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Raja Yoga: The Ultimate Guide to the Royal Path
On 11 September 1893, a thirty-year-old Bengali monk addressed the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. He had arrived in America without an invitation. He had briefly slept in a railway freight car. He spoke for a few minutes, and the response was extraordinary enough to launch a lecture career across the United States and…
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Hatha Yoga: How Physical Yoga Became What It Is Today
Open the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the founding text of physical yoga, written in the fifteenth century. Count the postures. There are roughly fifteen, and most of them are ways of sitting down. A modern vinyasa class moves through more shapes than that in ten minutes. Something happened between the fifteenth century and the yoga studio,…
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What Is Samadhi? Yoga’s Highest State Explained
Patanjali names it in the second sentence of his text, then spends four chapters circling it without ever quite landing. Samadhi is the eighth and final limb of yoga. It is the state the whole system points toward. It is also the thing the tradition finds hardest to say anything useful about, and every classical…
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The Eight Limbs of Yoga Explained
Walk into most yoga studios and you will encounter the third limb. Only the third. The one about posture. It occupies the hour, the mat, the marketing, and for a great many practitioners it is the whole of what the word means. Patanjali gave it three sentences out of 196. The eight limbs, ashtanga, appear…
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Patanjali and the Yoga Sutras
We do not know when Patanjali lived. We do not know where. We do not know whether he was one person. For the author of the foundational text of classical yoga, the biographical record is close to empty, and what fills the gap is mostly legend, including a charming story that he descended from the…
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The Bhagavad Gita and the Three Paths of Yoga
Two armies are drawn up facing each other, and one man asks his driver to take him into the gap between them so he can see who he is about to fight. He looks. And in the ranks opposite he finds his cousins, his teachers, the grandfather who raised him, men he has eaten with…
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The Upanishads and the Birth of Yogic Philosophy
A boy named Nachiketa is given away by his father to Death. The father, Vajashravasa, has been performing a great sacrifice, giving away his possessions as the ritual requires. But the cattle he is offering are old and barren, animals that have already given everything they had. The boy notices. He asks his father, more…
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The Vedas and the Earliest Roots of Yoga
For roughly three thousand years, the oldest sacred texts in India were not written down. They were held in people. Families of reciters memorised the Rigveda syllable by syllable, tone by tone, and passed it to their children using a set of verification techniques that border on the obsessive. In one method, jata-patha, the reciter…
