Saucam: developing purity in our lives

By Susan A.

Reading time: 4 min

Saucam is one of the most known yoga values. Yoga is much more than asanas. Sooner or later, the yogis who want to go further on their self-knowledge and spiritual development end up searching for that information behind and supporting all the lifestyle promoted by yoga.

One of the most common ways to start digging into that knowledge is to get in contact with the values of yoga. Those values can either be found in the Yamas and Niyamas, or in the Bhagavad Gita, one of the important texts from India. Here we explore Saucam. Keep reading and learn more about it!

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Saucam: the purity in our lives

Saucam is purity in two ways: internal cleaning and external cleaning. While external cleaning is universally known and understood, the same doesn’t happen with internal cleaning. Let’s start with external purity.

Bahya Saucam: the external purity

It’s easy to appreciate external cleaning and to recognize its value even in extremely different societies around the world. Keeping the body cleaned, having a tidy house, nice clothes, etcetera is well appreciated.

We have daily routines, not only on the exterior but also with our health. For that, keeping a healthy diet, drinking water, taking the right teas is important and keeps our body in balance.

Why is this so important?

We need a healthy body, inside and outside, and a clean and organized environment so that we can concentrate on the issues of the mind, otherwise, we will be stuck dealing with these problems, which are more basic but still really important for us.

Like we daily keep these activities of external cleaning, we need to do the same with the internal process.

saucam

Antara Saucam: the internal purity

The internal purity is about keeping our minds clean! If in the first place, we can think about keeping a positive attitude and ignore the negative thoughts, it goes way beyond that, and quite easily we can understand how we manifest impurity in so many moments of our life.

These are some examples of tendencies we all have of impurity thoughts, and what should be our attitude instead.

How can we clear our mind? Basically, we need to keep pure and positive thoughts, independently of what others do. For example, if someone hurts us and we keep feeding the resentment, it can become in hate, a painful and disturbing state of mind. In this case, we must look for the humanity in the other person and change our thoughts for positive ones.

It’s also about keeping our values and follow them. In case we don’t follow the values we believe in, we start an internal conflict and a process of self-condemnation. This one is not better in any way than the previous example, which means that self-condemnation is as impure to us as the condemnation of others.

Another source of impure thoughts that we must work on is envy. We need to work on being happy with others’ successes. That means that every time someone achieves something we would like to have, whether we like that person or not, we should never have envy feelings about their success.

Being selfish is another negative feeling to avoid. When we are selfish, it’s most likely possible that, besides the thoughts, we also have selfish actions. When we realize we are not considering others wishes, needs, and happiness, we must deliberately change our mind and actions in the opposite direction.

These are the most common situations in which we end up losing the purity of our mind. As mentions, it’s not about self-condemning ourselves, it’s about paying attention and consciously work on Saucam.

Improving Saucam is working on our thoughts and actions of peace, accommodation, non-violence, humility and other similar values. We must pay attention to it daily, and why? Because a clear mind will be comfortable and in alert, quiet and self-confident, ready to learn and develop.

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