1st Limb · Bahiraṅga
The Restraints — how we meet the world, before we ever meet the mat.
Root: √yam — “to restrain, to curb, to hold in check” (the same root used for reining in a horse). One-line: the restraints.
What is Yama
The first limb — restraint in a shared world
Yama is the first limb of Patañjali's eightfold path, and the word itself tells you what it does: √yam means to restrain, to hold something within bounds — the same verb used for reining in a horse. Where later limbs will ask the practitioner to gather and direct attention, Yama starts one step earlier, with how a person moves through the world in relation to others. It is outward-facing: five restraints governing action, speech, and impulse in a shared world.
Patañjali makes an unusual claim about these five in the very next sūtra (YS II.31): they form a mahāvrata — a “great vow” — that holds regardless of one's class, place, time, or circumstance. Not situational ethics, adjusted for context, but something closer to bedrock. This is part of why Yama opens the path rather than appearing somewhere in the middle: everything that follows — steady posture, regulated breath, one-pointed attention — is far harder to sustain honestly on a foundation of harm, dishonesty, or grasping.
Yama and Niyama are usually read as a pair: Yama restrains what would harm the world around you; Niyama cultivates what nourishes the world within you. Both belong to the bahiraṅga — the “outer-limbed” practices — not because they're superficial, but because they concern conduct and orientation before the more interior work of attention and absorption begins.
The Five Yamas
The Five Yamas
From a- (not) + hiṃsā (injury, harm). The most fundamental of the five, and traditionally read as the ground the other four stand on — not just refraining from violence, but a settledness that changes the emotional weather around a person.
From sat, “that which is” — truth, or being itself. Speech and action aligned with what's real.
From a- (not) + steya (theft). Extends past property to time, credit, attention — anything taken that wasn't freely given.
From brahma (the highest, the absolute) + carya (conduct, movement toward). Popularly narrowed to “celibacy,” but its older sense is broader: conduct that moves toward what matters most, rather than dissipating energy in every direction.
From a- (not) + pari (around) + graha (seizing). Non-possessiveness — taking only what's needed, holding what comes lightly.
In the Ashtanga Tradition
Restraint as lived practice
Pattabhi Jois's Yoga Mala frames Yama plainly as restraint in one's dealings with the outer world, and spends comparatively little time theorising it — the emphasis in this lineage has always fallen on lived practice over doctrine. In a Mysore room, that plays out concretely: you don't get to compare your practice to your neighbour's (Asteya, Aparigraha), you don't fake a posture you haven't earned (Satya), you don't force a body that isn't ready (Ahiṃsā). The six-day-a-week discipline of the method becomes the classroom for Yama, whether or not it's ever named aloud.
Practising It
A running question, returned to daily
Off the mat, Yama shows up less as a rulebook and more as a running question: does this action, this word, cost someone else something they didn't agree to give? Ahiṃsā asks it of the body and of others; Satya asks it of speech; Asteya of time and credit; Brahmacharya of energy; Aparigraha of possessions and outcomes. None of the five are meant to be perfected before starting — they're the practice itself, returned to daily.