WE WESTERN PRACTITIONERS (I cannot speak for non-Western practitioners) have come to realize, somewhat reluctantly, that our spiritual practice has not eliminated some of our basic psychological ills, including deep anxieties, fears, and neuroses. This is hard to admit. We came to practice, and continue to practice, because we believe in the liberative freedom promised by texts, teachers, and practices. But as time moves forward, we see that practice sometimes leaves many stones unturned. How is it that we can develop strong and flexible posture practices, deep states of meditation, or advanced prāṇāyāma techniques, yet still leave many of our deep-seated habits and thoughts untouched?
Many practitioners report that periods of deep practice can sometimes be followed by periods of confusion, depression, or anxiety. Returning from workshops or retreats, practitioners have to face the reality of relational existence. For most of us, it is the world of relationship that brings up our deepest holding patterns. That being so, it is the clarifying work of attending to the push of habit and the pull of relationship that forms the first limb of yoga practice.
Without beginning on the first limb of the path, the yamas (restraints), our practice may bypass important developmental activities crucial to our psychological growth, including cultivating relationships with diverse people and learning how to navigate relational existence in general. Sincere and eccentric relationships demand of us authenticity and present-centeredness. Virginia Woolf described this succinctly in a diary entry of June 22, 1940: “More to the point and less composed.”1
As our yoga practice matures, we find ourselves less accompanied by self-reference and, in place of self-interest, a new kind of movement in tune with the world. The practice of waking up the mind and body and the practice of stilling mind and body go hand in hand in what is referred to as the royal (rāja) path of yoga, described by Patañjali as the eight-limbed path. This path, known as Aṣṭāṅga yoga (aṣ—“eight,” tāṇga—“limbs”), involves the simultaneous practice of eight limbs, or branches.
The poisons Pattabhi Jois referred to prior to teaching about the kleṣas have as their common denominator self-centeredness. Envy, anger, jealousy, greed, and scattered desire all resolve to fortify our sense of self with an unsatisfying and ultimately untenable solution. The yamas keep these diverse and conflicting impulses in check. Desire, for example, is necessary for anyone who pursues a spiritual path, but it’s the act of seeing through desire by holding it in check that ultimately transforms our relation to it and to others. Without a practice that increases the clarity of thought, perception, and feeling, we wind up moving through the world enclosed in a soliloquy that leaves in its wake alienation, harm, and dissatisfaction. We have a moral obligation to the entire ecological web of existence to wake up from self-pity and self-promotion in order to attend to our place in the world with sensitivity and wisdom.
The eight limbs are as follows:
1. Yamas (external restraints): the clarification of one’s relationship to the world of people and objects. There are five practices associated with this limb:
Ahiṁsā (not harming, nonviolence)
Satya (honesty, being truthful)
Asteya (not taking what is not freely given, not stealing)
Brahmacharya (wise use of energy, including sexual energy)
Aparigraha (not being acquisitive, not accumulating what is not essential)
2. Niyamas (internal restraints): personal principles governing the cultivation of insight.
Śauca (purification)
Santoṣa (contentment)
Tapas (discipline, patience)
Svādhyāya (self-study, contemplation)
Īśvara-pranidhāna (devotion, dedication to the ideal of pure awareness)
3. Āsana (posture): cultivation of profound physical and psychological steadiness and ease in mind, breath, and body.
4. Prāṇāyāma (breath and energetic regulation): sustained observation and relaxation of all aspects of breathing, bringing about a natural refinement of the mind-body process through the stilling of the respiratory process.
5. Pratyāhāra (withdrawing of the senses): a naturally occurring uncoupling of sense organs and sense objects as awareness interiorizes.
6. Dhāraṇā (concentration meditation): locking awareness on a single object (such as sound, breath, sensations in the body) until the field of awareness becomes singular and focused.
7. Dhyāna (absorption): concentration deepens to the point where subject and object dissolve.
8. Samādhi (integration): the sustained experience of concentration, in which there is a complete integration of subject and object, revealing pure awareness as the nondual substratum of reality; no-separation.
Some teachers describe the first four limbs as external and the last four limbs as internal. Others say that you practice the first four limbs with sheer will and then the last four limbs occur spontaneously. However, this is not the traditional approach to the eight limbs, nor what Patañjali intended. A balanced practice is the simultaneous investigation of all eight limbs as each limb compliments every other limb. Richard Freeman describes the eight limbs as a complete yoga practice,
. . . which is evolving into deep and spontaneous meditation and complete liberation. The variety of limbs guarantees that the awareness operates in all spheres of one’s life, so that no distortion, perversion or fantasy will attempt to usurp the solid ground of real Yogic insight. In many of the yoga Upaniṣads the eight limbs are further expanded into fifteen. The advantage of considering the path of yoga to have many aspects is that one is encouraged not to neglect the moral, the ethical, the interpersonal, the physiological, the esoteric and the meditative aspects of practice. The term Aṣṭāṅga implies both simultaneous realization of all these interrelated aspects of practice and a logical step-by-step progression where one limb prepares one to truly practice the next one.2
In contemporary yoga practices we often jump into the third limb, of āsana, and end up with a fragmented and imbalanced yoga practice because it has no roots. The rooting of a practice occurs when one starts at the beginning with the ethical codes that Patañjali outlines as the stepping-stone to further practices.
The root problems in our world—violence, greed, anger, inflexibility, intolerance—are at core a problem of perception and consciousness. In terms of perception, our attitudes, behaviors, and actions are conditioned in ways that are not challenged within culture. And in terms of consciousness, there seems to be a fundamental existential dislocation, one that has both cognitive and ethical dimensions. That is, individual and collective duḥkha both stem from a disorientation in our understanding of reality, and a distortion of what we are actually experiencing. Because our root problems have to do with perception and consciousness, this means that any viable solution must be framed in terms of a transformation of consciousness. It requires an attempt to arrive at a more accurate grasp of the human situation in its full depth and breadth, and a turning of the mind and heart in a new direction, a direction commensurate with the new understanding, one that brings light and peace rather than strife and distress. This begins with the cultivation of a practice rooted in human and ecological relationship rather than individual success or achievement. Yoga is a practice of horizontal transcendence (you and me in relation to each other) rather than vertical transcendence (my practice for my own freedom).
Many practitioners of Hatha Yoga have a partial view of practice since the cornerstone of the path, the yamas, is bypassed or avoided altogether. The foundation of the spiritual path of yoga is ethics. Ethics forms the foundation of yoga practice, because as a set of suggestions for how to live, it goes right to the heart of our actions of body, speech, and mind. The ethical principles of nonharming, truthfulness, the wise use of sexual energy, not stealing, and nonacquisitiveness refer to the honest examination and transformation of our physical actions and interpersonal relations. They not only apply to the way we act in external relationships, they also apply to our internal states as well. We apply these ethical principles to all relationships, including intrapsychic.
If our yoga practice went no further than the first limb—ethics-based restraints—we would still experience great benefit, as would those around us. Ethical principles keep us kind, sensitive, and balanced in our internal states as well as in our response to the external; the yamas place us over and again squarely in community, even in the community of characters and energies that move through our internal awareness. They keep us grounded in the world of relationship, which includes other people, animals, the environment, the elements, and even one’s internal states of mind and body.
The yamas also help keep the mind and the energetic flow of the body from being scattered. They help us maintain our equilibrium while being in and of the world. This also helps us study our own psychology, since we watch closely our intentions when taking any given action. Having the yamas as guides allows us to see clearly the nature of our intentions so that we can monitor our volitional actions and engage appropriately with whatever circumstance we find ourselves in. The yamas remind us that the purpose of yoga is to show how experience can be made a source of creative action. In fact sometimes the most negative characteristics of one’s personality are more prominent sources of wisdom than the positive aspects, because they are the details and encumbrances that we’ve struggled with most, know most intimately, and have learned how to wrestle, restrain, and transform.
In addition to teaching yoga I also have a psychotherapy practice. In my continual training as a psychotherapist I am always amazed at how strict the guidelines are about professional ethics, such as maintaining confidentiality or not having inappropriate sexual relations with our patients—yet the psychology of ethics on a personal level are never discussed. One of the greatest differences between the Western and the yogic models of psychology and psychological methods of transformation is that yoga begins with a very clear articulation and description of ethics, while Western psychology avoids altogether the topic of ethical action except in terms of professional conduct. It is surprising that the training for people in the helping professions, especially since they tend to be the people who help us make decisions and take action, does not include training in the psychology of being ethical. Personal commitment to the yamas helps us work with our deeply conditioned and seemingly instinctual patterns of reactivity so that our intentions and actions can be motivated by clarity of mind and generosity rather than chronic patterns of reactivity or self-interest.
When we move farther along the path of yoga, much like hiking up a mountain, we want to travel lightly. This means not bringing along the weighty baggage of inappropriate relationships, guilt, shame, and the manifestations of a mind caught in greed, hatred, or delusion.
Unlinking actions of body, speech, and mind leave in their wake difficulty and stress. Traveling lightly begins in the first limb through the purification of our relationships both internally and externally. The demands of desire are endless. Like insatiable energies, they continually strive for satisfaction by creating in the mind the belief that something outside of ourselves can last eternally. The entire path of yoga, from beginning to end, orients the practitioner toward a life of renunciation. What is most difficult to renounce, however, is the desire for a solid and permanent sense of self. The yamas, as a cornerstone of practice, keeps the practitioner embedded in the world of relationships in order to use this relational matrix as a means of seeing through a self-centered reality. The yamas safeguard against the tendency to act out habitual patterns of reactivity.