Yoga For Happiness

How can Yoga help someone with establishing and maintaining good relationships???

Successful relationships require mutual effort from both sides. Whether a relationship is with someone at work, at home, or with a friend, there is a need to maintain a stable connection. If there is an emotional connection, such as love or romance, this can be complicated, but Santosha can still be applied.

What is Santosha? In the Yoga Sutras, Santosha is one of the listed Niyamas (moral observances). The Niyamas could easily be identified as virtues. Within the Yoga Sutras, Maharishi Patanjali reveals Santosha and its value in daily life.
Santosha is often described as a state of contentment. If you can maintain a state of contentment, you can find happiness, and you can remain happier for longer periods of time. We should be pro-active in our cultivation of contentment, in order to release the mind from the burdens of pain.
Yet, how does this apply toward cultivating successful and healthy relationships? Practice complete acceptance of friends, co-workers, associates, and family members. In other words: Accept each individual for who he, or she, is, without pre-conditions.

Do not hold anyone to your expectations. To accept people for who they are is extremely difficult for some people. Relationships often fail because of pre-conceived expectations. Many people go out on a "first date" with a pre-qualifying list of requirements for a prospective partner to fulfill.
While it is true that each of us has expectations in regard to the pursuit of a "soul mate," it is also true that you cannot change people to suit your requirements. This concept applies to every relationship we have. You can choose your spouse and friendships carefully, but you must accept what you cannot control.
A passive state of mind will also help cultivate your work, business, and family relationships. Patanjali points us toward the appreciation of life's difficulties. It is easy to embrace joy, happiness, and bliss. On the other hand, life can be full of suffering, pain, and sorrow.

Santosha teaches each of us to accept and learn from the difficult experiences we will encounter in life. Know that life will change, and we should be happy with what we have at this moment. When we stop the outer world from affecting our inner-being, we have found true happiness.

It is hard to believe that one Niyama can be so valuable, but contentment, and the resulting states of happiness, will serve a Yoga practitioner like a flashlight down a dark path. Light gives us vision and focus. With the help of Santosha, a dark path that we were once lost on, can become an adventurous journey.
To receive Free Yoga videos, Podcasts, e-Books, reports, and articles about Yoga, please visit:

http://www.yoga-teacher-training.org/member-offer.html