A couple of weeks ago the theme of my classes was santosha or contentment.
One can neither be happy all the time nor sad all the time. Cyndi Dale writes this in her book "The Subtle Body":
"Excessive joy consumes heart energy, leading to deficient heart energy. It also relaxes the heart so it cannot function effectively."
"Excessive worry and sadness burn up lune energy, leading to deficient lung energy & can cause abdominal pain and swelling."
Contentment is the balanced space between happiness and sadness, i think. & it lies deep within the self. So deep that sometimes we have to journey to find it. It is that part of us that remembers that everything is going to be o.k. and everything has reason whether or not we can see it. Contentment is quiet. Discovering contentment does not mean that we will never experience our emotional swings. We will simply be less apt to attach to these swings.
So often we rush through our lives trying to find peace and other good feelings in the externals of life. We get really attached to our material possessions, to how other people view us, etc. Rolf Gates suggests in his book "Meditations From the Mat" that we start looking at ourselves and world from the inside out. & that we realize our spiritual perfection instead of wallowing in our imperfections. So often we allow ourselves to get bogged down in our judgements, sadness and we feel that we are imperfect beings who have to work to fix our imperfections. Gates suggests that we see ourselves as the earth - stable, sound, and the nonsense that we deal with is the rain. The rain comes and the rains goes, but the earth stands - stable, sound..... content.
"Love the earth"
