(Photo by Mira Devi)
I’ll be honest with you. Pratyahara isn’t a word I use often in class. Funny way to open when it’s literally in the title but stick with me. I was introduced to it during my Yoga teacher training, the fifth limb of Patanjali’s Eight Limbs, the withdrawal of the senses from external objects, and I understood it intellectually. But when I started teaching, I didn’t know how to bring it into class without losing everyone.
What I didn’t realize then was that I was already teaching it.
What Overstimulation Looks Like
I’ve been teaching Yoga and hosting retreats long enough to recognize overstimulation. It looks like the student who arrives slightly on edge. The one whose eyes scan the room before they’ve even unrolled their mat. The one who, in a restorative class, lies down and immediately checks their Apple Watch.
We are living in a time of constant sensory stimulation. Checking our phone before we get out of bed. Zoning out of the commute with a podcast. Back-to-back meetings, group chats, notifications. Our nervous systems are being pushed to breaking point, and most of us don’t even realize it.
When the Senses Finally Withdraw
I know when Pratyahara is happening in a class or on retreat. The energy in the room just changes. A student who was watching me, watching other students, watching the door, suddenly stops watching anything. Their eyes soften or close. They stop performing the pose and start feeling it. They are, for the first time perhaps in weeks, fully present.
And sometimes, what surfaces in that stillness is unexpected.
On my retreats, I’ve had students cry in pranayama and Savasana. When we intentionally withdraw awareness from external distractions, the internal world becomes visible. And what’s been stored in the subconscious can finally surface. What they’re experiencing is Pratyahara. They just don’t know to call it that.
And the numbers are beginning to reflect what I’ve been witnessing in the room. Recent data from BookRetreats.com shows that 43% of U.S travelers are joining retreats specifically to recover from burnout, and interest in nervous system reset retreats has grown by 105% year-on-year since 2023.
People don’t know it, but they are crying out for the fifth limb.
Teaching It Without Naming It
So how do you guide someone toward Pratyahara when the word itself might stop them in their tracks? The teaching is important. But give them the feeling first, and the language to name it will mean something when it arrives. You don’t always need the word straight away.
It might be asking a student to fix their gaze on a single point, a drishti, and notice what happens to the mind when the eyes stop moving. It might be guiding awareness through the five senses one by one, asking what they can hear, feel, smell, until the external world becomes less of a distraction. It might be simply reminding a student that choosing to rest in child’s pose rather than pushing through another Chaturanga isn’t a failure. It’s often the deeper practice.
The ego wants to perform, but Pratyahara asks us to let go of that performance.
My Own Evolved Practice
I used to think Pratyahara required the right conditions. A quiet room, a clean space, the right time of day. Then I became a mother.
My son is six months old. My practice now happens on a Yoga mat rolled out next to his playmat, surrounded by toys and whatever new sound his vocal cords are testing out. I rarely practice in ‘Yoga clothes.’ I am almost always interrupted. The environment is, by most definitions, completely wrong.
And yet. The practice of turning inward, following the breath, and choosing to focus even for a brief moment is achievable. Pratyahara is about learning to find stillness within any environment. Which is, I think, exactly what so many people are beginning to discover. When 56% of people interested in Yoga retreats now name mental health as their primary motivation, not flexibility, not fitness, something profound is being expressed. They are reaching, often without knowing it, for the fifth limb.
Overstimulation looks different from what it did when Patanjali wrote the Yoga Sutras. The noise is louder, and the distractions are more…distracting. But the remedy is the same.
Withdraw. Turn inward. Find what was always there beneath the noise.
Hannah Saunders is a Yoga teacher and retreat host based in Portugal. She completed her 200-hour teacher training in Goa, India, and has since taught across the globe, from Australia and Bali to Guatemala, Ecuador, and Italy. Her classes and retreats are grounded in alignment and anatomy, with a focus on the nervous system and how our external world shapes our inner experience. She empowers students to listen inward and build a practice that is truly their own. More info here.
