ATTEMPTING TO PRACTICE ideals like brahmacharya in daily life is challenging, but like all the yamas, such ideals encourage transformation by which the alienation between myself and the world ultimately diminishes and a sense of mutual connection, responsibility, and empathy progressively matures. This is the actualization of nonduality. A lack of self-preoccupation allows us to be devoted to the welfare of others.
Free from the stress of dualistic fixation, and the ongoing habit of dividing the relational field into two—a subject and an object for the subject—we emerge free and better able to respond to others. In any form of fantasy or fixation there is no immediate and direct contact with the other. The other becomes an object that we steal for our sensual or imaginative gratification. This is an indirect experience of ourselves mediated by idea rather than by contact, control rather than receptivity. The yamas, though characterized as restraint, actually serve to open us up beyond a restrained existence. Knowing ourselves through self-image only turns us into objects for ourselves. This is unsatisfying. Hidden within the egoic strategies of stealing, being dishonest, or treating others as objects is a much deeper longing obscured by habitual tendency. Our deepest longing, also our greatest fear, is to simply be, without creating a need to be. Every negative behavior is a distorted attempt to connect with something greater than our conditioned circumstances. Thus, waking up in the yoga tradition, especially through the practice of the yamas, is waking up to a life of intimacy.
Any project of the ego is a facsimile of direct experience. The ego is always trying to become something other than it is, and the yamas are the antidote to these ambitions. There is no world beyond our actions here and their eventual effects, no matter how much we try to create something more everlasting, a utopia, a place away from this relational reality. Frustrated by this, we create otherworldly metaphysics, thinking that practice takes us away from this very world when in fact it connects us more deeply to the inherent nonduality of self and world.
“O Pavamana, place me in that deathless,
undecaying world wherein the light of heaven
is set and everlasting luster shines.”1
These words from the Vedas ring true to the part of us longing (or hoping) for something otherworldly to rescue us from the birth-death-and-birth cycle of existence. We want to create permanence in an impermanent world. The yamas remind us, however, that practice begins in this world, in this body, and nowhere other than right here. You and I are here together, and as such, our relationship forms the basis of the path, not a departure from it. Our relationships are our yoga practice; our practice exists not in some other place at some other time but in this very interconnected existence—you, I, water, trees, cars, winds, and breath. Water lilies and stars, breath and mind, rocks and moss—our stories about reality create separation, when in fact close examination reveals only the interpermeation of forms, coming and going.
The first two limbs, of restraints and ethics, are inseparable from intimacy. What yoga practice entails is not a self-reform or a self-improvement project but a complete forgetting of self-enclosure—an absence of that continuous checking and rechecking of our sense of ourselves. We no longer need check ourselves in the mirror of circumstance, constantly concerned with our place and performance in the scheme of things. We can instead simply be, breathing in and out, taking action based on a direct meeting with and response to our circumstances. But in order to truly meet our circumstances, we need to see them for what they are, and that is why ethics and psychology are bound together as psychological, social, and environmental action.
This eight-limbed path thus sets out to teach us about our patterns of reaction and also suggests appropriate actions, not as commandments but rather as suggestions. After learning about the ways we react, over and over again, we can embark on a project of action. And how do we take action? What do we do? How do we move? What are the conditions for spontaneous action, for feeling whole without needing to become “someone”?
There is no final way to act that will be judged as ultimately pure or essentially violent, except by those around us. The yamas are designed to open us up to those around us by motivating us to contemplate our actions of body, speech, and mind, internally and externally. In being sensitive to the effects of our actions, we open to the greater good. The yamas teach us about karma and the consequences of our intentions. When we do not understand the workings of karma, ethical restraints are not treated as psychological tools but rather as commandments or rules.
Again, the ethical practices outlined in this first limb are not to be thought of as commandments that will be punished by an all-powerful god. The nondual traditions, which include yoga, most forms of Buddhism, some schools of Advaita Vedanta, and Taoism, don’t operate within a system of rights and wrongs, which, in effect, would turn the theory of karma into a theory of a god who rewards or punishes. Karma is retributive only in its effect on us psychologically, not metaphysically. To add to this, by treating karma as attention to our actions in the here and now, we begin to see that we have the potential for awakening and also the potential for shutting down. Good and bad, heaven and hell, no longer become external or idealistic places or principles but rather psychological potentials. Instead of a divine that determines what is good or bad, we recognize in ourselves the ability to wake up and also the ability to return to a life of habit. When we see these two energies—waking up and closing down—operating in the mind and body at any given moment, we begin to see how important it is that we meditate on our actions of body, speech, and mind.
This continually keeps our practice connected with this world at this moment. “It is important to be responsible for everything you do and to see clearly the effects of your actions,” my first yoga teacher said when I asked her the definition of karma, “What you do right now counts.”
Many yoga students tell me that they cannot take action until they come to a place of stillness in mind. But Patañjali does not teach in this way. Though he may not have known about sticky mats and buckwheat cushions, Patañjali would argue strenuously for the practitioner to see engagement in the world and formal practice on the mat and cushion as one and the same thing. This is where his first limb begins. Abstract ideas about relationship, nonviolence, and ethics are very beautiful and compelling but what use are they in terms of psychological change if they cannot be put into practice?
A center of gravity is finding in oneself and others both the stillness of nonreactivity and the vitality of compassionate and wise action. Yoga is not about passivity; it’s about being in the world without being enslaved by worldly identification. The formal practices of these eight limbs help ground the practitioner in a balanced practice that uproots any habits in mind and body that prevent true freedom.
The other limbs, which we will discuss in greater detail later in this book, are also specific forms of practice. Pratyāhāra is the practice of naturally internalizing attention; dhāraṇā is the mindful practice of returning over and over again to an object of meditation such as the breath, mantra, sound, or sensations in the body; and dhyāna is the unfolding of dhāraṇā into a focused and concentrated state of mind. The stillness of dhyāna then becomes the platform from which one practices the several stages of samādhi.
Samādhi is not some final resting place, nor is it a goal of yoga, as many assume; rather, samādhi is a technique to be practiced like every other limb in the eight-limbed system. It consists of deepening our meditation practice to the point where we experience firsthand the ultimate separation of pure awareness and that which is impermanent. However, samādhi, as a series of techniques, is also subject to change, and returns us, full cycle, to the practice of ethics described in the first limb. If our ethical commitments as outlined in the yamas are not in good order, our progress in samādhi is stalled, and we backslide to the first limb again. This turns the eight-limbed system into a kind of circular set of practices that eventually form the path of yoga, rather than linear steps that end in samādhi. We continually cycle through the eight limbs, studying and practicing each limb in depth in a kind of circumambulation that wakes us up with each turn.
Cultivating a yoga practice is not just about physical flexibility and strength. Cultivating awareness is not about race, gender, or class—it’s about waking up to who we are and our place in the world. That is why we start with the yamas.
The heart of yoga is the cultivation of equilibrium in mind and body so that one can wake up to the reality of being alive, which includes not just joy and health but impermanence, aging, suffering, and death. A yoga practice that excludes the shadows of illness or aging cuts itself off from the truths of being alive. Similarly, a practice that focuses exclusively on physical culture and the performance of yoga poses at the expense of psychological understanding and transformation is a one-sided practice. Without the balanced practice of all eight limbs, and a path rooted in the first limb especially, yoga practice can easily become another form of materialism.