The yamas and niyamas of ashtanga yoga: relevance to social work practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Yoga has gained popularity in the West as not only a method of physical exercise, but also for many, as a source of healing, social transformation and a way of life. Despite this, little literature exists examining the utility of yoga and its philosophical roots for social work. This paper explores the first two limbs of the eight-limbed ashtanga yoga system, the yamas (ethical restraints) and the niyamas (spiritually conducive practices), discussing their relevance to social work practice, particularly in the context of social work ethical theory. The yamas are the ethical restraints of ahimsa (nonviolence), satya (truth), asteya (non-stealing), brahmacarya (sensual abstinence or restraint), and aparigraha (non-avarice, non-possessiveness). The niyamas are practices conducive to spiritual development: sauca (purity), santosha (contentment), tapas (persistence), svadhyaya (study of sacred scriptures), and isvara pranidhana (contemplation of the divine). The yamas and niyamas are an example of the coalescence of deontological, consequentialist, virtue, and feminist ethics. This piece explores each yama and niyama, describing both their traditional roots and their implications for social work ethical theory and practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".