“If you’re naughty today, Santa won’t bring you any presents!”, “If you don’t come here immediately I will leave without you!”, “eat your dinner or I will give it to your brother” (completely pointless lie by the way…), “no, that’s yucky” (when my toddler is pointing at some chocolate biscuits that she sees at the bakery every day) and so on and so on. Oh no! My poor children are not getting the truthfulness they should from their own mother! And what about Santa Claus? Do we have to get rid of him to be truly truthful?
But what are these yamas actually? The yamas are the first one of the 8 limbs of yoga and are kind of a moral code or rules of social behaviour, quite similar to the Christian Commandments. The main ones are non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, self-restraint and non-grasping.
Truthfulness obviously means not going around telling lies to people and generally being an honest person. It doesn’t mean telling people they look awful today (even if they do) as that is only our own opinion and would most likely hurt someone’s feelings which would contradict the commandment of non-violence of course… It means not using words to manipulate others, promise something we can’t fulfill or say something we don’t actually mean.
So when I actually thought about my day to day life I thought, oh no! I think I lie to my children all the time!!! And mainly to manipulate them and to get them to do something! My toddler is only two so she is not asking “why? why? why?” all the time yet. I would imagine that would probably provoke even more lies from parents!! “We need our raincoat today”, “Why?”, “Because it’s raining”, “Why?”, “Because the weather is bad”, “Why?”, “Because there are clouds in the sky”, “Why?” …”BECAUSE I SAY SO!!!”
And of course our kids are completely surrounded by lies, TV, nursery rhymes “Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool?” (err, no, and I will certainly not give you three bags full of my body hair), “row, row, row your boat, gently down the river, and if you see a polar bear, don’t forget to shiver”???!!!! Not really the first thing you think of doing if you run into a polar bear, which is very unlikely if you’re rowing along most rivers in the world!!
The worst ones are actually French songs!! “Une sourie verte…” is about a little green mouse (!) that runs through the grass, gets caught and then dipped into hot water and oil so it will be a snail!!!! Come on, really??
Obviously behind most lies that we tell our children there are good intentions (I really can’t speak for whoever wrote the green mouse song though…) and it’s usually to keep them safe, healthy or generally speed things up. But how can we teach them to be truthful, if we are telling them so many lies even if the intention is good? Maybe if we just sometimes pay attention to what we are saying and why we are saying it. Sometimes lying is the easiest way of course but at the end of the day they are learning from us!
Truthfulness also means being honest to ourselves, admitting something we find difficult to admit and generally being true to ourselves. I don’t want to take things like the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus away from my kids! They are fun and part of being a child! What is most important I think, is that we teach them to be true to themselves. They will find out what is true and what is not true soon enough, but finding inner truth is difficult! So let’s encourage them to find their own way as much as we can and embrace their individual personalities.
We can still lie to them about Santa Claus for a while!
Very interesting article, never really thought about this before. Really refreshing to read