There is a moment most practitioners know. You have been told what a practice does — that it balances the brain, that the breath follows the moon, that ten minutes will change your life — and something in you wants to ask: how do we know?

Aṇūṭṭara is written for that moment.

I am a doctoral fellow in the science of yoga, which means working between two rooms that rarely talk to each other. In one, the texts: careful, strange, often astonishingly observant, sometimes plainly wrong. In the other, the laboratory: precise, sometimes narrow, and often unaware that the question it is asking was asked centuries ago. This magazine sits in the doorway between them.

What you will find here

Each issue does three things.

It reads the old texts closely, with the Sanskrit alongside, and asks what each claim actually says before asking whether it is true. This issue begins with the Śiva Svarodaya, a text about which nostril the breath flows through, and what it noticed about the rhythm of the day.

It reports what the research has found, including the studies that disappoint. Every study is linked so you can read it yourself. When the evidence is small, we say so. When a popular claim has been tested and failed, we say that too.

It gives you something to practise, because none of this matters unless it changes what you do on an ordinary morning.

What you will not find

You will not find promises. The practices in these pages are education, not treatment. Some of them help many people; none of them are a solution to a whole life, and a magazine that told you otherwise would be selling something.

Anuttara is often translated as “that which has nothing higher”. I like it for a humbler reason: it is a name for the place questions lead to when you keep asking them honestly. That is where I hope these pages take you.

— Aditi