Yoga Sutras Week 7 - The Eight Limbs of Yoga
Patanjali is laying out the path to enlightened awareness.
This enlightened awareness
needs to be all-inclusive.
The whole of you
needs to fall into this light.
To do this,
you will need yam and niyam.
You will need to come in harmony
with the natural law of things—
to cease being in conflict with your own existence,
to stop creating trouble for yourself.
You will need to merge your body back into life
by liberating it from your psychology.
You will need to allow your breath
to meet life in its fullness,by again removing your psychology
from your breathing.
You will need to turn inward—
and start to move, act, feel, breathe,
be
from your own authentic nature.
Uninfluenced.
You will need to start being able
to give the fullness of your attention
to whatever is occurring.
To show interest in your own existence.
As you do this,
you will begin to merge.
You will begin to flow with life.
You will begin to forget yourself.
And through this…
you will merge
into the totality
of what you are, and have always been.
For you are Life itself.
The Yoga Sutras
So, the Yoga Sutras…
Forever revealing, forever fresh.
This journey of yoga.
Of course,
you might Google a translation of the Sutras—
or pick one up somewhere.
But just a heads up—
it won’t sound like this.
We have to make these things
mean enough
to touch the very core of us,
to create change.
I’m being very true to the Sanskrit.
But it has to run through my own experience.
And I advise you to do exactly the same—
run it through your authenticity.
And then see how it wants to move you.
Then,
you’ll constantly be able to re-inspire yourself.
Because the mechanism for inspiration is internal,
not external.
If we ever inspire each other,
it’s because something is being awakened inside
as we talk.
Sometimes,
it just rises like a bubble from the soul.
That is your awakening
It’s your deepest part saying:
“Let’s live in accordance with this, shall we?”
And the psychology,
the physiology—
they tremble
at the prospect
of living in accordance
with that deep truth.
Because they’ve been up to other stuff.
It’s good to tremble a little.
It’s good to feel shaky sometimes, isn’t it?
It is good when a whole structure—
a whole belief system—
takes a knock.
And in a split second,
you realise…
you’re not in control of anything.
And suddenly,
everything inside has to re-jig
to match this revelation.
Isn’t that beautiful?
(Though it might not feel beautiful at the time.)
You might go:
“Whoa! Wait a minute… what’s happening to my life?”
Change
is what’s happening to your life.
Something inside us has to decide:
Are we up for change, or not?
Or are we a “done deal”?
Fixed for life.
What I am today is what I’ll be at 90.
“I’m a finished product. I’m bloody brilliant.”
Or…
Are you up for continuous transformation?
Growth.
Awakening
upon awakening
upon awakening.
The surrender of choosing change.
Massive.
Alright.
That’s the preamble.
Now we’ve got our sutra.
Patanjali offers us the eight limbs of yoga.
The eight facets of the yogic diamond.
They tap into all the dimensions of you—
inviting a surrender
of every part of yourself
back into the great flow of life.
Or…
a surrender into your true nature.
Your own authentic being.
So you can live from that depth.
That truth.
It doesn’t matter how you name it:
The great flow of life,
or your true nature.
They have different flavours,
but it’s the same surrender.
What matters
is the mechanism inside your body
that lets go of
“I”
“Me”
“Mine”
And softens.
That’s what allows the experience of yoga—
unity—
to happen.
Yoga is the dissolution
of fixed identity.
Of the “I”
the “Me”
the self-contraction.
So that you can release
and merge
back into the greater intelligence
that’s already living you.
For this, we have the eight limbs...
Yama and Niyama
First thing:
let’s look at our attitudes.
Let’s suss out
what we’re up to
inside ourselves—
what’s creating conflict with what is?
The parts that are anti-acceptance
Why are we
at odds with ourselves?
At odds with Life?
Patanjali lays out
ten ways to get back into harmony.
(We’ll cover these next week.)
Asana: Move with Life
Your body
is a piece of life.
It belongs to life.
It’s throbbing with Prakriti, nature.
But the sense of “me”, “mine”, “I”
has attached itself to the body.
You think it’s yours.
Massive delusion.
We will all have to face this delusion at some point.
We’re going to have to give it back.
Back to the earth
from which it came.
We overcome this through asana.
We start to release the psychology
from the physiology through the practice of asana
Move.
Let the body move—
not from your desires,
inhibitions,
agendas,
or competitiveness—
but from breath.
From Life.
And that…
is asana.
Cease to identify with your body
by getting into your body.
Get in to get out.
Pranayama: Liberating the Breath
Your breath
is impacted by samskaras,
mental tendencies,
stored emotions.
These will all be disrupting the natural harmony of the breath.
But it’s meant to flow
in endless reciprocal ease
with Life.
The ego has contracted it.
Loosen it.
Start to breathe.
Observe it.
You’ll see:
The inhale flows.
The exhale flows.
They flow because they are part of Life.
The more you observe it, the more you will be pulled into the flow.
The breath becomes a meditation.
It pulls you back into rhythm with Life.
And then…
you’ll notice the pause—
a doorway,
a profound stillness.
Look into it,
and you’ll begin to see beyond the veil.
Into the deep, still essence
behind everything.
Pratyahara: Turning Around
The fifth limb:
Pratyahara.
This is the hub of the wheel.
The centre around which all the others turn.
Pratyahara means
to turn inward.
To stop identifying
with the world,
with what’s happening,
with everyone else.
And to face the sun.
To come back to
inner awareness.
Inner stillness.
Inner rest.
Inner authenticity.
Because your own mental fabric is the world.
You've got the world in your mind…
and you call it I.
I mean—
everybody else's opinion,
everybody else's idea,
everything that you took on…
That’s now made you unnatural.
Not yourself.
Turn away
Turn inward.
Can you do it now?
Just drop into your body.
Into your being.
Maybe you’ve been there all along
as you’ve read this.
That’s the place.
We’ve spent a long time
walking away from the sun.
At some point,
we turn.
That’s Pratyahara.
Run everything through your authenticity checker.
Ask:
How does this sit with me—
beneath the fears,
anxieties,
Conditioning?
What does that place say?
And then:
Am I willing to live by that?
Rather than the thousand voices
telling me what I should be?
You see?
You’re getting to hear all these voices of the world—
stored inside your own psychology.
“You’re not good enough.”
“You should be doing mor.e”
“We should be ther.e”
And the practice is… to start to hear them and ask:
Is it true?
These voices
aren’t even yours.
You’ve taken them on.
And now they echo in your mind
But they are not the truth.
And they are not you.
You have to listen to the one voice inside yourself.
That is why Pratyahara is the hub of the wheel.
Once you’ve tasted it —
that authentic inner place —
the practice becomes simple:
Practice being what you are.
In your asana,
you’re with yourself.
In your breathing,
you’re with yourself.
In your interactions,
you ask:
“God, where am I?”
Am I out there
trying to be something
for someone?
Or am I in here,
with the truth of myself?
This is the question.
Not a trick question.
Just: Where am I?
And something shifts.
It’s not that Life is happening to me.
Life is now emerging through me.
Life is coming from me.
I’m connected
to the deeper me.
No more firefighting.
I’m not managing life—
I’m flowing as life.
This…
is Pratyahara.
And it’s not just something you do on the mat.
It’s a way of living.
All day long.
Dharana: The Power of Interest
Dharana means:
to hold a sustained interest.
To be able to stay with just one thing.
Not forced concentration—
but genuine interest.
It means:
the ability to sustain interest
in whatever you’re doing.
To be able to hold something
long enough
to stay with it.
Not distracted by this,
by that,
by that other thing.
But staying
with a singular thing
you are truly interested in.
Often it’s called concentration—
but that’s a misleading word.
Concentration is a kind of effortful, mental state.
Dharana isn’t that.
It’s heart-based.
You’re simply choosing
to be interested.
If you’re genuinely interested,
concentration isn’t a problem.
It’s natural.
If you’re not interested…
then concentration’s a nightmare.
You’ll be fighting.
Fighting life.
So decide:
What am I interested in?
And then give yourself to that.
Give yourself fully
to what is right in front of you.
And if you can’t do that then go and do something else!
After a while of practicing this you will build a muscle.
That means you can engage with whatever Life puts in front of you.
Interest leads to presence.
Presence leads to power.
Do I feel more powerful to you
when I’m present with you?
Do we have more intimacy?
Is my energy not almost demanding that you are present with me?
We begin to create a different reality around ourselves
just by showing up in this way.
Then what we show interest in starts to reveal itself to us.
You are the key that opens every door.
Dhyana & Samadhi
If you stay interested,
you forget yourself as a separate being.
You forget the “I”.
You become the happening.
This is Dhyana.
And he says if you can blend into just one thing for a little bit of sustained time,
if you can develop this muscle inside of yourself to be present with Life,
more and more and more, that one thing will become everything..
then , Samadhi emerges—
integration.
Union.
You can barely tell
where you end
and Life begins.
You can still come back and be functional.
But you’re no longer fooled
by separateness.
A Life Worth Living
It’s not a ladder.
You don’t master one step at a time.
It’s an integrated way to live.
Thank you, Patanjali,
for making the path so clear.
Two thousand years later,
here we are asking:
“Why would we live any other way?”
Let’s bring these eight limbs
into the limbs of our bodies.
We are being told stories repeatedly.
It is literally in the molecules of the air of our society.
This then becomes the voice inside our head.
That voice is not accurate.
It takes a lot
to get clean.
To wash off the world.
But it’s worth it.
We don’t have to be against the world but we certainly don’t have to be locked into it.
The world doesn’t need more people who are successful.
It needs freelancers—
people not trapped in the world mind.
People injecting enough light
quietly, consistently—
keeping the whole thing afloat.
The time to do the work is when it’s needed.
Not when everything is easy.
That’s usually when we abandon it.
But the opposite is true.
Thank you
for being like this.
For doing this work.
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