Satya: Making room for more than one truth

As we move through our Year of Skillful Living, August brings us into intimate conversation with Satya. Building upon our recent practice of Santosha—learning to find contentment with what is—truthfulness asks us to take the next step: to see reality clearly, speak it courageously, and hold space for complexity.

But let me go deeper and beyond by-the-book yoga philosophy in this post.

Personally, I think Satya should come next to Ahimsa (sorry, Patanjali, but hear me out), because truthfulness without care can very easily become cruelty dressed up as honesty. We have all probably encountered some version of “I’m just telling the truth” used as permission to be unnecessarily harsh, dismissive, or self-righteous. And while Satya asks us not to distort what is true, Ahimsa reminds us that how we carry that truth matters, too.

When telling the truth is the easy (and hurtful) part

A few weeks ago, I found myself reflecting on a disagreement within the larger yoga community. I won't revisit the issue itself here, because this isn't really about who was right or wrong. What stayed with me was the way people spoke about one another. (And that included myself, albeit not publicly. Just with a few trusted friends.)

Everyone had a position. Everyone had reasons for believing what they believed. But somewhere along the way, expressing one's own truth seemed to require discrediting someone else's.

I caught myself thinking about how often we do this outside these very public conversations, too.

Sometimes, we become so invested in being heard, understood, or validated that we start treating another person's perspective as a threat to our own. Sometimes, our logic becomes this: for my experience to be true, yours must be somehow less true or more flawed.

The space between differing realities

This is the part of Satya that I find the most interesting: the space between what I know to be true from where I stand, and what another person knows to be true from where they stand.

I don't mean that there are no facts, or that truth is simply whatever we decide it is. Facts do matter. But so much of what we experience with one another is filtered through context—our histories, relationships, expectations, fears, values, even what we happened to notice in a particular moment. Two people can walk away from the same conversation with very different accounts of it, without either one necessarily lying.

I think we get into trouble when we assume that acknowledging someone else's reality somehow weakens our own. We rush to correct details, defend intentions, explain what they misunderstood.

Sometimes we are so busy establishing why our version makes sense that we stop being curious about why theirs does.

For me, empathy begins somewhere in that gap: in being able to say, "I can see how you arrived there." There is something deeply human about allowing another person's experience to make sense on its own terms, even when it does not match ours.

Maybe that is part of the discipline of Satya, too: not only speaking truthfully, but becoming spacious enough to hear a truth that complicates our own.

Integrating Satya into daily life

To weave truthfulness into your routines this month, consider these subtle shifts in awareness:

• Notice when you are trying to prove rather than understand. There is a difference between clarifying your position and needing the other person to concede that yours is the better one.

• This one feels particularly important to me: Separate intention from impact. You may not have meant to hurt, dismiss, or offend someone. That can be true. It can also be true that they were hurt, dismissed, or offended. One truth does not automatically cancel out the other.

• Be curious about the version you are resisting. When someone's account immediately makes you defensive, pause long enough to ask what feels threatening about it. Sometimes the discomfort comes from their perspective adding something inconvenient to our own.

• Let yourself say, “I don't know.” Truthfulness also means recognizing the limits of what we know. We do not always have enough information to make a judgment, explain another person's motives, or confidently decide what happened.

• Speak from your own experience. This is what I saw. This is how I understood it. This is how it felt to me. There is humility in locating our truth within our own perspective instead of presenting it as the only possible account.

• Practice listening without preparing a rebuttal. Understanding another person's position does not obligate you to adopt it. Sometimes listening is simply allowing someone else's reality to exist in the room without immediately placing yours on top of it.

Maybe the practice this month is not to become less certain of ourselves, but to become less threatened by complexity.

May you hold your truth with courage, and make room for the truths of others with compassion.

Love always,

Rachel

P.S. I am reposting another version of this on my Medium.

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