Abstract

Contentment in life is the degree to which one perceives that wants are being met and accordingly, getting satisfied with what you have and who you are. This contributes to inner peace, happiness, gratitude and compassion to others and a feeling of purpose and meaning in life. The practice of yoga can help us to cultivate a sense of inner well-being, which allows us to feel contented without needing validation from the outside world. This study was carried out among 50 yoga practitioners of Patanjali Yoga Research Centre, Kozhikode, Kerala, India using a questionnaire containing the measure of contentment and the characteristics of the respondents such as age, sex, marital status, whether experienced any psychological problems during the past six months, and whether experienced any other problems in life during the past six months. The data was analysed as scores, percentages and through statistical test. The results show that when compared to before the practice of yoga, after starting yoga, higher proportion of people have experienced eleven positive contentment in life related items, while higher proportion experienced eight negative contentment related items less only. This indicates that yoga practice has helped the respondents to better experience the life contentment related items considered in this study. There exists statistically significant difference between the mean contentment score of the respondents before and after the practice of yoga, with a comparatively higher score obtained after yoga practice. Similarly, statistically significant difference was observed between the mean contentment score of most of the contentment related items under the study before and after the practice of yoga, with a comparatively higher score obtained for the items after yoga practice. These results establish the influence of yoga in improving contentment in life of the practitioners. How various contentment items under the study might have influenced the experience of other contentment items after yoga practice have also been interpreted in the paper, mainly from a psychological perspective.