The eight limbs of yoga

The eight limbs of yoga are the eight parts of the practice that the sage Patanjali set out in the Yoga Sutra, in a single line, aphorism 2.29. In Sanskrit the set is called ashtanga, from ashta, eight, and anga, limb. They are: yama, how you behave towards others; niyama, how you behave towards yourself; asana, posture; pranayama, working with the breath; pratyahara, drawing the senses in; dharana, concentration; dhyana, meditation; and samadhi, absorption.

Two things are worth knowing before anything else. The first is that they are called limbs and not steps for a reason. A limb is not a rung. You do not complete yama and graduate to niyama. They are practised together, the way arms and legs are used together, and a beginner in their first week is already doing at least three of them.

The second is a matter of proportion. Of the eight limbs, one is asana, and the Yoga Sutra devotes three short lines to it. What almost everyone in the world now calls yoga is one eighth of the subject, and the smallest eighth by the amount written about it. That is not a rebuke to anybody who came for the postures. I came for the postures. It is simply the map.

Yama is usually translated as restraint. It is the outward facing half of the ethics, and there are five.

• Ahimsa, not harming. The first and the one the other four hang from.
• Satya, truthfulness.
• Asteya, not stealing, which classically includes taking credit, time and attention that are not yours.
• Brahmacharya, moderation, most often read as continence, more usefully read as not spending yourself carelessly.
• Aparigraha, not grasping. Not hoarding, not accumulating past need.

Here is where I depart from how this is usually taught. These are presented as moral instruction, and if you are anything like me your reaction to moral instruction from a web page is to close the tab. So take them instead as observations about what interferes with a quiet mind, which is what they are for in the text. Patanjali is not primarily interested in making you good. He is interested in the fact that a mind occupied by a lie it told, or by wanting something somebody else has, is a mind that cannot settle. The ethics are there because they work, not because you are being examined.

The place ahimsa shows up first for a new student is on the mat, applied to themselves. Forcing a knee, holding the breath to get further into a forward bend, practising through a genuine pain: that is himsa, and it is the version of the yama that a class actually teaches.

• Saucha, cleanliness, of the body, the surroundings and what you take in.
• Santosha, contentment. Not passivity. Not wanting the current moment to be different as a precondition for working on it.
• Tapas, literally heat. Disciplined effort, the willingness to do the difficult thing repeatedly.
• Svadhyaya, self study, which classically means study of the texts and of yourself in equal measure.
• Ishvara pranidhana, surrender to something larger than yourself.

The last one causes trouble for people who are not religious, and it need not. Ishvara pranidhana can be read as devotion to God, and for a great many practitioners in India it is exactly that. It can equally be read as the recognition that you are not in charge of the outcome, only of the effort, which is a practical instruction and not a theological one. Both readings are inside the tradition. Choose the one that is honest for you and do not pretend to the other.

Tapas and santosha are set against each other deliberately, and that tension is the whole of a sustainable practice: work hard, and stop demanding that the results arrive on your schedule.

Asana. Patanjali defines it in three words: sthira sukham asanam. Steady and comfortable, that is asana. Not deep. Not advanced. Not photogenic. Steady and comfortable. He then adds that it is achieved by relaxing effort and by the attention resting on something infinite, and that once it is achieved, you are no longer disturbed by opposites like heat and cold.

Read plainly, the whole classical purpose of posture is to give you a body that can sit still without complaining, so that the later limbs become possible. A person who can sit upright for thirty minutes without pain has finished what Patanjali asked of asana. Everything beyond that, and there is a great deal beyond it in the later hatha texts, is additional and worthwhile and not what this particular line was about. If you would like the plain physical entry point, tadasana and padmasana are the two ends of it: standing steady, and sitting steady.

Pranayama. Prana is the vital force carried by the breath. Ayama means extension or regulation, so pranayama is the regulation of that force rather than merely breathing exercises, although in practice you start with breathing exercises. The Sutra places it immediately after asana, and the order is not decorative: the text says pranayama follows the establishment of posture. In a class this is exactly right. Somebody who cannot sit comfortably cannot breathe slowly, because the discomfort keeps interrupting.

This is the limb where I ask people to be careful without a teacher. Simple lengthening of the breath and anulom vilom are safe to learn from a good description. Retention, forceful breathing and the strong kriyas are not, and the classical texts say so more sternly than any modern one.

Pratyahara is the fifth limb and it is the one that gets skipped in most explanations, usually with a vague sentence about withdrawing the senses. It is the hinge of the whole scheme: the first four limbs face outward, the last three face inward, and pratyahara is the turn.

The classical image is a tortoise drawing its limbs into its shell. What it describes is the moment when the senses stop chasing what is in front of them and follow the mind instead. It is not sensory deprivation and it is not forcing yourself to ignore a noise. Forcing yourself to ignore a noise is still attending to the noise.

You have already experienced it. It is what happens in a good savasana, when the traffic outside is audible and has stopped mattering. It is what happens in the fourth or fifth minute of watching your own breath, when the room recedes without you having done anything about the room. That is pratyahara, and the reason it is hard to teach is that it cannot be done on purpose. It arrives when the conditions are right, which is the argument for the four limbs that come before it.

The last three limbs are treated as a group in the text itself, where they are called samyama, and the reason is that they are not three activities. They are three depths of the same activity.

Dharana is concentration: holding the attention on one thing. A point, a sound, the breath at the nostrils, an image. The characteristic of dharana is that the attention keeps slipping and you keep returning it. If you have ever tried to follow ten breaths without the mind wandering, you know exactly what this limb feels like, and you know that the returning is the practice rather than a failure of it.

Dhyana is meditation: the attention stops slipping. It becomes continuous, like oil poured from one vessel into another rather than water dripping. You do not do dhyana. Dhyana is what dharana becomes when it stops being interrupted.

Samadhi is absorption: the separation between the one attending and the thing attended to falls away. Every honest description of this in the tradition admits that words stop working here, and I am not going to do better than the tradition. What I will say is that the tradition is unanimous that it is not a mystical bonus feature. It is described as the natural end of a continuous process that begins with how you treat people and how you sit.

The order is instructive and slightly deflating. The three limbs everybody wants are the three you cannot practise directly. You can practise sitting. You can practise returning your attention. The rest is what happens.

Philosophy pages tend to end with an exhortation. Here is a practical suggestion instead.

Do not attempt eight limbs. Attempt two, one from each half, for a month, and let the rest look after themselves.

• From the outer limbs, take ahimsa and apply it to your own practice only. One month of not forcing anything. If a posture hurts a joint, come out. If the breath becomes ragged, come out. That is a complete practice of the first yama and it will change your asana more than any technique.
• From the inner limbs, take dharana, five minutes. After your practice, sit, and count the breath to ten, and start again at one when you notice you have wandered off. You will not get to ten for weeks. That is the practice working, not failing.

The other six limbs are not being neglected. Saucha is why you wash before you sit. Santosha is why you did not give up in week two. Svadhyaya is why you are reading this. Asana is what you did before you sat down. Pranayama is in the counting. Pratyahara is what the room does on the good days.

And if you want the historical footing under all of it: the eight limbs come from a text that codified practices already old when it was written, and asana was one small part of a scheme whose subject was the mind. The Government of India's own account of yoga's origin and development puts it in the same terms, that Patanjali's sutra is chiefly identified with the eightfold path and that asana is there to bring stability of body and mind. Reading the sutra itself, in any decent translation with commentary, is a better use of an evening than most yoga content, this page included.

The Sanskrit, the plain meaning, what it asks of somebody who is not going to become a monk this year, and where it turns up in an ordinary hour in a hall. The last column is the one that makes the scheme stop feeling like a syllabus.

The numbering is not a ladder to be climbed in order. They are called limbs rather than steps deliberately, and most people meet the third and fourth first and work outwards from there.

Six of the eight limbs are dispositions and states. Two of them are things you can go and do, and this site is largely about those two.

Asana is the third limb, and in the sutras it means a steady, comfortable seat rather than a repertoire of shapes. The nearest thing to the original sense here is Padmasana or, more practically for most bodies, Vajrasana. Everything else, Tadasana, Trikonasana, Bhujangasana and the rest of the library, came much later and exists largely to make sitting still possible.

Pranayama is the fourth, and it is the one that follows immediately: Anulom Vilom and Nadi Shodhana are the practices in that lineage, with Bhramari as the easiest way in. Pratyahara, the fifth, is what Yoga Nidra rehearses, and Savasana is where most people meet it without being told what it is. The Sanskrit words are collected in the yoga glossary.

The practical version, for somebody who is not going to read Patanjali this year: do the third limb and the fourth limb, and let the rest arrive if they are going to. That means a short practice you repeat, which is what the ten minute morning routine and the seven day beginner plan are for, and one breathing practice you keep, which for most people is Ujjayi or the alternate nostril work. The word hatha, which is what most Indian classes are actually called, refers to this same body of practice rather than to a modern brand, and the hatha page explains where the term comes from. If you want the beginning of it rather than the philosophy of it, how to start yoga at home is the practical door.

Every page on this subject explains what the limbs are. Almost none of them corrects the five misreadings that actually stop people, and after forty years of being asked, these are the five.

• They are not a syllabus with a pass mark. There is no stage at which yama is complete. A person in their first week who came out of a posture because it hurt has practised the first limb properly, and a person of thirty years' standing who forced a knee that morning has not.
• They are not a religion you are being enrolled in. One limb, ishvara pranidhana, raises the question, and it has an honest non theistic reading inside the tradition: that you control the effort and not the outcome. Nothing else in the eight requires you to believe anything at all.
• They are not the same thing as the modern style called Ashtanga. The word is shared and the referents are different. Patanjali's ashtanga is this eightfold scheme. Ashtanga vinyasa yoga is a twentieth century physical method of fixed sequences, and somebody on a timetable saying ashtanga means the second one.
• They are not ranked by importance. The order is not a hierarchy of value. It is closer to a description of what makes what possible, which is why the only ordering the text insists on is that breath work follows a settled posture.
• They are not a reason to feel inadequate about the postures. The observation that asana is one eighth of the subject gets used, quite often, to make people who came for their back feel shallow. It should not be. Coming for the back is how nearly everybody arrives, including me, and the body is a legitimate door. What the proportion tells you is where the road goes, not that you took the wrong entrance.

There is a sixth, which is less a misreading than a habit: treating the inner limbs as a treatment. The last three are not a prescription for a symptom, and a person in genuine distress needs care rather than a concentration exercise. The practices that genuinely help an agitated nervous system are the plain ones, breathing and lying still, and they are gathered in yoga for anxiety rather than here, where the subject is what the scheme actually says.

Two of the eight can be learned from a page. Two more can be learned from a page badly. The last four cannot be learned from a page at all, and it is worth being plain about why rather than pretending otherwise.

Posture can be described. What cannot be described is the correction, because the correction depends on what your particular hips are doing, and no text has ever known that. Breath work can be described up to a point, and then the point arrives: retention, forceful breathing and the locks are where the classical texts themselves stop being casual and start warning the reader, and a hall with a teacher in it is the right place for them.

The sitting limbs are the ones that really need a room. Not because concentration is difficult to explain, but because almost nobody sits for long enough on their own to find out what happens after the first uncomfortable ten minutes. A fixed hour, in a room where other people are also sitting still, does what willpower does not.

That is the whole of what a class is for in relation to this scheme, and it is a modest claim: the postures get corrected, the breathing gets supervised, and the sitting gets a time and a place. The batches, in the hall in north Bangalore and live online, are listed on the classes page, and the physical two limbs are where any of it starts. If you would rather come at the philosophy from underneath, through the body, how to start yoga at home is the door most people use.