This text was written for the European Yoga Congress in 2026
Emotional Management in Classical Yoga
by Andrey Safronov
The anthropology of classical yoga describes our emotional life differently from the tradition familiar to us, which goes back to Plato. For European thought, an emotion is a driving force: the very word (Latin ex-movēre, “to set in motion”) points to that which moves a person to act. In Patañjali’s yoga there is no separate “emotional” layer as a faculty in its own right; the psychic is, as it were, “spread” between the sense-faculties (indriya) and the mind (citta). An emotion appears not as a motive but as a colouring of consciousness, a seizing of it by the indriyas (grahaṇa), and a scattering of the mind (kṣipta–vikṣipta).
This is already evident from the language itself. Patañjali’s central method is vairāgya; the word goes back to the root √rañj, “to be coloured,” from which rāga — “a colouring” — is also formed (the same root underlies the name of the guṇa rajas, originally “red dust”). Vairāgya thus literally means “the removal of colouring.” Crucially, this is not about the disappearance of emotions but about the ability to retain clarity while experiencing them — about disidentification. At the same time, classical yoga knows the opposite pole as well: the cultivation of contentment (santoṣa). “The yogin is ever content,” says the Bhagavad-gītā (12.14); the Pāśupata-sūtra goes as far as the image of a practitioner who laughs and sings.
Later this view was enriched by Indian aesthetics. Treatises on theatre and music — the Nāṭyaśāstra and the Saṅgītaratnākara — developed a detailed typology of emotional states (bhāva) and of their transformed “taste” (rasa); these elaborations influenced the tantric approach. An independent source of influence was Buddhist practice, systematised in the Visuddhimagga.
As a result, yoga’s repertoire for working with emotions turned out to be rich but heterogeneous and technically demanding. Modern popular yoga makes almost no use of this heritage — its place is more often taken by techniques borrowed from Stoicism, and at times from Christian asceticism. All the more reason to return to a properly yogic understanding of emotion.
