Raja yoga

Raja yoga is the name commonly given to the eight limbed path set out in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, in which posture and breathing are two limbs among eight and the destination is a trained, quiet mind.

Raja means royal or king, and the older use of the phrase was as a description of a state rather than a school. The fifteenth century Hatha Yoga Pradipika uses it that way: the union of the mind and the soul is called raja yoga, at verse 4.77. A seventeenth century writer, Sundardas, listed raja yoga as one of twelve kinds and called it the best. The modern meaning, in which raja yoga is the name of Patanjali's whole system, dates from Swami Vivekananda's book Raja Yoga, published in 1896, which equated the two and was an immediate success. That is why the phrase now behaves like a style name when historically it was not one.

The practical consequence is odd and worth stating: raja yoga is a path with almost no classes. You will not find it on a timetable next to vinyasa and yin, because it is not an hour of anything. It is the frame that all of those hours sit inside, and the part of it that most people practise without knowing the name is the last twenty minutes of a class, lying still.

Patanjali's second book gives the eight, and the order is an argument, not a list. You are not meant to finish one and move on; the later limbs simply do not work while the earlier ones are ignored.

1. Yama, restraint. Five: non violence, truthfulness, not stealing, continence, not grasping. These are about how you treat other people, and they come first.
2. Niyama, observance. Five more, turned inwards: cleanliness, contentment, tapas or discipline, svadhyaya or self study, and surrender. Note that tapas, svadhyaya and surrender are exactly the three that sutra 2.1 calls kriya yoga, which is the source of one of the great naming confusions in this subject and is explained on the kriya yoga page.
3. Asana, seat. One limb. Patanjali asks for a posture that is steady and comfortable and says almost nothing else. The hundreds of shapes came later, from the hatha tradition.
4. Pranayama, breath. The regulation of the breath, and the hinge of the whole system. Anulom Vilom and Nadi Shodhana are where a beginner meets this limb in practice.
5. Pratyahara, withdrawal. Taking the senses off their objects. The most neglected limb, and the one a long relaxation such as Yoga Nidra actually trains.
6. Dharana, concentration. Holding attention on one thing. Trataka, gazing at a flame, is the plainest version taught anywhere.
7. Dhyana, meditation. Attention that stays without being held. Not a technique you do; a thing that happens when the sixth limb has been practised long enough.
8. Samadhi, absorption. The end of the sutras, and not something I am going to describe as though I had a report to file.

Patanjali's definition of yoga itself, in the first book, is citta vritti nirodha, the stilling of the movements of the mind. Everything in the list serves that one sentence. The four books are named samadhi pada, sadhana pada, vibhuti pada and kaivalya pada, and the middle two are the practical ones. The eight limbs guide on this site works through them one at a time.

If you searched for a raja yoga centre or a raja yoga meditation class, the results you saw were probably not about Patanjali at all. They were about the Brahma Kumaris, and both meanings are legitimate uses of the words.

The Brahma Kumaris are a movement founded in 1936 by Lekhraj Kripalani in Hyderabad in Sindh, then in British India, with their headquarters now at Mount Abu in Rajasthan, and by their own account over a million students at more than eight thousand centres in more than a hundred countries. What they teach under the name Raja Yoga meditation is described on their own pages as a meditation without rituals or mantras that can be practised anywhere at any time, and it is practised, distinctively, with open eyes. Their introductory course has traditionally been a series of seven sessions of about two hours. There are no postures in it and no breathing exercises.

So the two things share a name and very little else. One is a classical eight limbed path in which posture and breath are limbs three and four. The other is a modern taught meditation on the self as soul, with no physical component, offered through a worldwide network of centres. Neither is a corruption of the other, and I have no interest in refereeing between them. What matters practically is this: if you want Patanjali, a Brahma Kumaris centre is not where to go, and if you want a taught meditation with a community around it, then a philosophy book about the sutras will not give you that either. Ask which one is meant before you travel.

There is a third use worth knowing, since it turns up in searches. Yogananda described his kriya yoga as the distilled essence of raja yoga, using the phrase in Vivekananda's sense to mean the whole classical path.

Since there is rarely a class, the honest question is what a person who says they practise raja yoga does on a Tuesday. In my experience it is four things.

They sit every day, at the same time. Twenty minutes is a real practice and an hour is not necessary to begin. The obstacle is never the mind at first; it is the lower back and the hips. Sukhasana on a folded blanket, Padmasana if the knees allow it, Vajrasana if kneeling suits you, or a chair, which is not a failure. Morning or evening matters less than the same hour twice.

They keep a small physical practice, for the sake of the sitting. This is the part people who come to yoga through philosophy tend to skip, and their backs punish them for it. Ten minutes is enough: the ten minute morning routine, or the standing shapes, or Surya Namaskar at a slow count if the shoulders are willing.

They train attention on purpose. Concentration is a limb and it is trainable. One object, held: the breath at the nostrils, a flame in Trataka, a syllable in So Hum, or a sound in Om chanting. Sitting with no object at all and calling it meditation is how most people waste a year.

They pay attention to conduct. The first two limbs are not a preface. Truthfulness and non grasping are practices in the same sense that breathing is, and they are the ones nobody can check for you. This is the part of the path that has no equipment, and in my experience it is the part that actually changes people.

A bedtime sequence is the closest thing on this site to a session in the spirit of the last four limbs: a little movement, then breathing, then a long withdrawal of the senses, in that order.

Raja yoga is not really an alternative to a class. It is a question about what you are doing the class for.

• You want the classical path and you like reading. Then this is your territory. Start with the second book of the sutras and the eight limbs guide, and sit for twenty minutes a day while you read.
• You searched for a raja yoga centre near you. You almost certainly want the Brahma Kumaris, and their courses are taught at their own centres. That is a good thing to know before you spend an afternoon looking for a class that does not exist under that name.
• You want to meditate and you do not want a physical practice. Fair, and unusual on this site. Open eyed meditation as the Brahma Kumaris teach it, or breath meditation on your own, are both routes. My reservation is only that the body eventually makes itself heard.
• You mainly want to be less stiff and less anxious. Then you want limbs three, four and five, and the ordinary name for those together is hatha. Yoga for anxiety is the practical page.
• You want the whole framework taught gently with chanting and philosophy in the room. Sivananda is the school that most explicitly teaches all of it in one hour.
• You want a strong practice and the philosophy can wait. That is honest and it is where most people start. Ashtanga, and note that its name means the eight limbs too, which is a third collision of vocabulary in this one subject.

My verdict. If somebody asks me what yoga is, the eight limbs are what I answer with, and I would rather a student knew that list than any posture on this site. My reservation about raja yoga as a thing to take up is different from my reservations elsewhere: it is not that the path is doubtful, it is that people try to enter it at the top. In about forty years of teaching I have watched a fair number of people arrive wanting meditation and absorption, unwilling to spend six months on the breath and unwilling to look at how they speak to their families, and it does not work. The order in the list is the teaching. My advice is unglamorous. Sit for twenty minutes daily, keep ten minutes of movement so your back tolerates the sitting, take one concentration practice and stay with it for three months, and read the two ethical limbs once a week. Do that for a year and the later limbs will need no explanation from me.

Raja yoga is not taught here as a named path, and no style is: the classes here are not labelled by style. They are one teacher, about forty years of teaching, one hall at the residents' association in MSR Nagar in north Bangalore, in person there or live online, all ages and all levels, and the hour is asana, pranayama and relaxation, taught slowly.

There is no philosophy lecture, no sutra study group and nothing taught here under the name raja yoga. What the hour does contain, and this is the overlap worth naming, is limbs three, four and five in that order: posture, then breathing taught as a subject with its cautions said out loud, then a long relaxation at the end that is not treated as an afterthought. That is not the whole path and it is not claimed to be. It is the part of it a class can honestly deliver.

The first two limbs are nobody's to teach in an hour, and the last three cannot be handed over at all. If the contemplative end is what you want, the material is on this site and it is free to read: the eight limbs of yoga for the map, the glossary for the vocabulary, and Yoga Nidra for the withdrawal of the senses, lying down, which is the easiest of the inner limbs to begin. The classes page has timings and costs.