One object. One place. Hold it there.
The Sixth Limb
With dharana the Yoga Sutras cross into the inner limbs, and Patanjali's definition is a model of compression: desha bandhah chittasya dharana — concentration is the binding of the mind to one place (III.1). One object, one location, held. The object hardly matters — the breath at the nostrils, a mantra, a flame, an image of the deity, a point in the body. What matters is the binding: attention placed on the object and returned to it, again and again, every time it strays.
And it strays constantly. Dharana is the limb where the practitioner discovers, usually with some horror, what the mind actually does when asked to hold still — the endless commentary, the planning, the replaying, the sheer weather of thought. The practice is not the absence of wandering but the noticing and the return. Each return is a repetition, and the faculty being trained is the most consequential one a mind has: the ability to place attention deliberately and keep it placed.
Practice
Every concentration practice in every contemplative tradition is dharana under a local name — the breath-counting of Zen, the kasina discs of the Theravada manuals, the rosaries and japa beads, the icon gazed upon until gazing forgets itself. In modern Meditation instruction it appears as "focused attention" practice, the form most beginners are taught first, because it must come first: without the capacity to hold an object, nothing subtler can be attempted. The instruction is always the same three moves — place attention on the object, notice when it has left, bring it back without drama. The third move is where the skill lives. Self-recrimination at each wandering is just more wandering; the clean, kind return is the entire art.
Place in the Sequence
Dharana, Dhyana, and Samadhi are not three practices but three depths of one practice, and Patanjali gives the trio applied to a single object its own name: samyama (III.4), the master key to the third chapter's catalogue of powers. Dharana is effortful — attention held to the object with many returns. When the returns become unnecessary, when attention flows to the object in an unbroken stream, concentration has ripened into Dhyana, the seventh limb. The doorway in from the outer limbs is Pratyahara; without the senses withdrawn, the binding never holds.
Related
- Eight Limbs of Yoga — the sequence
- Pratyahara — the previous limb, withdrawal
- Dhyana — the next limb, effortless flow
- Meditation — dharana as focused-attention practice
- Yoga — the parent overview