Samadhi

Samādhi joins three elements: the prefix sam, 'together,' the prefix ā, 'towards,' and the verbal root dhā, 'to place or hold.' Literally it means a 'placing together' or complete composure — the mind gathered and settled so fully onto its object that the ordinary gap between knower and known begins to close.

As the shortDefinition notes, samādhi is meditative absorption. Classical yoga distinguishes stages: samprajñāta samādhi, absorption still accompanied by subtle cognition, and asamprajñāta, in which even that subsides. It is less an achievement you seize than a stillness that arrives when concentration and meditation mature and effort quietly falls away.

Samādhi is the eighth limb of Patañjali's aṣṭāṅga. In the Yoga Sūtras it is defined (3.3) as the state in which meditation shines with the object alone, the mind seemingly empty of its own form. Together with dhāraṇā and dhyāna it forms saṃyama, the integrated core of contemplative practice.

In practice you do not 'do' samādhi directly. You steady posture and breath, gather attention onto one object (dhāraṇā), let that attention flow unbroken (dhyāna), and absorption may ripen from there. Most practitioners taste only brief, partial glimpses — moments where self-consciousness thins — and that is entirely normal.

A common misconception treats samādhi as a blissful trance or a permanent 'enlightened' status. Classically it names a range of states, not a single trophy, and the deepest (nirbīja, 'seedless') points beyond experience itself toward kaivalya. It is a doorway on the path, not merely its finish line.