When Patanjali says that the practice of yoga has eight limbs, yama and niyama are the lenses through which we look at what we´re doing; asana is where we can be if we are able to establish the body free from tension in joyful steadiness. The fourth limb of yoga is pranayama. Patanjali defines pranayama by stating first that it happens within asana. He says within that, within asana, within joyful steadiness in the body free from tension and manifesting the infinite beyond duality then comes pranayama. In other words pranayama is a deepening of asana. It´s where asana goes if it is able to, if it is allowed to, if it is given the space. In other words it is not separate from it. It is not the next linear step, but a deepening, an infolding.

The first point to grasp is that pranayama and asana are not techniques. Pranayama does not mean breathing practices and asana does not mean posture practices. It just is that posture practice elicits the state of asana very well and breathing practice can elicit the pranayama state very well. But neither of the definitions that Patanjali gives to asana and pranayama are referring in any way to something technical, something that you must do. They are referring to what happens when you have given up doing. When you are letting doing just happen. Giving up doing doesn´t mean that actions stop. And this is the heart of the teaching of Lao Tzu Wu Wei; non action doesn´t mean nothing happening. It´s also the heart of the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita in which Krishna states very clearly you must not become attached to non action as not doing. You must not interpret non action as meaning doing nothing. It means the recognition that doing is impersonal, that things happen by themselves. Including our claiming of them.

So Patanjali doens´t really tell us to do anything. He is aware that we are in action; that we are instruments of action. All he is saying is that if those actions lend themselves to freeing the body from tension then as the body becomes free from tension the state of asana will manifest. This is a state within which the structural dualities of the body no longer impinge on awareness. Then the physicality of the body disappears: because physicality, matter, form, is dependent upon the three dimensions of space which are indicated to us experientially through the dualistic structure of the body: left right, front back, top bottom, inside outside, etcetera.

Patanjali ends his definition of asana with “beyond duality”, going beyond duality. Asana is going beyond duality in the body. And then he defines pranayama as within that, within having gone beyond the duality of the body you are no longer in the body as a limited physical capsule. This doesn´t mean that anything has left the body. It means that the body ‘as such’ has left the field of awareness. Within that, pranayama is the release of exhalation, inhalation and transition, until they become unhindered and subtle. Thereby the duality of the breath is transcended uncovering the inner light and initiating the mind into meditation. So this is the description of what might happen in asana when you are no longer aware of, therefore, no longer able to concern yourself with, body as a structure, with body as an object. Then you are left with the functioning of the body, the activity of the body, the organic processes of the body that are keeping you alive which is most obviously the breathing mechanism. So then your attention is naturally drawn by the breath. In other words pranayama is not something that you have to do to the breath. It is not even that you have to fix your attention on the breath. It happens when the relaxation in the body is so deep that the body as a structure can no longer be perceived and instead you are just left with the body in its functioning, most obviously the breath.

So that is the link between asana and pranayama. The breath takes your attention. Of course there is going to be an oscillation. The oscillation away from the breath may be to the body as a structure. It may be so fast that you don´t even notice that. So you are thinking about baked beans on toast and then back to the breath again. Given that there is always an oscillation, although this is a linear description, it does not refer to a linear process. The linear appearance is that the link between asana pranayama is the natural drawing of the attention to the breath as a function of your interest. You must be interested in what is actually happening as you relax deeply. Release of the exhalation inhalation and transition comes about simply through observation. It is not a result of a technique. It is not as a result of something that you do to the breath. It´s what happens when your breath is that which takes your attention effortlessly and naturally.

What Patanjali says is that “elucidation of all of the characteristics of exhalation, inhalation and transition” is the process or invitation to pranayama. Which means that in your attention being taken to your breath, if that attentiveness is sustained then eventually all of the characteristics of the breath will become evident in the light of your awareness. This is not because you are looking for them. This is not because you are holding your mind on your breath. It happens because your breath is giving itself to your attention because that´s the most obvious thing that´s happening within you.

He uses the word, paridrishtu, which means to see through. In other words light is travelling through. The light of your awareness is penetrating the breath to such an extent that it become unhindered, dirga, and sukhsma, subtle. This means that naturally and organically, manipulation of the breath dissolves into the light of your awareness. The habit of pushing and pulling the breath, the habit of trying to manipulate the breath, however unconsciously dissolves in the light of awareness. Then it becomes unhindered or free. Being in a state of very deeply relaxed stillness your need for oxygen becomes very minimal, so your breathing becomes very subtle.

Obviously this is not happening if you are struggling with the postures or the bandhas. If you are still struggling then you are making effort. When you need more oxygen, your breath doesn´t necessarily become that subtle. But when you are sitting, when there is a letting go of the effort, the intent, relative to the struture of the body the need for oxygen for the body becomes very low. Then the breath becomes shallow, it becomes subtle if you are deeply relaxed. How subtle depends on how relaxed you are. Mental activity also requires oxygen and also requires nourishment. It is well known that if you go into deep meditation it is hard to tell if you are breathing. It is hard for anybody else to tell if you are breathing because everything has become so quiet, so still. Then the need for oxygen is minimal. So the breath becomes subtle.

Just as the structural dualities of the body are transcended as the state of asana, the dualities of the breath are transcended as the state of pranayama. The first aspect of that is you can´t really tell the difference between breathing in and breathing out. And the second phase of that, when you are going a little bit deeper, when you relax a little bit more, is you can´t even be sure if you are breathing at all. And then going a little deeper than that is you can´t even be sure if there is a breather. Of course there is still breathing but it´s not very clear, because it is very subtle. But you know there must have been breathing because you haven´t died.

So this is what Patanjali is talking about. Transcending the dualities of the breath just means that your breath becomes so subtle and your mind becomes so relaxed from its habit of claiming all actions that the body is doing, and all activity in the mind, as its own, that the sense of self as the breather disappears. Then breathing is just happening without it any more being “my” inhalation, “my” exhalation, deep exhalation, deep inhalation. It is no longer even exhalation or inhalation. But nevertheless it is still happening as rhythm, as an oscillation between opening and closing; drawing in, letting out. That fundamental oscillation of the breath remains.

So the point here is that Patanjali makes no reference to anything that is done relative to pranayama. Pranayama is a happening that occurs within asana, which is also a happening that occurs within the enquiry into the possibility of relaxing the body totally free from tension. This takes place within the structural dualities of the body that are brought into focus by a particular shape, until those structural dualities dissolve from your awareness. Not from reality, not from somebody else´s awareness, but from your awareness.

Then Patanjali says that when the duality of the breath is transcended, this uncovers the inner light and initiates the mind to meditation. This happens via what he calls pratyahara. Then meditation is coming as a result of this process. A process of first freeing the body from tension, within which the breath is totally released from any effort. This includes any claiming of any aspect of the breath, any identification with the process of breathing. Breathing has to be there. But it does not have to have anything to do with ‘you’ as thye sense of self controlling the situation. Of course even though you can join the party and start playing with your breath, you don´t have to.

In Patanjali’s definition of pranayama the word paridrishtu, to see through, is the key. With this word he is giving us the key to yoga. It is seeing through. It is not making happen. Seeing through our projections, our assumptions. Our assumption of autonomy: of “I, me, mine”. Nothing needs to be destroyed, nothing needs to be abandoned, nothing needs to be given up, nothing needs to be changed. Things will change, things will be given up. But the changing, the giving up are inevitable happenings that result from clear seeing, or seeing through. The inhalation, exhalation and transition are released through exhaustive elucidation of all their perceivable characteristics. This simply means to become totally intimate with the breath in all of its characteristics, in all of its fullness. This is not a matter of quantative analysis, or accumulated data. Intimate awareness is enough to free the breath form the tensions of imposition until it becomes unhindered and subtle. In other words there is no need to manipulate the breath. Awareness transforms everything. Awareness transforms tamas into sattva. Awareness transforms stagnation, inertia, tension, imposition into lucidity and freedom.

When the breath (inhalation, exhalation and transition) becomes unhindered and subtle as a result of exhaustive elucidation the duality of the breath is transcended. This transcending of the duality of the breath uncovers the inner light and initiates the mind into meditation. Transcending the duality of the breath means simply that the distinctiveness between inhalation and exhalation has disappeared. That’s the beginning of transcending the duality of the breath. The beginning of experiencing that is to recognise that they’re not separate, that what you do to the exhalation is being done to the inhalation. But more specifically the initial aspect of transcending the duality of the breath is when the breath becomes so subtle that the movement coming from the inhalation and the movement coming from the exhalation can’t be distinguished to be such. In other words if you were to step a little bit away from your breathing you might wonder, “am I breathing in? Or am I breathing out?”. This does happen quite often,

A more subtle aspect of transcending the duality of the breath is to wonder if you are even breathing at all. That disappearance brings with it a disappearance of the breather. That is the final aspect of transcending the duality of the breath: when the breather and the breath are transcended. Then there is no longer any sense of the breather, a doer relative to the breath. This duality of the breather and the breath is referred to earlier when Patanjali says samadhi undermines the duality of the seer and the seen. These two: the subject and the object, take their form only in relation to one another. Samadhi is the final dissolution, or transcendence, of these dualities: the subject and the object, or the doer and the deed.

When the duality of the breath is transcended, the inner light initiates the mind into meditation. Here is stated quite clearly something that’s actually happening in-between all of the limbs of yoga, that one transforms into the other spontaneously. They are not separate. Of course you can go to asana and no further, or pranayama and no further and therefore you can say that they are separate. The beginning of initiating the mind into meditation is what Patanjali calls pratyahara. This refers to .”.the senses releasing their objects and losing power over the mind”.

What this phrasing means is very deliberate. What means is the senses are no longer pulling your attention outwards to external stimuli. The events occurring outside your body no longer magnetise you. But within that the senses release their objects. There is a big gift in that phrase. What Patanjali is saying is that objects belong to sensory perception. That the perceptible characteristics of an object depends upon the sensory organs that are being used to perceive it. Therefore a tree does not appear the same to a cat as it does to a dog, or to a human being. Nor, to that matter, does a tree appear the same to two human beings. The seen, the object, the grasped, the owned, all these different terms Patanjali uses, refer to an event in the mind.

The word ‘object’ often implies that it has nothing to do with personal partiality or fantasy. However, perception is always subjective. In other words you see is only what you see, it is not the thing in itself. It is not what is being seen. And if this all sounds a little abstract, it becomes quite pertinent when you think about hearing people saying bad things about you or you saying bad things about other people. When you speak in such a way or when anybody speaks in such a way they are in fact referring only to their own perceptions and therefore they are referring to their own prejudice, their own assumptions, their own values, there own fears.

Pratyahara is where those objects created by the senses are no longer impinging themselves upon awareness. There are still objects of awareness but these objects are no longer being generated by the senses. They are coming from inside. They are coming from inside the body or from memory. Pratyahara is internalisation of awareness. Now that doesn’t mean that you are no longer capable of hearing sounds. It doesn’t even mean that the vibration of the sound is no longer reaching the brain. It just means it is no longer reaching your attention. The organism, the body, the brain is still perfectly well aware of what is going on. So if a cracking sound arises because the beam above your head is splintering and breaking, you get up and run out of the room; it’s okay! So there is no need to be afraid of going deep into internalisation on the basis of spurious concepts of external danger. If something important is happening, if it is important to you you’ll notice it. But if it’s not as important as what you are doing then you won’t so a fly landing on your neck you might not notice. That doesn’t mean you won’t notice anything at all. It means you won’t have a ‘a fly landing on my neck, its disturbing me ’ thought

The transformation in awareness from pratyahara to dharana is “…the mind in singular internal suspension”. This means that the flow of objects of awareness arising from within becomes suspended on one of those perceptions. The mind in singular internal suspension is dharana. If you meditate on an image of Durga, when the mind is suspended on that perception only, dharana is happening. When that image is no longer moving in and out of focus but is just there. If you haven’t taken on any seed in particular then there will come a moment when the activity of the mind suspends itself on a single perception. It maybe a feeling, it may be an image, it may be a thought. It may be something quite different from that. Dharana might last a few seconds. It might last a few minutes. However long it lasts it can go in two directions: back to pratyahara, and on into dualistic perception or it can go further in, into dhyana. There is constant oscillation in awareness. Your awareness can oscillate between pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, dharana pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, pratyahara, pranayama, etcetera, etcetera, quite fast, quite slowly. The eight limbs of yoga don’t represent a fixed linear progression.

According to Patanjali the next transformation phase is the unravelling of that perception. The subtlety of that which is actually happening becoming apparent. The subtlety of what is actually happening becoming apparent involves the recognition that all perceptions are projections. This point of the transformation of awareness is the beginning of samadhi. The recognition that all perceptions are projections is not a conceptual one. It is not the arising of the idea that all perceptions are projections. Anybody can have that in the dualistic mind. It’s the manifestation of the projective nature of perception in the moment. This comes about once the perception has been unravelled. Patanjali later on goes on in great depth about that, about dhyana, the unravelling of a perception or the penetration of the mind into a perception. He talks about the form of the perception, the origin of the perception and the implication of the perception. These are all seen through which means that all perceptions are seen to belong to and rest upon absolutely everything.

The transformation from dhyana to samadhi consists of seeing through the projected nature of perception. Which means that the apparent form of that perception “…radiates the singular significance of emptiness”. The singular significance of emptiness rests upon the fact that any perception or any object or any thing is interconnected inextricably to all other things. And therefore to comprehensively define or understand anything, all other things must be included in that understanding and definition. In other words, no single thing is in any way separate from all other things. This is the singular significance of emptiness. No object has within itself any inherent substance that in any way is differentiating it from the apparently inherent substance of any other apparently separate object.

The amusing thing is that this process of the mind moving, from dualistic perception to non-dual awareness, is happening all the time. And the purpose of yoga is simply to recognise that this is what is actually happening all the time. Yoga is not some fantastic psychological mechanism of fabricating a special state of consciousness called samadhi. Samadhi is that into which and out of which you are oscillating all the time. But the oscillation is so fast that you don’t notice that there is an oscillation. The nature of samadhi is so subtle that it leaves no reference point for you to remember that you’ve been there. So you pay attention in your memory only to the oscillation out of it into awareness of objects.

What’s happening when you’re loving watching the sunset is that you are becoming one with the sunset. You are transcending the duality of the seer and the seen. The beauty of the moment is taking you out of the dualistic mode of perception. This is what makes you feel so good. In the subject having been transcended, the seer, the watcher no longer being present is resting. Samadhi therefore is not some far off, distant, difficult to achieve, esoteric special state of consciousness. Samadhi is the ground of consciousness. Samadhi is the ground of your being. Samadhi is the ground of your life.

As such it is potentially available all of the time. It’s happening all of the time and becoming familiar with its happening, within the oscillation of awareness into it and out of it, makes it more available and its regenerative power more available. More than anything else, that which makes us tired, that which makes us tense, that which makes life hard to cope with, is identifying ourselves only with the process of perceiving objects from an apparent subject. This requires effort. It takes effort to hold God away from you so that you can see him, serious effort. And this effort is exhausting.

You could say that the pragmatic purpose of yoga practice is to allow you to relax completely. Complete relaxation is an expression of what Patanjali calls the dissolution of the identity field. Or you could say suspension of the sense of separate self. And when the identity field is in suspension, the Buddha field is in manifestation. Nourishing everything around it. So there is no need to go anywhere. Be here. Now. To samadhi makes it no difference if you are in a temple, in some sacred place, or if you are in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. To your willingness to recognise that, it makes a difference perhaps. But that’s an expression of your conditioning, not the nature of samadhi.

La Croce, Toscana 2005