environment you can put more energy into that thing that task that undertaking that you are trying to focus on whether that's the path of yoga or whether you're studying martial arts or whatever it might be for you there's a common theme of how to make that happen simplifying the other aspects of your life so that you're not as distracted your energy isn't as dispersed so the interesting thing about the yamas is that it is kind of closely follows this idea of the golden rule of treating others the way that you want to be treated not being violent toward others because you wouldn't want somebody to attack you or harm you or to kill you and eat you for dinner not lying to other people because you don't like to be lied to not stealing from other people because you don't want to be stolen from not draining other people's energy because you don't want the same done to you and not hoarding things because you don't want other people to hoard resources so very similar to that Golden Rule and um going back to that idea of the yamas being the first thing that ideally we would learn in yoga so think about before you even learn a posture or a movement of what we call yoga if you had studied these things how would that have changed the way that you approached learning how to do the postures because I know especially for me in the beginning of my practice I was much younger and I had a very strong ego driven practice I wanted to achieve the poses that looked pretty I wanted to do headstand I wanted to do arm balances because they looked really cool and that was very much an ego thing for me because I was on this path of becoming a yoga teacher and I wanted to be really good and I wanted it to um have that flashy kind of impressive quality of how wow she can stand on her hands for so long and look how strong and steady she is but that was a different time in my life and definitely a different time in my psychology until I started to realize and I started to study some of the philosophy underneath yoga and realizing that doing postures and doing a really strong practice can actually become a breeding ground for the other issues that we have right so we very often come to yoga as a way to relax and as a way to relieve stress in our life because we have these patterns that might not be the healthiest and then what we end up doing is taking the yoga practice and piling those same patterns right on top of it so I was in a pattern in the rest of my life where I was pushing myself really really hard in school in my personal life in my work to earn money to support myself it was a very intense period in my life and I did the exact same thing in my yoga practice I was trying to push myself to advance as hard as I could and as fast as I could and that usually doesn't work well when you do that with yoga practice which it didn't for me and um my body wasn't really a fan of that whole process so over the years I did end up tweaking the way that I was approaching that and understanding the fact that my ego can really start to rear its head in my practice and things like being self-critical as well when I would do a pose and I would think well that's not good enough I'm not trying hard I'm not practicing enough those were the things that I would also be saying to myself very frequently in other aspects of my life so once I started to notice that crossover it was that opportunity for self-study where I started to have an understanding of the process and I was able to watch my ego and start to check it when those things would start to come up as a pattern so watch that in your own practice because I think if we started out with this and I was being truthful with myself when I was doing my practice and I was practicing in a way that wasn't harmful to my body and wasn't ego driven then my pastures probably would have looked very different my practice would have looked very different but it was kind of a backwards process for me and probably for most yogis out there where you learn the postures you got bad habits and then you had to go back and fix them afterwards and that process of fixing those bad habits is really an ongoing thing we're always sliding back into bad habits recognizing it through self-study and then going back down that path of trying to balance it out and create a healthier habit but watch that process because the ego is strong and the ego is very good at sneaking its way into things that we think we might be doing from a place of being healthy but it can really come on any of the different levels it might be in your thought process it might be in the way that you're speaking to people the way that you're relating to people it might be in the decisions that you're making it might be in the things that you're purchasing if you're getting the fanciest yoga pants and the most expensive yoga mat so that you feel like your practice is important that might be something that you want to think about that your ego might be weaseling its way onto your mat or into your mat all right so this was the overview of the yamas our first Branch out of the eight limbs of our yoga practice so just one part of the eight pieces of the puzzle