Asteya - The Yama of Non-Stealing

Teaching

Dec. 6

Written By Rami

Northern Lake I, watercolour on paper by Rami Schandall, ©2020.

I am thinking a lot about the turn of the year — closure, endings, and beginnings. I am aware of a sense of impatience, hurrying forward, and a simultaneous desire to put the brakes on and slow down, maybe even back up a bit. Do you, like me, feel the loss of recent hours or days? How tempting it is to rush headlong forward, toward the next thing which will surely be an improvement on the old thing; or, to reach for the past, which now exists only in our (selective) imaginations.

There are still three weeks of December. There are days and moments to engage with, experiences to metabolize. The precious moments of this life are PRESENT only once — fleetingly so.

The third yama in Patanjali's Yoga Darshan is asteya, or non-stealing. Not committing acts of theft seems like an obvious virtue. More subtly, asteya also applies to speech and even to thinking — to not claim what is not ours, to not cheat, nor misappropriate. How do we steal, how do we take what is not offered? We may do so in unawareness, unconsciously; or, more deliberately, out of a sense of not having enough, of not being enough. Could this apply to this end-of-year and a seasonal hunger for what we don't have — for the future, for the past, for things as we wish they could be?

Yoga philosophy, as teacher Hali Schwartz reminds me, always offers an antidote to the problems it posits. A way toward asteya can be to remember sat or great truth: the fact of total interdependence, that we are never separate from the whole. When we REMEMBER interconnectedness deeply enough, a natural sense of responsibility arises. We can feel into innate completeness, and meditate on generosity. We can learn to not steal even from ourselves — to not steal the present from ourselves, to be awake to its essence, and our presence in it.

Yoga and meditation are practices that continually lead me back to this sense of presence. So too, writing and making art. All the art-making I do engages with the experience of authentic presence, and attempts to express some aspect of that — whether inward sensation or external interaction or both. In my Art Gallery, the landscapes paintings Land & Water are strongly informed by a sense of presence in PLACE, while seeing, or remembering, a geography deeply felt. That sense of presence is alive in the making.

If we awaken to deep presence and interconnection, natural responsibility matures: we are called to expand this practice to act in ways that make amends for stealing. So often we benefit from theft that we did not choose. If we are engaged in the practice of not-stealing, we need to be accountable for this debt too. In 2020, there have been loud calls for reparations, to wake up to the ways that capitalist societies have stolen and continue to steal from those whose labor is undervalued or unpaid. Since slavery and the colonial theft of indigenous lands, these processes continue as brutal and unsustainable resource extraction, and as human-rights infractions in industries all over the world. There are many, many ways to be honourable and accountable, to hold a sense of stewardship and care for each other and the earth, to act in generosity toward all sentient beings. Some Black, Indigenous, and social justice organizations I learn from, engage with, and donate to in this effort are listed below.

I have been thinking of asteya also as transparency. I experience the trials of this year as a requirement for deeper clarity as a thinker, teacher, and student. The process of writing through the yamas and niyamas in this series is one expression of this clarifying process. Naming my teachers is another. All I teach and write is filtered through my thoughts and experience, but those teachings are informed by layer upon layer of input from writers and teachers, who drew from teachers, who drew from teachers, who came from a mix of cultures and knowledges that are forever being discovered through different lenses. I am never working in isolation but always with many guides, friends, and healers, who support my practice and well-being. I name the yogis and teachers I currently work with on my Yoga & Meditation: Guiding Principles page, and I am happy to answer questions about sources, resources, and influences.