On Santosha, contentment, and the name that followed me home.
There are teachings we seek out, and there are teachings that seem to find us… Santosha found me long before Santosha Soul Collective existed.
During my 200-hour yoga teacher training, we were each asked to choose one of the Yama or Niyama and create a presentation around it — not simply explaining the philosophy, but finding some way to make it tangible. Something we could experience together.
I chose Santosha.
Contentment.
For my presentation, I brought beads and little cords and we sat together making Santosha keychains while we talked. We reflected on gratitude and contentment, but also on ourselves — why we had chosen teacher training, the poses we loved, what had brought us to yoga, who we were becoming.
At the time, it was an assignment… I didn't know I was choosing a word that would follow me.
When I eventually moved from Michigan to North Carolina, friends from my training gave me things bearing the word Santosha. They wrote to me about it. They told me that when they heard Santosha, they thought of me.
Somehow, this ancient little word had woven itself into the way the people who loved me saw me.
And over the years, my understanding of it changed…
Santosha is often translated simply as contentment, and for a long time I connected it deeply with gratitude. Gratitude is still one of the most grounding practices in my life. There is something powerful about stopping, particularly when life feels hard, and asking:
What is still here?
What is still good?
What can I be grateful for in this moment?
But life eventually taught me that Santosha asks more of us than gratitude when things are going well… It asks us whether we can find steadiness when they aren't.
I have practiced Santosha through grief and loss. Through starting over. Through enormous change and uncertainty. Through seasons when the circumstances of my life looked nothing like what I would have chosen.
Losing my mom changed me profoundly. And somehow, even within that loss, I've continued to find her.
In butterflies. In moments of intuition I can't quite explain. In the parts of myself that remind me of her. In the strength and love she gave me that didn't disappear when she did.
The gold butterfly that now lives within Santosha isn't simply branding to me. It is remembrance. Transformation. Connection. A reminder that loss and love can occupy the same space.
Maybe Santosha is like that, too… Not pretending that something doesn't hurt. Not calling chaos peaceful. Not convincing ourselves that everything happens exactly as we would have wanted.
But learning that contentment can exist alongside all of it.
The longer I live this practice, the more I see another kind of Santosha in looking backward.
For years, pieces of my life seemed unrelated. Human resources and Recruiting. Leadership. Youth programs and detention centers. Nonprofit work. Coaching and management. Athletics, gymnastics, dance, fitness and wellness. Teaching. Yoga philosophy. Building community.
At the time, they were simply different chapters. Now I can see them beginning to make a whole.
Each taught me something I would eventually need. How to lead. How to listen. How to communicate. How to teach. How to hold space for people who are having very different human experiences. How to build systems. How to trust my instincts. How to be strong without losing softness. How to ask hard questions and live with integrity and accountability.
Eventually, teacher became manager. Manager became leader. And somehow, eventually, leader became business owner. I am still learning that last one every single day.
Some days I feel deeply aligned — I teach, I move my body, I take care of myself, I accomplish what needs to be accomplished, and I can almost see all the pieces clicking into place.
Other days I realize I've barely had water and have somehow accumulated twelve more things on my to-do list. I walk around feeling like a flaming dumpster fire of chaos!!!
There is an ebb and flow to building something you care about. And perhaps this is where Santosha has become most real for me. Contentment isn't arriving at the point where everything is finally easy. It isn't complacency. It isn't giving up the desire to grow. And it certainly isn't pretending that difficult things aren't difficult.
For me, Santosha has become the practice of trusting where I am while continuing to move toward where I am going. Of recognizing abundance without denying difficulty. Of allowing strength and softness to exist together. Of looking around in the middle of a life that is imperfect, demanding, beautiful, exhausting, uncertain and deeply meaningful and being able to say:
I am here.
There is something to be grateful for here.
There is something to learn here.
There is enough here to begin.
Years ago, I chose Santosha for an assignment… Then my teachers and friends reflected it back to me…Life kept asking me to practice it. And eventually, when it came time to name the space I was creating, there was never really another name.
Santosha had already followed me home.
Santosha — contentment not because everything is perfect, but because we learn how to meet this life, exactly as it is.
Take care,
Cashel
