36. An introduction to the five layers of you

If you’ve ever felt stuck, overwhelmed, or out of sync with yourself, understanding the five layer of yoga can give you a practical, transformative way to feel better; physically, mentally, and emotionally.

I’ll be breaking down each layer, from the most tangible (your physical body) to the most subtle (your bliss layer), and showing you how they’re all interconnected. Plus, I’ll share how you can use these layers as “routes in” to improve how you feel, whether that’s through movement, breath, or mindset (or all 3!)

Here’s what we cover:

🪷 The Physical Layer: Your skin, bones, muscles, and everything you can touch

🪷 The Energetic Layer: Your breath and vitality, and how frazzled energy is tied to frazzled breathing

🪷 The Mental Layer: Your thoughts, emotions, and inner dialogue, and how they shape your energy and body

🪷 The Wisdom Layer: Your inner compass, insight and intuition

🪷 The Bliss Layer: That deep sense of peace and joy

You’ll learn how to use these layers to shift your state, whether you’re feeling anxious, exhausted, or just out of sorts. By the end, you’ll have three powerful “routes in” to create more clarity, calm, and connection in your daily life.

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Useful resources:

💻 See the shownotes here

✨ Living in Alignment: A Yoga Philosophy Journey to Define Your True Values:

Join our free online workshop to uncover your personal values and start living in alignment. You’ll learn yoga wisdom, experience a guided meditation, and leave with a values worksheet to use as your compass for future decisions. Save your seat here

🤩 Last week’s episode:

If you missed last week’s deep dive into prana and pranayama, go back and give it a listen! It’s packed with insights on how your breath shapes your energy. Listen here

🗓️ Next week’s episode:

Get ready for a guided Yoga Nidra meditation that will take you through these exact five laters, can't wait!

As always, happy practising!

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Transcript

AOY 36 - The Five Layers of You

 [00:00:00] hey, heroes. Okay. I am really, really excited about this episode. Actually, if I'm really honest and open, these five [00:01:00] layers meant nothing to me for quite a while. I just, I didn't get them at all. I didn't understand what they meant. I didn't understand what kind of impact they have on day-to-day living.

And for me, that's what yoga philosophy is all about. It's about how to make our day-to-day living even just a little bit easier. Anyway, so I'd been aware of these five layers of for ages, easily a decade, and they didn't mean very much to me. I very, very rarely talked about them. And then when I started my yoga therapy training, so just a side note here, yoga therapy uses the tools and knowledge of yoga as a personalised individual therapy for someone who's got anything going on; physical, mental, both. I am loving the training, although it's flipping hard. But anyway, these five layers are really pivotal to [00:02:00] understanding the whole person. So in yoga therapy, that would be, for example, a, let's say I'm working with someone who's suffering with back pain. It'd be really easy to think, well, what muscle has been pulled or what tendon is inflamed? But yoga therapy takes a much wider angle looking at how does this back pain affect your movement and your posture, but also how does this back pain affect your breath? And how does it make you feel mentally is having this back pain affecting your ability to tap into your insight? And by that I mean experiencing pain could mean that it's more likely we revert to old unhelpful habits rather than using our insight and intuition to guide us towards new, more helpful habits.

Anyway, so. I really love this approach to therapy, but then seeing the five [00:03:00] layers in this way then made it click in my head how we as people who might be receiving therapy of some sort or might not, can use a basic understanding of the five layers to improve how we are. Because essentially each of the five layers gives you a route in a way in to improving your physical state, your mental state, your emotional state, your ability to connect with your intuition, whatever it is that will make sense to you to focus on at the moment.

Okay, so the five layers all have Sanskrit names, and I'll use the Sanskrit name just now, this once with the English names and then the English names from then on, unless I forget and habitually go back to the Sanskrit, and if that's the case, I, I apologise for that now.

So I'm starting with the most tangible layer and I'm finishing with the [00:04:00] least tangible layer. The most tangible layer is the Annamaya kosha. This is your physical body, this layer is one that you can touch your skin, your muscles, your organs, your bones.

Then we have the pranamaya kosha. This is the energetic body, or we can also think of it as the breath body.

Then the manomaya kosha, which is the mental layer, followed by the Vijnanamaya kosha, this is the layer of insight, intuition, inner wisdom. And finally The least tangible layer is the anandamaya kosha the bliss layer.

okay. Let's explore each one individually.

The physical layer.

I'd say that this is the layer that needs the least explaining. You know, you can see it, you can feel it, you can move it around. It's your [00:05:00] physical body, your skin, bones, muscles, and so on. And of course, we're moving the physical body around when we practice yoga, Asana, The physical practice of yoga. 

The energetic layer. In last week's episode, I talked about prana in terms of pranayama, which is the fourth limb of the eight limbs of yoga. Do go give that a listen if you haven't already. It's linked to in the show notes or give it a listen, even if you have listened, there was loads of information in it and you'll probably take something different from it each time!

But anyway, prana is yoga's mythical energy. It's your life force, your vitality. We can't see it or, or at least I can't, but many people are able to feel their energy, at least in terms of their energetic state, which might be high energy or [00:06:00] depleted or frazzled. But there's something really interesting here, which is that prana also refers to the breath. In the eight limbs of yoga, we talked about pranayama being breathing techniques. So frazzled energy will be caused by or will cause frazzled breathing, feeling full of energy will probably be caused by or will cause full breaths and so on. If there's a particular energetic state that you'd like to cultivate, just have a think. Can you do this through your breath? If you want to feel calm, can you calm your breath, sending your breath into your lower lungs or elongating your exhale, or both? If you want to feel high energy, can you access energy from your breath? Try it hero, and I would [00:07:00] love to hear how you get on.

And now let's look at the relationship between the two layers that we've talked about so far. The energetic layer and the physical layer. I would imagine that you can already kind of detect a link between these two. When your physical body is tired, you probably feel that your energy is sluggish and depleted. but when you feel bright and strong, you probably feel like your energy is lifted. In fact, you might even have a hard time dividing the two up. I know I do.

The mental layer. Okay. For me, this is where it gets really interesting. In all the reading and the studying that I've done, I can't find any instances where the yogis ever say that the mind is in the head. In fact, this layer, the mental layer, indicates that the yogis [00:08:00] see our mind as an approximation of our whole being.

Your mental layer encompasses all of your mental processes, remembering, predicting, imagining, worrying, et cetera. Your mental layer is the home of your thoughts, emotions, inner dialogue. It's a busy layer, right? So. Yeah, because we are humans. We have active mental layers, and yoga isn't asking us to just disregard this layer.

There's no pressure for this layer to become less active. But what about noticing this layer? What about noticing your mental activity and then relating that to the two we've covered already? So if you notice that your mental layer is particularly active and that activity is maybe of a sort of negative nature worry concern, it's [00:09:00] repetitive, I bet that you notice that this has an impact on your energetic layer, perhaps making you feel low on energy or making that energy feel a bit more frazzled and, well, hero, you probably know what I'm gonna say here, but the nature and speed of your mental layer probably also has an impact on your physical body, right? Making you feel tense and tight.

So let's take a side step for a moment, because there's already so much information and so much richness and so much potential in thinking about these three layers. They don't affect how you feel, they are how you feel. So I promised you that this is something that you can use in your daily life to feel better, and here's how I see it. Let's say that you feel a way that's less than ideal. Maybe you are [00:10:00] knackered and you have a beast of a day ahead. Or let's say you feel anxious or something else, anything else. By even just knowing about these three layers, you have three routes into improving how you feel.

You could use your mind, you could repeat a mantra or an intention. You could practice mindfulness or meditation. And remember last week, we talked about meditation as just doing your best to concentrate on one thing, understanding that your mind will wander, and when it does, you'll bring it back to that one thing with kindness and compassion and a bit of discipline too.

Or you could use the route in of your energetic layer, changing your breathing to help you feel how you want to feel. Or you could use the route in of the physical layer, moving your [00:11:00] physical body to improve your energetic state and your mental state, three potential routes in, and you just choose the one that's best for you in that moment.

Isn't that cool? Okay, let's continue. The wisdom layer. This layer is definitely moving into, or at least in, in my opinion, it's moving into much more esoterical concepts, and this wisdom layer is our layer of internal wisdom. Your knowing of you or how you are or what you need. And you know, I think that a lot of us are really cut off from this, especially, you know, with things like social media and the internet giving so, so much advice, many of it from people who have never met you. It's so easy to look outside of ourselves for insight as to what we should do, how we should progress, what we should [00:12:00] focus on. And speaking of deciding what you're going to focus on, what to spend your precious resources of, your energy, mental bandwidth, and time on, we have a free online workshop coming up, living in Alignment, a yoga philosophy journey to define your true values, which is a yoga wisdom lesson with me and a guided exercise to set your values. Essentially, it's designed to help you uncover what's best for you to focus on and what you put down for now or permanently. Because hero, we can't do everything at once. The wisdom layer is a bit like a kind of inner compass, and you could also say it's your gut feeling, your inner knowing.

And I really believe that the more that you access this and listen to this, the stronger it gets.

 The bliss layer. So, so here we are at our least tangible layer. The bliss [00:13:00] layer is a feeling of completeness, which might be permanent or it might be fleeting. A feeling that you might have had maybe already in a delicious Savasana, or when you are with people who know you deeply and accept you exactly as you are or something else where you know everything is going to be okay.

There's a peacefulness, a joy, a blissfulness. And I believe that connecting with and listening to the wisdom layer brings you closer and closer to this bliss layer. And that's it yogi. They are the five layers to your being.

The physical layer,

the energetic layer,

the mental layer,

the wisdom layer,

and the bliss layer five routes into access and change how you feel.

How you see the world, how you treat yourself and others. Isn't that amazing? [00:14:00] Don't forget to grab your free space on our Living In Alignment Workshop and make a note in your diary because next week on the podcast we have a guided yoga nidra, a relaxing meditation to guide you through these five layers, and I cannot wait.

If you've enjoyed this episode, would you rate and review it? We'd be so grateful and send it on to a friend too. And as always, happy practicing.