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