The previous instalment in this series explored the fifth limb of yoga: introspection (pratyahara), that post compared our mental experience to a stream of loosely connected and often repetitive thoughts. Dharana, the sixth limb, then considers how to deal with that torrent and focus awareness elsewhere.
With the first two limbs of yoga addressing the moral ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’, the third is concerned with what we in the West usually associate with yoga, namely the bodily postures or asanas.
What we know as yoga was collated and defined by the Hindu mystic Patanjali around the third century CE. Though the word is now most often used to refer to the set of postures (asanas), these constitute only one of the eight sutras or set of rules he wrote down.
Something about boys 