Patañjali systematised yoga in the 4th–5th century CE, drawing together streams of practice that had been evolving long before him, including influences from Buddhist and Jain traditions. His work is precise and brilliant, but it represents one moment in a much larger continuum.
The Upaniṣads both precede and follow him, while the Ṛig Veda reaches further back still, expressing early Yogic ideas through symbolic and mythic language. The later emergence of Tantra introduced many of the elements now central to what we recognise as modern yoga; chakras, kuṇḍalinī, haṭha yoga, and the detailed mapping of the subtle body.
Much of contemporary practice is therefore tantric in origin, though this is often overlooked due to misunderstandings about what tantra actually entails.
To treat Patañjali as the sole philosophical authority is to narrow the tradition, leaving aside the rich developments that came after him. The physical practices, breathwork, and integration of body and transcendence that define modern yoga are deeply shaped by these later traditions. Historically, there was no strict divide between meditation and embodied practice; such a separation is largely a modern construct. Practices now labelled as mindfulness or meditation; whether Buddhist, Vedic, or otherwise, have long existed within a shared and overlapping yogic landscape.
The insight that what we take to be the self is not fixed is an important starting point. Thoughts, emotions, and bodily states are constantly shifting and none of them provide a stable identity. Recognising this loosens our attachment to them however this is not the end of the inquiry, rather it opens it.
If these changing elements are not the self, what remains? What becomes apparent is the presence in which all experience arises; the witnessing awareness itself.
This awareness is not separate from the individual, yet it is not limited to the individual either. It is both intimate and expansive, the ground in which all experience unfolds. In the language of the Upaniṣads, Ātman is Brahman: the innermost self is not different from the universal.
This can feel confronting, especially in cultural contexts shaped by different theological assumptions. But within the yogic tradition, it is a recurring realisation. The teaching of “no-self” serves an important purpose in dissolving false identifications, but if taken as a final conclusion, it risks ending the inquiry too soon. What remains is not emptiness in the sense of absence, but a fullness that cannot be reduced, a stillness that contains everything.
