When I began my yoga practice about fifteen years ago, I had come to yoga to relieve physical pain. And the practice did, indeed, relieve much of those aches and pains. But shortly into the journey, I found my mind calming down and my heart softening. It was as though my whole body-mind ecosystem system was beginning to be transformed in subtle ways because of the physical practice. When I asked a friend at the time about this, she simply said, ‘Yes. That tends to happen with yoga.’ 

Wow, I thought, really? This happens to everyone?

What follows is a very, very brief, sticking-to-the-absolute-essentials summary of the basics of yoga philosophy based on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the foundational text of what we think of today as ‘yoga’. It is intended to help set the stage for how the practice of yoga nurtures the entire body-mind ecosystem.

The body-mind ecosystem

Yoga philosophy presupposes that the person that is ‘me’ is made up of five components. Patanjali delineates these components by using the word ‘kosha’. Kosha literally means ‘sheath’ and is usually translated as ‘layers.’ I am not sure if the language of layers is helpful or not. I personally find it distracting for reasons that I won’t go into here. Right now, I find it helpful to think of the koshas as components rather than layers, so that the thing that is ‘me’ is more like a marble cake or a set of inter-locking gears than a Russian doll — the five components are in constant conversation with each other without any hierarchy among them (see Box 1).

What Patanjali would have told me when I felt my mind and heart shifting is that as I began to practice yoga is that not only were parts of my physical body opening up and coming alive, but so were these different components of myself. The breath work, rhythmic movements, and brief meditations cleared space for these components to become more evident and harder to ignore.

How yoga nurtures the body-mind ecosystem

Mircea Eliade was a well known scholar of religions who studied yoga in depth and for decades. He pointed out that the power of yoga is its appreciation of human psychology, that yoga not only tells us how the body-mind ecosystem works but also gives us tools to nurture and mature the ecosystem.

The practice of yoga involves eight ‘limbs,’ eight separate sets of tools. These are set out in Box 2, and I have included an attempt to connect the various limbs of yoga to the components of the ‘me’ that they specialize in. I am aware that many folks will argue with this particular approach, but my hope is that it helps you grasp more readily the way in which each limb has a role in helping you nurture your own body-mind ecosystem.

The eight limbs can be broken down the following way – two (the yamas and niyamas) focus on the ethical practices, two (asana and pranayama) focus on what is often characterized as the physical body, and four (pratyhara, dharana, dhyana, and samadhi) focus on the mind/soul. The breakdown I have offered is not perfect, but it is a handy shortcut that may help those new to the eight limbs a way to not feel overwhelmed.

There are many excellent overviews of the eight limbs of yoga (see resources, below). In this blog, I will highlight various limbs in the ‘How-to’ and ‘Practices’ sections when the practice focuses on them.

The work of living: The point of it all

According to Patanjali, each of us is born with work to do. We have memories and dispositions imprinted on us (‘samskaras’) that are both good and bad.

Some yogis, especially more traditional ones, believe in reincarnation. If this is your belief, samskaras follow the individual’s ‘soul’ from one life to the next. And in each life, the person’s work is to decrease the bad or negative samskaras and increase the good or positive ones. In other words, your work is to clean up shop and make your set of samskaras as good as possible. All the cleanup you do is thought to travel with you to your next incarnation.

If you do not believe in reincarnation, samskaras are simply the predispositions you were born with, plus everything you have done and everything that has happened to you over the course of your life. Your work, then, is also to clean this up.

Cleanup work can be simple, like keeping a more consistent sleep schedule so that you can be your best every day. It can also be very, very hard. For example, if you have experienced victimization, cleanup might mean doing the healing work of reconciliation with your victimizer, and finding forgiveness in your heart. Not exactly a skip through the park.

Progress, not perfection

The beauty of yoga is that perfection is not really ever expected. You just work on what you can work on, using the tools yoga provides. In time, progress happens. And the result is that you feel stronger, more resilient, and just ‘better.’ Old wounds heal, new possibilities open.

A fellow yoga teacher recently commented to me that she sees these kinds of transformations in her students all the time. They are rarely spoken about, but they are everywhere. Students start coming to yoga with all sorts of demands on themselves and the practice, as I did years ago. I wanted to be out of physical pain. And after a while, if students stick with practice, they settle into a rhythm and awareness that helps them weed their way through life in a more contented way. They feel less reactive to the ups and downs of everyday living and can start seeing the forest for the trees.

As yogis dig into all eight limbs of yoga, the benefits multiply. It is not magic. It is just tapping into your own body-mind ecosystem to nurture it, to calm it when it needs calming, and to challenge it when it needs challenging. And so you grow.

Resources to dig deeper

There are many, many translations of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. The one I find most accessible to begin with is by Alan Finger, The Tantra of the Yoga Sutras.

A favorite introduction into the many dimensions of yoga is Erich Schiffmann’s Yoga: The Spirit and the Practice of Moving into Stillness.

Deborah Adele does a lovely job at breaking down the ethical practices of yoga in The Yamas and Niyamas: Exploring yoga’s ethical practices.

From more on meditation, see my An Ounce of Meditation: A tiny guide to get you started