"Yoga Board" Yama 3: Asteya: NonStealing- LauraGyoga

Transcript

[Music] hey everyone I'm Laura and we're on our third week of talking about the yoga yamas and this week we are talking about AA so AA is translated to non-stealing or non-coating and I feel like this is one of the Yas where at face value it seems pretty easy to follow so you're not going to go into the store and take something without buying it or go into somebody's house and take something that doesn't belong to you so it seems like okay most of us are probably practicing AA most of the time and you can kind of stick with it at that level um but of course everything in yoga has layers so AA is the same way it has layers one of the ways that we want to think about AA is in terms of yourself and this is one of the ways that we often don't think that we can steal from ourselves but a lot of the choices that we make or even just the habits that we have the thought patterns that we have can actually end end up stealing from ourselves and this happens by either moving into a pattern of constant worry or constant anxiety when you allow yourself to exist in that constant anxiety there's no room for enjoying the present moment and being content and being happy so you're taking away that enjoyment from yourself the um the other end of this would be taking away from your future health so if you are making decisions that are not good for your health that you're not exercising or you're eating things that are unhealthy you're taking away your future health because you're not setting yourself up to be able to do things and to have a healthy body in the future so you're taking away the experiences that you would otherwise have and you're also taking that experience away from the people who love you so if you become sick because you're not taking care of yourself you're taking that experience away from the people who want want to do things with you and that's really a loss for them as well as yourself because you're missing out on those experiences that you would have had those memories that you would have created together now we can do this with ourselves so we talked about taking away our own peace and happiness but we can do the same thing to other people so if we're putting our anxiety or our worry onto other people or we're causing them to feel worried then we're taking away their peace or if we are in a bad mood for whatever reason maybe you're having a bad day and you go to the store and you're very rude to the person at the checkout or you're very rude to the teller at the bank because you're having a bad day and you feel like you just don't want to be bothered by with being nice to people so by doing that you're taking away their enjoyment of the situation of being able to enjoy their workday or being able to keep their peace of mind so make sure that you don't try to push that off on others and steal their enjoyment of their day or of their moment the other way that we can steal from others besides just material things are ideas and this is kind of a big thing even as a yoga teacher I know I usually try to explain the way that I do my class planning or the way that I create my lesson planning or even my boards most of this information or even the majority of it really is not coming from my brain personally I didn't come up with the yamas I didn't come up with the translation of what the yamas are I'm just putting my own spin on it or my own interpretation on it so this is really not my information I'm kind of borrowing it from different sources and different teachers and it's important to acknowledge that as a yoga teacher you're really just a conduit for the information it's not your information this was a big thing um just a few years ago there were a lot of different situations where people were trying to patent sequences or patent the way that they were doing videos things like that they were trying to put their own brand on it and say that it was theirs and the yoga Community really had a strong reaction to that because there's this idea in yoga of the golden chain of information being passed down from year to year and letting the information be freely available so branding something or putting a copyright on something would decrease the availability of that information and in a way that's stealing from people I feel like yoga is supposed to be something that is freely shared the information is supposed to be out there so that everybody who wants access to it can use it for their own benefit um but in terms of being a yoga teacher if you take a sequence from somebody else or you take information from somebody else class which we often borrow things definitely just make sure that you give credit for that so if I use a sequence from say Shiva Ray I really enjoy her sequences sometimes I'll use pieces of it when I'm teaching my class and I'll tell my students this is a take on one of Shiva Ray's sequences just so that they know where the information is coming from and that it's not my personal sequence that I came up with so in terms of stealing from others we can take their ideas we can take their information um one of the things that I personally had run into with doing these YouTube videos was I was putting music on in the background and I ended up coming up with copyright infringements on my videos and they would ban them in certain countries because of the use of that music and I didn't even think about it really that I was almost stealing the music that those artists had created because I was using it in the background of my video without giving credit for it a lot of times I would just put a playlist on and whatever came up came up but um I wasn't putting credit on the video for whoever did that song and um YouTube has really cracked down on that so I've tried to get away from using specific music unless it's something that is just open for General use the other thing that you want to keep an eye on is making sure that you don't steal others energy and this can really go down a couple different Avenues sometimes when you're around someone and you're just very very over overbearing or very very needy where you need constant attention we've all met people who have that sort of Personality that sort of energy where when you leave them you feel drained be aware of that and try not to be that person try not to suck the energy out of other people you can also think about this as make sure that you do what you need to do clean up after yourself make sure that you do your work assignments at your job don't let that get put on to somebody else where they have to use up their energy cleaning up after you or finishing your projects make sure you take care of your own responsibilities so that you don't steal somebody else's time or energy having to pick up after you now going down to the next one um the environment this is a huge one for me the environment is something that we don't think about as stealing from we think that the resources are just readily available for us to take and in terms of yoga we come at this from a karmic standpoint so for karma there's this give and take there's this balance that we're trying to create and in terms of AA of non-stealing if you're taking Goods or you're using materials and we all have to do that we have to eat we have to have shelter um we have to have transportation so those are all resources that we're using to sustain our life and our lifestyle but if you're not using those resources to do good in the world to help others to better the situation of others you're really only using those resources to better yourself or to earn yourself money then that is stealing from the environment you're using those resources only for your personal use now I like to think of this too as um something that you can do in terms of your attitude so maybe you you have to work you have to be able to pay your bills and support your family but you know you can't quit your job and volunteer all the time because you have those responsibilities but you can change the way that you do things during the day the way that you go about interacting with people making sure that as you interact with each person during your day that you're leaving them in a better State than when they first encountered you make sure that you're making their day better in some way even if it's just being kind and courteous being a good driver being a good customer all of those things being a good coworker making sure that everyone who comes in contact with you ends up feeling better when they walk away from you and in that way you're using the resources that you're taking to sustain your own life to put more good out there than you're taking there needs to be that balance if you're taking more than you're giving then you're going to have a karmic deficit you're going to have bad karma from that if you're giving and using those resources for good then you're going to be on the positive side of your karma a lot of the things in terms of environmental impact that we want to think about too and we've talked about this with Aima is making sure that you're not using a lot of packaging that just ends up single use going into the trash filling up landfills or um even just a coffee cup thinking about if you get a tog go coffee and it's in one of those paper cups with the wax lining in it a cup like that takes about a hundred years to break down when we put it into a landfill and a lot of people think oh it's paper it's you know it's going to disintegrate pretty quickly but because of the way that they line it to hold a hot beverage it's very strong and it takes longer than we're going to be on this planet for it to break down so by taking all of those single use items and throwing them in the trash and then filling up the landfill we're stealing that space we're stealing those resources from something that could have been used for something else or that could have just maintained its natural beauty so we have to think about the way that our decisions have this ripple effect now right along the same lines in terms of animals in terms of our diet and in terms of the clothes that we wear when we eat meat or we wear leather or we consume Dairy we are stealing either an animals life or their experience when dairy cows have their baby calf taken away so that their milk can be used for dairy we're stealing that calf so that we can have their milk instead of that calf and it's a horrible experience for the mother but we're really stealing a life when we eat meat or we wear leather or any kind of animal product so we need to think about that the animal is not willingly giving its life to us we're taking it forcefully that's probably one of the most common forms of stealing that we find in day-to-day life that a lot of people people even who practice yoga do that very regularly so think about your diet think about the impact that that's having and how much resource you're taking you also want to think about in terms of meat production meat production just to make a pound of beef takes a huge amount of water and a huge amount of grain and a huge amount of fossil fuel to transport that meat once it's butchered to transport it to wherever it needs to go so all of those resources put together it's a huge amount that you're using just for one meal say whereas if you were vegetarian the impact that you're having by eating a plate of vegetables is tremendously smaller it's much less water that takes to grow that it's much less fossil fuel that it takes to transport that and then you have the added bonus that you're not taking a life in order to sustain your own life so it's really important to think about it on all these different levels so the one thing that I didn't get to touch on on time um and I'll try try to be concise with this because I don't want to steal your time but being chronically late is a way of stealing other people's time and I experienced this sometimes when people are late for appointments to see me I'm there and I have to wait for them to get there and I can't really do anything else in the meantime at least any major projects CU I have to be there and I have to wait until they get there and if this is something that you chronically do if you're always late you're taking little bits of people's time and of course we know time is the one thing that we cannot get more of our time is very precious so if you have a tendency to always be late you're putting your time above the needs of other people's time just take that into account make sure that you're not stealing time everybody's late sometimes it's totally fine you know we all get stuck in traffic and things like that but make sure it's not a habitual pattern where you're always taking other people's time the other way that time can be stolen is by not being prepared so if I showed up to teach my yoga class and I didn't have have my lesson plan done for the week and I didn't know what I was teaching and I just kind of sat there and thought about H what do you guys want to do this week what what should we talk about what kind of poses do you want to do I would be wasting their time because they showed up there ready to do a yoga practice and they're expecting me to have done my preparation as the teacher to give them a good practice and an organized practice so it's up to me to show up prepared and give them what they're expecting so that I'm not wasting their time so after we look at all these different layers of AA of non stealing of not taking more than you need to sustain yourself we bring this into our physical practice and for this week our physical practice our haa practice the way that we do our our ASAS is going to be about balance but not so much the kind of balance that you're thinking of not so much you know standing on one foot kind of poses it's going to be more more of a sequence that creates balance within our body a lot of times either the front or the back of the legs are tighter or the front or the back of the trunk we have these imbalances that throw us off when we feel imbalanced when we're off our Center that's when we try to grab and pull things toward us we try to fix that imbalance usually from external sources and it's not the way that actually works to fix our imbalance we have to create balance from an inner space so our practice is going to work on balancing some different areas that are usually out of balance and then our prama we're going to do an inhale retention a hold at the top of the inhale because that's a really full part of our breath it gives us that feeling of already being full already being complete and not needing to pull additional things toward us to feel that completeness the Mantra that I used for the this practice is and each piece of that Mantra cleanses a different thing cleanses greed cleanses want cleanses passion so that we can exist in that state of balance and peace if you prefer the English version of that you can say I have everything I need that's a really good Mantra even during the day if you're going about your day and you have that feeling of want or need or need to draw things toward you so that you can feel like you have enough use this Mantra I have everything I need the mudra that we're going to use is the samuta mudra which is also called the treasure chest which I really like and it's just cupping the hands one over the other to create this little enclosed space that's your treasure chest for women it's left hand on top for men it is right hand on top so those are the components that we're going to pull into our practice to really embody this idea of AA of not stealing of not needing more than is necessary to sustain our life so that there's enough for others to use as well thank you for joining me