The Eight Limbs of Yoga (Part 4)

So now, as promised, I’ll return to the first two limbs: Yama (Restraint), and Niyama (Responsibility). Each of these limbs is composed of five sub-limbs — as noted in The Eight Limbs of Yoga (Part 2) — which suggest ways of life and belief that extend outside of your practice. Various books dedicate a fair amount of page-space to discussing and explaining these, and the gurus don’t really like to admit that they were developed in a pre-modern context in ancient India. So you see various degrees of obfuscation and dancing around the issue when you read about these limbs, as well as a fair amount of dogmatism or mysticism. Especially because they come at the beginning of any discussion of the 8LoY, I think they serve to obscure some of the more relevant issues.

However (and once again) the practice of yoga that we know and love was indeed developed under this lifestyle and ideology, so I think it’s important to consider and understand those values, even, or perhaps especially, where they don’t match our own. Yoga, like Buddhism or Jainism, was first developed to complement the practices and morality of the people who practice it — not as a new, comprehensive code of ethics or religion. Thus, by looking at these, we should be able to see what practices and values might be important to our practice. But these injunctions and instructions make no claim to completeness, and should not be taken as such.

Yama: Restraint

The first limb in yoga concerns avoiding sin. The tools to do that are expressed in five restraints. You can think of these like yoga’s cardinal sins, and the expiatory methods to eradicate them.

Ahimsa (against violence), Satya (against lying), Asteya (against stealing), Brahmacharya (against lust), and Aparigraha (against attachment)

For the most part, these deal with fairly standard, universally sinful activities — i.e. violence, lying, stealing, lust… — so I won’t try very hard to rationalize why they’re considered sinful. And instead, I’ll talk about why observing them might help, or inform, your practice.

Ahimsa: against violence

B.K.S. Iyengar wrote that ahimsa is not just a restraint against violence but an active attitude of benevolence. It’s important to remember that all kinds of people practice yoga, and everyone gets something different from it. Yoga is not (well, usually not) a competition, and as in any community little will be gained by hostilities or tribalism within. We aspire to help and support each other, not attack or injure; and the idea is that attitude should make us all better off in the long run.

Satya: against lying

Lying, as well as its corollary, actively telling the truth, seem like fundamental tenets of any community. In terms of physical well-being, you want to make sure that your instructors and the people around you know how you’re feeling, whether your injured, etc.

So you have to be honest with the people around you, as well as with yourself, in order to avoid further injury and aggravation. But I think it’s also important to think about honesty more broadly, and consider the emotional and functional ramification of lying, or failing to tell the truth. Trust is one of society’s most fundamental institutions, and we dedicate a lot of energy to making sure it can be maintained. It’s how we work together, and it’s what helps us come together and make good decisions.

Astaya: against stealing

Short answer. People want to feel comfortable and secure in their belongings and in public. When you learn not to take what isn’t yours, you also learn to develop or find what you need for yourself.

Brahmacharya: against lust

Brahmacharya is one of the yamas that gets a lot attention from the gurus and is the source of a lot of obfuscation on their part. Simply put, it’s an injunction against sex. However, that’s sort of hard to maintain as a life practice for, say, more than a generation, though, and no one really condones universal celibacy anyway. So in the face of that, you find these various theories of when it’s appropriate to have sex, and when not to, a lot of which are fairly bizarre from a Western perspective and which I won’t go in to because, while sort of risible, I don’t think it would be productive here….

But I also don’t want to just discard the whole idea off the cuff, either. I think there’s a real danger of making a baby/bath water type mistake by going with the knee-jerk reaction to the gurus’ treatment of brahmacharya. After all, plenty of morality has been developed regarding the issue of sex, and to assert some moral control over it shouldn’t immediately feel like a bad idea….

So I translate brahmacharya as an injuction “against lust,” which I find apposite, given that lust is one of the 7 deadly sins of Christianity, and it maybe evokes what it is about sex that might warrant restraint. The gurus say that sex drains your vitality, and it makes your concentration wander. It can also unexpectedly get you in to trouble and tie up your life in other ways that might inhibit your practice, or your life more broadly. As Matt Ridley put it in The Red Queen, a book on sexual selection: “The gradual synonymy of sex and sin in Christendom is surely based more on the fact that sex often leads to trouble rather than that there is anything inherently sinful about sex”

Sex can be a distraction. It can also make people do crazy things. Therefore, the gurus would advise you to exercise prudence and restraint where it’s concerned. So I think you do have to water it down in the end, but the fundamental rationale does make sense.

Aparigraha: against attachment

The final yama is aparigraha, and this one, too, may feel slightly unnatural to a Westerner — if not really everyone. People, after all, are attached to the things they have and the things they want.

B.K.S. Iyengar wrote: “By the observance of aparigraha, the yogi makes his life as simple as possible and trains his mind not to feel the loss or the lack of anything.” (Light on Yoga)

That explanation doesn’t quite do it for me, though. The philosophy of renouncing all worldly aspirations seems almost inhuman in a way. I think, maybe, the key here is to remember that there are more important goals than the accumulation of stuff, and material wealth. That doing good for others, building friendships, families, communities, and knowledge, are more important than some other kinds of wealth. And by observing that, everybody benefits.

That’s my best shot.

The Eight Limbs of Yoga (Part 3)

Dhyana: Meditation

The seventh limb of yoga is Dhyana, and it, like the others, builds off of the limbs that came before. The traditional concept of meditation is of a sort of unmoving, quiet, sustained level of concentration. A mental stillness accompanied by physical stillness. Dhyana, though, is not that kind of meditation. It may seem counterintuitive at first, but in yoga we practice a moving form of meditation. Building on the Dharana, the action of inner awareness, your yoga practice creates an expansive and intricate, dynamic object on which to build a sustained meditation; the mind learns to project itself onto the vista of the body.

In this way, your body becomes an expression of the complexity and versatility of your mind. You learn to immerse yourself within a single task, and bring all the abilities of your mind to bear on this one, sustained action. And that, as closely as I can put it, is the true achievement of yoga.

Samadhi: Serenity

The eighth limb of yoga, unlike limbs three through seven, doesn’t really lay any foundation for further development. Samadhi, or as I call it ‘Serenity’, is more like the point where you breast the tape at the end of the race. It’s the reification of your yoga practice’s (viz., the sustained coordinated action of the mind and body working together) cumulative benefits.

By practicing yoga, you learn to endure stress, while keeping your mind calm at the same time. You learn to focus your mind, taking it in many directions at once without losing focus. You bring your body into a state of complete control, while putting it to use from its core to its extremities. Yoga makes you happier, healthier, stronger, and more flexible.

And it’s fun. There’s a whole great community of people involved in the practice, and the variety of asanas, as well as styles of practice, is sure to provide you with a lifetime of opportunities for growth and exploration.

The Eight Limbs of Yoga (Part 2)

To finish up our discussion of the 8LoY, I’ll be describing the proscriptions of the eight limbs themselves. Again, this is not meant to be a definitive treatment, but more of an abridged introduction for those of you who don’t own or haven’t read the books like The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, or B.K.S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga. Many of these ideas have been (liberally) cribbed from such yoga authorities as these, along with the wisdom that sort of floats around the rest of the yoga community. So (and it should come as no surprise) this will not be all new information for those of us who have been around this stuff for a long time.

Being a bit of a logophile myself, though, and always looking to improve things where I can, the translations from the Sanskrit are essentially my own, and any errors or quibbles that anyone might have should be attributed directly to the source (i.e. yrs. truly). Many of the ideas have been streamlined or rendered more palatable for a western audience as well, by me, and the reasons for this are twofold. First, the influence of my own practice and ideals has led me to understand the 8LoY in my own unique way; and second, some of the ideas expressed in the more seminal works of yoga are simply more complex and potentially alien to be dealt with here, today. I do expect to cover all of the major bases, though, and with luck I hope this will be all anyone might need to go out and get practicing with confidence and a basic understanding of what their yoga’s about.

So, as I wrote in my earlier post, and just to reiterate, the eight limbs of yoga, in their order, are: Yama (Restraint), Niyama (Responsibility), Asana (Posture), Pranayama (Active Breath), Pratyahara (Eliminating Outward Confusion), Dharana (Cultivating Inner Awareness), Dhyana (Meditation), and Samadhi (Serenity). I’ve written that the limbs are “in their order,” because this is indeed the order in which they have traditionally been described and repeated over the years. However, in our discussion, I’ll be modifying that order so that Yama and Niyama will come at the end, and we’ll start instead with the final six limbs, before moving on to a brief introduction to the ethics and broader life practice of yoga. I’ll be doing this because Yama and Niyama are more “end goal” type LoY, and they’re really meant to be cultivated in the context of regular yoga practice and study. By going about the discussion in this way, I hope to more accurately show how a beginning yoga student would encounter these limbs and incorporate and develop them over time. Furthermore, and maybe this is just the way I see it, but both Yama and Niyama each include five different sub-limbs of their own, which can make them seem kind of hairy and involved in a way that I’d rather not get tied up with for too long, especially right at the beginning of a post.

So let’s start, then, with limb #3.

Asana: Posture

Asana is indeed the easiest limb to describe, and it’s certainly the most recognizable part of yoga. You can take pictures of asanas, and show them to your friends. They’re the hundreds of poses that make up your practice, and they’re the first thing you learn when you walk through the door. Yoga, which means unity, is the work of putting the whole the mind to work within the body. The asana is the place where that work gets done, as well as the place where it takes shape.

If you think of your body’s asana practice as a yoga factory, though, —let’s say it’s a factory with an assembly line, just for clarity — you still need power and movement to make your product. And this is where your breath comes in, for limb #4.

Pranayama: Active Breath

We all know that we get our oxygen from breathing, and (if we took biology) that that oxygen is used to react with the glucose in our bodies to give us energy. Thus, the importance of breathing while exercising. However, in yoga, the breath serves a further purpose, or two further purposes in fact. For one thing, because we develop our asanas with the movement of the body, we have to recognize the way that breathing itself can move us, in the act of expanding and emptying our lungs. The interactions between your breath and your spine, your whole torso really, can make an enormous difference in your ability to move through the asana practice. And furthermore, we recognize that breathing is the first and most obvious outward point of access to our bodies. As we take control of our bodies, we realize that the breath must be tamed first, before the other problems that we’re trying to unravel in ourselves, whether mental or physical, will start to loosen themselves up for us.

By being engaged with your breath, you become active within your body as a whole. And in this way you start to cultivate a unity of body and mind. But… things aren’t always so easy as that, and breathing with control is only the first step to really developing that unity. Your concentration on your breath and your posture has to be sustained, and put to use.

Pratyahara: Eliminating Outward Confusion (Limb #5)

Part of yoga is learning to detach yourself from the outside world, and subsist mentally on what you and your body can provide in terms of fodder for happiness and contentedness. There are various proscriptions in the realm of Niyama, which I’ll touch on at the end here, that encourage a more abstemious lifestyle; but first I think it’s important to learn, in the context of an asana practice, why that might be desirable.

Pratyahara is about learning to ignore whatever distraction that might crop up as you practice, like learning to keep your balance while your neighbor loses hers; but it’s also about a level of concentration that runs deeper than the superficialities of the present. I like to tell my students that they’re trying to cut down their “temporal bandwidth” in their yoga practice: ignoring the past and the future, and just concentrating on what they’re doing in the moment. I tell them that’s the only way they’re ever going to learn to know what it’s really like to be embodied. So you have to get your mind in order, and, as much as possible, bring it to bear on the task at hand. You’ll never be able to achieve the unity of body and mind, and discover the manifold benefits and abilities that you contain, latent within yourself, if you aren’t able to keep your mind present and active as you practice yoga.

Which brings us to limb #6.

Dharana: Cultivating Inner Awareness

When you get to a place where you can effectively cultivate the sixth limb, things really start to take off in terms of your yoga practice. Once you’ve brought your whole mind to bear on your practice, your breath is moving steadily, and you know the positions of the asanas and where they’re moving, your whole sense of yourself and what you’re capable of starts to undergo a radical transformation.

Dharana is awareness of your body, from the extremities all the way to your center. It comes from attention to detail, and an ability to send that kind of close attention all over your self. You start to take control of your body, and move it with an authority and active knowledge. You develop physical power and capability by teaching your body, through the process of expanding your mind into it, to grow stronger and healthier. This is really a two way street, where the body and mind work together, and develop together to increase strength, elasticity, and stamina.

The Eight Limbs of Yoga

For my first post, I’d like to discuss the eight limbs of yoga: just to establish where I stand and how I view the yoga tradition. This is by no means a comprehensive discussion, and isn’t meant to be. Discursive explications and analyses of the eight limbs have been outlined by K. Patthabi Jois, B.K.S. Iyengar, and others; and if you’re interested, I encourage you to check out Yoga Mala or Light on Yoga for more. This post, though, is simply meant to present, from a western practitioner/instructor’s perspective, what the eight limbs of yoga are, what they mean to me, and why they might be important for people who want to practice yoga.

So, since this site is meant for people of all levels of practice, we’re going to start with the basics.

The eight limbs of yoga, in their order, are:

Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana, and Samadhi

For those who don’t understand the sanskrit, the meanings of those words, respectively, are:

Restraint, Responsibility, Posture, Active Breath, Eliminating Outward Confusion, Cultivating Inner Awareness, Meditation, and Serenity
[trans. mine]

So why are these important? — and why should you care? All the great yoga masters have, in the past, gone to great pains to understand and explain them in their books and teachings, but what does it mean to the average practitioner, or the person just starting yoga? Well, there isn’t really anything in the polymorphism of western traditions that opperates in quite the way that yoga does, so the answers to these questions aren’t really direct or simple to draw out. However, I think with some discussion and examples we can start to understand how they function, and, by extension, why they’re worth thinking about.

Discussion of the 8LoY: What are they? / How do they function?

It turns out that the eight limbs of yoga have a fairly simple role. They provide a time tested heuristic for advancing your yoga practice, and they lay the foundation for a larger structure (i.e., the practice itself) that is meant to help yogis/yoginis develop better lives. In a way, the eight limbs of yoga define how yoga is practiced. But they also help us define what that practice might provide, as well as what it simply isn’t.

For instance, yoga is not a religion. There are no yoga gods; there is no yoga creation story; and no one worships the idealized form of yoga or attends a yoga church. In this way, the eight limbs of yoga don’t claim any kind of monopoly on morality or value judgements, and we acknowledge that even the most accomplished yogi can’t tell you what the face of God looks like.

But be that as it may, that’s not the end of the story. The eight limbs nonetheless outline some basic principles that guide the yoga tradition; and this has been their role since the yoga’s creation.

So notice, then, that in yoga there are a method, an ideology, and a moral sense. And these guide the ways that we practice. They guide practice “on the mat,” certainly, but the eight limbs also guide yoga practitioners in a certain style of thinking, and a certain way of life.

(Now in my experience, at least, people who practice yoga are generally less dogmatic, less chauvinistic about their ideals than your average politician or evangelist, and I think that’s probably for the better. The principles of yoga are, after all, more personal, more locally oriented, than many of the value systems we cultivate in the West; they don’t require that everyone think the same way as everyone else. Yogis understand that everyone will take something different from the practice, and each practitioner will pursue his or her practice in a particular way. But…)

I don’t think there’s any getting around it: people who practice yoga do so, at least in part, because they want to be more sensible, grounded people. We use yoga to understand life more generally — and not just as a means to a physical end.

The practice of yoga is thus distinguished from following an exercise regimen, or playing a competitive sport. The goals of yoga are more complex — or “holistic” — than toning your body, or outperforming your opponents on the playing field.

In yoga, there is this central notion that wisdom is important. That it can be maintained, and advanced, and passed on to new people; and that it makes a difference to our well being whether we do or do not cultivate that wisdom properly. We who practice yoga believe that there are lessons to be learned, about ourselves, and about life itself, from the ways and ideals of the old yogis. If nothing else, after all, their methods helped them develop all the cool poses and sequences that we know and use today. And, if the lives of the aforementioned yogis Jois and Iyengar are any indication, the practice also does great work to ensure our longevity.

And the first step to understanding the practice, understanding how to derive the benefits of yoga for yourself, is getting a sense of its founding principles. Just as an American might look to the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or the Declaration of Independence to understand what it means to be a citizen in this country, I think an aspirant (or sadhaka :) should look to the eight limbs of yoga to understand what it means to practice yoga.

More to come

About this site

This site was created as a resource for my yoga students, as well as anyone else who's interested. I'll do my best to keep people up to date on events in the area, address any questions that you may have, and maybe also discuss some of the broader principles of yoga while I'm at it.

I intend to post here at least two to three times per week, depending on what's going on. Before long, then, I'd like to see this space start to fill up with content. I already have plenty of opinions and ideas and things of my own to say, but I'd also love to hear from my students and friends and make this into as much of a community discussion as anything else. So if you have any thoughts, please feel free to send me an e-mail or leave a comment.

Thanks for reading.

-Schuyler