What We Steal From Ourselves — Asteya

How Much of Your Life Are You Living

How much of your life are you actually living? Not managing, not surviving, not running through. Living. There's a version of being present most of us think we have — until we stop and realize we've been somewhere else entirely. In a conversation from three years ago. In a worry that hasn't happened yet. In a comparison that makes no sense to nurture.

Today we continue our exploration of the Yamas, the ethical principles that form the first limb of yoga. We've already talked about Ahimsa and Satya. Today, the third one: Asteya. Non-stealing. And I want to take it somewhere you may not have considered before.

The Subtler Layers of Stealing

When I first studied Asteya, it was framed as the obvious thing — don't take what isn't yours, don't take credit that belongs to someone else. That's where we have to begin, because it's real and it matters. But the more I sat with it, the more I started to see the subtler layers. There's the way we copy someone else's voice, their way of moving through the world, their aesthetic — and slowly, without realizing it, drift away from our own. That's a form of stealing too. It happens a lot in the yoga community: taking from the outside because we've quietly stopped trusting what's inside.

Superior to Your Sorrows

And then there's the one that stopped me completely. This past week I was listening to an interview with Perkins Rocha — a Venezuelan political prisoner and former magistrate, under house arrest after years of detention. He was explaining how he survived, mentally and spiritually, and he said something I haven't been able to forget. He talked about developing the capacity to be superior to his sorrows. Not numb to them. Superior — as in, no longer owned by them.

And I thought: that is Asteya at its most essential level. What he was describing was the refusal to let his circumstances steal his inner life. His presence. His capacity to still find something worth holding onto, even inside those walls. That's the theft we almost never name — letting the past, or the fear of the future, rob us of the gift of the present moment.

The Theft We Don't Notice

I think about how often I've caught myself replaying a conversation that already ended, or running through a scenario that hasn't started yet. In those moments I'm not here. I'm not available to the actual texture of my life — the sound of birds in the morning, the weight of my dog settling against my leg, the simple fact that I'm breathing.

What Kundalini Yoga Trains

This is where Kundalini Yoga keeps showing up for me, not as a metaphor but as a literal training ground. When you're in the middle of a kriya — arms up, tiredness creeping in, the mind screaming that you can't hold it — what is actually being practiced? Endurance, yes. Strength, yes. But more than that: the ability to stay present with something hard without letting the hardness steal your awareness. You learn, breath by breath, that the effort doesn't have to cancel out the experience. And if you can do that on the mat, you start to carry it into everything else.

The Stories We Carry

There's another layer to Asteya: the stories we carry about what happened. We have a real choice — to rewrite what we've lived in a way that lifts us, or to stay locked in a version that keeps us fighting with what was. And that fight costs something. It costs now, which is the only thing that's actually ours. Time is our most precious resource, and we give it away so easily — to fear, to resentment, to comparison, to the noise of a mind that's never satisfied with where it is.

Coming Back

In Kundalini Yoga there's the neutral mind — the meditative mind that sees clearly without being pulled in any direction. Neither stuck in the past nor anxious about the future. The hardest place to reach and the most worth practicing. If you have a practice this week, bring one question into it: what am I letting steal my presence right now? Asteya isn't only about not taking from others. It's about not stealing from yourself — from your own presence, your own story, and the people around you who deserve the version of you that's actually here. Sat Nam.