On Practicing Asteya

When most people think of yoga they most often visualize people doing all sorts of physical shapes with their body. While this is true, this is only one of the eight limbs, also known as the 8-fold path, of yoga which was codified by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras. Patanjali was the first to classify a framework for yoga, but all corpus of works on yoga philosophy span over 8000 years. Each limb offers a path to travel and each connects to the others until the practitioner achieves a state of absorption and embodies their true self, Atman. The entire path of yoga is to remember our wholeness and return to our origins. To do this though, one must clear the lenses of our perception by working with our own hurts and obstacles to achieve discernment and clarity, Samadhi.

A practitioner can be said to be practicing Yoga by working with just one limb on the path. The bendy person practicing Asana, the physical portion of yoga, is practicing yoga just as much as the practitioner who is following the limb of the yamas or niyamas.

Yamas are the guiding principles for building relationships to the external world while the Niyamas are for building relationships to the internal world. Both these limbs together are the foundation of all yogic thought. The Yamas are the first limb of yoga, the Sanskrit word means “restraints, or things to avoid while on the spiritual path. There are 5 of them, they are:

• Ahimsa: practice nonviolence in thought, word and deed; practice self-love, cultivate compassion
• Satya: tell the truth; opt for silence if your words may harm others
• Asteya: non-stealing, even in non-material ways, such as withholding information or time
• Brahmacharya: use your energy wisely and with intention; avoid excess or overindulgence
• Aparigraha: you are enough and you have everything you need already, Non-accumulation, Non-possessiveness

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. We steal from the earth, we steal from our future, and we steal from ourselves. We steal from our own opportunity to grow ourselves into a person who has a right to have the life they want.

~Deborah Adele, “The Yamas and Niyamas”

The below text is my foray into practicing Asteya for a period of 3 months in the earlier part of 2020. What was intended as an experiment into focusing on one Yama and my day-to-day interactions in my relationships with people in my life, became a soul-searching of my past upbringing, my past relationships, and a deepening of my understanding of how I move through the world. What’s most interesting to me is how often I need to revisit this Yama, how often I falter on my practice and adherence to not steal from myself, and how often when I get stuck in a “fear” loop, I inadvertently steal from others.

(originally written May 9, 2020)

“Keep your cards close to your chest” is a mantra I’ve lived with all my life. I was explicitly taught, if they don’t know how you feel or how deeply you feel, they can’t hurt you. There is a lot of truth to this, but it is also incredibly limiting. To experience intimacy there has to be a level of vulnerability born by being open in feelings and expression. For years I experienced a life with someone who keeps his cards closer than I do and I realize now how it feels on the other side.

Marriage is not easy. Without communication it feels like a small piece of the soul being slowly stripped away day by day. I gained a partner in finances, dinner plans, and occupying space. Reflecting back to the beginning and my thoughts on the future I realized early that what I thought, well, this wasn’t it at all. I began a journey of inviting him to come along. I dropped my cards in hopes he would drop some of his. I invited him to everything, in the hopes he would find himself along the road. He wouldn’t budge. Every card I dropped he accused me of trying to get in his mind. Every invite declined for unknown reasons. Being constantly rejected by the person you wanted to be a partner in life is devastating. Each day just a little worse. Around the sixth year I knew something needed to change because I couldn’t sustain rowing the lifeboat with the both of us in it. My staying as long as I did is because I am incredibly stubborn but the price for that was energy drain and more. I was in a period of endarkenment that felt very much like Alex Grey’s painting with the same name.

There was a dichotomy between who I made myself to be in order to carry someone else through and another person that I rarely let out anymore but felt warm, comforting, and inviting. I realized I didn’t know myself anymore. I had stolen from myself the last 9 years by being with someone who didn’t want the same things in life as I wanted and wasn’t even willing to meet me half way. The whole time, this feeling of two separate selves, it was still me. The person who bore the weight of the family and carried them through, this very strong person, I intensely disliked her. I was strong and willful. I was also angry, stubborn, controlling, critical, cynical, and too definitive. This other side was compassionate, thoughtful, considerate, loving, and lost somewhere.

When I read “I woke up one morning to realize I no longer had access to the experience of my life…I no longer could remember any experiences of where I had been or what I had done….I was on overload and my system shut down. I had taken no time…for reflection or integration; it was just on to the next thing, full speed ahead,” in Deborah Adele’s book “The Yamas and Niyamas: Exploring Yoga’s Ethical Practice”, I realized that was me. And, I was doing it to myself. Because I chose the carry the weight of someone along for the ride but without the effort to sustain it by myself. This meant my calendar was always full, my time always accounted for, and my downtime spent crossing errands off the to-do list. I don’t remember much of the last 9 years. But I look back and see that every day I stayed, I was stripping away my soul, I stubbornly refused to let go, I was devastating myself. What’s worse, I was putting my child through this and he had no choice.

By the time I decided to ask him to leave, I was already on a path of getting back to myself. But when he left I wasn’t anticipating the crushing depression that was about to follow. Depression and the lethargy that comes with it helped me feel all the feelings I had pushed away. The feelings of anger, worthlessness, suppression, regret, and remorse all came washing over me.

Through the whole journey I found that side of myself I loved. In an effort to protect her, I pushed that part of myself away. The road I followed for years was no place for someone so weak. Compassion isn’t weak though nor is thoughtfulness and consideration. This is how I felt at the time, so I built up walls and boxed in that part of myself. We do all sorts of things to protect ourselves and this was mine. Once unchained I looked back once more and instead of feeling angry and unkind towards my ex, I saw an adult with deep afflictions who inherited very unhealthy coping mechanisms from his childhood. I saw the various memories I did retain as a movie reel that had striking resemblances to his own parents’ dysfunctional relationship. There was a part I was supposed to play and I fought against that role, but it was never going to be allowed by him to go any other way. It was like he was repeating a pattern for himself unconsciously and my refusal to play along but stay was the cause of the struggle.

There is a lot of wasted energy in swimming against the current all the time. There are times to swim upstream, just like some fish do to get to mating grounds. I let go though and let the current carry me. I became an observer to what was around me and allowed myself the space to just be, no striving or struggling. That’s about the time I realized I was practicing Ahisma and Satya through my journey.

Because I let go, the fear of loss released the tight hold. The part of me I didn’t like who was externally so strong was a shield with fear hiding behind it. While I was trying to get my husband to come along and build a more intimate life with me, he wasn’t ready to come out of his suffering. I was trying to carry him somewhere he didn’t want to go because he simply wasn’t ready. Any pull from me to be more intimate was stealing from where he was on his own path. While this may have been out of a desire for more intimacy, it was creating a space where there was less intimacy.

An outward focus leads us to…send our energy into their lives in unhealthy ways.

Deborah Adele, “The Yamas and Niyamas”

There is an energetic dance between two people in a relationship that requires both people honoring each other while simultaneously honoring the self. I’m still trying to find the delicate balance of honoring myself while simultaneously honoring others. As with everything in life, sometimes I falter and hurt others with careless actions or words, just as others hurt me. In these moments I go back to the foundation from which everything revolves, Ahisma. Compassion.

Relationship gives us access to Divinity through the portal of love. God is love, the attraction that brings us together. Oneness is the realization of our intrinsic continuity with all of existence and the source of existence. The recognition of our oneness is an expansion of the “self-system” into a holy context, to be a Godself in relationship with infinite Godselves, the entire evolving chain of being beheld in your lover as a reflection in a Sacred Mirror.”

~Alex Grey, “Net of Being”

First graphic adapted from: https://harlemyogastudio.com/asteya-non-stealing-you-have-enough-and-you-are-enough/