Take a journey along yoga's ancient philosophical path with our series and understand the deeper principles of your practice.
Each new year, most of us seek ways to remedy our ills and frailties of the previous twelve months. Goals missed, opportunities not taken, topped off with a little festive over-indulgence, and we’re ready to wipe the slate clean and start over.
Almost immediately as the clock strikes twelve on January 1st, we resolve to become better versions of who we were last year. And there’s no better way to achieve such personal growth and moral rectitude than with yoga.
An ancient spiritual system, yoga is revered in the west as an expedient for inner peace and calm, outer health, vitality, and unfathomable flexibility. While the physical practice of posture – known in Sanskrit (yoga’s mother tongue) as asana – is important for many reasons, it’s only one small step of a longer, philosophical path.
The meaning of yoga
When we start practicing yoga, we’re at risk of placing too much emphasis on ourselves, our own path and purpose, unconsciously rewiring ourselves to believe we must go inward and serve ourselves before anyone else.
The truth is, we can’t serve ourselves without simultaneously serving others and the world around us. With internet-based classes on the rise, and ‘flaking’ fetishized web-wide, we engage in many aspects of life - particularly yoga - as an isolatory practice. In this, we run the risk of it becoming disproportionately self-serving. This creates huge deficits in our lives and detracts from the true meaning of yoga: unity.
Yoga is ultimately a practice of unionising our own mind, body, and soul, but we should challenge whether we can come to understand what that union looks like without involving others, and their experiences of us.
By nature, we’re sociable creatures and yoga honours and respects this. We project our own experiences of the world onto others. From their actions and responses, we can look at ourselves deeper, magnifying the intentions behind our own motivations, and learn how to be better versions of ourselves.
Through others, we equip ourselves with the tools needed to achieve alignment and union of mind, body, and spirit.
Eight limbs of yoga
Understandably, when we begin a yoga practice, we focus on the physical exercises (asanas) as a tangible mean to a spiritual goal. But asana is just one spoke of the yogic wheel. And, to achieve inner peace, flexibility of mind and body, as well as elasticity within our spirit, we should embrace all eight steps of the yogic path.
Pioneered by the Sage Patanjali in their Yoga Sutras, the eight limbs of yoga were determined as the essential tools for preparing the heart, mind, body, and spirit for achieving ultimate enlightenment and surrender to higher divinity.
By practicing all eight limbs holistically, we can live by a sound moral compass and understand the importance of who we are as individuals, while understanding and respecting our humility within the universe.
First steps: Yamas and Niyamas
Yamas
Put simply, the Yamas are vows and considerations about the world around us and how we interact with it. They transmute the physical strength, flexibility, and calm we develop on the mat, applying such venerable qualities to other areas of our lives. Through proscription of the Yamas, we avoid displacement and establish a sound moral compass, by which we treat ourselves and the world around us with compassion and respect.
There are five Yamas, which are:
Ahimsa - non-violence
It’s natural to assume this simply means to not hurt another person or adopt a vegetarian but ahimsa’s meaning is multifarious and runs deeper than avoiding physical acts of violence. While it’s important to not hurt other people or creatures, it’s equally important to not hurt ourselves. Ahimsa prescribes a life of honour and respect for the self. Acting, thinking and talking to ourselves in a nurturing way, avoiding destructive, negative patterns.
Because ahimsa is a Yama, its philosophy also connects to the world around us. Thinking about our impact on the earth and taking steps to avoid environmental harm are all part of our commitment to a life of compassion and non-violence.
Satya - truthfulness
Asteya - non-stealing
Brahmacharya - control of physical and spiritual energy
Aparigraha - non-covetousness
Niyamas
Referring to intrinsic duties and personal observances, the Niyamas are parallel to the extrinsic responsibilities determined by their sibling Yamas. A malleable mandate for calibrating the physical self and developing character, the five Niyamas are:
Saucha - cleanliness
Many religious orders observe ablutions before prayer or attending places of worship. While we may deem it important to take a similar approach to our yoga practices (our spaces and mats are sacred platforms for deep exploration, after all), the Niyama Saucha doesn’t necessarily refer to personal hygiene or how mucky your mat is. Many yogic philosophers have come to understand Saucha as a cleanliness of mind and spirit.
When we practice yoga, we invite and work with higher frequencies and stronger waves of energy. If we meet said energy with an adverse disposition (aggression, for example), we quickly become displaced and struggle to harvest the positivity of our practices. It’s important to ‘cleanse’ ourselves of ingrained impurities before we practice, otherwise we’ll spend a good portion of our practices wading through inner pollution before we’re permitted to reap the real rewards of yoga.
Santosha - contentment
Tapas - burning desire/burning of desire
Svadhyaya - self-study
Isvarapranidaha – surrender to God/higher power
A mandate for modern life
Patanjali penned his yoga sutras and established the eight limbs of yoga in an age drastically different to the twenty-first century - with different problems and different priorities.
Even though the wisdom and ethical theory of the eight limbs has been routinely passed down through generations of teachers, like everything, how yoga is practiced has been subject to evolution and moulded to fit the needs of the moment.
Today, in the west, we’ve adapted yoga to ameliorate the stresses and tolls of our hectic lives – largely favouring asana and meditation. But as yoga’s reach expands (thank you, world-wide web), we’ve started to reignite the eight limbs and exercise curiosity about the deeper spiritual meaning of yoga.
Lifting the veil, we’re now looking beyond the surface and exploring the deeper echelons of yoga and finding more elasticity in our practices by broadening our minds and embracing yoga as a system for living with intention.
And we’ve come to recognise the fantastic caveat of philosophical systems, like yoga – their teachings aren’t prescriptive. Instead, they are impetuses for deeper consideration, new perspectives, and offer us avenues for adapting ethics and morals to any given situation or circumstance.
The philosophical teachings of yoga are open to interpretation and wholly subjective – they’ll always mean something unique to each of us. But they’ll always have the same intention: to help us change for the better and feed that change to the world around us.
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