The impressions I discussed in last month’s blog post are all made up of the same ‘stuff’. That stuff is made up of the three primal elements or gunas.

My first experience with Ashtanga yoga was, well, like most, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I thought I’ll give it a try and to be honest I found it really, really difficult. I found it immensely challenging because many of the poses in the practice, my body’s not skeletally structured for.

Let’s quickly recap. We’ve worked through the first two rungs of samyama (concentration and meditation) and we’ve now dipped our toes into samadhi (enlightenment).

The third chapter of the sutras is a chapter on ‘progressing’. It starts by unpacking the last three of the eight rungs of yoga. These final three rungs are concentration, meditation and samadhi. Collectively we call them samyama.

As promised, I’m going to dig a little deeper into some of the principles I’ve already touched on in this series and also in previous blog posts. These teachings are something I continually come back to, and I always get some new insight or understanding each time I do.