Yama Drama: Considering the First Branch of Yoga

by Nina

In classical yoga (the yoga of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras), there are eight “branches” or “constituents” of yoga.

Moral injunctions (yama), fixed observances (niyama), posture (asana), regulation of breath (pranayama), internalization of the senses toward their source (pratyahara), concentration (dharana), meditation (dhyana), and absorption of the consciousness in the self (samadhi) are the eight constituents of yoga.

The five moral injunctions that make up the first branch, yama, are rules regarding our conduct with the outside world.

Non-violence (ahmisa), truth (satya), abstention from stealing (asteya), chastity (brahmacarya), absence of greed for possessions (aparigrahah) are the five pillars of yama.

If you are someone who is pursuing yoga as a spiritual path, conducting your life according to the yamas is the necessary first step on your path to union with the divine. But what if you are just—as many of us are—using yoga for your health and peace of mind? Reading this quote from Georg Feuerstein helped me understand how the yamas apply to way I conduct my own life.

For as long as we pursue a lifestyle that falls short of these moral virtues, our energies are scattered and we continue to harvest the negative repercussions of our actions. —The Deeper Dimensions of Yoga

For a brief time after college, I was addicted to an afternoon soap opera (“The Young and the Restless” if you must know). Ultimately tiring of all-to-predictable drama, I had an epiphany: if everyone on that show just stopped lying to each other, not much would happen on a given day. Sure people would fall in and out of love, have children, suffer from illness, and lose loved ones, but the bulk of the drama, including the violence, was the result of secrets and the lies everyone told to cover them up. Now I have met a few drama queens out there who seem to thrive on all that commotion, but for the rest of us a lot of drama is just plain stressful and disruptive.

And the rest of the yamas? You can probably figure it out. Nighttime television is filled with violence of every kind, and you can see over and over how one act of violence leads to another and then another (killing a second person to cover up the first murder usually turns out to be a rather poor strategy), quite the opposite of peace. When there is stealing, this, too, inevitably leads to harm of all kinds, including lies, violence, betrayal, and so on. Not very relaxing, that’s for sure.

A Hollow Trunk by Brad Gibson

Greed for possessions? Even if you don’t commit crimes to obtain the objects of your desire, the lust for material goods can cause you to overspend, even going into debt, which is not only stressful for you but can be ruinous for your family. Or maybe the desire for material possession simply means you work at a stressful, unsatisfying job or are continually dissatisfied with what you do have, both of which are impediments to peace of mind.

I saved chastity for last, because this is a complex one for our culture. To be honest, the original meaning in the Yoga Sutras certainly meant no sex at all for a yogi. But for us ordinary “householders, I like to think about brahmacarya as sexual responsibility. If you are reckless in your sexual conduct, well, we’re back to the soap opera territory: lies and violence, jealousy and pain. (I learned that lesson back in my college days, when I was under the illusion that there was such a thing as “free love.”)

I started this post a few weeks ago after I received a couple of requests for us to tackle the topic of yama, but it was very hard to write. And in the end, well, I chickened out. I mean, who am I to hold forth on topics of this nature? But some recent events (yama drama, you might say) gave me a little shove. I hope it at least gives you some food for thought.