Part 2 Yoga Sutras Steps 5-8 From Patanjali

This is part two of Patanjali's 8 steps of yoga development. Steps 5-8 and the preceding steps or blocks that precede your search towards Samahdi. Followed by my favorite story about our lives. So grab a drink and sit back and enjoy this is a good one.

Transcript

Hello friends,

Welcome back to part two of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali,

The eight essential steps or limbs of your body you could consider them to be.

Patanjali wants you to take into account before you try these eight steps of yoga,

The essential steps of yoga,

There are five things that you should keep in mind or have conquered or are not an issue in your life before you make the eight steps.

The first of those five is non-violence.

That's pretty simple.

Non-violence to yourself and non-violence to others.

So what Patanjali is saying,

You definitely have to have a non-violent essence about you,

An awareness that is at peace with itself.

So there's non-violence,

Then there's truthfulness,

The second step.

Truthfulness to yourself,

Truthful that you're going to put an effort into what you're going to do and not just,

Like I said in the asanas,

That you have to have direction,

But you just have to be truthful to yourself that you're going to make a sincere effort to study yoga.

And the third is honesty.

You definitely have to be honest with yourself.

The fourth is sexual continence.

I think when someone talks about sexual continence,

I don't think it's,

It's not that sex is not an issue.

There are a lot of yogis out there that abuse the power of being a yogi and steer people down the wrong path,

But we won't get into that.

Sexual continence basically to me means that sex is not an issue.

While you're meditating,

While you're studying yoga,

You can have a single pointed frame of mind.

So that's definitely an important thing.

And then the last one,

The fifth,

And the fifth has to deal with non-possessiveness.

And basically what Patanjali is trying to say is you have to drop the I.

There comes a point,

And we'll get into this in the steps here too,

That you have to be non-possessive and you have to be able to let go and just be free and be a free soul.

So we'll give a quick recap of the first four steps that we talked about in the first video.

So the first one is yam,

Which is self-restraint,

Nanyam,

Which is direction,

Asyam is going to be your postures,

Being able to be relaxed in a posture so that you can raise your energy,

And then there's pranayam.

Pranayam is basically breathing and the rhythm of breathing.

And that brings us to the fifth,

And here we go.

So the fifth is pratyahara,

And that basically means coming back or returning,

Turning inwards.

Basically instead of having your focus going outwards all the time,

You have to focus it inwards towards your awareness and let your awareness be the guide in that.

So that's what they mean by pratyahara.

And then the next one is dhyahana,

The conceptualization.

Basically dhyahana is saying you have to have one focal point,

One concentrated focal point to move forward with.

When you're going into meditation,

Whether it's breathing through your nose,

A lot of people watch their breath going in and out,

And that's their focal point.

And that works just great.

And then the next one,

So with this section you have to be able to have a fixed point on one thing.

And then,

Like I said,

A lot of people use breath.

You can imagine a silver thread going down through your body and connecting up all the chakras and everything,

And that works fine.

Just something to have a focal point,

To have one fixed point where you can drop thought.

So that's your launching board.

That's your pad to jump forward with and make that leap into no thought.

And then there's daihan.

Daihan is meditation.

Meditation is the seventh step.

And when it comes to meditation,

The Indians have two words,

Two words that they like to use.

There's anahakyar,

Which means I am,

And prasmita,

Which means am.

So you drop the I.

So while you're meditating,

You get to a point where it's just I am,

And then you have to drop the I.

And dropping the I is the next step in the evolution towards meditation.

And actually,

I don't think you're really meditating until you drop that I.

And then there's just amness.

But then you have to drop the amness too.

When the amness drops,

You're entering into things like samadhi,

And samadhi is basically an is-ness where you and the universe combine together and there's no more separation between the two.

And that leads us to samadhi,

Which is the eighth step.

You got to be careful though.

In yoga,

They have this thing called bhashmata,

Which means the fallen from yoga.

Bhashmata yogi is someone who has fallen from yoga.

And what can happen is basically you get caught up in life.

Things happen.

You might have a relationship crisis.

You could have something going on in your life that could make you fall backwards.

The loss of a loved one or something like that could make you fall all the way back to the first step.

And that's what bhashmata yogi means,

Is that someone that's fallen backwards.

But you can go step by step.

Once you've fallen from samadhi,

You fall into daihan,

Into meditation.

And a lot of times,

Even when I meditate sometimes,

I shift between the two,

Between daihan and samadhi.

I can actually see the visuals of the first two levels of samadhi,

But the third level of the seedless samadhi,

There's nothing.

You just totally disappear.

And when you meditate,

You can come in and out of that.

And you can fall backwards from meditation if something disrupts you or say something happens and you can fall back to conceptualization,

To daihana.

And if you fall back to daihana and you're having problems focusing on one object,

Then you go back to pratyahara,

Which means turning in.

So you can fall back step by step,

Or you can fall back many steps,

But you'd have to start all over in a sequential order.

And that's what Patanjali's contribution to the metaphysical world is,

Is that he laid out a roadmap from A to Z,

So alpha to omega.

He laid out every turn of something that could happen.

He thought of this and wrote it down 5,

000 years ago,

Which is amazing.

So in a sense that,

In a nutshell,

Covers the eight steps and then the five preceding steps,

The eight limbs and the five preceding steps towards the eight stages of development while you learn to study yoga and learn to meditate and things like that.

But before we go,

I want to share a little story with you.

This is one of my favorite stories.

Anyway,

Here it goes.

Once upon a time,

There lived an ancient Chinese guy,

And he lived by the river.

And every day before the sun came up,

The Chinese man would grab his fishing pole and his lunch,

And he would make his way down the rocky cliffs of the riverbank and walk along the rocks in the dark until he sat down and would cast his fishing line out and start fishing for the day.

And this was his daily routine.

He loved doing it every day,

And he was completely peaceful and completely happy doing it.

But what happened one time was he was walking down the riverbank among the rocks,

And he stumbled upon a bag of rocks.

And not thinking too much about it,

He picked the bag of rocks up and put it in his lunch sack and took it to his fishing area as he walked down the rocky path in the dark.

He sat his pole down,

And it wasn't quite light out yet.

It was getting close,

But it was still pretty dark.

So out of boredom,

He opened up the bag of rocks and didn't really look at them too much,

But basically grabbed the first rock and skipped it along the water surface,

And it went bing,

Bing,

Bing,

Bing,

Bing,

Bing,

Bing,

And then fell deep into the wide,

Vast river.

And so he did that again because it was entertaining.

He just picked up a rock,

A nice,

Big-sized rock,

And skipped it along the water surface,

Bing,

Bing,

Bing,

Bing,

Bing,

Bing,

Bing,

Bing,

Bing,

And it would fall in the water.

And he did this over and over until basically he came down to the last rock.

It was a pretty big rock.

And as he lifted the rock up to throw it and tossed it into the river and skipped it along the river surface,

A ray of morning sunshine came in and hit the edge of that rock,

And it made the fisherman look at the rock,

And he realized at that moment that it was a diamond.

So he realized he was rich.

He's like,

Wow,

I'm rich.

And he got really happy for a minute.

But then he became really sad because he threw all those rocks away,

And they could have been diamonds.

More than likely it was a whole bag of diamonds,

But he didn't know that.

He couldn't comprehend that because he was in the dark and he couldn't see.

And this is the case with all of us.

Basically we go throughout our lives and we come across things that could be diamonds.

A relationship could be a diamond or it could be a rock.

It depends on the person you're with and how you approach it,

Like with these,

Approaching these yoga steps that could enhance your life.

You don't know these yoga steps could just be a rock or they could be a diamond.

But the moral of the story is to don't go your whole life throwing all the what could be a diamond away,

You know,

Just passing up all these opportunities in life to finally discover when you're really old,

You have one rock left.

And yeah,

You're rich,

But think about your whole life and how your whole life could have been.

You could have been rich your whole life with just a little awareness,

With a ray of light.

One ray of light can change everything for you.

So anyway,

That's the story.

That's one of my favorite stories.

I love to share it.

Like I said,

Don't wait till you're old and you know,

You've thrown everything away.

I can't tell you what all is going to be diamonds in your life and I can't tell you what will be rocks.

To one person what's a rock is another person's diamond.

It all depends.

Everybody's so individual.

Everybody's different.

And just like with the breathing exercises in yoga,

Everybody breathes a little bit different.

So you have to formulate your own pattern.

You have to formulate your own intelligence and watch your breathing.

The more you can watch your breathing in every aspect you do,

Then the better you'll have your breathing ahead in yoga and coming to the brink of samadhi and then eventually experiencing samadhi.

So I've laid out the foundation and the grounding for this to happen.

And I hope that you guys pick up some yoga sometime.

Go visit a school or look at it here on Insight Timer and take a class.

The worst that could happen is you say it's a rock.

But do it with awareness.

Approach these teachers with awareness.

Use awareness as you stretch your body.

Feel your body.

Go inside.

Have that focal point inside and come to one point of concentration.

And then from there drop that.

Drop that I am and develop into the amness.

And then when you can get to that point of that you're just amness,

You just are,

Then you can drop that too.

It's the greatest leap.

It's the scariest leap because you're diving into the abyss.

You don't know what's going to happen.

But you don't know if it's a rock or if it's a diamond.

Give it a shot.

What's the worst that can happen?

Anyway.

Okay guys and girls thank you for joining me.

It's been my pleasure to share these sutras with you and share my insight that I've picked up along the years.

Honestly I don't go out and memorize everything I've read.

What happens I think is that you assimilate these things.

You read something.

You resonate with it.

It vibrates with you.

You take it within and keep it as a diamond and think that that could be a diamond.

So you know it's not about memorizing anything.

It's more about absorbing it like you do your food.

You eat your food.

You don't think about it.

It works.

It feeds your body.

It gives you nutrition and does its job.

Information can do the same thing for the mind.

It can help you to understand what is valuable and what's not valuable.

I've heard a lot of mystics say that the best thing in life to do is to focus on the essential.

Focus on the essential until you've arrived.

Then after you have arrived then you can relax and let go.

Anyway.

Thanks again for joining me guys.

Much love and like I said if you leave me a rating that'd be great.

Leave a review if you like this video or this audio excuse me.

And we'll move forward from there.

And look forward to the next one.

Take care of yourselves.

Goodbye bye.