Sankalpa: Clarifying Purpose (Not Setting a Goal)

Sankalpa is often translated as “intention” or “purpose,” but in yoga, it does not mean setting a goal, making a wish, or deciding what you want to become.

Sankalpa is orientation.

It is the steady remembrance of why one practices at all and what yoga is meant to resolve.

Unlike goals, which belong to the mind’s future projections, sankalpa functions as an internal compass. It does not ask, What do I want to achieve? It asks, What am I aligning myself toward?

This distinction matters.

Without sankalpa, practice easily becomes fragmented. Techniques are applied without understanding their role, and progress is measured through achievement, comparison, or extraordinary experience rather than freedom from misidentification.

Sankalpa and Attention

There is a simple but essential principle in yoga:

• Where intention rests, attention follows.

• Where attention goes, the mind moves.

• And where the mind moves, the body and nervous system respond.

Sankalpa establishes the direction of this movement.

It does not force focus, nor does it control outcomes. Instead, it continually reorients attention away from distraction, habit, and unconscious momentum and back toward clarity.

Without this orientation, the mind will always return to what it knows best: familiar patterns, inherited beliefs, and conditioned responses. Not because it is wrong, but because that is how the mind functions.

Sankalpa Is Not Personal Preference

Sankalpa is often misunderstood as a personal motivation… health, calm, balance, or growth. While these may arise as effects of practice, they are not the purpose of yoga as Patañjali defines it.

In the Yoga Sūtras, the purpose of practice is not the improvement of identity, but freedom from identification itself.

This is why samādhi is presented as the destination at the beginning of the teachings… not as something to attain immediately, but so the practitioner does not confuse the path with the aim.

Sankalpa keeps this destination in view without turning it into a fixation.

Sankalpa and the Mind–Body Relationship

Because attention directs the mind, and the mind directs the body, sankalpa directly shapes how practice is embodied.

When intention is clear:

• the nervous system settles more readily

• effort becomes appropriate rather than forceful

• practices integrate rather than compete

When intention is unclear, the body often reflects this confusion through tension, restlessness, or collapse.

Sankalpa is not imposed on the body. It allows the body to organize itself around truth.

Path and Purpose

Sankalpa reminds us that yoga is not about reaching samādhi as an experience, nor about escaping difficulty.

It is about meeting pleasure and pain, clarity and confusion, movement and stillness, without becoming identified with them.

This is not an easy path, but neither is a life driven entirely by habit, distraction, and unconscious momentum. Yoga requires slowing down. And slowing down allows perception to become transparent and honest.

Sankalpa does not demand perfection.
It asks for remembrance.

A Gentle Note to the Practitioner

If sankalpa feels unclear, that does not mean you are doing something wrong. It means you are at the beginning of discernment.

Sankalpa matures through practice. It is not decided once and for all.

Return to it often.
Let it refine you rather than define you.