Yoga as the ancient, complete spiritual system it truly is, and Patanjali's eight limbs, of which the physical postures are only one.
For most people in the modern Western world, the single word "yoga" instantly calls up a very particular image: stretching and balancing in a studio, rolled mats and patterned leggings and impressively difficult physical postures. This image is not wrong, exactly, but it is a tiny and rather misleading fragment of something genuinely vast. The physical practice that the West has so eagerly adopted is only one small part of a complete, integrated, and ancient spiritual philosophy, many thousands of years old, whose true and original aim was never a flexible, photogenic body at all, but a still, clear, and ultimately liberated mind. To meet the whole of yoga, rather than just its most visible limb, is to discover with some surprise that the postures everyone knows are really just a doorway opening into something far larger and far deeper.
The word yoga itself comes from an ancient Sanskrit root meaning "to yoke" or "to unite," and that root points directly at the tradition's very deepest goal: the union of the individual self with something far greater than itself, and the patient stilling of the restless, chattering mind that ordinarily keeps us cut off from it. Around two thousand years ago, the sage Patanjali gathered the existing scattered teachings together into a single concise and foundational text, the Yoga Sutras, in which he famously and economically defined the whole of yoga in essentially one line as "the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind." Everything else in the entire system, very much including every single physical posture, exists ultimately in service of that one central aim. Yoga, properly and fully understood, is nothing less than a complete and sophisticated technology for quieting, clarifying, and finally liberating human consciousness itself.
Patanjali laid out the full path as having eight distinct limbs, eight interconnected and mutually supporting aspects of practice that hold one another up like the parts of a single living body. The first two are entirely ethical foundations: the yamas, a set of restraints such as non-violence, truthfulness, and non-grasping that govern how we treat the world around us, and the niyamas, a set of positive observances such as contentment, self-discipline, and self-study that govern how we treat ourselves. Only the third of the eight limbs, asana, refers to the physical posture so universally familiar today, and in the original teaching its main and rather humble purpose was simply to make the body steady, healthy, and comfortable enough to sit still in deep meditation for long periods. The fourth limb, pranayama, is the conscious regulation and refinement of the breath. The fifth, pratyahara, is the deliberate drawing inward of the senses, turning the attention gently away from the constant clamour of the external world. And the final three limbs describe progressively deeper stages of meditation itself: dharana, focused single-pointed concentration; dhyana, sustained and effortless meditative absorption; and finally samadhi, a state of profound union in which the hard boundary of the separate, anxious self grows quiet and thin.
Seen whole and entire, the eight limbs together describe a complete ascending path, leading all the way from how you behave toward others in the ordinary world, up through the patient disciplining of the body and the breath, and on into the very deepest and subtlest reaches of the meditative mind. The physical postures are genuinely real and genuinely valuable, but they are only the third rung of an eight-rung ladder.
Priya first came to yoga purely and simply for her chronically aching lower back, and for the first two full years it remained, for her, nothing more than a helpful and pleasant form of physical exercise. Then one day a teacher, almost in passing and without making much of it, happened to mention the yamas, the ethical restraints at the very foundation of the path, and something quietly shifted in her understanding. She began to notice, slowly at first, that her practice of non-harming did not actually have to stop at the very edge of her rubber mat; it could naturally extend outward into how she spoke to herself in her own head, into how she ate, into how she treated a particularly difficult colleague at work. The physical postures had been her doorway in, but she had now walked right through that doorway and into a whole integrated philosophy of how to live an entire life. Her back, in the end, was genuinely better. But more to the point, and rather more importantly, so was she.
Whether or not you ever actually set foot on a yoga mat in your life, the eight-limbed framework offers a remarkably complete and balanced model of a fully integrated spiritual life: personal ethics, honest self-care, the living body, the conscious breath, the trained senses, and the progressively deepening and quietening mind, all carefully woven together into a single whole. And if you do happen to practise the physical postures, you can now let them be exactly what they were always truly meant to be, not the whole of yoga by any means, but a single beautiful and accessible entry point into the much larger lifelong work of stilling and uniting the self. The mat is simply where a great many people happen to begin. It was never, in the original vision, meant to be the place where they stop.
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