Most people in the West first encounter yoga through the body and, often, through the breath. We go to a class. We learn asanas, or physical postures. We stretch, strengthen and are invited to notice or work with our breathing and, perhaps, discover that something happens on a yoga mat that is difficult to put into words. We leave feeling calmer, clearer, more grounded or somehow more ourselves.

In some yoga classes, attention to the breath or the practice of pranayama is integral; in others, yoga is taught much more as a form of physical exercise. But asana and pranayama are still only part of a much larger tradition.

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras are famous for good reason. At some point in the long and already rich history of yoga, Patanjali undertook the extraordinary task of gathering and systematically organising existing yogic ideas and practices into a coherent path. There is considerable scholarly debate about exactly when the Yoga Sutras were composed, but what has endured is the structure that Patanjali gave to the practice of yoga.

At the heart of this structure are the Eight Limbs of Yoga.

I have become increasingly interested in the Eight Limbs through my own yoga practice and through my work as an embodiment coach and somatic relationship specialist. Much of my work is with people healing from trauma: learning to feel safer in their bodies, understand their nervous systems, recognise patterns of protection and defence, and discover that there can be more choice in how we respond to ourselves, other people and the world.

This is one reason I have been so interested in Dr Arielle Schwartz’s Therapeutic Yoga for Trauma Recovery, and I have trained and become certified to teach her method. This approach brings contemporary understandings of trauma and the autonomic nervous system, including polyvagal theory, into conversation with the ancient teachings of yoga and, particularly, Patanjali’s Eight Limbs.

The more I study them, the more I see the Eight Limbs not as eight separate practices, but as a path of transformation: one that begins with how we live, moves through the body and breath, changes our relationship with our senses, attention and mind, and ultimately opens towards something much larger than the separate self we ordinarily take ourselves to be.

Yoga and suffering

The word yoga comes from a Sanskrit root associated with yoking, joining or uniting.

And yet there is a beautiful apparent paradox in the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna describes yoga as a kind of disjoining: a release from our entanglement with suffering.

I find this profoundly moving.

It does not mean that a life of yoga is a life in which nothing painful ever happens. We will still encounter illness, loss, disappointment, change, conflict and grief. Rather, yoga offers a path through which our relationship to suffering can change.

That has certainly been my own experience. Yoga has increasingly become, for me, a practice of learning how to remain present with my body, my thoughts, my feelings and my reactions without automatically being carried away by them.

Patanjali’s Eight Limbs offer a remarkably complete framework for understanding how that transformation might happen.

1. Yama — how we meet the world

The first limb is yama: the ethical foundations of yoga.

The five yamas are:

Ahimsa — non-violence

Satya — truthfulness

Asteya — non-stealing

Brahmacharya — continence, restraint or wise use of energy

Aparigraha — non-grasping or non-possessiveness

I have become particularly interested in ahimsa.

In Light on Yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar makes the beautiful point that ahimsa is much more than a negative command not to injure or act violently. Its wider positive meaning is love.

He also writes that violence arises from fear, weakness, ignorance or restlessness and that, if we are to become free from it, what is required is a change in our outlook on life, a reorientation of the mind.

That phrase has stayed with me.

It feels particularly significant when we think about trauma, especially relational trauma, which can leave us angry at life, ourselves and others, sometimes raging for many years.

A nervous system shaped by frightening or overwhelming experiences becomes organised around survival. We become vigilant. We anticipate danger. We protect ourselves. We may attack, withdraw, freeze or become consumed by thoughts designed to make sense of what is happening and keep us safe.

Ahimsa does not ask us merely to suppress those reactions. It invites something deeper: a gradual movement away from fear and harm, and towards love.

That can begin with something as simple, and as difficult, as noticing violence in our inner world: the harsh thought, the attack on ourselves, the judgement, the resentment, the impulse to strike out. Awareness creates the possibility of another response.

The movement is not simply do not harm. It becomes a deeper question: Can I learn to meet myself, other people and life from a different place?

This is yoga as reorientation.

Brahmacharya refers to conscious restraint, the wise direction of energy, and the bringing of body, speech and mind into greater alignment with what we most deeply value and with our highest self.

Arielle Schwartz writes that, from a trauma-informed perspective, this principle asks us to use our energy wisely so that we can best take care of ourselves. If much of our energy is consumed by ruminating on the past or worrying about the future, our present lives can become severely compromised. Similarly, when we subjugate our own needs to those of others through co-dependency or people-pleasing, we can give away enormous amounts of vital energy, sometimes remaining in these patterns for many years.

Brahmacharya invites moderation through awareness of how we spend our time and energy, and how we direct our lives. Through observation and conscious redirection, we can begin to use that energy in ways that better serve our physical and spiritual wellbeing.

The yamas therefore ask a profound first question: How am I living?

Before posture, breath or meditation, the Eight Limbs of Yoga begin with our way of being in the world.

2. Niyama — how we cultivate our inner life

The second limb is niyama, usually translated as personal observances:

Saucha — purity, clarity or cleanliness
Santosha — contentment
Tapas — self-discipline, effort or inner fire
Svadhyaya — self-study or self-reflection
Ishvara pranidhana — surrender to a higher power or something greater than ourselves

If the yamas concern how we meet the world, the niyamas turn us towards our own inner life.

For trauma recovery, svadhyaya, or self-reflection, is particularly resonant. Ever since I was required to keep a journal throughout my early training as a counsellor and psychotherapist, I have understood the significance of developing awareness of self and of self in relation to others. This is why I ask all my clients to keep a journal. I find therapeutic work becomes much more potent when self-reflection continues between sessions.

Healing asks us to become curious about ourselves and about how we relate to others, our environment and the world. What happens in me when I feel threatened? What patterns do I repeat? What sensations come first? What stories does my mind create? What am I defending against? What do I need?

The purpose is not relentless self-analysis. It is increased self-knowledge.

Two of the other niyamas hold together what can seem like opposite movements: tapas, the self-discipline and effort involved in practice, and ishvara pranidhana, surrender to something greater than ourselves.

There is effort. We practise, learn, return and begin again. There is also surrender: an acknowledgement that we cannot control everything and that some things must be allowed, accepted or released.

Schwartz repeatedly returns to this balance in trauma-informed yoga, between choice and acceptance, agency and surrender. Healing needs both.

3. Asana — coming home to the body

Only with the third limb do we arrive at asana, the physical postures that have become almost synonymous with yoga in much of the modern West.

Patanjali’s famous description of asana is remarkably simple: the posture should be both steady and comfortable.

This offers quite a different orientation from pushing the body towards the most impressive possible shape.

In trauma-informed yoga, we are not using the body merely to achieve the pose. We can use the pose to come into relationship with the body.

The questions become: What am I noticing? What feels supportive? Where am I holding tension? What happens if I soften or stop? Do I want to stay here, or do I want to move?

For someone whose relationship with their body has been disrupted by trauma, these can be profound questions. The body begins to become somewhere we can inhabit rather than escape.

Choice matters too. A pose becomes an invitation rather than a command, and the practice becomes less about performance and more about presence.

4. Pranayama — breath, energy and the mind

The fourth limb is pranayama.

Iyengar describes prana expansively as breath, life, vitality, energy and strength. Ayama carries the sense of extension, expansion and restraint.

Pranayama is therefore much more than simply taking a deep breath. It is a disciplined relationship with breathing and with the movement of vital energy.

What particularly interests me is the ancient recognition of the intimate relationship between breath and mind.

Iyengar observes that emotional excitement changes our breathing, something most of us can recognise immediately. Fear has a breath. Anger has a breath. Grief has a breath. Calm has a breath. But the relationship can also work in the other direction. By bringing conscious attention to breathing, we can influence our state.

Iyengar writes that when breathing is regulated, the mind can become calmer and emotional excitement can lessen. Schwartz similarly works with breath in relation to autonomic state, while emphasising choice and sensitivity to what each individual nervous system needs.

This matters enormously in trauma-informed practice. The instruction is not simply, Breathe like this and you will calm down. Instead, we become curious about the relationship between breath, body and state. What is my breath doing now? What kind of breathing feels supportive? What changes when the breath changes?

The breath becomes one of the bridges between body and mind.

5. Pratyahara — turning towards the inner world

The fifth limb is pratyahara, often translated as withdrawal of the senses.

That translation can make it sound as though yoga requires us to shut out the world. Schwartz offers another way of approaching it, as an inward redirection of attention and prana, or life-force energy. In this way, pratyahara can help us turn towards ourselves and our inner world even when there are other people, distractions or demands around us.

This is particularly interesting through a trauma lens.

A nervous system that has learned to expect danger may constantly scan the environment. We notice every sound, every expression on another person’s face, every possible sign that something is about to happen. That outward orientation once served an important protective purpose.

Pratyahara begins to ask whether attention can also travel inward. Can I notice what is happening inside me while remaining connected to what is happening around me?

Schwartz brings pratyahara and the next limb, dharana, into her teaching of dual awareness: the capacity to notice our internal experience while remaining oriented to present reality.

This is very different from disappearing into ourselves. We become able to recognise, Something is happening inside me, and I am also here, now.

This capacity is central to trauma recovery.

The gunas — recognising the state we are in

Traditional yoga also gives us another language for understanding our changing states through the three gunas. Tamas is associated with heaviness, inertia and dullness; rajas with activity, agitation and restlessness; and sattva with greater clarity, balance and serenity.

Schwartz brings the gunas into conversation with contemporary nervous-system understanding and also uses the simpler Goldilocks metaphor of too cold, too hot and just right.

I find it useful to let these different languages sit alongside one another rather than treating them as identical. Each offers a different lens through which to recognise the state we are in.

The important practice is learning to notice that state and, increasingly, to ask: Do I have to be completely governed by it?

That question leads naturally into the next limb.

6. Dharana — gathering the mind

The sixth limb is dharana, concentration.

Iyengar describes the mind in different conditions: scattered, distracted, dull, and finally capable of becoming gathered around a single point.

This feels extraordinarily relevant to contemporary life and particularly to trauma. Attention can be captured by fear, rumination, memory, imagined futures, the behaviour of another person or simply the endless movements of our own minds.

Dharana begins to develop another possibility: Can I choose where I place my attention?

Can I bring it to the breath, to sensation, to a point of focus, or to what is actually happening now? Attention becomes something we can practise directing rather than something that merely happens to us.

Schwartz’s method of therapeutic yoga for trauma recovery invites us into dharana through drishti, a Sanskrit word referring to the gaze or point of visual focus used in yoga. The eyes might rest on a point on the floor, an object associated with safety or something in nature. This can be calming and can help interrupt the constant visual scanning that often accompanies hypervigilance.

Dual awareness can also allow us to focus on something such as the breath moving through the body while noticing the wider state we are in. Hypervigilant states can bring quick, shallow breathing high in the chest. Rather than judging this, we can notice it and, where it feels supportive, experiment with slowing and deepening the breath towards diaphragmatic breathing, also known as belly breathing.

In this way, we practise noticing what is happening and direct attention towards what supports and nourishes us rather than remaining automatically pulled towards what depletes us.

Satchidananda’s commentary on the Yoga Sutras repeatedly returns to this training of the mind. Patanjali is not offering philosophy simply to be thought about. The sutras are practical instructions in learning how not to be continually governed by the movements of the mind.

This is one of the places where ancient yoga and contemporary trauma practice meet particularly beautifully. We learn to notice activation without necessarily following it wherever it wants to take us.

7. Dhyana — sustained presence

From dharana comes dhyana, meditation.

Schwartz writes about the challenges meditation can present for people with a history of trauma, including an active mind and a restless body. Rather than treating this as failure, practice can gradually make more room for the stillness beneath the chatter of the mind, our roles and identities, and the wounds we have experienced.

I have found this to be true in my own practice. Meditation can bring me beneath the noise of thought, roles, wounded identities and egoic positions, towards a deeper sense of Self and connection.

Iyengar uses the image of oil being poured steadily from one vessel into another: an uninterrupted flow. Concentration becomes sustained.

There is something else in his description that I relate to: the suggestion that the mind gradually takes the shape of that upon which it rests. What we repeatedly give our attention to matters. Fear and resentment shape us, but so can compassion, love, presence, truth and the sacred.

Dhyana is not simply the forcing of the mind into blankness. It is a different relationship with consciousness itself.

We begin to discover that thoughts, feelings and sensations can be observed as they arise and move through us.

Satchidananda, commenting on the opening sutras of Patanjali, describes the true Self as the Observer: the one who sees the activity of body and mind without being identical to it.

For me, this is one of the most liberating discoveries of contemplative practice. I can recognise, I am having this thought, but I am not only this thought. I am experiencing this feeling, but I do not have to become the feeling or act automatically from it.

Something opens between experience and reaction. In that space there is presence, and in presence there is choice.

8. Samadhi — beyond separation

The eighth limb is samadhi.

Schwartz describes this as a unified state of pure awareness in which we are fully immersed in the present moment. Samadhi has also been translated in different ways, including absorption, integration, self-realisation and liberation.

Iyengar describes a state in which the ordinary division between the knower and the known falls away. There is no longer the familiar experience of me here observing life out there. The separation softens.

This is the non-dual dimension of yoga.

Schwartz approaches samadhi through moments that may be much more accessible to those of us living ordinary lives: experiences of profound peace, gratitude, awe, compassion, joy and connection, when the habitual sense of separateness becomes less solid.

We may know flashes of this in meditation, in nature, in love, in creativity or in complete presence. Perhaps we know it in those unexpected moments when the usual struggle simply stops.

For someone healing from trauma, I find this particularly beautiful. Trauma can leave us profoundly separated from the body, from other people, from the world, perhaps even from ourselves.

Yet the path does not end simply with surviving or becoming better regulated. It points towards** healing,** transforming, thriving, connecting, belonging and love, and towards an experience of ourselves as part of something larger.

From suffering to presence

When I first began thinking about the Eight Limbs of Yoga, I thought I was learning a philosophy. The more deeply I study them, the more I see a lived path.

We begin with how we treat ourselves and other people. We learn to live with greater truthfulness, non-violence and restraint. We study ourselves, cultivate effort and surrender, return to the body and work with the breath. We become more aware of our state, learn to turn inward without losing contact with the world, gather our attention and observe the mind.

Gradually, we discover that every thought, feeling and impulse does not have to determine what happens next. Eventually, the path points beyond the defended, separate self altogether.

This is why the Bhagavad Gita’s description of yoga as release from our entanglement with suffering feels so powerful to me.

The Eight Limbs do not promise that life will cease to hurt. They offer something more subtle and, perhaps, more radical: a way of meeting life differently.

It is a gradual reorientation of body, mind and consciousness, from fear towards safety, from reactivity towards presence, from harm towards love, and from separateness towards connection.

Perhaps this is why yoga can be so much more than something we do on a mat.

It can become a way of being alive.

Photo: Rise Above by Ri_Ya on Pixabay