The Eight Limbs of Yoga

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras set out eight limbs, and only one of them is posture. The list runs: restraint, observance, seat, breath, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation, absorption. Modern yoga has expanded the third limb into an entire discipline and left much of the rest largely untouched.

The text itself is compressed to the point of severity. One hundred and ninety-six aphorisms, several of them a handful of words. It is not a manual you can follow unaided, which is why the commentarial tradition beginning with Vyasa is inseparable from it.

These pages walk the eight limbs in order, with attention to the five that get least attention: the ethical restraints that come first, and the three inner stages that come last and are treated as a single continuous movement. What the text says is kept distinct from what the twentieth century made of it.