What the Tradition Gains When Women Speak
An invitation to the Women’s Gita Circle — and a reflection on why women studying philosophy together still matters.
This Mercury retrograde, I’ve been reclaiming things.
Old intentions. Old parts of myself I had set aside.
Through the choppy waters, the shedding of skins, the explosive beginning of 2026 — the Bhagavad Gita has been steady. It has carried me through in ways I didn’t fully understand until I needed it to.
I know I’m not alone in this.
So I’m picking up an original intention: to create an ongoing, online discussion circle for women who love the Bhagavad Gita. Women who have dedicated hundreds of hours – and thousands of dollars – to their yoga education because they felt called to hold something precious, and now want a place to go deeper together.
This is the Women’s Gita Circle.
Why Now. Why Women.
If you’ve been listening to A Woman’s Gita podcast with Nischala Joy Devi and me, you already know the conversation we’ve been building. This circle is where that conversation continues – in community, in real time, across time zones, drawing together women from both West and East.
There’s something that happens in women-only spaces that I don’t think we talk about enough. I learned this living in an ashram for many years. There were learning times when men and women were together; but for deeper study, everyone appreciated breaking into non-coed groups. I found women to have profound insights that only surfaced when time and space allowed – and that women’s ethical and philosophical metric was uniquely subjective to their lived experience as caregivers. These are voices I want to amplify.
When men are present in yoga philosophy discussions – even wonderful men, even well-meaning men – something shifts in us. We become more careful. More performative. More afraid to get something wrong, to look foolish, to be exposed as not knowing enough.
This isn’t conscious. It’s samskāra. The conditioning of patriarchy runs deep, and it has touched every woman who has ever sat in a philosophy class and wondered whether she belongs there.
The Women’s Gita Circle is a different kind of room.
Here, I want elder teachers to model something simple and radical: listening. Asking real questions. Not performing certainty. And I want newer teachers and curious practitioners to see what that looks like – to witness women getting it, women working to carry this tradition forward, women doing the same work of caring for others, tending their bodies, and trying to ensure the welfare of the world in their own small corner.
A Note on Lineage
Before our first session on March 16th, I want to say a little about where I’m coming from – because I believe naming our lineage matters. It’s how we understand where our ideas originate.
Yoga found me as a child. My father was a Fulbright scholar who took our family to India in 1974, and there he bathed me in the Ganges on my birthday. I have a clear memory of the specific moment – I know it changed me. India became imprinted in my heart in a way I’ve never fully been able to explain.
After art school, the Grateful Dead, Venice Beach, and punk rock in 1990s Los Angeles, I ended up at an ashram – and had the extraordinary experience of remembering. My life picked up where it had left off at the Ganges.
My guru was called Sri Donato, a Western woman inspired by Yogananda, Aurobindo and the Mother’s Auroville. I spent more than thirty years at her ashram, where I encountered the Yoga Sūtra almost immediately and was completely captivated. I developed a relationship with Krishna that felt as if it spanned lifetimes. The Gita became the anchor that saw me through inspired years as a renunciant, and later challenged me to re-evaluate my dharma.
I lived in the library. I led pūjās, taught meditation, taught yoga philosophy, guided others in the subtle body. It was precious time, with beautiful people.
And then I outgrew it.
Not bitterly — gratefully. The late Bede Griffiths understood that ashrams serve their greatest function when they open outward, as a learning resource for their wider communities. That’s the direction I felt called to go.
I became interested in learning classical yoga, and found my way to Srivatsa Ramaswami at Loyola Marymount. I completed his Vinyasa Krama teacher training and studied with him for several years – and I continue to study with him when I can. His specialty is the yoga texts: read slowly and carefully in Sanskrit, with the notes from his decades of study with Krishnamacharya close at hand. He shines especially in his treatment of Sāṃkhya philosophy and in his ability to hold the distinctions between Sāṃkhya, Vedānta, and Buddhism with remarkable clarity. I have also appreciated his consistent respect for women students and teachers.
My lineage, then, is this: my family (my father’s academic and philosophical life), my ashram years in the Yogananda tradition, and Mr. Ramaswami. To these I bring the syncretic California sensibility I’ve absorbed my whole life – the Theosophical Society, the devotional, the new age, the academic. I’ve lived all of it.
But at heart, I am a jñāna yogi. An intellectual. I come to the Gita through inquiry, not primarily through devotion – and I say this honestly, because I think many of us are there, and we don’t often see ourselves reflected in how yoga philosophy is taught.
What I can tell you is this: whether I have been deeply devotional, as I was in my ashram years, or more agnostic, as I am now — the Bhagavad Gita has held me through all of it. It has not required me to believe any one thing. It has remained consistent no matter where I stood. That, more than anything, is why I believe in it.
Our First Discussion: Bhagavad Gita 2.47
“You have the right to perform your actions, but you are never entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty.” – tr. Easwaran
We begin with one of the most important and most misused verses in the Gita. How can we better understand this verse when expressed through the voices of women? Women whose work supports the world’s welfare in a thousand unseen acts of care every day. Come ready to question what you think you know.
The first session is free.
The Women’s Gita Circle meets biweekly online. All registered participants receive the replay.
If the Bhagavad Gita has been a companion on your path – or if you’re just beginning to explore it – I hope you’ll join us.
→ Reserve your seat in the Women’s Gita Circle
Already listening to A Woman’s Gita podcast with Kamala and Nischala Joy Devi? Share this with the women in your yoga community who are ready for this conversation.
