Santosha

The next of the niyamas is santosha, or contentment. I've always found this one to be a little deceptive, and I think in that also one that I need to particularly work on. The deceptiveness in my mind is that my initial impulse upon learning of the principle was to distrust it as something passive, in that I understood it as implying one should be content with unfair or bad conditions, and not try to do anything to make things (or, the world, or a relationship, whatever) better.

Rather, in inquiring more about santosha, in one sense it's rather more about embracing conditions that can't be changed, and being content instead of desiring to change something that can't be changed. If it just can't be changed, that desire will always go unfulfilled, and there will then always be suffering from that, in the Buddhist sense. One external angle one might look at this from is in terms of a relationship - one might want their partner to be different somehow, or have some idealized image of them, but the other person can't just be forced to change to conform to that. Rather, it makes for a healthier and happier relationship to be content with the person as they are; note, however that that doesn't mean to passively accept something negative in that context, one can approach that aspect of the relationship in a healthy way, and failing that, can always leave the relationship.

From another angle, santosha might be remembered, say, during a yoga class when one side is particularly stiff, or a social interaction when one is feeling inexplicably shy for the day. To embrace that feeling and accept it with compassion in that contentment is much healthier that stressing at wanting something that just is to be some other way, when it plainly isn't. It doesn't mean it's 'bad,' that just how things are in that moment, on that day, and recognizing that makes for a mindset with much better equanimity.