Number of words: 581

In Sanskrit Yoga means “yoking,” which refers to the method’s goal of joining the individual with God, first by uniting the various parts of the body with one another, then making the body as a whole work together with consciousness as part of an ordered system. To achieve this aim, the basic text of Yoga, compiled by Patanjali about fifteen hundred years ago, prescribes eight stages of increasing skills. The first two stages of “ethical preparation” are intended to change a person’s attitudes. We might say that they involve the “straightening out of consciousness”; they attempt to reduce psychic entropy as much as possible before the actual attempts at mental control begin. In practice, the first step, yama, requires that one achieve “restraint” from acts and thoughts that might harm others—falsehood, theft, lust, and avarice. The second step, niyama, involves “obedience,” or the following of ordered routines in cleanliness, study, and obedience to God, all of which help to channel attention into predictable patterns, and hence make attention easier to control.

The next two stages involve physical preparation, or development of habits that will enable the practitioner—or yogin—to overcome the demands of the senses, and make it possible for him to concentrate without growing tired or distracted. The third stage consists in practicing various asana, ways of “sitting” or holding postures for long periods without succumbing to strain or fatigue. This is the stage of Yoga that we all know in the West, exemplified by a fellow in what looks like diapers standing on his head with his shanks behind his neck. The fourth stage is pranayama, or breath control, which aims to relax the body, and stabilizes the rhythm of breathing.

The fifth stage, the hinge between the preparatory exercises and the practice of Yoga proper, is called pratyahara (“withdrawal”). It involves learning to withdraw attention from outward objects by directing the input of the senses—thus becoming able to see, hear, and feel only what one wishes to admit into awareness. Already at this stage we see how close the goal of Yoga is to that of the flow activities described in this volume—to achieve control over what happens in the mind.

Although the remaining three stages do not properly belong to the present chapter—they involve the control of consciousness through purely mental operations, rather than physical techniques—we shall discuss them here for the sake of continuity, and also because these mental practices are, after all, solidly based on the earlier physical ones. Dharana, or “holding on,” is the ability to concentrate for long periods on a single stimulus, and thus is the mirror image of the earlier stage of pratyahara; first one learns to keep things out of the mind, then one learns to keep them in. Intense meditation, or dhyana, is the next step. Here one learns to forget the self in uninterrupted concentration that no longer needs the external stimuli of the preceding phase. Finally the yogin may achieve samadhi, the last stage of “self-collectedness,” when the meditator and the object of meditation become as one. Those who have achieved it describe samadhi as the most joyful experience in their lives.

Excerpted from pages 104-105 of Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi