The First 4 Steps Of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras

I have shared Buddha's teachings with you.

I have shared Bhojirama's teachings with you.

I have teached Siddhartha's teachings with you.

But no teaching would be complete.

Nothing from the East would be complete if you didn't add Patanjali.

Patanjali was a rare,

Phenomenal human being way before his time.

For his words even today,

In today's standard,

Apply meaning to life as we know it and can change life as we know it if you apply these yoga sutras that Patanjali laid down for us.

If you summed up all of Patanjali's work,

You could probably put it on four or five pages,

Which doesn't seem like a lot.

But when you have someone like Osho explaining things to you and explaining how things have changed and terms have changed and meanings have changed and outlooks have changed over the years,

Then you get ten volumes.

And I read all ten volumes back in 2006.

I've never really stepped into a yoga environment.

I've been in yoga studios before,

But I've never really studied yoga that I knew of,

Right?

Except that in Aikido,

I studied Aikido for a little over twenty something years,

And in the beginning of the Aikido sessions,

We basically are doing yoga.

We're stretching and doing the postures,

The asanas that they do in yoga.

We just never called it that.

And one of my teachers named T.

K.

Lee,

He was very adamant that you did that stuff before class started because he didn't want it to be associated with his Aikido.

But anyway,

Today I would like to share with you the eight steps,

Or the eight limbs they call them,

Of Patanjali's teachings.

So what we'll do is we'll break it up into two sections.

This audio recording will cover the first four steps,

And later I'll make the other last steps the last four steps,

And we'll complete this talk in a two-part series.

It's just way too much to put into one session,

And I wouldn't want to bore anybody or lose anybody's attention,

So we'll keep it short and simple,

And we'll start with the first four.

Now,

These steps are like steps of a ladder.

You could basically say that.

And when you're climbing a ladder,

You might be able to skip one step at a time and get up on the second rung faster,

But basically these steps need to be taken in order.

They're sequential.

They're meant to be in this order so that you can move up to the next step and then move up to the next.

Of course,

You could always go back down a step and practice the previous step if you felt like you needed to at any time.

Or you could just skip up one step.

But Patanjali also wants us to remember that these are not just steps.

They're also like limbs of your body.

They're like branches that come off of your body.

They're all a part of you,

And they become a part of you when you start practicing them and studying these steps and applying them in your life.

Now,

Some would argue that yoga is all about certain postures,

The asanas,

And we'll get into that in a minute,

But true yoga,

Basically yoga,

The word yoga itself means to unite,

To yoke,

To make whole again,

To bring back to one and make whole again.

So that's what yoga stands for.

And there's a lot of division between people who just study the postures and don't study the whole spiritual side of it,

The complexities of the spiritual side.

So anyway,

Let's get down to it.

Let's get down to the bone.

We call the first step yam.

And yam basically means self-restraint,

Direction,

Focus.

You can't go through life,

Or you can go through life,

Going a couple miles in one direction and then turn around and heading back in the opposite direction,

Because that puts you right back where you started.

And if you took off in another direction and went a couple miles that way and turned around and came back,

You'd still be nowhere ahead in life.

So you kind of need direction.

You need some sort of self-restraint to guide you through life.

I started studying Aikido and martial arts at a very young age,

Right?

As soon as I got into the military,

I started studying.

And I guess in the martial arts,

It's kind of easy to have a goal because the guy wearing the black belt is basically the one that is running the show and does all the neat tricks.

And of course,

You want to learn all those tricks.

So you develop a sense of direction because there's a goal.

There's something to shoot for.

There's something that you want,

Something you desire.

Now in the spiritual world,

When you get up into the higher realms of the spiritual world,

You have to drop that desire.

But in the beginning,

You need that.

You need a focus.

You need some sort of direction or you're never going to get anywhere.

You're just going to run around in circles and waste your life away and not accomplish anything.

So the second step of Patanjali is what they call Nanyam,

Which means discipline.

Now,

Disciple and discipline basically come from the same root.

And it's changed over the years,

Right?

The definition has changed from meaning something beautiful to looking at something when we think discipline,

You have to discipline your child or even you just think about like disciplining your pet or something.

And in the beginning,

Discipline seems hard,

Right?

It's very chaotic.

It's that your dog might be going a little crazy thinking,

You know,

What are you doing to me?

And you're just trying to teach it to go to the bathroom outside,

You know,

Something simple,

But it takes discipline.

You have to discipline your animals.

You have to discipline your children in a certain way,

Or they have no direction either.

So we learned discipline at a very young age with our parents in the older generations,

The before the generation X basically discipline had a whole different meaning.

And now the younger generation,

They have to be disciplined in a whole different way.

You know,

And of course,

I'm not a psychologist,

So I can't get into rights and wrongs,

Good or bads,

But something's going to be lost.

Something in the translation will be lost if we cannot hand down discipline in a civil way towards our youth growing up.

So that leads us to the next step,

The next limb from your body is this asyan.

Asyan is a basically means rest.

It also means posture.

Okay,

So like in Aikido,

Especially in TK Lee's class,

We would come in and warm up,

You know,

Stretch our bodies and everything before class.

So you want to get there early to do that.

And then as class started with TK Lee,

He would sit us down in this sitting posture in Aikido,

Where you're basically your legs and your feet are kind of tucked up underneath you and you're lying on your shins and the bottoms of your feet and you're just sitting there.

And at first it's very uncomfortable and beginning students have a really hard time sitting still.

And I think TK just loved getting his students to be able to sit still because Americans are known to have very bad manners and they can't sit still.

So one of the key aspects of TK Lee's teaching was to get you to sit still for a long period of time while he would sit there and describe in detail the Aikido that he wanted to teach or sometimes he'd just go off on a tangent and just pick up any subject like engineering and just go to town and have us sit there and squirm.

But after about three or four years,

You get really good at sitting still and you're able to concentrate on what the teacher's trying to teach.

And that sounds counterproductive.

Like,

Why would you want to waste three years where you can't really listen with full intent?

And the reason is that it comes from yoga.

It's asyaan,

Rest and posture.

And not only does it mean posture,

It means a relaxed posture.

So if you can sit there in Saiza for 30,

40 minutes and it not bother you at all,

Then you've mastered asyaan,

You've mastered the posture portion of yoga.

And of course,

Yogis have all kinds of postures that they teach you and I think they're really cool because a lot of them help circulate energy in your body and help you to raise energy in your body.

So the asyaans,

The postures are really cool to learn.

Like I said,

We do them before class in Aikido,

But we just don't technically include it in our teaching.

It just depends on what school you go to.

But anyway,

So then the very last for today,

The fourth step,

The fourth limb of your body is pranayama.

Pranayama means breathing.

Now a lot of people,

A lot of yogis can focus on breathing.

And Osho does a whole breathing meditation that helps you to unlock each chakra and move energy up and down throughout your body.

And when you get done with doing the breathing meditations that he has,

Then you just feel pretty cool.

It's just like there's chaotic breathing,

There's normal breathing,

And there's this,

The whole meditation is to try to get you to be chaotic and not think about how fast you're breathing,

How slow you're breathing,

Just make it fast and slow,

Slow then fast,

And just keep it all chaotic.

So to be angry,

Your breath has a certain pulse to it.

You breathe in and slow through your nostrils very crazily and chaotic.

But if you're meditating,

You'll find yourself breathing so slow that at points when you go into deep meditation that your breath will basically stop.

You'll stop breathing for a few seconds,

And then you'll catch yourself not breathing.

This is just some deep occurrences that happen when you've been meditating probably about five,

Ten years.

And yogis from Patanjali's lineage have been able to basically stop breathing for,

Believe it or not,

I've read stories like ten years they can stop breathing.

Everybody will think they're dead and everything,

But then after ten years in the grave they start breathing again,

Life comes back into their body.

And I know that sounds crazy to even think about,

But I've heard these stories being told many times,

So who knows,

Right?

So anyway,

Focus on your breathing when you're mad,

Focus on your breathing when you're happy,

Focus on your breathing when you're around friends,

And focus on your breathing when you're alone.

And see if you can notice the changes in your breath,

Changes that might help you down the road where,

Like if you're feeling like you have to get up in front of a crowd and talk to a lot of people,

You might want to remember a breath that will calm you down.

So Pranayama's breathing and that puts us into the end of today's discussion.

And I will pick it back up real soon and give you the last four steps.

And it gets so much more exciting the higher you go,

The higher steps you take.

But like I said,

You can go back down a step,

You can go back all the way down to direction and discipline,

Or you can go to the second step and focus on your discipline and just dedicate your life to doing these eight steps and growing from them.

You know,

Study yoga,

Go take a class and actually see what we're talking about.

Anyway,

I think here on Insight Timer there's a whole yoga section.

And like I said,

I've read the Patanjali Sutras twice now and there's so much information in the sutras that I could never share all of it in a fifteen minute video or audio track.

But like I said,

Even here on Insight Timer there's a whole yoga section,

Teachers that could probably benefit you quite a lot in life if you listen to what they say,

Especially if they know who Patanjali is.

Almost everybody who studies yoga knows who Patanjali is.

Like I said,

Patanjali lived five thousand years ago.

This yoga sutras were written five thousand years ago.

That's twenty-five hundred years before Christ,

Before Buddha came along.

This is ancient music in the pines,

You could say.

But it's amazing what he came up with and how it still applies to us today and how we can grow from it and experience what Patanjali called yoga,

The yoking of existence.

Alright,

Thank you for joining me.

We'll talk to you later.

Bye.