Write your thoughts and reflections on the yoga philosophy Satya.

I read “The Four Agreements” a couple years ago by Don Miguel Ruiz, and there are a lot of overlaps between those and the yamas. The first agreement is to be impeccable with your word, which I find correlates to the yama of satya, truthfulness and sincerity.

Overall, I think people like to think they’re mostly truthful, but when some of the examples came up, I started to think about all the little things that we say or don’t say throughout the day that may fall into untruthfulness or insincerity.

I was brought back to a time when I wasn’t truthful during a meeting at work but didn’t even realize it at the time. It was during a presentation to faculty about what marketing efforts we were taking to help their programs and SCTCC, and I was talking about organic reach through our  social networks. I mentioned that my coworker, Matt, and I write student stories. Then I gave an example of a story that “I” wrote and talked about the reach. The truth was, Matt wrote it. I didn’t even realize that I had even been untruthful. As we walked back after the presentation, he mentioned that he had written the story, and I was mortified. I apologized over and over, and he was 100% understanding, saying that people credit him for a lot of things that I do. But even that slip had let about 30 faculty think that I had written this great story that got a lot of interaction in the community, when it should’ve been Matt who got the credit.

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After reading through Nicolai Bachman’s description of satya, one of the items that stood out to me that more people would do well to embrace is, “It is our responsibility to separate what is actually true from the falsehoods and deceptions couched as truths.” This also goes along with Bachman’s statement, “I can change my mind when new and sensible information presents itself.”

I think this is so true of our world today when anyone who sees anything on the internet now thinks themselves a scholar. It is a responsibility we have to ourselves and to our community and fellow humans to make sure that information we espouse and are sharing is the truth. Maybe it takes a little bit more time and effort to seek out medical journals or scientific papers versus an opinion piece from a newspaper, but armed with the truth, we can make sure that we are helpful and truthful to ourselves and others. When we embrace that, we also make sure that we are holding true to ahimsa at the same time and not sharing harmful information or communication.