68 terms from across The Living Practice, each with its source and the page where it lives
Definitions follow the usage on this site. External links go to reference editions such as Wisdomlib; the second chip on each card opens the page where the term is taught. A term missing from this list is a correction waiting to happen: the form at the bottom of the page welcomes it.
Non-harming: the first yama in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. Arjuna's refusal to fight is framed initially as ahimsa. The Bhagavad Gita reframes it: the deepest harm can be the refusal of one's own dharma. The soul cannot be killed; grief at action is not the same as grief at harm.
Space or ether: the subtlest of the five great elements and the medium of sound. In later esoteric traditions, the "akashic" field of subtle impression. The element through which the metaphysical reaches open.
In Buddhism, not-self: the teaching that no permanent, unchanging Self can be found. Where the Vedic tradition finds atman, the Buddha found a flowing process with no fixed owner. The great divergence between the two streams.
Non-grasping, the fifth yama. Holding possessions, people, and outcomes with an open hand.
The third limb: posture, originally the steady and comfortable seat that makes long meditation possible, later the whole physical practice of yoga.
Non-stealing, the third yama. Taking nothing that is unoffered: objects, time, credit, energy, or attention.
In the Vedic tradition, the true Self: eternal, unchanging, pure awareness, ultimately one with Brahman, the ground of all being. What meditation uncovers beneath the sheaths.
A direct descent of the divine into the material world. The sequence mirrors evolutionary biology: fish, tortoise, boar, half-lion, dwarf, warrior-sage, ideal king, divine human.
A “lock,” a muscular contraction held to contain and redirect the breath and its energy. The Bihar School glosses the word as to “hold,” “tighten” or “lock,” and explains that “the bandhas aim to lock the pranas in particular areas and redirect their flow into sushumna nadi for the purpose of spiritual awakening.” The three classic locks are mula bandha at the root, jalandhara bandha at the throat, and uddiyana bandha at the abdomen.
The “purification of the elements,” a preparatory practice in the tantric traditions. The scholar Georg Feuerstein describes it as “an important Tantric practice and a precondition for the safe and complete arousal of the serpent power (kundalini-shakti).”
The awakened heart-mind of Mahayana Buddhism: the aspiration to awaken for the sake of all beings, and the felt kinship beneath the separate self. As Jack Kornfield glosses it, “This sense of deep connection, of belonging to the same family, is bodhichitta.”
The divine song: 700 verses spoken by Krishna to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, embedded within the Mahabharata. The central teaching is nishkama karma, act fully, without attachment to outcomes. It is the most-cited scripture in the yoga tradition.
Devotional service: the yoga of love. Understood in the Bhagavatam as the highest form of practice because it operates through the heart. Prahlada's story is its primary teaching text. Alongside the familiar sense of loving devotion, the word carries an older, more concrete range inherited from its Sanskrit verbal root bhaj-, which the lexicons gloss as "distribution, partition, separation" as well as attachment, so that a share, a portion, and a belonging are all folded into the idea of devotion.
One who vows to attain full awakening for the sake of all beings, and to keep returning across lifetimes until every being is free. The bodhisattva vow extends into future lives.
Right use of vital energy, the fourth yama. Often rendered as moderation or continence: desire directed rather than scattered.
The Mahayana teaching that the potential for full awakening is possessed equally by all beings, covered over like the sun behind clouds. Everyone, without exception, can become a Buddha.
The discerning intellect; the faculty of judgment and discrimination within the inner instrument. The clear light of buddhi distinguishes the real from the unreal.
The subtle energy centers along the spine, from root to crown, used on this site to organize pose families and their qualities.
Generosity, the practice of giving freely without expectation of return. In the yogic tradition, teaching was offered and the gift kept it alive for the next person.
Concentration; one-pointed focus of the mind on a single object such as the breath, a point of light, or a mantra. The sixth limb.
From a root meaning "to uphold." Simultaneously cosmic order, sacred duty, righteousness, and the natural law that holds everything together. Always contextual: the dharma of a king differs from that of a sage.
Meditation proper: when concentration becomes effortless and the flow of awareness toward its object is unbroken. The seventh limb. The Pali form, jhana, became the Chinese Chan and the Japanese Zen.
The Ayurvedic daily rhythm: rising, cleansing, eating, moving, and resting in time with the day.
The three constitutional energies of Ayurveda, vata, pitta, and kapha, read as patterns of movement, heat, and stability in body and mind.
The yogic gaze: fixed focal points used inside the asanas, turning a physical pose into a moving concentration practice.
One-pointedness. The gathered quality of a mind resting on a single object, the fruit of dharana.
A classical Sanskrit manual of Hatha Yoga, framed as a dialogue in which the sage Gheranda answers the pupil Chanda Kapali. It organizes practice into seven exercises rather than Patanjali’s eight limbs: the “purificatory, strengthening, steadying, calming, and those leading to lightness, perception, and isolation” (I.2), and it teaches that of the many asanas “thirty-two have been found useful for mankind in this world” (II). Scholars count it, with the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the Shiva Samhita, among the three seminal texts of hatha yoga.
The three qualities of manifest existence: tamas (inertia), rajas (activity, passion), and sattva (clarity, harmony). Spiritual practice generally cultivates sattva and uses rajas purposefully.
The teaching that nothing has a separate self and everything inter-is with everything else, so that looking deeply into one thing reveals all the rest. Thich Nhat Hanh coined the English word for a very old idea: “When you touch one, you touch all.”
The perception of the body from within: heartbeat, breath, gut, the felt sense of being a body. Contemporary science’s nearest measurable neighbor to pratyahara.
Surrender to the divine: the fifth niyama in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. Requires relinquishing both actions and their outcomes. Bali's gift to Vamana is its defining story.
Repetition of a mantra or sacred name, silently or aloud, so a single sound becomes the point the mind holds.
The Buddhist ladder of meditative absorption, climbing rungs nearly identical to the yogic samadhi.
The five afflictions that keep the mind bound and drive suffering (Yoga Sutra 2.3–9). The root of them is avidya, spiritual ignorance; as Georg Feuerstein sums up Patanjali, “This is the primary klesha. From it spring the I-sense (asmita), attachment (raga), aversion (dvesha), and the will to live (abhinivesha).” Kriya-yoga aims at their gradual thinning.
Breath retention, the held pause of pranayama. In the words of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, “Kumbhaka is the keeping the air confined inside” (HYP 2.45, trans. Pancham Sinh). It is the phase in which the locks (bandha) are engaged, and the classical texts distinguish retention after the in-breath from retention after the out-breath.
In Classical (Patanjali) Yoga, the word for liberation. It means literally “aloneness”: the standing-alone of the transcendental Self (purusha) once it is no longer entangled with nature (prakriti). Patanjali’s fourth and final book is the Kaivalya Pada.
Action, and the principle that every action creates an energy that returns to its source. The quality of intention and the direction of attention both matter.
In tantric and hatha yoga, a dormant spiritual energy pictured as coiled at the base of the spine, at muladhara, and awakened to rise through the central channel. The common derivation, as Swami Satyananda notes, is from kundal, a coil, so kundalini is “that which is coiled.” This is a subtle-body concept of yogic experience, not a claim about physical anatomy.
Divine play. The stories of Vishnu's avatars are acts of Leela: play that reveals the nature of spiritual reality. Seeing life as Leela is itself a practice.
A world or plane of existence. The cosmology describes many lokas, from the dense material world to subtle and celestial realms, the worlds a meditator may discover within.
A gesture, seal, or attitude of the body used to direct energy and awareness. The Bihar School notes that “the Sanskrit word mudra is translated as ‘gesture’ or ‘attitude’,” and is also defined as a “seal,” “short-cut” or “circuit bypass.” Mudras range from simple hand gestures such as chin mudra to the whole-body seals of the hatha tradition.
Sweetness; the intimate quality of Krishna's divine aesthetic. Distinguished from aishwarya (majestic reverence), madhurya is the quality of love that meets God as a beloved friend, child, or lover. The Rasalila is its highest expression. The tradition considers it the most direct path to intimacy with the divine.
The sensory, processing mind that receives impressions and chatters. One faculty of the inner instrument (antahkarana), distinct from the awareness that witnesses it.
Sacred sound. A syllable or phrase repeated (japa) to gather the mind and carry it toward meditation. The tradition holds the sound itself to be a doorway, with Om as the seed-vibration of the absolute.
The vital points of the classical body described in the Sushruta Samhita, mapped alongside the muscles on the muscle diagram.
The receptive, non-reactive attention at the heart of Buddhist practice, named in the Satipatthana Sutta as the four foundations of mindfulness and counted the first of the seven factors of awakening. The contemporary teacher Jack Kornfield puts it simply: “Mindfulness is attention. It is a non-judging and respectful awareness.” It runs close to Patanjali’s smrti (Yoga Sutra 1.20), though it rests on the Buddhist reading of no fixed self rather than the witness of classical yoga.
Liberation; release from the cycle of suffering and rebirth into the realization of one’s true nature. The fourth and final aim of human life.
In Buddhism, the “blowing out” of the fires of craving, aversion, and delusion, and the liberation and peace that follow. As one translator of the Dhammapada notes, the word, “in ancient Indian languages (e.g., Sanskrit nirvāṇa; Pali nibbāna) suggests an extinguishing,” as of a flame starved of fuel. It is the Buddhist counterpart to the release (moksha) sought in the Vedic traditions.
A channel of the subtle body through which prana, the life-force, flows. Georg Feuerstein locates this “network of channels along which flows the life force” in the body’s subtle counterpart rather than the physical body, traditionally numbered at 72,000, of which three are chief: ida, pingala, and sushumna. The tantric writer Shyam Sundar Goswami stresses that the nadis “do not exist as tubules or wires, but are subtle lines of direction” along which the vital airs move, so they are energy pathways rather than nerves or vessels. Ida is read as the lunar channel on the left of the spine and pingala as the solar channel on the right; the Shiva Samhita, in Goswami’s rendering, names fourteen chief nadis in all.
The inner sound; the subtle vibration heard in deep stillness. Nada yoga is the path of meditation through sound.
Repetition of the divine name. The tradition holds that the name carries the actual presence of the divine. Prahlada's continuous chanting under persecution is its primary teaching text.
Action without attachment to its fruits: the central teaching of the Bhagavad Gita, taught directly by Krishna to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Rama's dharmic action across the Ramayana and Bali's gift to Vamana are its living demonstrations.
The second limb: five inner observances, including purity, contentment, self-discipline, self-study, and surrender to the divine. What we mean by the divine →
The five sheaths that cover the Self, set out in the Taittiriya Upanishad (Brahmananda Valli): the physical (annamaya), the energetic or breath (pranamaya), the mental (manomaya), the wisdom (vijnanamaya), and the bliss (anandamaya) bodies. Meditation peels them back, layer by layer, toward the center. The Upanishad pictures even that innermost bliss-body in the shape of a person: “joy is the right wing, delight is the left wing, Bliss is the self, Brahman is the tail, the support.” The peeling does not end at bliss; beneath it lies Brahman, the ground on which the sheaths rest.
The sage credited with compiling the Yoga Sutras, the roughly two-thousand-year-old aphorisms that organize yoga into eight limbs. Temple iconography shows him as half-human, half-serpent, and scholars still debate whether the grammarian and the yoga compiler were the same person.
In Ayurveda, an individual constitution: the personal balance of the doshas a person is born with.
The regulation and expansion of life-force (prana) through the breath. The fourth limb of yoga, the bridge between the body and the mind.
The cultivation of the opposite: a teaching from Patanjali. Transformation of a negative state so complete that what remains is capable of its opposite, reaching past suppression into genuine change.
The three foundational texts of Vedanta, read together: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Brahma Sutras. Every school of Vedanta interprets this canonical trio through its own lens.
Withdrawal of the senses from the outer world, drawing inward as a tortoise draws in its limbs. The fifth limb, and the true threshold of meditation.
The four goals of human life: dharma (duty), artha (material welfare), kama (desire and love), moksha (liberation). Bali holds dharma first and receives all four.
Taste or flavor: the specific emotional-spiritual quality of a devotional experience. Receiving a story's rasa is itself a spiritual practice.
The circle dance of Krishna with the gopis under the autumn full moon: the highest symbol of devotional yoga in the Bhakti tradition. Krishna stands at the center; the gopis move on the circumference, holding hands. Their longing toward the center is the structure of all devotional practice.
Absorption; the eighth limb, in which the meditator and the object of meditation merge and the separate sense of self dissolves into the absolute.
Evenness of mind; equanimity. The Gita's working definition of yoga: samatvam yoga uchyate, evenness is yoga (2.48). The same steadiness in success and failure, gain and loss.
The round of birth, death, and rebirth, turned by karma and the mind's clinging. It is the condition that moksha releases, and most of the older texts assume it as the backdrop against which liberation makes sense. The contemporary Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh reads it moment to moment rather than lifetime to lifetime: "Karma is our continuation, and continuation is rebirth. Every moment is a moment of rebirth."
Dharana, dhyana, and samadhi flowing together on a single object (Yoga Sutra 3.4). The complete gathering of the inner practice.
Contentment, the second niyama. The practiced ability to rest satisfied with what is, before anything changes.
Being, consciousness, bliss: the threefold nature of the absolute in Vedanta. Sat is eternal existence beyond time; chit is awareness fully conscious of all; ananda is boundless joy. This is enlightenment, the world beyond.
Truthfulness: the second yama. Speaking truthfully, and refusing to live inside a lie even when the lie would be more comfortable. Sita's final act is its deepest expression.
Purity, the first niyama. Cleanliness of body, surroundings, food, and thought, so the practice has a clear vessel to work in.
Sacred sites created where Sati's body fell as Shiva carried it in grief. Wherever a piece fell, the earth became sacred. There are 51 such sites across South Asia, honored to this day.
The six cleansing techniques of hatha yoga, literally the "six actions," used to purify the body before the deeper work of breath and meditation. The Gheranda Samhita, which makes purification the first of its seven limbs, names them in one line: “Dhauti, Basti, Neti, Nauli, Trataka, and Kapalabhati; one should practice these six cleansing techniques” (GhS 1.12, trans. Mallinson).
Self-study: the fourth niyama. Includes examination of what we are most intensely drawn to, most afraid of, most in conflict with.
One's own specific path of duty, distinct from dharma in general. The Bhagavad Gita holds that it is better to fulfill one's own swadharma imperfectly than another's perfectly. The Mahabharata tests this principle in every character: the question is never only what the right action is, but who we are while doing it.
Literally heat or fire. The disciplined effort that burns away what is extraneous, refining the practitioner toward clarity. Parvati's tapas to win Shiva back is its defining story.
Steady gazing, classically on a candle flame, until the eyes and mind grow still. A cleansing practice and a doorway into dharana.
The fourth state of consciousness named in the Mandukya Upanishad, beyond waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep and beyond the senses and the intellect. Not a further experience set beside the other three but the awareness in which they arise and pass, in the Upanishad’s phrase “neither inward nor outward.” It is the ground the syllable OM points to.
Equanimity, the fourth of the Buddhist brahma-viharas (divine abodes) and a near-cousin of the yogic vairagya. Not indifference but a steady, spacious balance that holds all of experience without grasping or pushing away: “Equanimity is not empty; equanimity is full of everything.”
The victorious or ocean breath. A gentle narrowing of the throat turns the breath to a soft oceanic sound, the inhale gathering like a wave and the exhale crashing like surf. The carrier-breath of meditation.
The eternal spiritual realm: the residence of Vishnu. The gate where Jaya and Vijaya stand is the boundary between the eternal and the manifest.
A deep-seated behavioral trait, the accumulated residue of past impressions. Where a single samskara is one subconscious imprint left by an act of will, a vasana is the whole chain of them. Georg Feuerstein glosses it as “the concatenation of subliminal activators” (the samskaras) “deposited in the depth of the mind where they exert a binding effect” (Yoga Sutra 4.8, 4.24).
Movement linked to breath; the connecting flows placed between poses in a sequence.
Discernment: the capacity to distinguish what is real from what is not, what is dharmic from what is not. Vibhishana's defection from Ravana to Rama is its defining story.
Fire sacrifice or ceremony. Daksha's exclusion of Shiva and Sati from his yagya, and Bali's great yagya at which Vamana arrives, are both pivotal moments in these stories.
The first limb: five ethical restraints toward the world, including non-harming (ahimsa) and truthfulness (satya). The roots of the practice.
A sacred geometric form used as an object of concentration, its center drawing the attention inward.
This site is a living resource. If a definition deserves a second look, a term is used differently in your lineage, or there is a word you would like added, write below. Corrections are welcomed with gratitude.