I am beginning a systematic practice based on Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras.
Why have I chosen this particular system? Why have I decided to focus my practice on a single system at all, when many systems lead toward the same goal and there is something wonderful about being able to combine practices from different traditions as one sees fit?
Until now, this is exactly what I have done. I have practiced different forms of yoga, Kriyā Yoga, Kundalini Yoga, stretching, qigong, standing on nails, breathing practices, and various forms of cold exposure — walking barefoot in snow, swimming in ice holes, cold showers, and ice baths. For some time, I also trained in groups practicing Eastern martial arts: aikido and taekwondo.
For a long time, however, meditation was not a central part of my practice. It appeared mostly on isolated occasions: gong meditations, meditation sessions among other practices at retreats, a short solitary dark retreat, or simply gatherings with friends when someone suggested that we all meditate together.
Looking back, I would not describe my own state during most of these experiences as meditative in the sense that interests me now. I was performing the external form of the practice, but my state of consciousness was not changing substantially: I could still clearly feel my body, observe the usual flow of thoughts, and remain within the familiar sense of myself.
When Practice Began to Change My State
At some point, I began noticing changes in the perception of my physical body. It would feel lighter, or sometimes cease to be felt almost entirely. There appeared a sensation of energy — like a field or a current — as well as moments without thought and states of pure contemplation or concentration.
Once, this happened while standing on nails for a prolonged period, around half an hour. I almost stopped feeling my body, my thoughts dissolved, and I felt a “current” passing through me.
During prolonged fasts, there were moments when I sensed not only what I can describe as my own “energy field,” but similar “energy field” sensations around other people, trees, and plants. At times, even space itself seemed to acquire density. Once I felt as though it were literally catching against my fingertips, almost like the surface of water. I have to say that this was such an unusual sensation that I found it difficult to believe myself.
For a long time, I practiced breath retention after exhalation. There was a period of about one hundred consecutive days when I did this as part of a discipline of the body. Then I stopped for a while and later returned to it only periodically.
But when the retentions began reaching one and a half to two minutes, I noticed that afterward breathing would sometimes become almost still on its own for a short period, and thoughts would quiet with it. During those moments, the body felt considerably lighter, and there appeared a sensation of a “field” that seemed first to align the body and then to begin rotating it.
At the same time, a high-frequency sound would appear. When I concentrated on it, it became louder; behind it, other sounds emerged, creating a sense of width and volume. The sense of a separate “I” would begin to dissolve into space.
These states did not last long — perhaps around five minutes — but they became regular and, at the same time, very comfortable and natural, already resembling an entrance into meditation.
They began drawing my attention toward several questions: How could these states be deepened and prolonged? And is it possible to preserve something of them in ordinary life?
At the same time, ideas I had arrived at intellectually, as well as concepts I had encountered in different books and teachings, began to acquire for me not an abstract but an experiential meaning.
Why I Needed a Text
Along the way, I have encountered different teachings, religions, and traditions. At first, I was more interested in metaphysics, ontology, philosophy, and esotericism, while my practical experience remained largely within the domain of working with the physical body and trying to relate my inner world to ethical principles found in different teachings.
My interest in practical traditions — Dzogchen, qigong, yoga — increased gradually as unusual states ceased to exist for me only as theoretical concepts and began arising directly in practice.
I was also familiar with Rāja Yoga, and in particular with Patañjali's eight limbs of yoga — aṣṭāṅga. The system seemed concise and well structured enough that I would periodically return to its description.
In my own experience, the first four limbs of Patañjali's system — yama, niyama, āsana, and prāṇāyāma — to the extent that they were already present in my life, began to open a way toward what follows them.
What I find particularly interesting is that it was the experience of meditative states that began to reveal the necessity of the preceding limbs. I saw not only how the body and breath influence a meditative state, but also how significant the first two — yama and niyama — can be: how the principles described in them may relate to the stability of consciousness, inner tensions, and the capacity to enter deeper states.
Practice Without Practice
Recently, an unplanned practice appeared in my life: I began wanting to meditate before sleep.
At first, it lasted ten or twenty minutes, then longer, and eventually some of these meditations began lasting up to two hours — not because I force myself to sit for two hours, but because the state feels so comfortable that there is no desire to change anything.
The body sits down by itself; the “energy field” seems to align and hold it; breathing becomes very calm and almost imperceptible; thoughts begin to dissolve; the need to do or change anything disappears — it becomes possible simply to be.
In this way, meditation began entering my life without a deliberate effort to sit down and meditate. It became a natural consequence of other actions and practices, and of a gradually changing state of consciousness.
It was then that the idea arose to choose a coherent path that I could use as a guide — to investigate these states further and, as far as possible, move toward direct knowledge of the nature of being.
Why Patañjali
Although I had encountered Patañjali's system before, some of its parts remained primarily ideas to me for a long time, while others seemed less significant.
For example, yama and niyama can easily be perceived as a set of ethical rules that precede the “real” practice. Over time, however, I began to discover what role they may play within the system.
Changes in my relationship to myself, my attachments, inner contradictions, and what happens between myself and the external world directly affected the state of consciousness. What once seemed like a separate ethical domain turned out to be connected with the ability to quiet the mind, release tension, and enter more deeply into practice.
Something similar happened with the body and the breath.
A sequence that can appear abstract when read as a system — ethical principles, discipline, body, breath, gathering of attention, concentration, contemplation — gradually began to reveal an internal coherence, because some of these transitions started occurring naturally in my own practice.
I do not intend to abandon other practices and activities that are already well integrated into my life. But I now want to investigate systematically one of the oldest surviving systematizations of yogic practice: to use the text as a map, and my own practical experience as a way of reading it.
Which Text I Am Going to Read
If the Yoga Sūtras are to be used as a guide to practice, the authenticity and transmission of the text matter. I do not want to mistake a translator's interpretation for Patañjali's words.
The Yoga Sūtras are a Sanskrit text. Sanskrit itself is an ancient Indo-Aryan language, not a writing system: the text was transmitted in manuscripts written in different South Asian scripts. The modern representation of Sanskrit in Devanāgarī is therefore not Patañjali's “original alphabet.”
In my notes, I will present the Sanskrit both in Devanāgarī and in the scholarly Latin transliteration system IAST.
The oldest surviving commentary on the sūtras, the Bhāṣya, has traditionally been attributed to Vyāsa. The traditional view treats Patañjali's sūtras and Vyāsa's commentary as two separate works, but modern textual scholarship has questioned this division. In particular, Philipp André Maas has argued for understanding the sūtras and the earliest commentary as parts of a unified Pātañjalayogaśāstra.
This is not a completely settled historical question. I therefore do not want to choose whichever version is most convenient in advance. Wherever the origin or reading of the text is disputed, I will make that uncertainty visible.
Sources
As my working Sanskrit text, I will use the electronic edition GRETIL — Patañjali: Yogasūtra with Bhāṣya (= Pātañjalayogaśāstra). It is based on Kāśinātha Śāstrī Āgāśe's 1904 edition; the electronic text was entered and proofread by Philipp A. Maas.
For the first chapter, I will also consult the critical edition:
For the history of the manuscript transmission:
Philipp André Maas — “On the Written Transmission of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra” (2010).
For historical and textual context, including the relationship between the Yogasūtra and the Bhāṣya:
Philipp A. Maas — “The Pātañjalayogaśāstra alias the Yogasūtra and the Yogabhāṣya”.
The list of sources may expand as the investigation develops.
My Method of Study and Practice
I will study the sūtras sequentially in Sanskrit, consulting the Bhāṣya, textual scholarship, and different possible translations.
Then I will practice according to how I have understood the meaning expressed in the sūtras and describe my experience. This layer — my understanding, practice, and interpretation of that experience — is subjective.
I will keep the study of the sūtras separate from the practice notes: the former will be based on the text and sources rather than on my personal experience.
The practice notes will work differently. Each will be linked to the particular study of the sūtras on which the practice was based. I may return to the same sūtras many times.
In this way, the series may gradually become not only an investigation of the Yoga Sūtras, but also a chronology of the changing observer.
I begin literally:
atha — now.