Chapter 6, Dhyana Yoga, is the Bhagavad Gita's most sustained treatment of contemplative practice. Where the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali codify the eightfold path in aphorisms, Krishna gives Arjuna a practitioner's manual — where to sit, how to hold the body, what to do with a wandering mind, and how to recognise the fruit of the work.
The Gita is realistic. Krishna concedes that the mind is 'restless, turbulent, powerful, and obstinate — as hard to master as the wind' (6.34). He does not pretend the work is easy. His response is the twin practice of abhyasa (steady effort) and vairagya (dispassion) — a formulation that Patanjali would later adopt almost verbatim. The meditator is asked to withdraw from sense-objects, sit erect, hold the gaze between the brows, and quiet the breath, until the mind — 'like a lamp in a windless place' (6.19) — burns steady.
But Dhyana Yoga is not for ascetics only. Krishna is clear that meditation is inseparable from moderation in all things: 'Yoga is not for one who eats too much or too little, sleeps too much or too little' (6.16). The middle path — measured food, measured rest, measured recreation — is the substrate on which the still mind is built. And when stillness arrives, the meditator 'sees the Self in all beings and all beings in the Self' (6.29) — the very fruit that Jnana and Bhakti also promise, reached now by the doorway of silence.
Read these verses as a sequence: the seat, the posture, the practice, the obstacle, the remedy, the fruit.