The Part of Yoga We Take Home
For the past few weeks, I’ve been moving between Georgia, where I’ve been leading yoga retreats, and the Czech Republic, where I’ve been spending time with friends and family. And I’ve noticed how differently time and attention can feel in these two worlds.
Naturally, there is less noise when you’re high in the Georgian mountains. But there is also less of the constant stream of input that usually fills our days. You wake up, you practice, you eat, you talk, you walk, you rest. There is space to notice things: your breath, when you’re tired, when you’re grateful (and when you’re irritated), and how quickly the mind wants to jump ahead to whatever comes next.
This has been the thread running through the retreats I’ve been teaching alongside my co-host, Kara: the yamas and niyamas, and what it might mean to take these teachings beyond the physical practice.
Because it’s relatively easy to feel calm at the end of a beautiful morning practice, sitting in the mountains with nowhere else you need to be and a nourishing breakfast waiting for you on a sunny picnic table. It’s a little different when you’re stuck in traffic, arguing with your partner, or exhausted at the end of the day, reaching for your phone without even thinking about it.
That, to me, is where the practice really begins.
The yamas and niyamas, the first two branches of Patanjali’s eight-limbed path of yoga, offer a framework for exploring this. In this post, I’ll give a brief overview of all ten, but over the coming weeks I’ll be digging a little deeper into each one: what these ancient teachings might actually look like in the very ordinary, messy reality of our lives today.
The yamas and niyamas aren’t rules
If you’ve never come across the yamas and niyamas before, they come from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and form the first two limbs of the eight-limbed path of yoga.
The five yamas are often described as ways of relating to the world around us: ahimsa (non-harming), satya (truthfulness), asteya (non-stealing), brahmacharya (wise use of energy) and aparigraha (non-grasping).
The five niyamas turn the attention inward: sauca (purification), santosha (contentment), tapas (discipline), svadhyaya (self-study) and ishvara pranidhana (surrender to something greater).
Beyond what can be taken at a surface level as good advice on how to live ethically, I’ve come to appreciate that these teachings give us a framework for examining the little things we tend to do when we’re operating on autopilot and how we can shape the direction of our responses over time.
They prompt us to ask questions like…
Why did I react like that? Why am I so desperate for this particular outcome? Why am I speaking to myself this way? Or why am I holding onto this?
Importantly, the yamas and niyamas aren’t about becoming a person who never gets angry, never compares themselves, never says the wrong thing, or never wants more. They’re more like a practice of becoming better acquainted with ourselves and the patterns that shape our actions and the intentions behind them.
Ahimsa isn’t just about being nice
Ahimsa is usually translated as non-harming, and it can be tempting to reduce it to a simple instruction: be kind.
There is the obvious stuff, of course, like how we speak to people when we’re frustrated, how quickly we can become impatient or judgemental, what companies and practices we support, and the little ways we can make someone else’s day harder because we’re having a bad one.
But then there is the voice in our own head, the one that tells us our body isn’t good enough, that we aren’t doing enough to succeed, or that we should be further along by now.
I’ve heard people talk about self-compassion as though it means letting ourselves off the hook, but I don’t think that’s right. Sometimes ahimsa looks like pushing yourself to do something difficult, saying no, or having the conversation you’ve been avoiding.
The difference is in the intention. Are we doing something because it is genuinely what we believe is right, even if it’s uncomfortable? Are we approaching ourselves and others with a compassionate curiosity that allows space to look behind surface-level motivations and explanations? That is where the space for actual change.
Satya: Being honest about what is actually happening
Satya is truthfulness, and I think one place we get stuck is assuming it means simply saying what we think. It doesn’t. You can be brutally honest and still be unkind.
For me, the more fruitful part of satya is the willingness to stop lying to ourselves and to be honest about how we are allocating our attention. It could be the willingness to admit that something isn’t working, that we’re jealous or exhausted, or that we’re staying somewhere because we’re afraid of what comes next.
And on the mat, this can be incredibly simple. Satya asks us to take a step back and dwell in the most powerful of yoga’s gifts: just noticing.
There is something very freeing about not needing to turn every experience into a positive one. Sometimes you’re distracted, uncomfortable, or simply don’t like what you’re feeling.
Satya is being willing to meet the truth of that moment rather than immediately trying to edit it. It asks us to be true to the moment long enough to focus on just one thing at a time. This, in turn, gives us the seed of meditation: not trying to get rid of thoughts, but increasing the space between them.
Asteya and the feeling that we don’t have enough
Asteya means non-stealing. Again, it sounds fairly straightforward until you start looking a little more closely.
We can steal someone’s time, attention, or energy, or take credit that isn’t ours. But I also think another kind of stealing happens when we live with a constant feeling of not enough. Not enough money, time, success, validation, and on and on it goes.
And so we keep reaching, blindly trusting that there is something else that might finally make us feel like we’ve arrived… a sentiment conveyed so powerfully by Alan Watts and captured in this mighty little video, Music and Life.
Asteya doesn’t mean we stop wanting things or stop having ambition. I think it’s a lot more subtle than that; it’s more about asking whether we can want something without believing we are incomplete without it.
Brahmacharya is about your energetic wellbeing
Brahmacharya has many different interpretations, and I don’t think it needs to be squeezed into one neat definition. The way I’ve been working with it on retreat is through energy. Where are you putting yours? Because we all have a limited amount.
And yet we so often spend it on things that don’t actually matter to us (scrolling, worrying, saying yes because we don’t want to disappoint someone, comparing ourselves to people we don’t even know).
Sometimes yoga gives us the rather inconvenient realization that the problem isn’t that we don’t have enough energy. It’s that we’re giving it away without interrogating the intention behind how we spend it.
Aparigraha is perhaps the hardest one
Aparigraha is non-grasping, and this one comes up for me all the time as I continue to reckon with the ways we grasp at much more than possessions and material wealth. We also grasp at people, identities, plans, outcomes, and at the idea of how our lives were supposed to look.
I think this is one of the places where yoga and life become almost impossible to separate. The practice is constantly reminding us that everything changes. Your body, breath, and practice change. Your circumstances and the people around you change.
Trying to hold everything exactly as it is doesn’t stop the change; it just makes the changing painful. Aparigraha, as I understand it, is about learning how to love something without needing to possess it.
Then we turn the practice towards ourselves
The yamas make me think about how I move through the world. The niyamas ask me to look at what is happening inside.
Sauca, for example, is often translated as cleanliness or purity. And I’ve come to think about it not just in terms of keeping the body clean, but in terms of what we continually put into our minds.
We talk so much about what we eat, but what are we consuming mentally? What are we watching, reading, and what conversations are we having over and over?
In yoga philosophy, these repeated patterns are sometimes described as samskaras, grooves in the mind that become deeper through repetition, and require attention and tending in order to heal.
I find the image of a wound useful here.
If you’ve ever had a physical wound, you know that cleaning it can be uncomfortable. You have to keep tending to it; you can’t just cover it up and hope for the best. I think our inner lives can work in much the same way. Sometimes we have to keep noticing the same pattern before we can finally stop feeding it.
Then there is santosha, contentment. This one can be easily misunderstood as settling.
But I don’t think contentment means deciding you don’t want anything more from your life. It’s being able to want something without making your happiness dependent on getting it.
That is a very different thing, and it’s surprisingly difficult to achieve.
Especially when we’re constantly being told, explicitly or otherwise, that there is something else we should be working towards: a different body, a better job, a more exciting life, etc., etc.
There is always another mountain to climb, but santosha asks us to notice the one we’re already standing on.
Tapas, discipline, is perhaps the less glamorous part of the practice. It’s easy to feel inspired on a retreat, for example. You have made the decision to come, created the time, and other people are in a similar state of mind practising alongside you.
But what happens when you go home?
Do you keep showing up to your meditation, your breath, your values, your practice?
For me, being able to answer that question in a way that feels truthful to you is much closer to discipline than forcing ourselves through something because we think we should.
And then there is svadhyaya, self-study.
This might mean studying sacred texts and yoga philosophy, but it is also the much more ordinary work of becoming curious about ourselves. Asking why something bothered you or why you engage in a pattern you know isn’t making you happy.
We don’t have to answer every question immediately. Just noticing the pattern is the first step.
And finally, ishvara pranidhana — surrender.
This is probably the hardest one to explain because it is deeply personal and can mean different things depending on your understanding of the divine.
For me, it is about surrendering to our connection to something greater than the individual self. To the sense that there is something sacred within each of us, and that we are also part of something much bigger than ourselves.
It is the practice of doing what we can and then loosening our grip on the outcome.
Which, in a world that constantly tells us to take control, can be quite radical.
So what happens when we go home?
I don’t want yoga retreats, or even individual classes, to become little bubbles where we spend time feeling peaceful and then return to our lives exactly as we were before.
Of course, normal life is going to be messier that the peace and quiet of the mat, but when we are confronted by all that noise and all those demands, that’s where the teachings become useful.
Maybe you notice that you’re being unnecessarily harsh with yourself and remember ahimsa.
Maybe you realize you’re exhausted because you’ve been giving your energy away in every direction, and think of brahmacharya. Those little pauses, that half a second matters.
Sometimes we imagine that a strong yoga practice should make us permanently calm.
I’m increasingly convinced that isn’t the goal.
The practice is not to never get lost. It’s to get better at noticing when we’ve become lost—and finding our way back.
Back to ourselves. Back to the practice. Again and again, over and over, treating each return as the gift that it is.
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