8 Limbs of Yoga - Ahimsa

ahimsa pratisthayam tatsannidhau vairatyagah
The more friendly one is, the more one stimulates friendly feelings among all in one's presence

YS II,35 Translation by TKV Desikachar

The first of yamas is ahimsa - do no harm.  Do no physical, verbal or mental harm to yourself or to others.

The idea of doing no harm might sound passive (we might think of those Jain monks sweeping the ground before them with a broom, lest they inadvertently kill a bug with their feet), but ahimsa is a dynamic, active, positive kindness.  It is the idea that formed the basis of Gandhi's philosophy of non-violent protest (satyagraha), which influenced Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela among others, and which demonstrates just how powerful, vigorous and world-changing this simple idea can be.

Ahimsa is a good first principle for your asana practice - practice with compassion and sensitivity for yourself.  You don't want to sacrifice the positive feeling gained in a pose by pushing yourself so far into it that you feel pain.  There is a balance to be found between effort in a pose (the sensation of having muscles work, stretch and come to life) and the pain felt when you crank yourself into a pose with the determination to get further or deeper, but without the self-love to make it work for you and how and who you are today.  Make the effort to come to your mat, commit to focus and do your best to make each asana your best version of it, so that it looks like your asana and not someone else's and so that it feels good (challenging, but positive).  That's all.  That's perfect.

Ahimsa is a good first principle when approaching your inner critic.  Most of us have one, don't we?  What does your inner critic say to you?  Would you ever dream of being as hard on anyone else as you are on yourself?  Ahimsa means accepting yourself exactly as you find yourself.  In your practice, see if you can be alert to your inner critic: notice when it sparks up it's commentary, listen to what it says to you, you will find that you can choose to ignore it.  You might even be able to laugh at it.  Decide to be kind to yourself instead.  Remind yourself that your thoughts aren't real.  Notice how rather than holding you back, this capacity for kindness within yourself actually helps you to achieve more.

Ahimsa is the most basic principle for living well.  Listen in and be kind.  Give kindness to other people.  My teacher told me that you can change someone's life by offering them a kind word.  I believe him.

Be kind to yourself and through finding compassion for yourself learn how to be kinder to others, even the people you find difficult; we're all just doing our best in any given circumstance.  Even just trying to be kinder to yourself and to others brings more kindness.  Don't intimidate yourself by imagining that you need to reach the highest of ideals, we can all think of someone who seems to us the quintessence of eternal sunshine and kindness (the Dalai Lama?  Nelson Mandela?), but we're all human, so we all get impatient, cross, grumpy, unreasonable, or frustrated sometimes. 

The great thing about yoga is that it lets us be human (with all our mistakes and weaknesses and the dark bits that we'd rather other people didn't know about), but it gives us space to reflect on how we could have a better, kinder, stronger, more generous way of living and it gives us a method for working towards that.

You can't truly be kind to others until you know how to truly be kind to yourself.  You above all others know the many ways that you have fallen short, and it is so much easier to linger on those memories than on the times that you did well, helped someone out or made a positive difference.  Sometimes you won't ever know how much something you said or did has helped another person.  Hold yourself in positive self-regard: you are a human being doing your best to be good, helpful, compassionate and you have a lot to give.

Be kind: don't jump to judge and separate yourself, seek instead to understand; treat others as you long to be treated yourself, with love and respect, regardless of whether or not they deserve or notice your kindness and regardless of what they offer you back.  Your kindness ought not to be dependent on what you hope or expect to receive from another. 

We all want to live in a kinder world, but the only part of the world that you can change is yourself.

It is obvious why this is Patanjali's first rule for living well, for without commitment to ahimsa one cannot very well set out along the path of yoga, or the path of living well.

8 Limbs of Yoga - Yamas

The first of Patanjali's 8 Limbs of Yoga are the yamas - observances for living well in the world.  

There was a time when spiritual pursuits were solely the domain of the Brahmin class.  In Vedic times it was only a member of the Brahmin class who could be a priest, perform religious observances and translate the Vedic texts.  But by the time of the Buddha and Patanjali, many of these religious ceremonies had become meaningless ritual; the shallow outward trappings of faith.  In response to this lack of genuine religious endeavour came the Upanishads, Buddhism and Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.

Patanjali's system of yoga took away the need for someone to be of a certain class or social standing by birth to follow a spiritual path - then as now, yoga is for everyone.  The Yoga Sutras also give responsibility for one's path to the student himself; we may consult teachers or learn from others, but essentially the yoga path is something we must do by and for ourselves.  To walk along the path of yoga, you have to practise; you have to experience it for yourself.

The yamas are Patanjali's rules for this new breed of yoga practitioners who were often living normal lives in the world, rather than living cloistered lives as priests or scholars.  They describe a set of restraints, which if practised, give yoga students a firm foundation on which to build their yoga practice. 

They yamas are as follow:

• Ahimsa - non-harming/non-violence

• Satya - truthfulness/honesty

• Asteya - non-stealing/integrity

• Brahmacarya - chastity/self-restraint

• Aparigraha - non-grasping/freedom from greed/non-attachment 

These restraints are consistent with the purpose and method of all yoga practice, for instance we cannot practice yoga successfully if we are being violent or causing harm elsewhere in our lives; we will not have a fruitful practice if we are being dishonest to ourselves or to others.

Patanjali describes the yamas as follows:

jati desa kala samaya anavacchinnah sarvabhaumah mahavratam
Yamas are the great, mighty, universal vows, unconditioned by place, time and class

YS II.31 translation by BKS Iyengar

These are vows for everyone regardless of their place or situation of birth (this had particular meaning for a culture with a caste system like India's) - they are for everyone.  They must not be broken for any excuse, be it time, place, or circumstance - it is no good being truthful all week and dishonest on Friday because it was expedient to for you be so.

It is helpful to think of the yamas not as rules, but as freedoms... to be free from causing harm; free from dishonesty; free from the guilt caused by having stolen; free from over-indulgence; free from greed.

The yamas require a commitment to self-reflection: sometimes it is obvious when we have transgressed one of the yamas, other times our actions are more subtle, our motivations more profound.  As when we become angry (ahimsa) because we did something we didn't want to do because we were unable to say no (satya).

A dedicated yoga practice requires not the highest levels of moral rectitude, there is no judgement to be taken here, there is no hierarchy of goodness; yoga requires only that we commit daily to the concept of yamas and each day forgive our shortcomings and commit once more to Patanjali's observances for living well in the world.

Patanjali's 8 Limbs of Yoga - Essential for Modern Practice

The practice of yoga goes back thousands of years, but the way it is practised has changed emphasis over the millenia.  Nowadays most of us come to yoga through the practice of asana, but when Patanjali wrote the Yoga Sutras in about 200BC the word asana simply meant 'seat' and was used to refer to the posture assumed for meditation (typically a seated lotus, siddhasana, or cross-legged position) and to the place where you sat to meditate.  Patanjali's only instruction when it came to asana was as follows:

sthiram sukham asanam
yoga pose is a steady and comfortable position

YS II, 46 translation by Mukunda Stiles

That's it.  Sit in a comfortable and steady position and practise yoga.  For a modern yoga student, it doesn't give us much to go on... and some of us can't sit comfortably in a seated position on the floor for very long without experiencing pain... and some of us can't sit quietly with ourselves for even a few minutes without being distracted by the chattering of our minds... we need a bit more help and that came later in the form of Hatha Yoga, a system which gives us the physical exercises to get us to the point of being able to sit quietly with ourselves.

But the 8 limbs of yoga naturally occur during any good modern asana practice and contemplation of all 8 limbs will deepen your yoga practice, whatever form it takes.

The 8 limbs of yoga as taught by Patanjali are:

• Yamas - social observances for living well within society

• Niyamas - individual practices for living well

• Asana - a steady and comfortable position

• Pranayama - breathing practice

• Pratyhara - withdrawal of the senses/drawing the mind's focus inward

• Dharana - concentration through fixing the attention on one point

• Dhyana - meditation

• Samadhi - deep meditation to such an extent that you forget yourself entirely

Some people imagine the 8 limbs of yoga as a ladder - in this analogy we must conquer each step in turn, first mastering the yamas, then moving on to the niyamas, etc. all the way through to samadhi, or enlightenment. 

Another common analogy is to imagine the 8 limbs like the legs of a spider with ourselves as the body; in this analogy each limb contributes concurrently to yoga practice. 

This image resonates more with my own experience of yoga practice.  Not only did I come to asana practice before I had even heard of the yamas or niyamas, but many of the concepts expounded in the 8 limbs had risen naturally in the course of my deepening asana practice before I knew or understood that they had names and had been codified by Patanjali thousands of years before.  For me, therefore, mastering each rung of the ladder in turn was not a prerequisite for experiencing a profound and transformative yoga practice.

Patanjali himself does not prescribe how we should approach the 8 limbs, so in a sense we are free to choose how we view them.  If you decide that you would like to begin by mastering the first rung of the ladder before moving on the next, then let me know how you get on - I am in awe... I fear that were I to take that option, I would spend the whole of this lifetime on that pursuit and end my days no nearer to being ready to step onto the next rung!

Over the next few weeks, I'll be writing about the 8 limbs... taking each one in turn, examining their meaning and considering how they enhance and enrich modern yoga practice.  Perhaps you'll have ideas and experiences to add to the conversation.

I think I am fairly typical - I tried yoga; it worked for me: life felt better, I felt better, and so I wanted to know more.  In seeking to know more I found that much of what I was experiencing in my practice had been described by various teachers and writers over the course of the preceding 2,500 years or so.  It's one of the wonderful things about yoga that once in a while you stumble across something that describes your own private experience so accurately that it amazes you, some of these descriptions are modern, but many of them are from ancient teachings, still as relevant today.  These teachings from centuries past are essential to modern yoga practice, even if that modern practice looks very different to what Patanjali would have understood as yoga.