Patanjali’s own definition of asana is strikingly minimal – steadiness and ease, nothing more – and his second teaching on it is even more counterintuitive. This article explores where asana sits among the eight limbs, what the practice actually involves day to day, and why the classical understanding matters especially for the body in midlife.
If you’ve come to yoga through a class, a video or a friend’s recommendation, asana is almost certainly where you started. The physical postures – the stretches, the standing poses, the balances, the forward folds – are what most people mean when they say yoga, and they’re a perfectly good entry point. The body is where we live and beginning there makes sense.
But asana, in Patanjali’s framework, is the third of eight limbs – and understanding what he actually means by it changes the way the physical practice looks and feels quite significantly.
Patanjali’s definition of asana appears in Sutra 2:46 and it’s strikingly minimal: sthira sukham asanam – the posture should be steady and comfortable. That’s it. No instruction about alignment, no description of specific poses, no guidance on how far to stretch or how long to hold. Just two qualities: sthira – steadiness, stability, alertness – and sukha – ease, comfort, a quality of spaciousness. The posture that embodies both of these simultaneously is, in Patanjali’s understanding, asana.
It’s worth sitting with how different this is from the modern understanding of yoga posture – which tends to emphasise achievement, advancement and the gradual acquisition of more demanding poses. Patanjali’s criterion isn’t difficulty or complexity. It’s the simultaneous presence of steadiness and ease. A simple cross-legged sitting position that genuinely embodies both sthira and sukha is, in this framework, more fully asana than an advanced backbend held with strain.
The Second Sutra on Asana
Patanjali adds one more teaching on asana in Sutra 2:47 that’s even more counterintuitive: prayatna shaithilya ananta samapattibhyam – asana is perfected through the relaxation of effort and meditation on the infinite.
The relaxation of effort. In a culture that tends to equate progress with trying harder, this is a genuinely radical instruction. Patanjali is suggesting that the deepening of asana practice comes not through increased force but through the releasing of unnecessary tension – physical, mental and the subtle tension of wanting the pose to be different from what it currently is.
Ananta samapattibhyam – meditation on the infinite, or absorption in the boundless – is the second element of this sutra and it points toward something that experienced practitioners often recognise but find difficult to describe: the quality of attention in which the boundaries between the practitioner and the practice begin to soften. The pose is no longer something being performed by a body – it becomes something being inhabited, fully and without resistance.
These two sutras – sthira sukham asanam and prayatna shaithilya ananta samapattibhyam – are the entirety of what Patanjali says specifically about asana. Everything else in the eightfold path applies to asana practice, but these two sutras are his direct teaching. They’re worth returning to regularly, because they have a way of revealing something new each time.
Asana’s Place in the Eight Limbs
As the third limb, asana follows the Yamas and Niyamas – the ethical and personal disciplines that establish the foundation of practice – and precedes pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana and samadhi.
The classical sequence is deliberate. The Yamas and Niyamas address how we live – the quality of our relationships, our choices and our inner life. Asana addresses the body – the physical instrument through which all experience occurs and through which all practice is conducted. A body that is habitually tense, uncomfortable or restless creates real obstacles for the subtler practices that follow. Asana, practised with the quality of attention that sthira and sukha describe, gradually removes those obstacles.
This is why Patanjali describes asana as preparing the ground for pranayama and the inner limbs. A body that has learned to be simultaneously alert and at ease – that can be still without rigidity, engaged without strain – is a body through which pranayama can work more freely, in which pratyahara arises more naturally and in which the sustained inward attention of dharana and dhyana becomes genuinely available.
The physical benefits of asana practice are real and worth acknowledging – improved mobility, greater strength and balance, relief from tension and stiffness, support for the nervous system and general physical health. For many people these are the primary motivations for practice, particularly in midlife when the body’s changing needs become more apparent. That’s a perfectly legitimate starting point and a genuine reason to practise.
But the classical teaching suggests that these benefits are, in a sense, the natural by-products of a practice oriented toward something more than physical fitness. When asana is approached with genuine attention to sthira and sukha – when the practice is about the quality of presence rather than the achievement of particular shapes – the physical benefits tend to follow, along with something less easily measured but often more valued: a changed relationship to the body, to discomfort, to the ordinary experience of being physically alive.
What Asana Practice Actually Involves
Modern yoga presents asana in a bewildering variety of styles and intensities – from vigorous vinyasa flows to gentle restorative practices, from the heat of Bikram to the precision of Iyengar, from the athleticism of arm balances to the simple dignity of a well-held mountain pose. Within this variety it can be genuinely difficult to identify what, if anything, they all share.
Patanjali’s two sutras offer a consistent criterion. Whatever the style, whatever the specific postures, the question worth returning to is always the same: is sthira present? Is sukha present? Is there genuine steadiness alongside genuine ease?
In a gentle Hatha practice – the kind taught at Green Deva – these qualities are both the aim and the ongoing inquiry. Each session begins with the simple act of arriving: settling into the body, attending to the breath, noticing what’s actually present rather than importing assumptions from the day outside. From there, movement is introduced gradually – not to push toward particular shapes, but to explore what the body is ready for today, with the honesty that svadhyaya cultivates and the kindness that ahimsa asks for.
The poses themselves are less important than the quality of attention brought to them. A carefully held, genuinely felt Balasana (Child’s pose) is a more complete expression of asana, in Patanjali’s sense, than a forced and distracted forward fold that happens to go further. This is not an argument against challenge – challenge has its place and growth often requires meeting the edges of current capacity. It’s an argument for honesty: for the practice of feeling what’s actually happening rather than performing a version of what practice is supposed to look like.
If you’d like to explore the poses themselves – how to come into them, what the body is doing and what each one offers in practice – the Practice and Poses section of the site covers the asanas in depth, each explored across three articles. You’ll find guidance on everything from Tadasana (Mountain pose) to Savasana, with modifications and variations for different bodies and needs.
Asana and the Body in Midlife
For adults in midlife – the primary audience of Green Deva’s classes – the classical understanding of asana as sthira and sukha has a particular relevance that goes beyond philosophy.
The body at 45, 55 or 65 is genuinely different from the body at 25. Not worse – different. More experienced, more particular in its needs, often carrying the accumulated history of decades of use, stress, injury and the various ways we’ve asked it to manage more than it comfortably could. A practice oriented toward steadiness and ease meets that body with the respect it deserves.
What often surprises people who come to yoga in midlife – sometimes after years of more demanding exercise, sometimes after long periods of very little movement – is how much a gentle, attentive practice can offer. Not because gentleness is all that’s possible, but because the quality of attention that sthira and sukha require tends to reveal layers of physical experience that more aggressive approaches simply override. Tension that’s been there so long it stopped being noticed. Patterns of holding that dissolved, quietly and surprisingly, when the practice stopped demanding performance and started inviting presence.
That’s the gift of asana practised in Patanjali’s spirit. Not the acquisition of impressive poses, but the gradual, honest, patient development of a different relationship with the body – one that brings steadiness and ease into a life that often has too little of either.
The eight limbs map out a complete path, from ethics to embodiment to stillness. If you’d like to carry that path off the page and into daily life, Still & Steady is a gentle introduction to yoga philosophy in practice.
Next in this series: Pranayama – working with the breath