“Pratyāhāra –
To see without the senses distracting or pulling the mind.”
– TKV Desikachar

“Pratyāhāra means withdrawing from that on which we are feeding.”
– TKV Desikachar Religiousness in Yoga Chapter Eleven Page 152

“Pratyāhāra does not mean we look at an object and say.
‘We are not going to look at that object’.”
– TKV Desikachar Religiousness in Yoga Chapter Eleven Page 153

“If we are completely absorbed in the breath in Prāṇāyāma,
automatically there is Pratyāhāra.”
– TKV Desikachar Religiousness in Yoga Chapter Eleven Page 153

“Amongst other roles Ujjāyī is a breathing technique to
facilitate the ability to remain in the doorway of awareness,
neither going in and introverting when tempted by the manoeuvring of the mind,
nor going out and extraverting when tempted by the shimmering of the senses.”

“Pratyāhāra is not feeding the tendency of the Citta to automatically form a positive, negative, or neutral identification with whatever stimuli the senses present to it. From that we can begin to understand how their external gathering activities stimulate our conscious and especially, unconscious choices.

From this we can begin to understand how the impact of this sensory process can lead us to travel in different directions and trigger different levels of response, often without us being really conscious of how deeply their input stimulates our psychic activities.

From these responses there will be the inevitable re-actions, again quite possibly unconscious and multilevelled, according to our psychic history in terms of our memory, habit patternings and deeper memory processes.

From those initial insights we can begin to understand and interact in how we can resist unconsciously slipping into the trance states that can so often culminate with the Kleśa manifesting fully in the entrancing dance of Udārā Rāga, or Udārā Dveṣa, or Udārā Abhiniveśa, the profligate children of Avidyā.”

– Commentary on Yoga Sūtra Chapter Two verse 54