Patanjali’s map, a pair of earplugs, and the breath at your nose.
The first thing I asked the group was a question that sounds obvious until you try to answer it: what is meditation?
Most people have something: sitting quietly, clearing the mind, an app. But the word has been borrowed so widely and stretched so thin that it’s worth being precise. So we started there, with a map.
The eight limbs: where meditation fits
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras describe yoga as eight consecutive limbs: a path that moves from the outer life inward. Most people in a yoga class are working with the third limb, asana, posture. Breathing practices belong to the fourth, pranayama. These are real, and they matter. But Patanjali’s path doesn’t stop there.
The outer limbs prepare the ground for the inner limbs:
- Pratyahara: withdrawal of the senses
- Dharana: single-pointed concentration
- Dhyana: meditation in the proper sense; a sustained, unbroken flow of attention
- Samadhi: absorption; the gradual dissolution of the boundary between the observer and what is observed
Most people using the word “meditation” are working somewhere in the territory of Dharana. Dhyana is what Dharana becomes with sustained practice. Samadhi is where that leads; eventually, and without forcing it.
This matters because it tells you what you’re actually doing when you sit. You are not trying to have no thoughts. You are training concentration: placing attention on an object, noticing when it wanders, returning it. That is the practice. Everything else is the slow accumulation of that effort, session after session.
Where we started: the complete yogic breath
Before the mind, the breath. The two are inseparable in yogic practice; the breath is the bridge between body and mind, and steadying one steadies the other.
We began with maha yoga pranayama, the complete yogic breath. It starts in the abdomen: belly expands on the inhale, draws back on the exhale. Then the breath fills the ribcage. Then the chest and collarbones lift. The exhale reverses the sequence. Three parts, one continuous movement.
For many people, this is already a revelation. We breathe mostly in the upper chest, shallowly, without much awareness. The complete yogic breath asks you to breathe the whole way down. It slows the nervous system. It gives the mind something honest to track. And it builds the foundation for every practice that follows.
If you can’t breathe well, you can’t sit well. Start here.
The earplug experiment: Pratyahara in practice
Once the group had settled, we tried something a little unusual: earplugs.
Pratyahara, the fifth limb, is the withdrawal of the senses; the hinge between the outer and inner limbs of yoga. The senses, by design, face outward: they evolved to scan for threats, not to turn quietly inward. Pratyahara is the practice of calling them back.
Rather than just describe it, we wanted to feel the difference. With earplugs in, the room’s ambient sounds recede. What remains is closer: the quality of silence inside the body, sometimes the sound of your own pulse.
The responses were split, and usefully so. Some in the group found the earplugs an immediate relief, a permission to stop attending to the outside. Others found them distracting, too aware of the occlusion to relax into it; one person found that their internal sounds — heartbeat, the body’s quiet machinery — became louder than the room had been. I loved hearing that. It reminded me of a retreat in Thailand where the sound of blood moving through my own veins became genuinely overwhelming; you close off the outside world and discover the inside is not as quiet as you expected. Both reactions are informative. The point isn’t to depend on earplugs; it’s to understand experientially what diminished external input feels like, so you know what you’re working toward when you practise without them.
The discussion that followed was one of the liveliest parts of the session.
After the practice: tea, cake, and what brought people here
We finished with tea and a very good chocolate and date cake in the café at The Painted Barn, which, as it turned out, was its own kind of practice. One of the things I’ve found, across many years of sitting, is that what happens after a session is nearly as important as the session itself: the gradual return, the conversation, the chance to bring the quality of attention you’ve been cultivating into an ordinary exchange.
Ten people came to this first session, from a range of backgrounds and starting points. The conversation was warm and honest. What brought them, and what they’re each working with, stays in the room; confidentiality matters in a group like this. But I’ll say that the questions people come with are rarely the ones they expect to leave with.
Come to the next one
The workshop runs monthly, on Saturdays at 1:30pm at The Painted Barn. An hour of teaching and practice, followed by tea. £10.
If you want to practise between workshops, the weekly Monday class at Barnham Broom Village Hall runs 5:00–5:25pm: short, practice-led, designed to fit around your week. £2, or £1 if you’re already booking the 5:30pm Hatha Yoga class.
Next month we build on the foundation we set. With abdominal breathing established, we’ll go further into Dharana: specific techniques for developing single-pointed focus and training the attention in a more deliberate way. If the nose practice felt promising, or if it exposed how much work there is to do, next month is the session to come to.
Everyone is welcome. You do not need experience. You do not need to have found it easy.
