Dhriti, the Yoga of Steadiness

Dhriti is the eighth nityayoga, and its name means steadiness, firmness, and resolve. It is classed among the auspicious yogas, favourable for undertakings that call for constancy and perseverance and for matters requiring a firm foundation. Reckoned from the summed longitude of Sun and Moon divided into twenty-seven parts, it advances as the lights draw apart. In the panchanga it lends its steadying quality to the reckoning of an auspicious moment, one of the five daily limbs consulted for muhurta. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition; the underlying reality is the combined motion of the two luminaries, whose summed longitude sweeps through the twenty-seven yogas over the course of a lunar month.

Dhriti, steadiness or firm resolve, is also used in classical Sanskrit ethical and dramatic theory as the name of a specific mental quality, the fortitude that allows a person to bear hardship or temptation without wavering, sometimes listed among the qualities an ideal hero or a disciplined practitioner is expected to cultivate. The yoga's association with constancy and perseverance draws on this established sense of the word rather than inventing a new meaning for astrological purposes, and dhriti in this ethical, non-astrological sense appears independently across a wide range of classical Sanskrit philosophical and literary texts, well outside any calendrical context.