Changing My Mind about Yama and Niyama
There’s nothing like a list of no-nos to inflame the adolescent western mind.
I was sitting in a circle at a yoga study group in New Zealand, and the only person of Indian descent was reading out a list of their personal list of Yama and Niyama, which very roughly translates as ethical precepts, dos and don’t dos.
“Stop complaining, stop talking about myself, stop ruminating, stop blaming, stop worrying,” she read. I watched the other faces in the room become progressively even more anxious than normal as they ruminated on their habit of doing all these things and inability to stop.
My friend was reading her list of precepts with a cheery buoyancy, in marked contrast to the glum mood spreading in the room. Obviously, there was some difference in how she was relating to these “ethics” and how her listeners were.
It was only recently, looking back, that I realised that she had been talking about something not quite captured by the English word “ethics”. What else could this list have indicated?
It was finally my yoga teacher Mark Whitwell who offered me a different interpretation of yama and niyama, one that helped me understand that strange gathering.
Yama and niyama are words made famous by the Yogasūtra attributed to Patañjali, authored sometime between 500 BCE and 500 CE. Yet the words appear in over 50 Hindu texts from various traditions, including the ancient Rigveda, perhaps two thousand years older. It’s a whole other story of how a once-famous text (the Yogasūtra) fell into obscurity for seven hundred years, only to be revived into the most popular text of modern yoga. Suffice to say that of the 196 sutras (short aphorisms) in the Yogasutra, the one on yama and niyama is one of the most frequently cited:
2.29 Yamaniyamāsanaprāṇāyāmapratyāhāradhāraṇādhyāna-samādhyo’ṣṭāvaṅgāni
Which translates to a list of the eight “limbs” of yoga:
yama (things to not do),
niyama (things to do),
āsana (postures),
prānāyāma (stationary breath practice),
pratyāhāra (residing in the source of perception),
dhārana (concentration),
dhyāna (meditation),
samādhi (absorption).
Perhaps the popularity of this sūtra is because in a philosophical text that is mostly focused on the functioning of the mind the eight ‘limbs’ (anga) of Yoga are the closest the Yogasūtra gets to ‘actual practices.’ And if there’s one thing western yoga enthusiasts love, it’s ‘actual practices’. Why? Perhaps because they’re coming from a goal-obsessed culture of doing, trying to relate to an ancient wisdom tradition that’s all about being. 21st-century Canadian poet Karen Solie ends her poem 'The World of Plants' in a way that expresses this hunger for action, and yet resentment of it:
It’s as if everybody always wants us to do something. I’d like to see someone make us. Please, someone, come on over here and make us.
Perhaps this is the unconscious cry to which a coterie of bullying yoga teachers have arisen in response to.
And yet as a million spiritual try-hards, myself included have discovered, you can’t actually ‘do’ yourself into the later limbs (pratyahara onward). They either arise spontaneously, or they don’t. This doesn’t stop people from trying to meditate, trying to get into samadhi, or trying to withdraw their senses inwards, but at some point, we recognise that this kind of effortful activity is a total waste of time.
And therefore we can look at the limbs of yoga as a natural progression from doing to being, from something that “I” as an illusion of a separate person engage, through to states that only arise as that sense of separation naturally dissolves. Yama, niyama, asana and pranayama are all things we can actually do… or are they?
When my teacher Mark Whitwell was with his teacher TKV Desikachar, he asked him about the order of the limbs of yoga. Are they really meant to suggest a linear progression? Not really, was his answer. Asana and prānāyāma are the only limbs we can consciously practice, Desikachar told him. Yama and niyama arise naturally. If you are someone who seems to be causing a lot of harm, you can’t just decide to practice ahiṁsa (non-harming). It must arise naturally from your deepened relationship with yourself that arises from your practice of breath and movement.
Similarly, Mark Whitwell recounts stories of many students who only found themselves able to practice satyā (truthfulness), brahmacaryā (right use of vital energy) and āparigrahā (non-grasping) as a result of their sincere and precise regular practice of āsana and prānāyāma. Their intimacy with body and breath had given them a feeling of new tenderness and self-love towards themselves, and a new feeling of non-separation from others, which was naturally leading to better actions.
After discussing with Mark what he had learned about this from Desikachar, I felt an immense sense of relief. I could see how the Christian (or post-Christian) society I had grown up in had primed me to interpret ethics as something that I should be doing, laced with a sense of guilt and struggle. The mainstream western yoga approach to yama and niyama was just duplicating the religious approach of laying down rules of right and wrong and expecting people to follow them through willpower alone. Here was a different approach, where right action could flow gracefully from my practice of āsana and prānāyāma.
I realised I had been relating to the limbs as “a list, in the order that you do them,” coming as I did from my western mind and its bias toward doing. I realised this was what had stressed out the listeners in that room: they thought they were being read a list of things that they had to consciously and strenuously not do, and they were already oppressed by the impossibility of this. Who hasn’t tried to be a nicer person, and failed? No, our patterns and mental grooves of reaction go far deeper than conscious effort can compensate for.
Instead, I propose we can read the limbs as a list in order of the externality of various phenomena, ranging from the most ‘gross’ or obvious through to the most subtle. Not a list like a to-do list, in order!
I realised that my friend in the Yoga group had been speaking joyfully about yama and niyama that were arising spontaneously as a result of her practice. These were things she was noticing coming as siddhis, or gifts, not a rule book! And yet all the listeners heard was yet more moral-ethical guidelines in a society already swimming in them. They were so used to being told what to do and failing, that her joy had created a depression in them.
We all know what we should be doing. We’ve all grown up swimming in various ideas of right and wrong, good behaviour and bad behaviour. But who is actually able to perfectly align with all their ideas? There is obviously a gap between practice and actual capability. Most people who break moral codes do so despite themselves, pulled along by deep logics of trauma and social patterning that feel out of their control. Seeing this, we start to step out of the logic of “good” people and “bad” people, and into a more forgiving and hopeful paradigm of unresolved patterns, through to resolved patterns.
It’s obvious that mental lists of rules, no matter how beautifully idealistic, do nothing to actually help us fulfil them in our lives and interactions. We need the power of breath and practice to go deeper and undo the samskaras (patterns) lodged in our bodies and minds.
After discussing with Mark Whitwell what he had learned about this from Desikachar, I felt an immense sense of relief. I could see how the Christian (or post-Christian) society I had grown up in had primed me to interpret ethics as something that I should be doing, laced with a sense of guilt and struggle. Here was a different approach, where right action could flow gracefully from my practice of āsana and prānāyāma.
And so did this happen? Yes. I have noticed that yoga relaxes my body, making it more sensitive and observant. I notice more things about the bug crawling in front of me, notice its aliveness. I don’t want to kill it. I am more nauseated when I see a fish being clubbed to death on the head. My body feels lighter and has stopped craving sugar and deep-fried carbohydrate to cope emotionally (deep-fried potato is genuinely no longer my favourite food!). I would still agree with Mark’s statement of “ahiṁsa before satyā” (non-harming before truth), but it much easy to access and tell the truth when I need to. The feeling of the movement of energy created by the merging of the inhale and the exhale, and the protection of that energy through bandha, creates a natural feeling to protect that through regenerative loving sexuality. The impulse to try to trade sex for love is not there any more. My body is loved by its breath, and is not desperate for male attention any more. Non-grasping at objects happens in a non-try-hard way when you have something so precious always already with you: your feeling of being alive.
And I believe that in order to approach yama and niyama in a nuanced and intelligent way, they need to rise naturally out of our bodies and our practice, out of our hearts not our minds. Otherwise, what will we do when someone steals from us who has already had everything stolen from them by an unfair system? What will we do when faced with wildly conflicting definitions of brahamacharyā? What will we do when we have to keep a heavy secret? We can trust in the goodness of our bodies revealed through our practice, throw out all ideas of needing to police a sinful body with rigid moral codes, and respond appropriately according to the living situation. And who knows, in an age of harm, our spontaneous wisdom of non-harming may be the most urgently profound outcome of our practice, rather than the nuances of internal experience.
Rosalind Atkinson is a writer, yoga teacher and artist living in Aotearoa New Zealand and Fiji. You can find her writing at www.thedirt.media and on IG @rosalind.lucy