Abhyasa and Vairagya: Why Some Aspirants Advance Faster

Sutra 22 of the Samadhi Pada is one line long and it settles a question every practitioner eventually asks in private: why do two people following the same discipline arrive at very different places? Patanjali has just said that success comes through practice and dispassion. Here he adds that both of these come in degrees — mild, moderate, and intense — and that the degree, not the discipline, sets the pace.

Swami Jyotirmayananda spends most of this lecture on the ground underneath that sutra rather than the sutra itself, because the gradations mean nothing until you know what is being graded. He retraces the outline Patanjali gives for the whole path — faith, strength, recollection, absorption, and the intuitive intellect that emerges from it — and then turns to the two elements that carry a practitioner forward: abhyasa, repeated practice, and vairagya, detachment.

Practice, in his treatment, is not a quantity. It is a rhythm. A time to wake, a time to sleep, a time for prayer. He is explicit that the alternative — too much one day, too little the next, and all of it done while imagining the holidays — is what produces years of effort without movement.

Then the four yogas are placed inside that rhythm: duty done without fighting the situation one has been given, feeling raised until generosity is ordinary, attention trained until it can rest on one object, and inquiry into what the word I actually refers to.

The lecture ends on a parable, and the parable is the reason to watch it. Some temple priests row a boat across a river all night to reach a festival. At dawn the far bank looks exactly like the near bank, because it is the near bank. They had never untied the boat.

Swamiji lands it without softening it. You can accumulate practices, log them in a diary, and ask periodically whether you have arrived — and if the illusions and the pride were never loosened, the honest answer is that you have not gone anywhere.

Passage Index

What Yoga Is Actually Purifying

The lecture opens with the traditional verse of adoration to Patanjali, who is credited with three works: the Yoga Sutras for purifying the citta, the mind-stuff; the Ayurvedic medicine for purifying the body; and the grammar for purifying speech.

Swamiji treats that three-part credit as a statement of scope rather than a biographical note. Body, speech and mind are one system, and a practitioner who attends to one while neglecting another has not understood the project. He puts it bluntly: a person may have a healthy body and a tongue that works like a snake, and then, he says, “you are not really healthy.”

The grammar, he notes, was never meant to produce literary scholars. Its purpose was to give what arises in the heart the ability to be expressed eloquently, spontaneously, and boldly. This is a characteristic move of his — a technical tradition read as an instrument of inner life rather than an academic possession.

The Outline Patanjali Gives

Before the gradations, the sequence. Faith, shraddha, is the entry point, and Swamiji makes an observation that changes its character: you arrive in the world with faith already. The work is not to manufacture it but to let it unfold until it has a vision. What people call self-confidence, he suggests, is faith operating at a lower altitude — the climber who says “Even if the leg is broken, still I will do it.”

Faith matures into virya, strength, and he distinguishes three levels of it. Vital strength is what most people pursue and what dazzles a crowd. Mental and spiritual strength look like nothing from outside. A figure sitting perfectly still can hold a room, and “Imagine what type of strength is needed to conquer the mind.” Anger, hate, pride, egoism — these grip the mind, and the strength that loosens them does not photograph.

He gives the sun as the image for what spiritual strength looks like from outside: small, entirely humble, illuminating and nourishing an entire earth. The revelation at the far end of that strength is that the individual was never separate. “As a wave, you don’t exist, you are the whole ocean.”

What the Mind Keeps Rehearsing

Smriti is usually translated as memory, but Swamiji takes it as the whole involuntary traffic of recollection that fills an ordinary day. You see a small spider and recall a larger cobweb. You sneeze and your memory produces last year’s illness. He calls it a dramatization and it is recognizable immediately.

The point is that this traffic has a flavour, and the flavour is chosen. A mind that rehearses hatred, anger, or its own sorrows is, in his image, a pot in which the same onion and garlic are reheated indefinitely — “You are just keeping the bucket of your mind filled with onions and garlics.” The consequence is social before it is spiritual: you make everyone near you feel miserable, even while laughing.

He sets three states of mind against each other. The tamasika mind goes dull, helpless, lonely. The rajasika mind becomes so bright with energy that it texts while driving and texts while walking. The sattvika mind turns toward the message of the sages, applies it, and finds an inner silence that poets have been describing for a long time.

Then the deliberate version: ishvara-cintana, intentionally generating thought of God through japa, mantra, and prayer. Swamiji anticipates the obvious objection — that a beginner recites without feeling, mechanically, while the saints who composed the prayer were dancing. His answer is that a medicine works whether you sing its praises or throw it into your mouth, and that a prayer carrying the attention of everyone who has ever recited it has a potency beyond the reciter’s understanding.

The Intellect That Changes Shape

There is a quiet thread running through the middle of the lecture: the intellect is not a fixed instrument. When faith enters, the intellect becomes sensitive rather than dull. When strength develops, the intellect can look at the ego and tell it to keep quiet — which is what makes an objective study of oneself possible at all.

Emerging from samadhi, that intellect becomes prajna, intuitive intellect. Swamiji reaches for a larva waking into a butterfly, and notes that the Gita has a name for the person in whom this has become permanent: sthitaprajna. The expansion is not metaphorical for him. He describes the practitioner who planned a pilgrimage and found the pilgrimage centre had opened inside his own heart, with no further interest in travelling.

Practice and Detachment

Here the lecture reaches its subject. Two elements carry progress: abhyasa, repeated practice, and vairagya, detachment.

Abhyasa is given a specific shape, and it is the most practical passage in the lecture. Life should be lived in a rhythmic pattern. “Be a musician, not just for the fingers. But your life should have a rhythm to it.” A time to wake up, a time to sleep, a time for prayer. His claim is counter-intuitive and worth testing: with that discipline you find more time for practice, not less. Without it, effort is abrupt and constantly interrupted by the fantasy of the next holiday.

Vairagya he treats as something that happens rather than something forced. As illusions break, dependence on the world falls away on its own. He grounds it in the sutra’s own list — birth, disease, aging, death — and asks the practitioner to hold both halves at once: the body is mortal, and you are not the body.

The detachment is cumulative and one-directional: “Once your way of looking at things have been found defective, you transcend it.” A habit recognised as negative is not returned to.

The Four Yogas Inside an Ordinary Day

Rather than treat the four yogas as four temperaments, Swamiji distributes all of them across a single ordinary day, in small measures — an ounce of each, not to be taken literally.

Karma yoga is doing one’s duties without being in contradiction with them. His reasoning is theological and unusually direct: God has not placed you abruptly in your situation, because a God who did so would not be omniscient. So the energy normally spent regretting or fighting a situation is available for patience instead.

Bhakti yoga he defines as the quality of feeling, not the location of worship — “love of God is not just confined in churches or temples.” The practice is to bring generosity, magnanimity, understanding and patience into every relation, including the ones that offer nothing back. He is precise about the failure mode: keeping a private ledger of how many people you have helped inflates the ego and is directly opposed to spiritual movement. “The moment your feeling rises to a high level of purity, you draw God like a magnet.”

Raja yoga is attention. He notes drily that most people have only ever been fully focused on something negative, and that when nothing negative is available the imagination supplies it. The training is ordinary — asanas, pranayama, staying with a mantra, resting the eyes on one image without changing the object every few moments.

For the three stages he uses a lens. In a forest with no matches, you focus sunlight through a magnifying glass onto dry twigs. The first stage is creating the focus. The second stage is to do nothing and let the focused light work. “Third stage, you still do nothing. Watch the miracle.” They merge. Concentration, meditation, samadhi. He asks for nothing dramatic in return — “A mind that has experienced just 15 minutes of quietness early in the morning” meets the whole day differently.

Jnana yoga is the inquiry. What is the soul that built this body, sustains it, and manages everything you never think about? Who am I? The answer he gives is the one the tradition gives: Saccidananda — existence, knowledge, bliss absolute — and he calls it the central core of every religion in the world.

Mild, Moderate, Intense

Only now does the sutra land, and it lands in about ninety seconds.

Both abhyasa and vairagya fall into three categories: mridu, madhya, adhimatra — mild, moderate, intense. Every combination is possible, and each produces a different rate of movement. Mild practice with mild dispassion is slow. Mild practice with stronger dispassion is better. Both increasing puts an aspirant on a higher level, and such aspirants, he says plainly, are succeeding faster.

The formulation is generous and unsentimental at once. “Intensity of practice along with increasing vairāgya. That is the formula for quick success.” And: “Everyone succeeds, but how much, how quickly, how intensely you will succeed will depend upon the intensity of these two points.”

Note what is being measured. Not talent, not years, not the volume of practice — the intensity of practice together with the clarity of understanding that makes detachment possible. Either one alone is the slow case.

The Boat They Forgot to Untie

The parable is the lecture’s argument in narrative form, and Swamiji tells it without hurry.

Priests of a temple learn that a great celebration is happening across the river, with laddus and festive food. There is a ferry, but they are too miserly to pay. So four or five of them wait for night, when the boat sits empty, and row across for free. They row from ten or eleven at night until four in the morning.

As the darkness lifts, one of them observes that the bank looks like the place they started. Another dismisses it — every bank looks the same, and they have rowed all night. Then more details resolve, and they realise they have not gone anywhere. Finally one of them works it out: “look, we forgot to untie the boat.”

Swamiji applies it immediately and without cushioning. You can go on doing lots of yoga while declining to remove your illusions or get over your pride. You do many things, many exercises, many pranayamas, and you write them down in your diary. Periodically you ask whether you have succeeded. And “If nobody says anything, you build up your own image” — already enlightened.

But you have not gone anywhere.

That is the practical content of Sutra 22. Intensity is not the number of hours logged. Rowing harder is not the missing element. The rope is.

Terms in This Lecture

Abhyasa : repeated, disciplined practice sustained day after day.
Vairagya : detachment; the falling away of dependence as illusions break.
Shraddha : faith, present from birth, developed until it acquires vision.
Virya : strength, at the vital, mental, and spiritual levels.
Smriti : the mind’s continuous involuntary recollection; also deliberate remembrance.
Ishvara-cintana : intentionally generated thought of God, through japa, mantra, and prayer.
Prajna : intuitive intellect, emerging from samadhi. The one established in it is a sthitaprajna.
Mridu, madhya, adhimatra : mild, moderate, intense — the three degrees of practice and dispassion.
Saccidananda : existence, knowledge, bliss absolute.
Samadhi Pada : the first chapter of the Yoga Sutras, in which Sutra 22 appears.

Questions for Reflection

– Of abhyasa and vairagya, which is the weaker one in your own practice right now? The sutra says the weaker one is setting your pace. – Does your daily life have a rhythm, or does it alternate between too much and too little while you wait for a break? – What is currently being reheated in your mind, and did you choose it?

Raja Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Samadhi Pada, Sutra 1.22 — Lecture 12 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation. The complete archive of these lectures is freely available at yogaresearchfoundation.org.

This study guide is drawn from the archived teachings of Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda.