Understanding Samadhi: The Final Limb of Yoga

Sri Dharma Mittra in a headstand with no hands

More than 1,500 years ago, sage, mystic, and philosopher Patanjali wrote the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. It gathered wisdom and traditions from many surrounding spiritual communities to create a comprehensive guide to living a yogic lifestyle. The most famous part of this text is the 8 Limbs of Yoga, a path toward enlightenment that includes lived values, yoga postures, breathing exercises, and deep meditation. At the end of the 8 Limbs is samadhi, a state of oneness and merged consciousness.

“When the object of meditation engulfs the meditator, appearing as the subject, self-awareness is lost,” reads the Yoga Sutras in influential yogi BKS Iyengar’s 1966 translation. “This is samadhi.”

“Uninterrupted flow of attention dissolves the split between the object seen and the seer who sees it,” elaborates Iyengar in his commentary. “Consciousness appears to have ceased and to have reached a state of silence. It is devoid of ‘I,’ and merges into the core of the being in a profound state of serenity. In samadhi, awareness of place vanishes and one ceases to experience space and time.”

Samadhi and samyaya

This final limb of Patanjali’s 8 Limbs of Yoga, samadhi, is a deepening of the two immediately before it: dharana and dhyana. Together, these three practices are samyaya, meaning tying up or binding.

To Patanjali, this is a layered process. With dharana, you commit to your practice and find focus. With that commitment, you find dhyana, an immersive meditative state that blurs the line between you, what you’re focusing on, and even the act of focusing. Dhyana leads the way to samadhi, when it all becomes one. From Sri Swami Satchidananda’s 1978 translation of the Sutras:

Dharana is the binding of the mind to one place, object, or idea. Dhyana is the continuous flow of cognition toward that object. Samadhi is the same meditation when there is the shining of the object alone, as if devoid of form.