grahaṇa-svarūpāsmitānvayārthavattva-saṁyamād indriya-jayaḥ
grahaṇa-svarūpa-asmita-anvaya-arthavattva-saṁyamāt indriya-jayaḥ
“From saṁyama on the act of perception–how we hear, touch, see, taste, smell, how we make story, create intention, and find meaning–an awakening of the senses.”

Yoga practice teaches that perception is subjective. As soon as I place my attention on an object (dhāraṇā), I experience how my mind moves off it. The return to the point of focus is a repeating process of letting go and also learning, or hearing, as Rohit Mehta would say, the story of my mind (dhyāna). In this process, ironically, I may become better at observing. When I attend inwardly–to breath, to inner shape and space and feeling–the inward sensing itself refreshes the senses. Though always subjective, perception can tune in better or worse to one’s own inner state and to the physical world.

In today’s sūtra, Patañjali invites us to attend to the senses themselves, to hearing, touching, seeing, tasting, smelling, and to consider how they influence and are influenced by our thoughts, by our sense of self, our experience of connection, and our purposes. What senses do I rely on most? Which do I use less or am even unaware of? Are there things I sense but shut out of awareness? What happens if I begin to be more aware, feel more?

In my cultural background, which does have Puritanical roots, there was a kind of hierarchy of the senses. Seeing and hearing were privileged more, commented on the most, and touching, tasting, smelling were noted less, and even, perhaps, admitted to with embarrassment. Various  commentaries on III.48 admonish the practitioner to not be “carried away by the senses,” and interpret the teaching here to be about control. From my experience, I would say that yoga has brought me not control but rather awakening, an increased sensitivity, and I am grateful for it.

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?
—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The great poet challenges us to tune to the living breathing world around us. What are we missing? What are our habits, preconceptions, schedules, stopping us from seeing…or tasting?

I have adopted a dog, a two-year-old mixed breed, who is part hound, and I am witnessing every day with him what it might be to orient first–before any other sense–to smell. This is fascinating, and I find I am checking in with smell more. As I do, I realize I have a fair amount of sensitivity to smell but I often tune it out and only become conscious of a smell because I feel generally uncomfortable or generally happy in a smell-related way. But what if I seek out smell? What if I choose to discern through smell? To deliberately scan my surroundings by smelling them?

A writing student of Audre Lorde’s recalls receiving feedback from her: “Good ideas, but I can’t smell it. And I can’t taste it. And I want you to go home and pull it out, and when you can smell it and when you can taste it… [bring it back].” (As told to Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival Is a Promise, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, pg 220.)

B.K.S. Iyengar considered that increased sensitivity is an attribute of buddhi (intelligence) and so taught embodiment, feeling the body, in many ways. He encouraged students to “savor” the āsana, and he explored the senses in multifold ways in prānāyāma, giving instructions for the eyes, ears, nostrils, tongue, skin.

The structure of III.48 parallels III.45, the subject of which was bhūta-jaya, alignment with the elements. There Patañjali directed our attention to the increasingly subtle layers of the physical world (table 15 in Light on the Yoga Sūtras, by B.K.S. Iyengar, gives a useful map of yogic cosmogony; see pg. 310).

Here Patañjali turns to the subtle aspects of perception itself. As in III.45, each of the terms in III.48 has a direct correspondence to layers of existence in yogic cosmogony, but they are also resonant on their own.

The five components of perception are

1. grahaṇa–grasping, apprehending, the input of data
2. svarūpa–inner essence of the senses, primary analysis
3. asmita–identity, sense of self, story
4. anvaya–connection, understanding, intention
5. arthavattva–meaning, purpose

Our eye is not a camera. Interpretation happens almost immediately. Expectation of what we see affects what we do see. And so one of the key components of perception is asmita, literally, “I-am-ness.” Identity leads me to create story. Story affects perception. For example, I live in a small city, and I do not expect to see rabbits here. And yet there is a rabbit who lives near my yard. But rabbits are not part of the story I have told myself. Squirrels are part of the story I have. And so, when a little furry thing darted across the yard, I saw a squirrel. It has taken me a while to actually see, and know that I was seeing, a rabbit.

Much of the agitation, hypervigilance, anxiety that we face comes from story. Yoga’s effectiveness is related to practices of tuning more to our senses and less to our thoughts. Just to pause and feel the touch of air on the skin, or to look at a few objects in the room, can calm, regulate, and can help general perception improve.

Our larger society is shaped by the stories we tell. Narratives can dull our senses, numb us to real events. I recently read a book that powerfully demonstrates this. Copaganda, by Alec Karakatsanis, takes a close look at how media covers crime. Since the mass demonstrations against police violence in 2020, there has been a general alarm in the media that crime is rising, despite the opposite being true. As Karakatsanis writes, we are “living in a period with among the lowest number of police-recorded crimes in modern U.S. history.” (pg. 5)

The consequence has been rising investment in police budgets and increasing militarization of local forces, not to mention the deployment of ICE in our cities. Though the crisis is manufactured, public perception is certain that we are in a time of increasing crime. Indeed, the press also shapes what we see to be crime.

Karakatsanis describes how the stories told about crime in the United States tend to protect the powerful and afflict the poor. News media feature articles about shoplifting yet rarely cover wage theft by employers. Local governments invest in police on the streets but do not indict slum landlords. Our national government builds bombs to drop on other countries but passively accepts a lack of housing for all people, as though we have no resources left to actually build homes.

Karakatsanis is a civil-rights attorney who has long worked against mass incarceration (the United States also has one of the highest rates of people imprisoned in the world). He describes his work to protect family-visitation rights in Flint, Michigan. He speaks to one of the children of a prisoner he represents:

She then said something I will never forget. She explained that working on the case was exciting for her not just because it meant that people cared about what was happening to her family, but also because it meant there were “adults who care about something.” … What I think she identified in us adults is a dulling of our senses and our spirits. … Copaganda is part of a deeper project of preserving the way things are and making us all okay with it. It turns things about our society that should shock us to the core into things we do not even notice, into things we meet with a million isolated shrugs and a sense of helplessness. –Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How the Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, pg.341

Many of us do not know what happens inside our prisons, not to mention the new, hurriedly constructed detention camps for immigrants. I would argue that the fourth aspect of perception Patañjali offers, anvaya, connection, is itself an invitation to know and see and feel all the connections around us, the natural world, yes, and our fellow human beings. Pada Three has taken our attention to the sun and the moon and the stars. Today’s sūtra may indeed be a call to consider our humanity.

Yoga practice is meant to awaken the senses, to increase awareness, and to open our hearts to the living, breathing, feeling world we are part of. What stories do we tell, or what stories have we been told, that cut us off from connection and care, that lead us to shut out suffering and conclude there is nothing to be done?

May we be adults who care. May we do something.

For every thing that lives is Holy.

–William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

—–

“This parallels sutra III.45. Instead of turning the attention to matter, here the yogi examines the act of perception and how it relates to the ego and the sense organs. Knowledge leads to mastery. By knowing the essential nature and purpose of the senses, the role they play in the act of perception, and how they work with and help maintain the ego-sense, the yogi gains control over the senses.” –The Reverend Jaganath Carrera, Inside the Yoga Sūtras, commentary on III.48

“Sensation is the act of receiving a stimulus through a sense organ; perception is the act of interpreting a stimulus registered in the brain by one or more sense mechanisms. While the psychological mechanism for receiving stimuli is similar in various individuals, interpretations of these stimuli may easily differ. A photograph is the result of sensation of light waves. Painting or drawing is the result of an artist’s individual perception. In short senses receive and the mind perceives.” –Sri Brahmananda Sarasvati, The Textbook of Yoga Psychology, commentary on III.48

“Everything we experience in the world is transmitted through the ‘I’ consciousness.”  –B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sūtras, commentary on III.48

Questions:
• Has yoga practice made you more sensitive? Opened perception?
• What does pratyāhāra, turning inward, teach you about the senses–smell, taste, touch, sight, sound? How are your senses active in pratyāhāra?
• What parts of your body do you sense with? Can you see with your heart? Listen with your bones? Feel with your feet?
• Do you sometimes protect yourself from sensory input?
• How do you take in the news? Has this changed?

rūpa-lāvaṇya-bala-vajra-saṃhananatvāni kāya-sampat
rūpa-lāvaṇya-bala-vajra-saṃhananatvāni kāya-sampad
“Beauty of form, strength, diamond-like brilliance, and dynamic alignment [are] body health.”

Sūtra III.45 states that saṁyama on the physical world–on its various layers, its interconnectedness–brings attunement with the elements (bhūta-jaya). III.46 expands on the blessings and abilities that come from attunement. One of these blessings is kaya-sampad.

Kāya is body and sampad (from sam-, “together,” + pad, “to fall”) is success, fulfillment, prosperity. The compound is often translated as “perfection of the body,” but is perhaps more helpfully understood to mean realization of the body’s potential. I have translated it as body health. (The English word health derives from an Old English word hal, which means “whole.” Thus health carries a sense of wholeness.)

Patañjali gives us the opportunity in today’s sūtra  to pause and consider: what do we mean by body health, and what is its significance to how we live and how we identify.

Do not think of yourself as a small, compressed, suffering thing. Think of yourself as graceful and expanding, no matter how unlikely it may seem at the time.  –B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life, p. 40

B.K.S. Iyengar taught āsana and prāṇāyāma to the young and old and to all bodies–tight, flexible, athletic, sedentary, injured, afflicted. He lived by this idea: that it matters how we inhabit our body. He often spoke, delightfully, of the mind of the body and the body of the mind, turning topsy-turvy our ideas of what and who shapes what and who.

In the Bhagavad Gītā, Krishna tells Arjuna that the body is the field (śarīram kṣetram, see sūtra II.4). We are the farmers that cultivate the field–and we are the field. B.K.S. Iyengar writes, “If you think you are your body, you are wrong. If you say you are not your body, you are also wrong.” (Light on Life, p. 25)

We are dehavat, embodied beings (deha, “body” + vat, a suffix indicating possession: “ones who have bodies”; see Bhagavad Gītā, XII.5). This is our perplexity. But it is also, as today’s sūtra celebrates, our blessing.

The health of the body, Patañjali writes here, is beauty of form (rūpa-lāvaṇya), strength (bala), diamond-like brilliance (vajra), and dynamic alignment (saṃhananatva). These four attributes weave together.

Rupa means form and lāvaṇya is beauty or loveliness. It is a word associated with the goddess Lakshmi and so suggests wealth and prosperity as well. Key to Iyengar practice (and many other physical disciplines) is a discovery of one’s own anatomy, especially the bony structures that serve as landmarks. We learn form, that is, we learn anatomy, in our own bodies.  We find inner structure that supports us better in gravity, that helps us move with more ease and expansiveness. Structure, indeed, helps us tune to the elements–to the fluidity of water, the force of fire, lightness of air, groundedness of earth, openness of space. I consider my own body to be unexceptional, yet its beauty has been revealed to me every day that I have practiced.

Bala is strength, a property that Patañjali has already mentioned as a focus for saṁyama in III.25 (he specifically mentions the elephant’s strength). How does yoga build strength? There is some element of building muscle, but, significantly, strength comes as well from directing the attention, with the practice of saṁyama itself. The mind builds strength as the body gains clarity. Strength also comes with the movement of prāṇa. There is a refreshment, a revitalization, that comes with practice, as though each cell has been vibrated and comes into better alignment. In āsana practice, we build a structure that supports flow of energy. A completed āsana, Mr. Iyengar has said, is like a tuning fork. No part leaks, or falls out of awareness, but all is brought into the whole.

Vajra is diamond (it also means thunderbolt or a weapon like a thunderbolt), and it indicates a structure that is clear and strong. The diamond is a crystal form of carbon and is a beautiful metaphor to consider the structures and form of the body. The skeleton employs various diamond-like relationships that, when active, support the body dynamically. To illustrate, I will share the instructions given in a workshop on mūla bandha by yoga teacher Ramanand Patel (a longtime student of B.K.S. Iyengar). It centered on the structure of the bones of the pelvic floor. 

Ramanand began by having the class sit in virāsana or on a chair and locate the sitz bones, the tailbone, and pubic bone (four points in dynamic relationship). He gave these directions: Roll the inner thighs down and feel how the sitz bones spread in response. Keep that inner rolling and then, in a counter action, move the sitz bones toward each other. Add to that a movement of tailbone toward the pubic bone and lift the pubic bone up. In the workshop, we repeated these cues in various different poses. The particular muscles used were not the focus, but rather the effect of the directions on posture, on the overall structure. For me, the effect was profound.

Though this was a workshop about the pelvic floor, what we did felt different than Kegel exercises, at least, as I have been taught them. The action of setting up the bones, like building a structure from within, created a movement of energy from the root up. It felt integrated, dynamic; it connected me to gravity and  helped me support myself in gravity.

This, I believe, is the significance of the last of the four qualities: saṃhananatva, dynamic alignment. From sam, “fully,” + han, “to strike or pound,” it means “having the quality of being closely joined, contiguous, coherent.” It could be translated as “well-knit” or “well-put-together.” The marvel to me of practicing yoga (and other physical arts) is that we can indeed learn how to put ourselves together. The body is often ready to do the remarkable thing. It is the mind that gives up.

Yoga has taught me to be a learner. To be open to possibility and to appreciate that my body is ready to teach me.

Mr. Iyengar writes:

It is difficult to speak of bodily knowledge in words. It is much easier to experience it, to discover what it feels like. It is as if the rays of light of your intelligence were shining through your body, out your arms to your fingertips and down your legs and out through the soles of your feet. As this happens the mind becomes passive and begins to relax. This is an alert passivity and not a dull, empty one. –B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life (p. 32)

B.K.S. Iyengar made few pronouncements on god or spirit, but shared a method of yoga that teaches through experience. To come into integration, to feel one’s own empowerment, to take responsibility for one self, is to approach the self within. That self, beyond words, is the owner of the field. That self shines in us and through us.

yathā prakāśayati ekaḥ
kṛtsnaṁ lokam imaṁ raviḥ
kṣetram kṣetrī tathā kṛtsnaṁ
prakāśayati bhārata
In the same way the sun
Lights this whole world,
So, son of Bharata, the owner of the field
Lights the whole field.

–Bhagavad Gītā, XIII.33

—–

“As the elements and their qualities are brought under control through yoga practice, the body gains its wealth in the form of beauty, grace, strength and compactness, and shines like the brilliance of a diamond. In short it is śarīra jaya, or loveliness and liveliness of the body.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Core of the Yoga Sūtras, p.101

“Cosmetics alone cannot impart beauty to the body, and yet in the cosmetic industry huge amounts are being invested so that the body-cult may flourish. Patañjali here gives four essential qualities for the excellence of the body. These are rūpa, lāvaṇya, bala, and vajra-saṃhananatvā, meaning form, grace, dignity and agility due to cohesion. There has to be beauty of form, but this alone does not give excellence to the body as is understood today in the modern craze for physical beauty. Along with form there has to be grace in movement, as also strength as expressed in dignity. Added to to this there must be the agility and the elasticity of limbs. Vajra is a weapon of great elasticity, for if it is not elastic it would get broken.” –Rohit Mehta, Yoga, the Art of Integration, p. 369  

Questions:
• What has practice taught you about the form of the body? Has practice given you a more vivid sense of the beauty of the body? The wealth of the body? How would you describe that?
• Has your practice brought you strength? Helped you feel more physically integrated, compact, expansive?
• How has yoga affected your relationship with your body? Your understanding of the relation between body and mind?
• Do you identify more or less with the body since beginning yoga practice?  

tato ‘ṇimādi-prādurbhāvaḥ kāya-sampat tad-dharmānabhighātaś ca
tataḥ aṇima-ādi-prādurbhāvaḥ kāya-sampad tad-dharma-anabhighātaḥ ca
“From that, the arising of the power of minuteness, etc., health of the body, and non-harm from its essential nature.”

Tataḥ, “from that,” says Patañjali, referring back to III.45, where he described attention to the physical world and its subtle layers and to bhūta-jaya, “attunement with the elements.” From such attention and attunement comes a power of insight, a resilience of the body, and a protection against the vicissitudes of life.

All three of these attributes are related to citta (consciousness, mind) expanding, penetrating, flowing through the physical world.

Commentators generally agree that aṇima-ādi-prādurbhāvaḥ, “the arising of the power of minuteness, and so on,” refers to the eight mystical powers cited in various classical texts. They would have been well known to Patañjali’s audience. They are transformative powers of citta:

1. aṇiman – to be minute
2. mahiman – to be large
3. gariman – to be heavy
4. laghiman – to be light
5. prāpti – to touch distant objects
6. prākāmya – to accomplish
7. vaśitva – to command
8. īśatva – to overcome

In the Core of the Yoga Sūtras, written later than Light on the Yoga Sūtras, B.K.S. Iyengar shifts his interpretation of III.46. He says that the supernatural powers are covered elsewhere in Pada Three, and that here, aṇiman, minuteness, refers to citta’s expanded ability to flow toward the atomic structure of things, to penetrate the underlying matrix of the physical world. Dr. Ramamurti Mishra, likewise, sees III.46 as describing the yogi’s realization of the dynamic and ever-changing aspect of nature.

The second attribute that Patañjali lists in III.46 is kāya-sampad. Kāya is “body” and sampad (from sam-, “together,” + pad, “to fall”) is success, accomplishment, blessing. Kāya-sampad is generally translated as “perfection of the body,” but I have steered away from this, for various reasons. Sampad does carry a sense of fulfillment of potential, and so I translate it as “health.” Patañjali explores kāya-sampad further in III.47.

Finally, Patañjali describes tad-dharma-anabhighātaḥ, non-harm from the body’s essential nature. This attribute alone is beautiful and paradoxical. Deep awareness of the physical world reveals, as Dr. Mishra says, its essential flux. To live in an embodied way is to experience one’s vulnerability, one’s own growth and decline. The great commentator Vyāsa claims that fire will not burn nor water wet the yogi. Winds do not sweep the yogi away. Even if one reads this as metaphorical, a statement of the mind’s non-disturbance, it is exorbitant.

Patañjali begins Pada Three by describing the transformations (pariṇāma) of consciousness (III.11-16). Citta is empowered through transformation, and in a yogic sense, these transformations are related to the release of constraints on citta, the removal of calcified patterns that limit possibility.

Today’s sūtra is all about possibility. The possibility to become minute, to be big! To be alive in the world in an embodied way. And, somehow, to be unharmed.

As I consider the marvels of Pada Three and transformation that Patanjali promises, I do wonder at the limits of what I find myself able to grapple with. We are in an acceleration of dire happenings–weather events and social upheavals, both the rise of right-wing authoritarianism and a growing resistance movement. In some ways, my consciousness has become adaptable, can flow toward both minuteness and greatness. But it falters at how much is changing and so fast.

For this reason, I was happy to read The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by the novelist Amitav Ghosh. He looks, with a great deal of compassion, to the collective failure to address the climate crisis. We suffer, he says, from a “great derangement,” and he is curious about it. He looks, especially, at his own beloved field, the world of literary fiction:

It comes as a surprise–a shock, really–to look back upon that period of surging carbon emissions [the 1980s and onward] and recognize that very few (and I do not exempt myself from this) of the literary minds of that intensely engagé period were alive to the archaic voice whose rumblings, once familiar, had now become inaudible to humanity: that of the earth and its atmosphere. (p. 124)

Vast changes are happening on the earth, and yet we do not seem to be listening. Ghosh describes how the form of the modern novel itself has played a role, valorizing the story of individual conscience rather than collective unfolding, centering human awareness and dismissal of non-human events. Nature, as envisioned by 19th century novels, was depicted as regular and orderly. The exceptional, the catastrophic, was considered outside the realm of serious narrative. In contrast, the great epics of India are full of awareness of non-human agency; the Hebrew bible depicts God as encountered through natural events, awesome and terrible as they may be.

What about the climate crisis is “unthinkable”? This is a great question. If the practice of yoga frees the citta to flow to the atomic substructure of things (as B.K.S. Iyengar describes), then can we as yogis stop assuming that nature is regular and orderly? Can we know ourselves to be in the midst of catastrophe?

Ghosh, like others I have written about in these pages, believes imagination has a role to play in freeing the consciousness:

To imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is any one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide.

–Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (p. 128)

How important it is, he seems to say, that we let fiction be fiction, not the narrative of what we already know but the opening to what may be. In other words, transformation.

—–

“The yogi can reduce himself to the size of an atom, or expand. He can become light or heavy. He can pierce rocks, have access to everything and master everything.” -B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, commentary on III.46

“The qualities of matter and energy are indestructible. According to the Sāṃkhya Yoga system, there is no creation and no destruction. The total energy of the universe remains the same. This is the eternal law of conservation of matter and energy. When atoms, elements, molecules, and compounds are integrated, an object is manifested. When they are disintegrated, the object goes into involution.” — Ramamurti S. Mishra, M.D., The Textbook of Yoga Psychology, commentary on III.46

“The five forms of elements, namely gross, subtle or fine, form, conjunction and means have their own characteristics. Studying their purposes and ways of utilizing them to achieve integration brings unity. Focused, concentrated examination of their structural relationships and function reveals their true character–being changeable, mutable and made up of the insubstantial matrix of nature. …The ātman is free from the contents of the elements and their sub-atomic structures.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Core of the Yoga Sūtras, pp. 99-100

Questions:
• Have you gained physical ability since beginning yoga practice? Do you feel your weight, size, power, material nature any differently?
• Have you become more attuned to the non-human world?
• Have you suffered physical loss from illness or aging? How have you navigated that? Has it changed your sense of the purpose of practice?
• Life brings essential challenges. It brings upheavals. How do you face catastrophe?

sthūla-svarūpa-sūkṣmānvayārthavattva-saṁyamād bhūta-jayaḥ
sthūla-svarūpa-sūkṣma-anvaya-arthavattva-saṁyamāt bhūta-jayaḥ
“From saṁyama on the physical world–the rough form, essence, subtle layers, interconnection, and  meaning–attunement with the elements.”

In today’s sūtra, Patañjali moves–in the words of Rohit Mehta–from “vastness to minuteness.” Look at the details of the physical world, says Patañjali, and he provides guidance. Look at the rough form of the thing (sthūla), its essential quality (svarūpa), and its subtle make-up (sūkṣma). See and enjoy connection (anvaya) and purpose (arthavattva).

Matthew Remski writes: “By living intimately with nature and learning the large and the small, the still and the dynamic, and how things work together, one feels blessed by the world.” This sense of blessing is a key reason we do yoga–Remski has named it aptly. Yoga helps us be intimate with our own bodies, with our breath, with the elements of our physical experience. Here we are, not somewhere else. We know connection and feel belonging.

Yoga practice cultivates subtlety of perception, attention to particulars–whether that be the movement of skin in an āsana or the quality of vibration in a chant. Yoga insists on direct observation, on participation.

The modern, Western world preferences the mental, and I am often surprised at how little time schoolchildren are given to be outside, to have direct experience there. Modern people, generally, live in a sensory deprived state, with artificial light, polluted air, plastic surfaces, constant noise of combustion engines. Yet we are built to be in close connection to the elements of the natural world, their sounds, sights, pleasures. Joy Harjo powerfully expresses this rupture:

The mind hungers for water over rocks,
The companionship of trees
And how light and the winds play together against
The skin of the earth.
–Joy Harjo, “Shapeshifter,” published in The New Yorker magazine, Oct. 6, 2025

It is a blessing to us to bring our attention to the minuteness of things–to the water, the rock, a leaf. We hunger for it. It soothes and settles us. It brings bhūta-jayaḥ, which is the subject of this sūtra.

The bhūta (from bhū, “to be”) are the five elements–earth, water, fire, air, space–though bhūta could also be understood to be “that which exists.” Jaya derives from ji, “to win,” and it carries a happy sense of victory, jubilation. I have chosen not to use the English word “mastery”  to translate jaya here, since it carries a sense of domination, even subjugation, which seems out of place in this context. Instead, I have translated bhūta-jaya as “attunement with the senses.”

To use Joy Harjo’s words, the mind hungers for attunement with the living world. Anvaya is connection, and we seek connection to experience meaning.

Arthavattva, purposefulness, is an intriguing aspect of III.45. The word artha is an important one in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, occurring as many as eighteen times in the text. Pada Two begins with a statement of the purpose of yoga (II.2, “yoga is for the lessening of pain and the realization of connection”) and develops in II.18, II.21, II.23 a consideration of why things exist at all. For me, there is a deep existential answerlessness to the aphorisms. Yet there is no doubt that Patañjali points us to meaning, offers us this way, that way, and another way to meaningfulness. In I.28, Patañjali tells us that it is through repetition (japa) of OM that we will realize its meaning (artha).

And so let us consider meaning and purpose. There is much that is fractured in the modern world. The burning of fossil fuels, in just a few centuries time, has thrown off the balance of the elements. The climate is too hot. Fire, water, air are increasingly turbulent, chaotic.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus upbraids his listeners to pay attention, to observe themselves and to consider the moment:

Jesus said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you say at once, ‘It is going to rain’; and it does. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and there is. You players! You know how to interpret the look of earth and sky, why don’t you know how to interpret the present time?” —Luke, 12:54-56

How do we interpret the present time? (The Greek word used for time here is kairos. It carries an implication of opportunity, significance, purpose, in contrast to chronos, which is sequential, numerical time.)

Cop 30, the global conference on climate change, has just concluded without a resolution on eliminating fossil fuels. Reporter Jonathan Watts explains that the results could have been worse. There could have been backsliding. Instead, infinitesimal progress was made, in the face of intense and ongoing resistance. Coalitions for taking climate action have held, and the work is ongoing. In an interview with Democracy Now, Watts spoke emphatically: “We are in a battle around the world, between those who want to keep the world habitable and those who want to exploit it until there is nothing left.”

What time is it? Change is happening. Who will shape that change? Cop 30 has made clear that those who have contributed the least to the heating of the planet are suffering the most from rising temperatures. Those of us who are citizens of the global north bear a responsibility here. Our nations have the resources to build a just transition, which would mean investment in renewables and support for adaptation.

If we seek attunement, if we seek connection, this is the time to act.

—–

“The Universe is made from the constituents of the basic elements of nature, earth (pṛthvi), water (āp), fire (tejas), air (vāyu) and ether (ākāśa). Each element possesses five attributes, mass (sthūla), subtlety (sūkṣma), form (svarūpa), all-pervasiveness or interpenetration (anvaya), and purpose or fruition (arthavattva). The characteristic of the gross forms of elements are solidity, fluidity, heat, mobility and volume. Their subtle counterparts are smell, taste, sight touch and sound. Their all-pervasiveness or interpenetration are the three guṇas, and their purpose is either worldly enjoyment or freedom and beatitude. [See Table 14 on the elements and their properties as well.]” -B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, commentary on III.45

“When we can play with the elements within our own bodies, with their renewal and disproportion and rebalancing, then we are aware of nature at a level that is not apprehendable in a normal way. It is supranatural, as normal consciousness is blind to it. We are discovering evolution through a journey of involution, like a salmon swimming back up the torrent from which he was born to spawn again.”–B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life, p. 206

“By living intimately with nature and learning the large and the small, the still and the dynamic, and how things work together, one feels blessed by the world. … In other words, meditate on the details of the world, and the world will seem to begin to communicate with you as the larger you that it is.” –Matthew Remski, Threads of Yoga, p. 181

Questions:
• How do the properties of the elements inform your practice? What would be an example, for you, of “playing with the elements”?
•What are patterns of being out-of-balance for you? In your physical body? In your mind and emotions? What methods help you restore and regulate?
•What supports you through these turbulent times?
•What might we as a society do to connect to the natural world better? How might more of us, in a daily way, be more intimate with the elements?

bahir akalpitā vṛttir mahā-videhā tataḥ prakāśāvaraṇa-kṣayaḥ
bahir akalpitā vṛttiḥ mahā-videhā tataḥ prakāśa-āvaraṇa-kṣayaḥ
“A non-imaginary perception of the external is the great out-of-body state. From this, the covering of the light is destroyed.”

The point of focus (deśa)  in the last two sūtras has been subtle–where and how the ear meets space (III.42) and where and how the body meets space (III.43). Today’s focus is perhaps even more refined–beyond the body and the senses.

Bahir means outer, external, that is, what is external to ourselves. This could be the experience of others, or happenings, places, worlds we have not seen. In an ordinary way, I can imagine things beyond myself. I can hear a story, form a picture in my mind, feel my way into another’s experience. But Patañjali describes here a power to perceive what is external that is not ordinary at all–a non-imagined, direct perception outside the body and senses, which he says is Mahā Videhā, the great out-of-body state (mahā, “great,” and vi-, “out,” + deha, “body”).

The commentators generally agree that Patañjali refers to a psychic ability to leave the body. Rohit Mehta, in contrast, understands Mahā Videhā, which he translates as the Great Death, to be the death of the mind, and by that he means the death of the patternings of the mind, the conditioning that life and experience and the “accumulation of the past” brings. (This is close to Patañjali’s definition of yoga at the start of Chapter One: yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ.)

In either interpretation, Mahā Videhā is a profound experience that, like the mystical fourth prāṇāyāma (a state beyond perception of external and internal, see II.51), destroys the covering of “the light” (II.52).

Light is light. It is the sun. The source of life. But what, in our human experience, covers it up? Sāṁkhya master Hariharānanda writes that the belief “I am my body” prevents us from feeling the light. Rohit Mehta describes the conditionings of the mind as the barrier.

I appreciate the writings of B.K.S. Iyengar that treat the body as the vehicle to light rather than itself the obstacle. Chapter Three, this Book of Marvels, takes our attention to the body again and again–from the energy centers, to the vital winds, to the senses. Saṁyama, the refinement of awareness, demands integration and strengthening of the body.

As I have written elsewhere, dissociation from the body has been a formidable obstacle for me. I have been healed of painful mental states–which I would describe as self-harming patterns–not by further separation from the body nor by intellectual activity but by a physical and energetic shift. The mind is part of the body, as far as I can tell, and a hallmark of citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ–the removal of old patterns of reactivity–is a greater attunement to body and to the world around me. A more acute, alive experience of the body and senses brings a calmer, more accurate perception of what is.

Today’s sūtra on Mahā Videhā, the great disembodiment, is poignant. I recently had a birthday, and I am feeling myself moving to a later stage of life. Signs of aging are vivid–changes in skin, bone, and hair. There is a work proper to this time, it seems to me: to feel gratitude, to find purpose, to reflect on death. Novelist Jeanette Winterson has written of her own birthday in a recent essay:

I am in the last quarter of my life now, even if things turn out well. Most of my life is behind me. That doesn’t feel like loss; it feels like the harvest. I can go to my apple store, my grain barns, my jars of preserves, and these things are there to remind me that I have done something with my life. That helps me when I am low in spirit.

Winterson contemplates, What if you feel you have wasted your life? It is never too late, she says, to do some good. And what would the good be?

Brought up religious, helping others was instilled in me as God’s Will. Given how much bloodshed happens in the name of God (any God) and is supposed to be this all-powerful Male Will (yuck) I think the least we can do is to offer a different approach, the one all religions claim to be based on. Love. Forgiveness. Compassion. I know. It’s always a shock to recall, isn’t it? Love. Forgiveness. Compassion.

She describes the great reward for her, the goodness, that is in teaching:

Time to talk about what makes life worthwhile is not time wasted. Time taken to discuss bullying and selfishness, versus kindness and compassion is not time wasted. I try to build these things in to the MA I teach on at the University of Manchester. They come thinking they will learn how to write fiction. I want them to learn how to tap into the wells of humanity.

–Jeanette Winterson, “Happy Birthday,” https://open.substack.com/pub/jeanettewinterson/p/happy-birthday?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=9dln0

In one of her last books, Mary Oliver wrote beautifully about aging:

There is something you can tell people over and over, and with feeling and eloquence, and still never say it well enough for it to be more than news from abroad–people have no readiness for it, no empathy. It is the news of personal aging–of climbing, and knowing it, to some unrepeatable pitch and coming forth on the other side, which is pleasant still but which is, unarguably, different–which is the beginning of descent. It is the news that no one is singular, that no argument will change the course, that one’s time is more gone than not, and what is left waits to be spent gracefully and attentively, if not quite so actively. –Mary Oliver, Upstream,  p. 165

Mary Oliver and Jeannette Winterson articulate how contemplating dissolution, ending, can be clarifying–can bring a distillation of values. Whether those values are kindness, care, or attention–the hard times, the ending times, can lift them up, reveal the light within.

—–

“The state of Videha is freedom from bodily enclosure. But here Patañjali speaks of Mahāvideha which may be called the Great Death. It is not the death of the body but of the mind. … The sūtra says that in this mindless state or the condition of Mahāvideha all obstructions to the shining of the light are removed. The screen that prevents the light from coming in is the accumulation of the past.” –Rohit Mehta, Yoga, the Art of Integration, p. 364

“At times it is fashionable to despise the body as something non-spiritual. Yet none can afford to neglect it. At other times it is fashionable to indulge the body and to despise what is not physical. Yet none can deny that there is more to life than mere physical pleasure and pain. … If you say you are your body, you are wrong. If you say you are not your body, you are also wrong. The truth is that although body is born, lives, and dies, you cannot catch a glimpse of the divine except through your body.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life, p. 26

“This siddhi is a further attainment derived from saṁyama on the relationship between the body and space, when the individual experiences the physical borders of the body beginning to blend or expand into the infinite ether around it. The ego-sense begins to experience itself as unfettered to a particular place….We come to experience the mind as omnipresent and understand that it exists and functions outside the body as well as within it.” –The Reverend Jaganath Carrera, Inside the Yoga Sūtras, commentary on III.44

“When the mind is felt to be both inside the body and outside, it is called imagined fixity. When the mind, being freed of the body, gains fixity outside, it is called Mahāvideha fixity. Thereby is attained the removal of the veil referred to in the commentary. The feeling ‘I am the body’ is the grossest of the veils over knowledge.” — Swāmi Hariharānanda Āraṇya, Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali (translated by P.N. Mukerji), commentary on III.44

Questions:
• How does your state of mind (happy, sad, calm, disturbed) shape your perceptions? What role does your past and long-established patterns (saṁskāras) play?
• Does your imagination help you understand people and things? Are there times when it leads you wrong?
• Have you experienced an out-of-body state?
• What is the light, for you? What practices reveal light? What brings meaning?

kāyākāśayoḥ sambandha-saṁyamāl laghu-tūla-samāpatteś cākāśa-gamanam
kāya-ākāśayoḥ sambandha-saṁyamāt laghu-tūla-samāpatteḥ ca ākāśa-gamanam
“From saṁyama on the union of the body and space, and by assuming the lightness of cotton fiber–movement as though weightless.”

In the last sūtra (III.42), Patañjali challenges us to place our attention on how the ear meets space, on how we listen. Here, he shifts focus to the whole body (kāya). How does the body meet space? How do we feel ourselves in space, feel the space in us? How do we move?

Consider the lightness (laghu) of cotton fiber (tūla). Assume that lightness. Move as though weightless (ākāśa-gamanam, literally, “sky-walking”).

To move with lightness is to be a sky-walker. It is to feel, as Mr. Iyengar puts it, the vast space within us, the emptiness between the particles of matter that seem so solid. It does not surprise me that Mr. Iyengar writes so eloquently about the body in space, because he had such an acute sense of learning through and with his body. It is a surprise to learn that a heavy jump from legs together to legs apart can become light–from imagination and intention. I choose to jump lightly, to make no sound, as light as cotton fiber. And I do! It is an alchemy that is a delight of our physical existence.

I live near the mountains, and I recently took a hike that follows a stream about three miles up to a lookout. Halfway up, I met a ranger, who was hanging a sign that said the trail was closed. A storm a few days earlier had washed it out, creating a deep ditch and other obstacles. I continued on with curiosity (the ranger seemed to accept a lot of hikers would do that) and what I saw was truly awesome. The storm had gouged a three-foot trench, had leveled bushes and trees, and had, almost inconceivably, cast stones down the mountain as though they were water. Fields of stone lay like they had been splashed there. How is that? How can water move rock? The wonder of it hit me.

Later, at home, I read about the phenomenon. It is called debris flow. When enough water falls over a short, concentrated time, power is unleashed. Earth trembles, rocks tumble, solids become like water. They are fluid. In a general sense, the things we think fixed are–in geologic time–moving. We are part of that movement. As Patañjali earlier referenced in III.40 (on udāna vayu), gravity acts upon us but our energy also acts upon gravity.

What do we think is solid? What do we think is immovable? This is a vital question in the current political catastrophe we are in. Upheaval is happening right now–government agencies dismantled, rights denied, legal precedents overturned, people kidnapped off the streets by government agents.

We may not feel much agency in the face of this. Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit offers guidance in a recent essay:

Don’t let what you do be limited by what you assume is possible – what you do has to be governed by common sense and wisdom but those sometimes tell us to not assume we know the limits. The first rule of the future is that no one quite knows what it will be, and major changes not uncommonly emerge from players who were not long before invisible, dismissed, derided. –Rebecca Solnit, “On Not Surrendering in Advance or During or at Any Point Thereafter,” Meditations in an Emergency 

Yes. What are the limits? What is solid? What is moveable? Our common sense often tells us that what is today will continue, that the rules for how we organize society or the economy are fixed, solid like rock. We see, in this storm of upheaval, that things are not so fixed. It is important, though, that we also envision what is possible, what we can make.

Bill McKibben, founder of Third Act and authority on climate change, has been working to spread the word about the revolution in energy production that has occurred in just the last three years. (Check out Sun Day, a celebration of the advances and possibilities of renewable technology, happening on this year’s fall equinox, Sept. 21, and see interview with Chris Hayes). Solar panels are now so inexpensive–thanks largely to China’s stepped-up production–and electric appliances so efficient that we can heat and cool our homes, drive our cars and electric bikes, light our cities, at far less cost than we can with oil furnaces, gas stoves, combustion engines, and coal power plants.

The age of fossil fuel dominance is ending. Though the U.S. political system is still under the sway of the fossil fuel industry, burning things to create energy will–sometime in the not-so-distant future–be a thing of the past. It turns out, in Bill McKibben’s words, to be much cheaper to point a piece of glass toward the sun–the great nuclear reactor in the sky–than to create energy in any other way. And, this form of energy is, by its nature, more egalitarian than fossil fuels. The sun shines everywhere. Solar (and wind) energy work against concentrated accumulations of wealth.

The energy revolution has happened, and we do not yet know it. There is a great lesson here.

David Graeber (see III.26) died five years ago this month.  He has had a profound influence on many  who work for social change. He taught us to imagine, to move lightly, to create. “The ultimate hidden truth of the world,” he said, “is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” Gratitude to David Graeber. Let’s make things differently.

Photo: David Graeber Institute

—–

“Space [ākāśa], sometimes translated as ether, is not the ether of the modern chemist. It is taken in its old sense as being the space permeating the emptiness between particles of matter….To reach the Infinite, we have to use finite means, as does the architect, even if he is building a cathedral or a temple. And, like the architect, yoga science says that you have to align your inner and outer bodies, so that they run parallel and are in communication with each other….Alignment creates an intercommunicating structure that, like a cathedral, is an offering to God. That is why for me alignment is a metaphysical word. Correct alignment creates correct space, as in a well-constructed building.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life, p.202-204

“By knowing the relationship between the body and ether, the yogi transforms his body and mind so that they become as light as cotton fibre. He can then levitate in space. … This is one of the supernatural powers called laghimā, or becoming as light as cotton. In the purāṇas, it is said that Lord Hanumān (son of the Wind God) jumped up to the sky to fetch the sun, which he thought was an apple. There is also the story from the Rāmāyaṇa that he leaped to the Himālayās to fetch the elixir of life, called sañjīvanī, to save the life of Lord Rāma’s brother who was wounded in a fight with Rāvaṇa’s son.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, commentary on III.43

“The feeling of heaviness inhibits; the feeling of lightness confers great freedom to travel, move about, and make the changes and transformations that are indispensable to life.” –Bernard Bouanchaud, The Essence of Yoga, commentary on III.43

Questions:
• Do you tend toward heaviness or lightness? In your practice, do you seek more grounding or more lightness?
• What poses ground you? What poses help you feel “light as cotton fiber”?
• If you could wave a magic wand, what change would you like to see in your neighborhood, in your town, in your country?
• What, in your lifetime, was an impossible thing that became possible?

śrotrākāśayoḥ sambandha-saṁyamād divyaṁ śrotram
śrotra-ākāśayoḥ sambandha-saṁyamāt divyam śrotram

“From saṁyama on the union of the ear and space — divine hearing.”

“Where does this world lead to?”
“Space,” he replied. “Clearly, it is from space that all these beings arise, and into space that they are finally absorbed; for space indeed existed before them and in space they ultimately end.”  —Chāndogya Upaniṣad, 1.9.1, translation by Patrick Olivelle

In yoga philosophy, ākāśa (space) is considered the subtlest of the five elements (earth, water, fire, air, space), the source of what is and–as described in the above passage from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad–the end.

B.K.S. Iyengar explains the element of space to be “the emptiness between particles of matter,” which sounds rather like our modern idea of space, yet, in the yogic tradition, space is understood to conduct sound.

Space is vast, even the space in us. As Mr. Iyengar says (see quote below), the amount of matter in an atom is equivalent to a tennis ball in a cathedral. We are mostly space. And we can access this vastness through sound. The practice of chanting and listening to sound, especially the sacred syllable Om, is central to yogic practice. It opens us to the space inward. Patañjali, in sūtra I.27, declares Om to be the speech of Iśvara.

Om is not a word, per se. It is a pre-word. It holds all the words, all the sounds are in it. “The past, the present, the future–all is just Om,” says the Māṇdukya Upaniṣad. “And whatever else there is…that is also Om.” Om is a language before languages.

Today’s sūtra directs our attention to our hearing, literally, to our ear (śrotram), and how our ear “meets” or “intermingles” (sambandha) with space. What do we tune our hearing to? Can we hear the vibrations within the great spaces of our body? Can we hear the sounds from far away, past our borders, maybe on the other side of the world?

The two major influences on my understanding of yoga have been Sanskrit teacher Vyaas Houston and B.K.S. Iyengar. Both have emphasized an inner attunement and an alignment to sound and vibration.

Vyaas Houston begins his course in Sanskrit with the first letter of the Sanskrit alphabet, अ (“a”). He  asks students to feel the sound, the location at the back of the palate, to feel the easy placement of the tongue, the relaxation of the jaw. It is a first sound, guttural, almost effortless, a sound babies make. The Sanskrit alphabet is structured around the shaping of the mouth, the action of the tongue and the diaphragm, the placement of the sound along the palate. It is orderly, and as we students learned these actions, how to make all the vowel sounds and how to form the “stops” (the consonants), we learned the shape and space of the palate; vibrations resonated in the room and in ourselves.  In the words of Dr. Ramamurti Mishra, “There is no better known method to control restlessness, uneasiness, and anxiety than the practice of nādam [sound].” (The Textbook of Yoga Psychology, commentary on III.42)

Likewise, B.K.S. Iyengar taught students to create space within through āsana, to open the inner channels that support a pose, to spread the awareness and sense the vibrations that the press of the foot, the lift of the arm, and the breath moving from center, spreading through the pose, create. With the ears, we listen to the sound of our breathing. We hear ourselves. In an even more subtle way, we listen to our inner state.

In this sūtra, Patañjali says that by contemplating the ear and space, we will gain divyam śrotram, divine hearing (or, the “divine ear”). What a promise! And what might divine hearing be? Vyaas Houston describes our normal hearing as being directional–we hear a sound as it relates to us. In the practice of chanting–and in the absorption in sound as sound, especially the sound Om, which encompasses all sound, we experience moving past our individual location. We hear a broad range of sounds.

Can we listen to the universe? Can we listen around the globe?

Omar El Akkad is an American journalist and novelist, born in Egypt and raised in Qatar and Canada. He has a broad international experience, and he has covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the treatment of prisoners in Quantanamo. He explains in an interview what led to his most recent book. “Since the age of 5,” he says, “I have been attuned to the West….  I am familiar with this culture and am fluent in it.” In short, he is familiar with how writers and professionals and those with influence accept a compartmentalization of concerns, accept a hierarchy of value for some lives over others. The atrocity of the bombing and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza  has changed his ability to compartmentalize. He has become out of tune with the norm. He writes:

What power assumes, ultimately, is that all those who weren’t directly affected by this, who only had to bear the minor inconvenience of hearing about these deaths from afar, will move on, will forget. Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but in the places where the bombs are built and launched it will have no bearing on mortgages, bills, employment…. In social and professional circles there will be limited tolerance for any talk about the fortunes of some exotic, dangerous-sounding people. … Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that’s what those people do, they die. Just for a moment, cease to believe that this particular group of people are human.

— Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone will Have Always Been Against This, p. 55

What operates in us to turn away from the roar of sound that is a massacre on the order of the assault on Gaza and the targeting of a civilian population? In what ways are we tuning in to our community’s status quo and not hearing what is outside our norms of polite conversation and consideration? Omar inquires of himself whether he is willing to disrupt, to turn toward the reality of human beings whose humanity is being denied.

To listen, to hear more, over great distance. To hold space for solidarity, not annihilation. That is my idea of divine hearing.

—–

“Normal hearing is directional. Attention is drawn to the most significant sound in the present environment. A sense of the location of the sound is established relevant to the position of the listener. … Scanning the entire range of hearing, including extremely subtle and distant sounds normally not heard, creates a common field unified by a sense of space. This can be further deepened by probing the space within all heard sounds. This eliminates directionality relevant to the specific position of the listener, the nexus of individuality.” — Vyaas Houston, Yoga Sūtras: The Practice, Part I, commentary on III.42, p. 110

“The practice of nādam [“sound, internal resonance”] is the best way leading to Cosmic Consciousness. This sound current is heard within and one should listen to it with a concentrated mind. There are innumerable varieties, such as buzzing sound, sound of lute, bells, waves, rumbling, waterfall, rainfall, chirping of birds, roaring of the ocean, stringed and percussion musical instruments, and various other musical sounds.” — Dr. Ramamurti S. Mishra, The Textbook of Yoga Psychology, commentary on III.42

“The amount of matter inside an atom is equivalent to a tennis ball inside a Cathedral, so our atoms, and therefore we, are almost entirely space. … The view that astronauts gained from outer space often left them with a unified, nonpartisan, borderless perception of the planet earth that changed their lives and led them to try to impart their experience through the pursuit of shared human goals to be achieved by peaceful cooperation. As I have said, we cannot all go into orbit, but we do have access to space, our inner space. Paradoxically, looking within has a comparable unifying effect as visiting space does for astronauts.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life, p. 202-203

“The eyes belong to mind and fire, the ears to awareness and space. …If you let your head drop forward in meditation, the frontal brain will feel distress. But if there is harmony between the eyes and ears, the focusing of awareness becomes easy. The eyes are the window of the brain, the ears are the window of the soul. This is contrary to popular wisdom, but when the senses are withdrawn (pratyāhāra), this is the true experience. The ears are able to discern vibration. Our inner space corresponds to what we normally call Heaven.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life, p. 205

“In everyday life, we sometimes hear without hearing, catching only part of what is said. Refusing to listen to another can even lead to partial deafness, with the attention remaining stuck on an inner discourse or on other exterior sounds. This faculty consists in hearing totally and exactly what is said.” –Bernard Bouanchaud, The Essence of Yoga, commentary on III.42

Questions:
• Does your yoga practice include sound? Do you chant, sing, make or listen to music in a regular way?
• What are obstacles to your listening well to others?
• Have you developed an ability to listen inwardly? How does alignment inform this process?
• How do you take in news? What are you tuning in to?

samāna-jayāj jvalanam
samāna-jayāt jvalanam

“With artful practice of samāna vāyu, radiance.”

Chapter Three is the Book of Marvels, and today’s sūtra concerns the marvel of radiance.  We often describe people as radiant, glowing, lit from within. This glow often seems to come from youth, from health, or from happiness.

But Patañjali speaks here of radiance that comes not from circumstance but from practice. Samāna-jayāt jvalanam, he says. With artful practice (jayāt), of the vital connecting breath (samāna), comes radiance (jvalanam, from ji, “to blaze”). There is no mistake that this is a personal, physical radiance: “The yogi glows like fire and his [her] aura shines,” says B.K.S. Iyengar in Light on the Yoga Sūtras.

The samāna vāyu, as mentioned in III.40, is one of the five vital winds (or breaths) of the body that govern essential functions. Samāna (from sam, “together,” + an, “to breathe”) is the connecting breath. It resides between the area of the navel and the chest, the territory of the nabhi cakra (see III.30), which is the center of ego, identity, personal power. The samāna vāyu is associated with the element of fire, and it governs digestive processes.

I first learned of the samāna vāyu in a workshop given by Iyengar Yoga teacher Patricia Walden, and she emphasized the role samāna plays in connecting the body–coordinating the legs with the arms, the lower body with the upper, the tail to the head. She taught that by locating this area in each āsana, one can spread awareness and integrate movement, embody more fully. I remember her demonstration of utthita pārśvakoṇāsana–she showed how the reach to the back heel from the samāna supports the twist that allows an extension of the top arm and the turn of the ribs and head.  Utthita pārśvakoṇāsana, a big, expansive pose, challenges connection. By accessing the central connecting breath, the practitioner can find the back heel, thread through from the center–unfold.

By the way, my own experience of āsana and prāṇāyāma has led me to translate jaya as artful practice, rather than mastery or conquest. Jaya  derives from ji, “to win,” and so carries with it a sense of accomplishment, even victory. It has a jubilant feel, a sparkle, which mastery and conquest do not convey. I am tempted to use victory, but the martial and competitive aspect of that also seems wrong.

At any rate, a marvel of yoga practice is that it brings vitality, and this sūtra teaches that key to that marvel is connection–the mind to the body to the spirit, energy to matter to energy. The samāna vāyu  governs digestion as well, helps us process, in other words, what we ingest–not just food but events and experience.

Trauma and a sense of powerlessness can bring a disruption in the body–a break or a disconnect. A Somatic Therapy technique for panic attacks is to locate physical objects in the room–the door, the chair, a lamp. Locating oneself in relation to simple things can bring the startled awareness, the skittering attention, back to what is happening now.  Yoga practice, likewise, brings us in, helps us locate ourselves in ourselves and in space. Yoga practice teaches us to ground ourselves in ourselves.

In some sense, saṁyama, the threefold process of dhāraṇā-dhyāna-samādhi (see III.4), the theme of Chapter Three, is presence. Presence brings transformation. The word jaya, that artful practice, suggests how active the alchemy is. Physical elements are shifted energetically.

Does our inner transformation take us toward greater integrity and authenticity?

There is disruption in the body politic today, as the world has failed to prevent a genocide in Gaza, and as the United States, which has supported that genocide, brings militarization to local city streets. Peaceful workers, longtime residents and loving family members, are being arrested, deemed “illegal” and “criminal.” Our national government is terrorizing immigrants, people of color, and political protestors.

Why do I bring this up here? The personal is political. My fate depends on yours. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed his Letter from a Birmingham Jail to white clergymen critical of the disturbances of civil disobedience. Why take action? Because we are connected.

In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…

This is the inter-related structure of reality.

–Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

Can I perform the alchemy of being part of the change our society needs? What attitudes of privilege, or exceptionalism, white supremacy, affluence, and individualism play out in me? Do they stop me from envisioning and helping me bring about systemic change, build a future that is more just for more people, not a select few.

Can I help make the glow of a profound transformation–one in which I know that “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”

We are tied in a single garment of destiny. May it be radiant.

—–

“Samāna being the element of tejas (fire), it makes life shine and flow with spiritual light. The presence of samāna in abundance gives the appearance of lustre, or a glowing sheen. With the help of this vāyu, he may even begin to perceive a special glow, or ‘spiritual aura,’ in others also.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Core of the Yoga Sūtras, p. 161

“By control over Samāna, the vital breath covering the region between the heart and the navel area, the body becomes fiery and effulgent. …There are many Yogis whose bodies look greatly effulgent and do not show signs of age. It may be due to this control over the movement of the vital breath in this particular region.” –Rohit Mehta, Yoga the Art of Integration, p. 360

Questions:
• How does the breath help you center yourself? Where do you feel the connecting breath in your body?
• What poses help you find balance between the upper body and lower? What poses help you connect?
• How well do you digest your food? How well do you digest experience?
• What might a radiant society look like?

udāna-jayāj jala-paṅka-kaṇṭakādiṣvasaṅga utkrāntiś ca
udāna-jayāt  jala-paṅka-kaṇṭaka-ādiṣu asaṅgaḥ utkrāntiḥ ca
“With artful practice of upward energy, one rises above water, mud, and thorns. They do not stick.”

The Vibhūti Pada (Ch. 3 of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras) contains much beautiful imagery. It moves from the microcosm of the human body to the macrocosm of the sky, from centers of energy within to the forces of nature around. It is full of marvel and wonder.

Today’s sūtra is a great example. From the practice of upward energy (udāna), says Patañjali, one rises above such impediments as water, mud, and thorns. They don’t even stick (asaṅga).

Udāna is one of the five vayus (winds), which as a group govern the vital processes of the body. They are prāna (pra-, “forth,” + an, “to breathe”), which describes the life force generally and, here,  the function of the heart and lungs in particular; apāna (ap-, “down,” + an, “to breathe”), downward energy, including the function of the legs and the organs of elimination; samāna (sam-, “with” + an, “to breathe”), a connector energy, the gastric fire, also an organizer of movement; udāna (ud-, “up,” + an, “to breathe”), upward energy, lift, movement up, also speech; vyāna (vi-, “out,” + an, “to breathe”), circulatory system, energy that pervades the whole body. (The locations within the body vary a bit depending on the source.)

This sūtra is about rising. Ud (ut- when prefixed to a hard consonant) appears twice. Metaphorically, water, mud, and thorns, are a perfect expression for life’s adversities. Getting mired in mud or stuck with thorns are ways to describe how we may tend to get fixed on past miseries, relive past hurts. We share about our moods by saying we are “up” or “down,” difficulty “flattens us,” and chronic sadness is felt as a weight pressing down–depression.

The spiritual path itself is often described as a movement upwards. We wish to progress toward enlightenment, toward lofty things. We seek to be “above” life’s miseries. We consider better things to be “higher.” The Bhagavad Gītā teaches that “those established in sattva go up” (XIV.18). Episcopalians begin their liturgy with the priest calling out “Lift up your hearts.” The congregation answers, “We lift them to the Lord.”

For those of us who practice āsana, ud may be the Sanskrit prefix we are most familiar with, as it is embedded in āsana names (uttanāsana, utkaṭāsana, utthita trikonāsana), as is the adverb ūrdhva, which means upwards (ūrdhva hastāsana, ūrdhva dhanurāsana). 

However, as practitioners know, there is no movement up without down.  Teachers start at the feet for instruction on how to stand. One must feel the feet and press down to go up, to stand tall.

It may seem that mastery of udāna might mean no contact or non-concern with natural elements. In my experience, this is not the case. Just as I must start with my feet in tadāsana (mountain pose), must go down to lift up, so does grounding, literally, connect me to vital force, to what is beyond me. The natural world, for me and for many others, is itself balancing, restorative.

I grew up in a big modern city, and I know firsthand that urban people don’t have a lot of  direct experience of water, mud, thorns.  We may not have been cooled by a creek, nor gone barefoot on earth. And we may not have harvested thistles or picked blackberries. Perhaps this has led me to have an anti-hierarchical sense of up and down. There are many gifts to going down, looking down, feeling with one’s feet, getting more embodied. They include going slower. Paying attention. Maybe doing things differently than we have done before. Yoga teacher Carrie Owerko once recommended in class that we take a chance, allow ourselves to make mistakes when we practice, to “get muddy.”

I recently read a memoir called The Salt Path, by Raynor Winn (and now a movie, soon to be released). The author tells of a cataclysmic period in her life, when in the course of a few months, she and her husband lost their home, a small family farm in Wales, and received a frightening diagnosis for long-time shoulder pain that he had been experiencing. In the same week that bailiffs came and possessed their home, Moth Winn’s physician informed the couple that Moth had corticobasal degeneration (CBD), with a life expectancy of eight years from onset (he had been experiencing the pain already for about six years). With no home and no money, with Moth experiencing greater fatigue and worsening symptoms, they are aghast, terrified, all security removed. They have to leave their home in a matter of days. Somehow, Raynor has the idea to let go completely, to put things in storage and live for a while with no roof at all but in a small, lightweight tent, and with only possessions they can carry with them. She suggests they backpack on the South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset:

“We could just walk.”
It was a ridiculous thing to say, but I said it anyway.
“Walk?”
“Yeah, just walk.”
Could Moth walk it? It was just a coastal path after all, it couldn’t be that hard and we could walk slowly, put one foot in front of the other and just follow the map. I desperately needed a map, something to show me the way. So why not? It couldn’t be that difficult. … I didn’t realize then that the South West Coast Path was relentless, that it would mean climbing the equivalent of Mount Everest nearly four times, walking 630 miles on a path often no more than a foot wide, sleeping wild, living wild, working through every painful action that had brought us here, to this moment. … I just knew we should walk.” (The Salt Path, pp. 6-7)

Raynor Winn is a great storyteller, and she vividly recounts beauties, terrors, lovely meet-ups, threatening encounters. She and Moth set up camp in the rain and wind, slide in mud, and encounter literal thorns. One day in a downpour on a cliffside, Raynor slips and slams into a bush:

I stopped spinning and tried to stand, but was pinned into a blackthorn shrub by dozens of barbs. When I was eventually back on my feet, Moth pulled them out one by one, leaving a throbbing pincushion of hands and legs. The non-waterproof was even less waterproof and I was covered head to toe in black mud. (p. 229)

She is so scratched and pricked that she has an allergic reaction, with vomiting and fever, for days.

Raynor is explicit that, at a juncture when they had lost everything, had been handed a death sentence, the path provides them focus. The path is practice. Whatever their confusion or apprehension, they return to the walk. As she writes: “The walk, only the walk.”

In Chapter One, Patañjali gives a list of methods to overcome disturbances of the mind (I.32-I.39). They are familiarly referred to as the “Or’s,” because they are complementary but independent, alternatives. The first offered is eka-tattva-abhyāsa, the practice of one thing.

The South West Coastal Path was Raynor and Moth Winn’s “one thing.” It didn’t make any obvious practical sense as a choice. As Raynor says, it was perhaps ridiculous for two middle-aged people, one who had a dire diagnosis and had been instructed to rest and not exert himself, both bereft of resources, homeless, with only a weekly stipend from the state, barely enough for food, to undertake. Yet it gave them a focus, and this focus proved to be healing.

I am struck by the actual exertion of what they set out to do, by how much that physical effort required body engagement, presence in the feet, in gravity, in the steps. The long daily walks, weighted with a backpack, literally strengthened Moth. He felt better, more agile, able to better function as they walked. (Apparently, they brought evidence of this back to his physicians, who still insisted it would be better for Moth to rest more.) And another kind of healing–mental rejuvenation, emotional balance, spiritual growth–happened. After the two summers it took to complete the Salt Path, they have a plan, a place to stay, and they begin to build a new life. Raynor reflects:

Bad things had hit us in the face like a tidal wave and would have washed us away if we hadn’t found ourselves on the path. Our journey had drained us of every emotion, sapped our strength and our will. But then, like the windblown trees along our route, we had been re-formed by the elements into a new shape that could ride out whatever storms came over the bright new sea. … At last I understood what homelessness had done for me. It had taken every material thing that I had and left me stripped bare, a blank page at the end of a partly written book. It had also given me a choice, either to leave that page blank or to keep writing the story with hope. I chose hope.  (p. 270)

Utkrāntiḥ means to rise up, to levitate. It derives from kram, “to step, walk.” Ut-kram is “to step up.” The long walk along the coast, the heave of the backpack on to the back, the press of the foot down, the anchor into gravity and the ascent from it, step after step, shaped Raythorn and Moth. The walk grounded them in the natural world, connected them to an endless horizon and an abundant ecosystem, unleashed their life force. They came through the water, mud and thorns.

—–

“The functions of the body are performed by five types of vital energy, prāṇa vayus: prāṇa, apāna, samāna, udāna and vyāna. Prāna moves in the thoracic region and controls breathing. Apāna moves in the lower abdomen and controls elimination of urine, semen and feces. Samāna stokes the gastric fire, aiding digestion and maintaining the harmonious functioning of the abdominal organs. Udāna, working in the throat, controls the vocal chords and the intake of air and food. Vyāna pervades the entire body, distributing the energy from the breath and food through the arteries, veins and nerves.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, commentary on III.32

“Yogis distinguish several kinds of energy, including the rising vital energy (udāna) at the level of the throat. This is the energy of spiritual elevation and brings speech and the skill, or faculty, of avoiding and overcoming obstacles. It is also, according to Hindu tradition, the energy that leaves the body through the top of the head at the moment of death.” –Bernard Bouanchaud, The Essence of Yoga, commentary on III.40

Questions:
• Has yoga helped you confront difficulties? How would you describe this? Rising above, passing through, entering into?
• Many names of āsanas emphasize going up–utthita trikonāsana, ūrdhva hastāsana, utkaṭāsana, uttānāsana. What are the benefits of up action for you? How does up teach down? How does down create up? What is your experience of gravity?
• Do you have a practice of going outside? What does it give you?
• Have you ever foraged for food–maybe by picking berries, dandelions, mushrooms? Have you harvested vegetable or fruit? What lessons does the plentifulness of nature teach?

bandha-kāraṇa-śaithilyāt pracāra-saṃvedanāc ca cittasya para-śarīrāveśaḥ
bandha-kāraṇa-śaithilyāt pracāra-saṃvedanāt ca cittasya para-śarīra-āveśaḥ
“Due to the release of the ties that bind [and limit perception] and due to [the ability] to go forth and experience feelings, [it is as though] citta enters another’s body.”

How do we practice power with, not power over? Power with requires, first, that we know we have power, we have agency, and, second, that we grant others their power. The culture we are raised in and the circumstances of our lives may make this difficult. Our upbringing shapes our relationship to authority, affects how we influence others and are influenced, how we comply and how we might attempt to dominate (see III.36).

Today’s sūtra again brings questions of autonomy and empowerment to the foreground. On one level, sūtra III.39 describes the supernatural ability (siddhi) to “enter another’s body” (para-śarīra-āveśaḥ). The yogic tradition is rich in stories about accomplished ones who can do this (see the example of  Śaṁkarācārya, as told by B.K.S. Iyengar in Light on the Yoga Sūtras, p. 220), yet there is a less literal, more common, level of meaning here, a marvelous power in its own right, that many of us–especially those of us who teach yoga or do body work–are familiar with. This is the ability to understand, to feel, another’s physical experience, almost as though our consciousness had entered into their body. We may sense the joint that is painful, the muscle group that is held, the block in the flow of energy, the sorrow, the fear, the anxiety.

An increase in sensitivity inwards can lead to a greater intuitive sense of others. (See III.19.) As a society-wide trait, this is invaluable. It is the way to live into the four great principles Patañjali describes in chapter one: maitrī (friendliness), karuṇā (compassion), mudita (joy), and upekṣa (presence). See sūtra I.33.

With different language than he has used before, Patañjali describes the yogic process. The ties that bind release (bandha-kāraṇa-śaithilyāt), he says. Bandha means binding, and we can understand the bandha here to refer to citta vṛtti (I.2), the patternings of thought and feeling that limit imagination, possibility, accurate perception of what is. Śaithilya is relaxation. A beautiful image–our bindings release, relax, maybe they are not gone, just relaxed. Even this allows movement. We gain freedom. We go forth and experience feeling (pracāra-saṃvedana). Pracāra is movement, literally “walking forward” (from pra, “forth,” + car, “to walk”). Saṃvedana is feeling, perception (from sam-, “together with,” + vid, “to know”). Similar to the word samādhi, it suggests a connection to what is known, a kind of fellow-feeling. Friendliness. Compassion.

The ability to enter into another’s experience (cittasya para-śarīra-āveśaḥ) carries inherent pitfalls, and it behooves teachers, body workers, therapists–really, anyone with strong intuition–to know this. The potential for misuse of power is real, and so also is the tendency to lose oneself, perhaps to comply in situations that might demand resistance.

In her remarkable book Defy, the Power of No in a World that Demands Yes (published this year), Dr. Sunita Sah tells of going to the emergency room with a pain in her chest that she does not recognize. The doctor listens to her heart, conducts an electrocardiogram, and finds nothing amiss. Dr. Sah is reassured, her symptoms begin to subside, and she assumes the doctor will now discharge her. Instead, the doctor orders more testing–a CT scan. Dr. Sah, a medical doctor herself, knows this additional test is unnecessary, yet something prevents her from refusing it.

How fascinating! Dr. Sah ponders this question in her book: Why does she, a knowledgeable, trained doctor, go along with a costly and not-harmless (because of the exposure to radiation) additional test?

Why do many of us comply in situations that call for us to speak out? Whether that means accepting medical procedures we don’t need,  getting talked into a purchase we don’t want, or standing by when elected officials pass bad laws (or take unlawful actions).

Dr. Sah observes that we all do feel a pull to group norms and to maintaining harmony. We may feel strong uneasiness about disagreeing, especially if that disagreement signals a negative opinion about another person to that person. She calls this insinuation anxiety:

We do not want to insinuate that we think the other person may be biased, corrupt, or plain incompetent.  So we often comply with a suggestion, keep silent, or accept a bad piece of advice, just so that the very person who is hurting us, costing us, or putting us at risk can save face. (Dr. Sunita Sah, Defy, the Power of No in a World that Demands Yes, pp. 55-56)

Dr. Sah believes defiance to be key to the political process and to our social connection to one another. She is intrigued by her own conditioning to consider compliance “good” and defiance “bad.” She proposes a definition of defiance that uplifts its importance:

Defiance means acting in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise. (Deny, p. xxv)

Defiance is not a one-time, out-of-the-blue event, according to Dr. Sah. It comes in stages, recognizable and common. The first stage is Tension. When something does not sit right with us, we may not know what to do, we may not be able to do anything, but we feel a tugging, a pull, an unease–it is the tension of being out of alignment with our values. I have long hated this feeling, have found it very painful, but reading Dr. Sah’s book, I feel a new appreciation for it. It is the first step of a process! The second is Acknowledgement (to oneself), third, Escalation (voicing to another person), fourth, Threat of non-compliance (or planning the action), fifth, the Act of defiance.

In many years of research, Dr. Sah has found that those who do defy a norm–like corporate whistleblowers or climate activists–even when they suffer difficult consequences for their act, feel good about what they did. They feel fulfilled–aligned.

Dr. Sah has no agenda per se, other than encouraging us all to take seriously the power of yes, to consider what is true consent, and the power of no, particularly the process of locating the values that sustain us. She describes the first stage of Tension not as a problem but as potential power:

Defiance can be brave, but it does not require world-renowned bravery. Defiance can lead to extraordinary change, but it does not stem from only extraordinary people. Defiance simply means knowing exactly who you are and acting in alignment with those values. (Deny, p. 205)

It is always possible, Sah says, to go in, to affirm one’s values and sense of identity, to find one’s voice and activate the potential for defiance:

It can take years, and it is not always easy. Along the way, there may be pushback and setbacks. It must be learned, practiced, and learned again.  (Deny, p. 205)

Yoga has taught me to appreciate repetition. The small steps, the pushback and setbacks, can lead to big things.

I am committed to the values of power with and not power over. Though I don’t always know how to align my actions with those values, I am encouraged by Dr. Sah’s book and the thought that the tension, the discomfort, is a good sign.

—–

“Letting go of the structure of personality and refining perception of movement awakens the faculty of influencing another’s mind and body. … Personality takes its shape gradually under many influences, those of parents notably. Accepting our character and making peace with the influences that shaped it (for example, society, religion, parents, or past actions) constitute the first condition of liberty that will enable us to influence another. The second condition is refining our perceptions until, gradually, we can perceive previously invisible movements that give life to the physical body.” –Bernard Bouanchaud, The Essence of Yoga, commentary on III.39

“When a teacher teaches, his mind penetrates, that is he projects his mind into the bodies of his students. Penetration is an eternal law of mind….Everyone understands others according to the quality and quantity of their penetration. When the quality of penetration is not pure, one has misunderstanding, delusions, and paranoid ideas about others.” –Sri Brahmananda Sarasvati, The Textbook of Yoga Psychology, commentary on III.39

“Considering all aspects associated with this siddhi, it is better for all to keep away from it.” –Rohit Mehta, Yoga, the Art of Integration, commentary on III.39

Questions:
• Has knowledge of the movements and organization of your own body, and of the patterns of your own mind, given you more awareness or understanding of others? Has it given you the ability to influence others?
• Has the practice of the four essential virtues–friendliness, compassion, joy, presence–helped free you from internal struggles or constraints? Has it affected how you relate to others? Is it a guidepost for you?
• Which of the yamas–non-harming, truth, non-stealing, connection to source, non-acquisitiveness (see II.30)–speak to you most powerfully? Which do you resonate with as a core value of yours?
• What is an occasion when you were given an instruction or directive that was wrong for you? Did you comply? Did you delay or pause? Did you defy? What did it feel like?