(santosha anuttamah sukha labhah)
I was talking today with another yoga teacher about the idea of contentment, or santosha, as it's described in the niyamas. To me, contentment is all about gratitude. In my life today I find it easy to be grateful. But it wasn't always this way. I can remember being 22 years old and living in San Francisco. I was struggling with my addictions and spent most days feeling sad, lonely and lost. I had started going to 12 step meetings out of desperation, and miraculously (or so it seemed to me at the time), I was beginning to feel better. I stopped drinking, got a sponsor, made some coffee and a few friends. Most of the day I was still mired in my own self-created suffering, but hanging around a bunch of sober people in church basements lightened the load, if only for an hour or two.
I remember one of the things my sponsor instructed me to do was to write down every day three things I was grateful for. I can remember thinking "what the *#(*$ do I have to be grateful for!" She never explained to me why I should do it, she just told me to do it. She was tough, and I was scared to disappoint her, so I did it. I discovered the reasons "why" for myself (thanks, Jill!) Shifting my mindset to the proverbial "attitude of gratitude" made me feel better. Feeling grateful made it easier to get out of bed in the morning, to shower and get to a meeting and then go out and look for a job. It made it easier to conceptualize a life without mind-numbing substances. Feeling grateful for what I had in that moment created hope for even more great things in the future. But it started with finding some contentment for the things I had already.
I once heard some one say that "good things happen to good people who stay in a good mood." I like this very much. Sure, that's not to say that we won't get our share of challenges in life. Pain and loss are part of the human experience. But it's not so much what happens to us in our daily lives so much as what we think about what happens to us, for as Hamlet says: "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
I'm not much of a philosopher. I don't do well in the abstract. I like practical, measurable results. Cultivating gratitude, quite simply, makes my day better. That's my motivation for doing it. I like feeling good. I love altered states of consciousness. I'm still a hedonist at heart, I've just found new ways to feel good that don't involve blackouts and barfing. Eleven years ago I had none of the things I have now, even though I desperately wanted them. But I did have a place to live, my health, a working mind and the ability to take suggestions and to do, as we say in the program, "the next right thing." The days have added up and turned into years, and now, into a decade. I still have a very long way to go. I still have days where I'm full of piss and vinegar and all I want to do is complain about what's wrong about my life. But I haven't forgotten my basic training. I sit down, take a deep breath and start my list.
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