What the Bhagavad Gita actually says about how dharma survives

Nischaladevi and I have just begun Chapter Four of the Gita on the podcast — the chapter where Krishna speaks of the Avatāra. This essay grows from that conversation.

“A huge amount of the important work is done by nice ladies. And I think a lot of people … want social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara or something like that. And so the fact that nice ladies actually change the world, maybe it’s about the fact that changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war.”

Rebecca Solnit said this in a recent New York Times interview. Liz Bucar, writing about it, named what Solnit was doing as theology — reaching, without translation, without apology, for the oldest frameworks we have for understanding how the world actually gets better.

I thought immediately of the yoga community. Of the women who have been carrying this tradition for decades — in strip-mall studios, in community centers, in living rooms on Zoom — holding the rooms, tending the practice, transmitting something they could feel was profound without always having the philosophical language to say precisely what. Without recognition. Without Sanskrit. Doing the work the Gitā describes as central, while the hero myth looked elsewhere.

The Bhagavad Gitā has been carried, largely, by nice ladies. Yoga teachers in studios. Women who learned the poses and the breath and some of the philosophy, who held the rooms and tracked the energy and made the spaces safe – often without being given the intellectual tools of the tradition they were transmitting. Without recognition. Without Sanskrit. On the margins of the battlefield, as I wrote in a previous essay, doing the work the text itself describes as central, while the hero myth looked elsewhere for its avatars.

I’ve been teaching this text for decades. I’ve been saying some version of what Solnit said for most of that time. What I want to do here is show you where the Gitā says it first – in a single verb most translations pass over quickly.

The verb the hero myth hides

Here is Chapter 4, verse 8:

paritrāṇāya sādhūnāṃ vināśāya ca duṣkṛtām dharma-saṃsthāpanārthāya sambhavāmi yugé yugé

“Whenever there is decay of righteousness, O Bhārata, and there is exaltation of unrighteousness, then I Myself come forth.” – tr. Annie Besant

We are in the Kaliyuga. The one-legged age. The tradition imagines dharma as a table standing on four legs – truth, compassion, austerity, generosity. In the first age, all four legs hold. As the cycle turns, one leg at a time gives way. Here, in the age we inhabit, dharma stands on one. Anyone paying attention knows what that feels like right now.

And into this age, the text says: I arise.

The question is how. And the answer is in a verb most translations pass over quickly.

Sambhavāmi.

I come into being. I arise. I manifest. The word is sam — together, completely — combined with bhū: to become, to be born, to take form from within conditions. This is not “I descend from above.” This is not the superhero arriving from outside the story. Sambhavāmi is the divine emerging within history — taking form through the age, through its people, through the communities that make themselves available to it.

One way to think about this: sambhavāmi is the divine as the conscience of humanity. Not separate from history, surveying it from a distance. Present within it, arising through the ones who refuse to look away.

This is what Annie Besant understood when she read the Gita as the story of the Logos — not a personal God who periodically visits creation, but the animating principle by which the world continuously comes into being. She wrote that the Avatāra “descends” — but descends is the language we use when we think of the Supreme as far-off, when truly it is the all-pervasive Life in which we live. To the outer eye it looks like a coming down. But the Avatāra is also the Īśhvara of the human Spirit, the Supreme Self of whom the individual spirit is a portion, an aṃśa. The divine presence on Kurukṣetra, she argued, operated through a farsighted, unswerving will – guided by a vision of history that divine eyes held past and future as one eternal present.

Sambhavāmi, then, is not the arrival of a savior.

It is a description of how dharma has always survived.

The avatar the hero myth misses

Because the hero archetype lives not just in culture but in our own minds, we tend to picture Krishna’s avatāra as singular. One divine figure, one body, one battlefield. But Krishna in the Gita is never alone.

He arrives with Arjuna. He is embedded in the Yādavas — the community of his birth, his people, his belonging. He is the Krishna of the Gopīs and Gopālas, the cowherd community of Vṛndāvan who knew him before the philosophy, before the battlefield, in the dailiness of tending and devotion. He is inseparable from Balarāma, his brother, the other face of the same force.

The avatāra, read carefully, is always relational. Always communal. The divine arises into relationship, not above it.

Thich Nhat Hanh said it in our own century: the next Buddha will be the sangha. The community of practitioners. Not the teacher at the front of the room. The room itself.

The Gitā said it first, in the verb sambhavāmi. Coming into being – through the ones who showed up. Through the nice ladies. Through the people on the margins of the battlefield who were never listed in the roll call of warriors but without whom the tradition would not have survived the night.

Age after age.

When the hero drops his bow

There is a moment in this text that the hero myth almost always misses – and it may be the Gitā’s most important turn.

Arjuna, the hero, the archer, the one the whole tradition has been building toward, steps out of his role entirely. He surveys the battlefield. He sees his teachers, his grandfathers, his friends arrayed on both sides. And he is overwhelmed by kṛpayā.

Compassion.

Not fear. Not weakness. Not – despite what Krishna’s first sharp words will call it – unmanliness. The Sanskrit names it precisely: a warm-hearted, immediate, embodied concern for the suffering ahead. He sees it clearly before anyone else names it. He cannot pretend otherwise. The hero drops his bow.

And in that collapse, the Gita’s real teaching becomes possible.

Kṛpayā is not a detour from the argument. It is the argument’s beginning – the crack through which eighteen chapters of philosophy enter. What follows is addressed not to the warrior standing tall, but to the one who faltered. Who felt what was at stake. Who could not look away.

Kṛpayā is the turn toward compassion – the moment of being moved. What the broader yoga tradition gives us, in the practice of karuṇā, is the discipline that follows: one of the four brahma-vihāras, the “divine abodes” shared between yoga and Buddhist mind-training. Karuṇā is not a feeling you hope to have on good days. It is something you cultivate – steadfast relational attentiveness, the capacity to remain present with suffering without being consumed by it, and to act from that presence. You train it the way you train concentration in meditation. Slowly. Repeatedly. Over a lifetime.

The Gitā opens with the moment the hero is broken open by kṛpayā. The tradition asks us to make that opening into a practice.

This is not the soft margin of yoga. It is its spine. And it is, as Solnit says, exactly what changing the world actually looks like – less like the French Revolution, more like showing up.

The longer story

Liz Bucar, writing about Solnit’s interview, named what Solnit was doing as theology without knowing it. Solnit, she wrote, has a method for sustaining hope: holding the longer arc of history, reading backlash as evidence of how much ground has actually been won, insisting we are more powerful than we feel. That’s a lot like how religious communities have carried hope across generations of suffering. They hold the longer story when the present moment is too dark to bear.

Annie Besant – nineteenth-century reformer, theologian, suffragist, and one of the first Western women to take the Gita seriously as philosophy – would agree. Reading the battlefield of Kurukṣetra as world history, she argued that the one who understands the Gita this way can stand unshaken amid the crash of breaking worlds — because what looks like catastrophe on one plane is, on another, the preparation for what comes next. To the divine eyes she described as Logos, past and future were not distant. They were one eternal present.

Vandana Shiva – physicist, ecofeminist, and a reader of the Gita who has said that her tradition taught her how to act without being destroyed by the results – put it differently:

“We must continue to create a new world, seed by seed, person by person, community by community, until this planet is embraced in a circle of resurgent love and resurgent life.”

Solnit, Bucar, Besant, Shiva. Four women, across centuries of crisis, arriving at the same place: hold the longer arc. Read the backlash as evidence of ground won. The tradition has survived before – not through institutions, not through heroes, but through the people who kept carrying it.

This is not optimism. Optimism claims to know how it ends. What the Gita holds is something harder and more honest: the refusal to let the Kaliyuga be the only thing that’s real. The knowledge that we have been here before. That dharma has stood on one leg before. That the corrupt have taken control before. And that the tradition survived – not in institutions, not in temples, not through heroes – but through the people who kept carrying it. Who kept arising.

Sambhavāmi.

The women who have been doing this work for decades without recognition have been part of this arising. The ones on the margins of the battlefield, doing the work the text calls central. The ones for whom changing the world has always looked more like caregiving than war.

They have been sambhavāmi – the Logos – all along. That is not peripheral to the tradition. It is how the tradition survives.

How would this change the way we live?

If the avatāra is not a singular hero descending to save us, but the conscience of humanity arising through communities willing to do the work – what does that ask of us?

It asks us to take our practice seriously, not as self-improvement but as preparation. To understand karuṇā not as a feeling but as a discipline. To show up for the sangha not because it is comfortable but because the sangha is, in this reading, where the divine actually lives.

It asks us to read backlash as evidence of ground won rather than ground lost – to hold the longer arc when the present moment is too heavy to bear.

And it asks us to stop waiting for the hero. To recognize that we have been sambhavāmi all along — coming into being, taking form within the conditions of our age, arising through each other.

The Gita was waiting for us to read it this way.

---

The Women’s Gita Circle meets this month to read Chapter 13 – where Krishna describes himself as the eyes of all beings, the hands of all beings. Not above creation. As creation. It is where the argument this essay has been building finds its fullest expression in the text.

If something here opened a question, the circle is where we follow it. We gather biweekly on Zoom – women reading the Gita together, in Sanskrit and in English, with full awareness of what the text has been used to argue and deep faith in what it actually contains. The conversation is the practice. Register here.

The side door is always open.

A Woman’s Gita is a podcast and ongoing project by Kamala Rose and Nischala Joy Devi – a verse-by-verse reading of the Bhagavad Gita by and for women practitioners. This essay grows from our recent conversation on Chapter 4, verses 8–11. You can listen here.

A woman’s passage into the second half of life — and how the Bhagavad Gita meets us there

There is a moment in every woman’s life when she realizes she is no longer becoming. She is living inside what she has become. And the question shifts — from What more can I achieve? to How did I get here? And why did I care so much about what anyone thought?

This happens quietly, in her own interior space — what the Gita calls the kṣetra, the field. And something in her knows: the field has changed.

It might arrive as hot flashes. A diagnosis. The particular loneliness of an empty nest. However it comes, everything suddenly feels different. We are no longer creating a life. We are living inside the one we have already made — and now we are facing ourselves.

This, I want to suggest, is a woman’s version of the crisis Arjuna feels on the battlefield of Kurukṣetra. He stands on his own ancestral field, paralyzed by the weight of what is being asked of him. Women rarely meet this moment as soldiers. We meet it as mothers whose children are grown, as women whose bodies are changing and can sometimes disappoint us, as people who have spent decades building a life and now find themselves standing inside it — conflicted, uncertain what to do next.

The dharmakṣetra–kurukṣetra metaphor meets us here as it met Arjuna: when both our inner and outer worlds stop making sense. The question of the right thing to do arises within the complicated field of family, relationship, and daily life, and the confusion that follows is called viṣāda — despair. A crisis of meaning.

The Gita meets us here — in disappointment, in the search for wise action. For some, this stage arrives as something like liberation: finally free of the need to prove anything. For others, it feels far less certain — we are asked to make choices without the guarantees that once oriented everything.

And this is often exactly when women feel most unmoored from their yoga practice. The studios are too hot. Too fast. Too demanding. The body that carried us through so much simply won’t do that class anymore. For me, it came after several surgeries — a body that had been through real campaigns and needed something different.

If you are reading this, you likely know exactly what I mean.

This is where practice has to meet us where we actually are. And the yoga you fell in love with is capable of meeting you here — it was designed for it.

Srivatsa Ramaswami, who has been my teacher for many years, teaches that this phase of life calls for a genuine shift in practice: less jumping, more prāṇāyāma; less physical demand, more interior work. The body still needs tending — core strength, range of motion, care for the changing kṣetra. But now the practice opens inward: bandha, mantra, concentration, meditation. And above all, according to Ramaswami and his teacher Krishnamacharya, we need the meaning that philosophy offers. Yoga philosophy is not decoration here — it is guidance. It holds us through uncertainty in a way that ambition never could.

The Bhagavad Gita, read this way, becomes something like a trusted companion for the second half of life. When we open it, we find Arjuna on his field — and later, Krishna uses that same word, kṣetra, for the body itself. The body as field. Our field. The one that has known surgeries and injuries, mountaintops and children. The one that has carried us through every single day of our lives.

This is the field we now inhabit differently — skillfully, and with the help of a tradition that anticipated this passage.

The Gita does not remove uncertainty. It teaches us how to stand inside it. It offers what the first half of life could not: a way of being that is not organized around success and failure, but around wisdom — around the skill of letting go of what we thought it would be. In Chapter 13, the Gita names the kṣetrajña — the knower of the field, the one who observes our changing nature.

The first half of life is pravṛtti — building, gathering, crafting a life. The second is nivṛtti — like a careful gardener, choosing what to prune so the next cycle can grow well. Yoga’s wisdom tradition was made for this path. These teachings can hold us steady, even in the most profound change.

---

If this reflection meets you in a place that feels familiar — if you are finding yourself standing in a changed field, asking different questions — you are not alone in it.

This is the kind of inquiry we return to together in the Women’s Gita Circle: not as a lecture, but as a shared space of reading, reflection, and conversation. A place where the text is not something distant, but something we learn to think with — slowly, in real time, and in the company of other women walking a similar path.

And if you’re newer to the Gita, or looking for a more personal way in, you might begin with the Dharma Flower quiz — a quiet entry point into how these teachings are already alive in your own life.

Wherever you begin, the field is already here.

Arjuna’s Collapse, the Stirring of Compassion, and What Chapter One of the Bhagavad Gita Actually Says

Most people who know the Bhagavad Gita begin with Chapter 2.

This is understandable. Chapter 1 is long, formally structured, and on its surface reads like a military inventory — the naming of warriors, the blowing of conches, the arrangement of armies. It does not announce itself as philosophy. And so readers in a hurry, or teachers working from a condensed curriculum, often begin where Krishna begins to teach: at 2.11, where the real argument seems to start.

In fact, I often recommend that beginners — especially those drawn to the Gita’s teachings on meditation and the inner life — start in Chapter Six, where the text meets you quietly and lets the philosophy work on you before you encounter the dramatic overture of Chapter One. There is wisdom in entering through the side door.

But something crucial is lost when we skip Chapter One entirely. Something that changes the meaning of everything that follows.

That something is kṛpayā — compassion. And it appears, quietly and precisely, at 1.27. Before Arjuna puts down his bow. Before Krishna says a single word. Before the Gita’s great philosophical machinery begins to turn.

I want to walk through Chapter One carefully — verse by verse, in its actual sequence — because for women coming to this text for the first time, the drama of this opening chapter is both the most human part of the Gita and the most consistently misread.

The Scene Is Set By the Wrong Person

The Bhagavad Gita’s first word is dharmakṣetre — on the field of dharma. But the first voice we hear is not Arjuna’s. It is not Krishna’s. It is not even Sanjaya, the narrator whose divine sight allows him to witness and report everything that happens on the field.

The first voice is Dhritarashtra’s.

Dhritarashtra is blind. He is the father of the Kauravas — the side the Gita will ultimately position as adharmic, corrupt— and he is sitting at a distance from the field, unable or unwilling to go there himself. He asks Sanjaya: tell me what is happening.

This detail is not incidental. The Gita opens with a figure of avoidance — a man who cannot see and will not go to the field, asking someone else to witness for him. Before a single philosophical teaching has been offered, the text has already shown us what it looks like to not look directly at what is unfolding in front of you.

Sanjaya then sets the scene at 1.2, and at 1.3 we hear from Duryodhana — the Kaurava prince, the primary antagonist of the Mahabharata. He speaks until 1.11, naming the warriors on both sides, rallying his forces, directing his men to surround and protect Bhīṣma — the patriarch, the mutual grandfather of both the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas, the man both sides share and both sides are about to destroy.

This matters for women reading the Gita. The first extended speech in the text belongs to a man marshaling power, naming allies, protecting a patriarch. It reads, frankly, like a boardroom. Or a Senate chamber. Or a list of names you recognize from the news.

The Conches and the Chariot

At 1.12, Sanjaya takes over the narration again, describing the blowing of conches and the thunder of battle drums — the ancient sounds of war being formally declared. And then, at 1.14, something shifts in the imagery:

Then, Krishna and Arjuna, seated in a magnificent chariot drawn by white horses, blew their divine conches.

White horses. A magnificent chariot. Two figures — one divine, one human — side by side.

This is the image the Gita has been building toward. Everything before it — Dhritarashtra’s blindness, Duryodhana’s calculation, the naming of warriors, the sound of drums — has been establishing the outer field. Now we arrive at the inner one. The chariot is not only a vehicle. In the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, the body itself is a chariot, the intellect the charioteer, the self the passenger. The Gita is already thinking in multiple registers at once.

Arjuna Asks to See

At 1.21, we hear Arjuna speak for the first time:

“Please take my chariot to the middle of both armies, so that I may look at the warriors arrayed for battle, whom I must fight in this great combat. I desire to see those who have come here to fight on the side of evil.”

This is important. Arjuna asks to look. He is not naive — he knows what is on the field. He has named the conflict himself. He uses the word evil. He is, at this moment, a warrior in full possession of his role and his purpose.

Krishna moves the chariot to the center at 1.24. At 1.25, he says simply: behold these Kurus gathered here.

And at 1.26, Sanjaya tells us what Arjuna sees:

Arjuna could see stationed in both armies — his fathers, grandfathers, teachers, maternal uncles, brothers, cousins, sons, nephews, grand-nephews, friends, fathers-in-law, and well-wishers.

Read that list slowly. This is not an abstraction. Every relationship that has structured Arjuna’s entire life is arrayed on this field, on one side or the other, waiting for him to act.

The Stirring of Compassion

At 1.27, something happens that the Gita names precisely:

Arjuna was overwhelmed with compassion — kṛpayā — and with deep sorrow.

Kṛpayā. Compassion. Not fear. Not cowardice. Not weakness. The Sanskrit word the text uses at this pivotal moment — the word that names what Arjuna feels when he sees clearly what this battle will cost — is the word for compassion.

This is the hidden hinge of the entire Gita, and we lose it almost immediately in the rush to get to Krishna’s teaching.

It is worth pausing on the translation. Kṛpayā is sometimes rendered as pity — and while pity is not wrong exactly, it flattens the word considerably. Pity maintains a distance between the one who feels and the one who suffers. It looks down. The Charter for Compassion defines compassion as “a warm-hearted concern for the suffering of others, with the sincere wish to alleviate it.” That is closer to what is happening in Arjuna at 1.27. He is not pitying his kinsmen from a remove. He is undone by what he sees. The suffering ahead is not abstract to him — it is his teachers, his grandfathers, his friends. His concern is warm, immediate, and accompanied by a genuine wish that things could be otherwise.

That is kṛpayā. And it is the ground from which the Gita’s deepest teaching grows.

It helps to understand something of the Gita’s wider purpose — a subject I’ll explore more fully in another essay, but worth touching here to give kṛpayā its full context. Religious historian Karen Armstrong has written about the threads the Gita was weaving together for people living in India at this time: the urgent need for release from the endless cycle of karma and rebirth; the longing for the Divine not as an abstract principle but as a personal liberator; and something newer and more politically demanding — a concern that extended beyond one’s own in-group. This last thread was not incidental. The Gita was in part addressing princes who governed empires — men whose decisions affected not just their kin but entire populations. The text was helping build a social contract, asking its audience to expand the circle of moral concern.

Compassion is “a warm-hearted concern for the suffering of others, with the sincere wish to alleviate it.”

Charter for Compassion

Kṛpayā — Arjuna’s compassion at 1.27 — is where that expansion begins. He does not grieve only for his side. He sees both armies. He sees the suffering ahead for everyone on that field. His heart breaks open not tribally but universally.

This is not weakness. In the context of what the Gita is trying to do — philosophically, ethically, civilizationally — it is the most important moment in Chapter One. The crack in Arjuna’s warrior identity is precisely the opening through which a wider teaching can enter.

The Argument Arjuna Makes

At 1.28, he speaks:

“Seeing my own kinsmen arrayed for battle here and intent on killing each other, my limbs are giving way and my mouth is drying up.”

From 1.29 through 1.35, he elaborates: “I do not foresee how any good can come from killing my own kinsmen in this battle.” He is not refusing to fight because he is afraid. He is refusing because he can see the consequences — the suffering, the grief, the destruction of families, the unraveling of the social fabric. He is making a philosophical and ethical argument. He is asking, with genuine urgency: what kind of victory is this?

At 1.40 through 1.46, he goes further — describing how this action risks adharma on a cosmic scale. The destruction of family lineages. The collapse of ancestral duties. The unraveling of the world.

This is not a man having a random panic attack. This is a man in a genuine crisis of conscience — caught between two forms of dharma that cannot both be honored. His kula dharma — his duty to family, to kinship, to the web of relationship — is in direct conflict with his kṣatriya dharma — his duty as a warrior, to fight what is adharmic, to protect the order of the world.

He cannot do both. And he knows it.

The Bow Is Put Down

At 1.47, Sanjaya closes the chapter:

“Speaking thus, Arjuna cast aside his bow and arrows, and sank into the seat of his chariot, his mind in distress and overwhelmed with grief.”

At 2.1, Sanjaya completes the vignette: Arjuna’s eyes are filled with tears.

This is viṣāda — often translated as despondency or grief, sometimes as anguish. Chapter One is formally titled Arjuna Viṣāda Yoga — the yoga of Arjuna’s grief. That it is called a yoga at all is significant. Even this collapse — especially this collapse — is part of the path.

Krishna’s Response — And Its Difficulty

And then Krishna speaks.

What he says at 2.2 and 2.3 is worth sitting with carefully, without rushing past it:

“My dear Arjuna, how has this delusion overcome you in this hour of peril? It is not befitting an honorable person. It leads not to the higher abodes, but to disgrace. Do not yield to this unmanliness. Give up such petty weakness of heart and arise, O vanquisher of enemies.”

Unmanliness. Disgrace. Petty weakness.

I want to be honest with you: this is a difficult passage. And I do not think the difficulty should be explained away.

Krishna is speaking to Arjuna in the language of kshatriya culture — the language of honor, of martial identity, of what it means to be a man of Arjuna’s caste and training. One reading is that he is meeting Arjuna exactly where he is, using the vocabulary most likely to reach him in this moment, before pivoting to a far deeper teaching. That is plausible. It is arguably what happens.

But the words are still there. Unmanliness. And the compassion — kṛpayā — that the text named so carefully at 1.27 has disappeared from Krishna’s framing entirely. What Arjuna felt when he saw the suffering ahead of him is now being called delusion. Weakness. Disgrace.

The Gita contains this tension. I do not think we serve the text — or ourselves — by resolving it too quickly. Reading the Gita honestly means reading it with both hands: the profound philosophical teaching it is building toward, and the cultural context it could not entirely transcend.

Arjuna pushes back at 2.4: “How can I shoot arrows at those deserving of my respect?” And at 2.7 he says plainly: “I am confused about my duty.”

At 2.9, Sanjaya tells us Arjuna puts down his bow a second time and refuses to fight.

And then, at 2.11, Krishna begins to teach in earnest.

Why Compassion Matters

Here is what I keep returning to: the Gita’s great philosophical teaching about the ātman — the eternal self, the witness beyond body and mind — arrives not in spite of Arjuna’s compassion but because of it. It is the opening that kṛpayā creates. His heart breaks open on that field. He sees suffering clearly and cannot unfeel it. And that crack — that inability to simply do the warrior thing and fight — is what makes him available to teaching he would never have needed otherwise.

Krishna will go on to offer one of the most luminous accounts of the self, of action, of liberation, of devotion in all of human literature. But it is Arjuna’s compassion that calls it forth.

For women reading the Gita — women who are so often the ones who see the suffering, who feel the cost of conflict in their bodies before anyone has named it, who ask what kind of victory is this when everyone else is still counting strategy — Chapter One is not the preamble. It is the beginning of the teaching.

Arjuna’s viṣāda is not a problem to be solved. It is the door.

---

The Women’s Gita Circle reads the Bhagavad Gita slowly, carefully, and honestly — in Sanskrit and in English, with full awareness of what the text has been used to argue and deep faith in what it actually contains. We meet biweekly on Zoom, and the circle is free while the community is growing. If this essay opened something in you, the circle is where we continue.

If you are new to the Gita and would like a more structured entry point before joining the circle, I recommend my workshop, The Gita’s Garden: A Beginner’s Way Into the Bhagavad Gita — a gentle, unhurried introduction to one of the world’s great philosophical texts, designed for women who are curious but don’t know where to begin. Details here.

You might also enjoy Your Dharma Flower — a short, Gita-inspired quiz that helps you understand how you naturally meet challenge, responsibility, and change on your path.

It’s a simple way to begin bringing these teachings into your own life.

Take the Dharma Flower quiz here.

The side door is always open.

---

A Note on Translation

The renderings in this essay are my own working summaries, informed by the translations of Eknath Easwaran and Paramahansa Yogananda, as well as ongoing translation work developed in collaboration with Nischala Joy Devi. They are offered as interpretive guides rather than literal translations.

Women’s Dharma, the Ethic of Care, and the Bhagavad Gita’s Battlefield

The personal is political. — Yoko Ono

The Bhagavad Gita opens with a shocking image.

For a spiritual text — one that will go on to offer some of the most luminous philosophical teachings in human literature — it begins in a difficult place. An army assembled. Two sides facing each other across a dusty plain. The blind king Dhritarashtra, seated at a distance, asking his aide to tell him what is happening.

On its surface, it is a scene of war. And for many women encountering this image, it does not immediately feel like an invitation.

We know what is asked of us on battlefields. We feed the soldiers before they go. We tend them when they come back broken. We prepare the bodies of the ones who don’t return. We hold the children. We hold the grief. We hold the whole structure of life together in the background of a story that will not remember us by name.

The Personal Is Political

A few years ago I stood inside Yoko Ono’s retrospective at the Tate in London, and encountered a piece that has not left me.

She called it The Personal Is Political.

On the ceiling: an image of a naked breast, with text inviting the viewer to think of their own mother. On the walls: thousands of written fragments — memories, apologies, odes, manifestos — from people around the world, circling the same recognition: that we were all once held. That someone chose to care for us. That this fact precedes every system of power, every political philosophy, every battlefield named in any sacred text.

Visitors were invited to add their own.

Layer upon layer, the walls filled with testimony. People remembering the most basic thing.

The personal is political. The one who fed you was doing dharmic work. The one who nursed the wounded was on the field. The care network is not the margin of the story. It is the ground the story grows in.

The Field — Inner and Outer

The Gita’s first four words carry everything:

Dharma-kṣetre kuru-kṣetre.

Kṣetra means field. Not battlefield alone — but field in the oldest sense. Tilled ground. Cultivated earth. The place where care shows and neglect shows, where what you bring determines what grows.

The Gita names two fields at once. Dharma-kṣetra — the field of right action. Kuru-kṣetra — the field of lineage, belonging, identity. Both names. Same ground.

This is the first teaching of the Gita: the sacred and the contested are not separate fields.

The battlefield is also your body. The soil you tend is also your interior life.

So the question is already present, before it is ever asked directly:

How are you tending your field?

A field is not passive. It requires attention, labor, and the willingness to act without certainty of outcome. The warrior and the farmer share this relationship to the earth.

This is karma yoga — not as productivity philosophy, but as the oldest human relationship to the ground beneath your feet.

The Gita’s first four words carry everything:

Dharma-kṣetre kuru-kṣetre.

Kṣetra means field. Not battlefield alone — but field in the oldest sense. Tilled ground. Cultivated earth. The place where care shows and neglect shows, where what you bring determines what grows.

The Gita names two fields at once. Dharma-kṣetra — the field of right action. Kuru-kṣetra — the field of lineage, belonging, identity. Both names. Same ground.

This is the first teaching of the Gita: the sacred and the contested are not separate fields.

The battlefield is also your body. The soil you tend is also your interior life.

So the question is already present, before it is ever asked directly:

How are you tending your field?

A field is not passive. It requires attention, labor, and the willingness to act without certainty of outcome. The warrior and the farmer share this relationship to the earth.

This is karma yoga — not as productivity philosophy, but as the oldest human relationship to the ground beneath your feet.

Zooming Out: Who Is on This Field?

Chapter 1 of the Gita reads like an inventory. Warriors named. Lineages listed. Conches blown. The dharma of the kshatriya — the warrior class — established and celebrated.

A roll call of power.

I cannot read it now without hearing something beneath it.

The listing of names — the administrators, the collaborators, the architects of systems that shape ordinary life — the networks of power whose names we now recognize as patriarchy — I hear them in Chapter 1. The men who run the visible stage of conflict, whose decisions define the conditions the rest of us live inside.

This is not a distortion of the text. It is the text doing what it has always done: meeting us in our actual moment and asking what we will do.

But the chapter makes something else clear:

we are not in that list.

To find women in this scene, we have to widen the frame.

There we find everyone else. The ones cooking, tending, nursing, grieving, rebuilding. The ones who hold what war breaks.

These are not minor characters. They are the majority of the world.

So the question becomes:

What is the dharma of those never given a place on the field?

The Second Sex and the Ethic of Care

Carol Gilligan named what she called an ethic of care — a moral framework rooted in relationship, responsibility, and the maintenance of connection.

Women have practiced this for millennia without it being named as philosophy.

The Gita’s battlefield operates through a different ethic — duty, honor, righteous action. Do your duty. Fight the good fight. Release the outcome.

This is not wrong. But it is incomplete.

Simone de Beauvoir named women “the second sex” — not second in value, but second in the story’s grammar.

What the Gita offers, I think, is not the warrior’s dharma but something more radical:

The recognition that the ātman — the witnessing self — is the same in every body.

Not male. Not kshatriya. Not defined by role.

And from this recognition, we can say clearly what the text itself leaves implicit:

The ethic of care is dharma.

To regulate a nervous system in a collapsing world.

To tend to relationship.

To hold continuity where systems fail.

This is not peripheral work.

This is the field.

The Battlefield Women Actually Live In

For most women, the battlefield appears not in combat but in relationship.

In care networks — the intricate, often invisible webs of responsibility that structure daily life.

These are our kṣetra. Our fields of belonging.

And over time, they can become strained. Imbalanced. Exhausted.

We find ourselves where Arjuna found himself — uncertain, overwhelmed, unable to locate our center.

In the second half of life especially, the field shifts.

Bodies change. Identities dissolve. Roles fall away.

Sometimes the body itself becomes the most contested territory.

And here the Gita speaks directly:

Your body is a kṣetra.

It is ground that requires tending.

It is not an obstacle. It is the field.

What Krishna Says First

When Krishna speaks, he does not offer comfort. He offers clarity.

Aśocyān anvaśocas tvaṃ prajñā-vādāṃś ca bhāṣase.

You are grieving for those who should not be grieved for.

This is not a dismissal of grief. It is an invitation to look more carefully.

What, beneath what has changed, remains?

The ātman is not above the field. It is the capacity to remain present within it.

To act from clarity rather than confusion.

So the question becomes:

Where, in the middle of everything that is changing, can you locate that in yourself?

This Is Your Field

Dharma prevails in the Mahabharata.

And the women who tended the wounded, buried the dead, and held the world together through and after the war — they are part of that victory.

The triumph of dharma does not belong only to the warrior.

It belongs to everyone who showed up on the field.

We are not on the margins of this story.

We are the ground it grows in.

The ethic of care is not a consolation for those who were not given the hero’s role.

It is a necessary dharma — one the Gita’s philosophy fully supports, even when its cultural frame did not.

We read it with both hands: the tradition as it was given, and the truth it contains that exceeds it.

Dharma-kṣetre kuru-kṣetre.

The sacred field and the contested one are the same ground.

Tend it carefully.

You are both the farmer and the field.

Invitation

If this opened something in you — a question, a recognition, a place where the Gita meets your life — the Women’s Gita Circle is where we continue.

We gather biweekly on Zoom. Women reading the Gita together, in Sanskrit and in English, with full awareness of its history and deep trust in what it offers.

This is a philosophical conversation, not a lecture.

Come as you are. Bring what is real.

And catch my dialogue with Nischala Joy Devi on A Woman’s Gita podcast.

I went to the mountains because I didn’t know what else to do.

Nearly three decades of monastic life. Decades of service, study, devotion — the kind that soaks through to the bones until you can no longer tell the difference between vocation and self. I had given everything I had to give, and somewhere in the giving, I had lost the thread of why I began. The word for this, in Sanskrit, is parikhinna — exhausted, worn through. I didn’t know that word for what I was feeling then. I only knew I had to stop.

So I went to the mountains with my dog Lhasa, the jindo who had found me at my worst hour and who I always credited with saving me. We began, the two of us, sitting outside in the evenings listening to the forest. That was enough, for a while. Just that.

This is the story of how the Bhagavad Gita stopped being a text I taught—and became a way I learned to live.

---

Then COVID came, and the world went quiet, and the land started talking.

There was a particular piece of ground at the hermitage — sloped, neglected, full of possibility. Something about it had been speaking to me since I arrived, and when everything else closed down, I finally listened. I would make this into a garden. I would make this into Vrindavan — that sacred grove where Krishna played, where everything was alive and abundant and shot through with the divine.

I dug in. Literally. I moved earth, turned soil, planted seeds. It was not, in retrospect, the most sensible project for someone who needed rest. But the work had a quality that rest couldn’t provide: it was honest. The land told you immediately whether what you were doing was right. It didn’t flatter. It didn’t defer. It had no investment in your self-image. If you didn’t water, things died. If you chose the wrong location, things failed. If you brought your attention and your care consistently, something extraordinary happened — the land came alive under your hands and began, in its way, to give back.

At the same time, I was studying the Bhagavad Gita as though my life depended on it. Which, in a way, it did.

I had been teaching the Gita for years — or trying to. Trying to get to the teacher trainings, conferences, and lectures beyond the ashram walls into the wider yoga community. What stopped me cold, again and again, was something I kept hearing when I would meet yoga teachers in person:

“Teach the Gita? What? They didn’t do that in my training.” Bright, devoted practitioners, genuinely hungry for depth, who had never been given a way into the most important philosophical text in their tradition.

Not because they weren’t capable—but because no one had translated the text into something livable.

This troubled me more than I knew how to say.

So in the mountains, with the garden and the Gita side by side, I started to understand something I had been circling for years: the text and the land were teaching the same thing. The Gita’s buddhi yoga — the foundational yoga of discernment, of seeing clearly from a bird’s-eye view before you act — was exactly what any good gardener does before touching a shovel. Where does the light fall? What does this soil want? What is already here that I haven’t noticed yet? The Gita’s karma yoga — the yoga of action offered without attachment to results — was exactly what it felt like to mulch the beds in autumn knowing the frost was coming anyway. You plant the seed. You cooperate with the rain and the sun. You do your part, and you relinquish the rest.

The garden was the Gita. The Gita was the garden. And both, slowly, were teaching me to live.

---

Then the storm came.

They were calling it the storm of the century, and they were right. Lhasa and I came home just ahead of it, and through that first night, the snow fell and kept falling. By morning, three feet. By afternoon, six. By the following morning, nine feet of snow had buried the fence, covered the garden entirely, and sealed the door. The grocery store collapsed under the weight of it. Help didn’t come — not for nearly a month. It was, for our small mountain community, a natural disaster that stripped everything down to what was true.

The truest and most costly thing was that Lhasa died. She had fallen ill the night the storm began, and I could not get her to a veterinarian. I sat with her through it. Then I was alone.

Grief does something that nothing else does. It removes the decorative layers — the stories you’ve been telling yourself about who you are, what you’re doing, what you’re building — and leaves only the essential. In that month of snow and loss, I read the Gita’s eighth chapter over and over, the one that speaks of the migration of souls, of what carries forward and what releases. I thought about Lhasa returning to the garden. I thought about what I was holding onto.

I had, in the months before the storm, been quietly making peace with giving up my teaching life. No one is looking for what I have to offer. This is mine — my study, my practice, my relationship with the text. I had been talking myself into retirement. Into smallness. Into the very thing the Gita most consistently warns against: the abandonment of dharma dressed up as humility.

The storm ended that conversation.

When the snow finally melted and the garden woke up again — aching, changed, alive — two Akitas arrived in my life, Jude and Stevie, rescued in the aftermath of the same storm. And I knew, with the clarity that grief sometimes bestows, that I had to come back to teaching. Not because I was ready. Not because the path was clear. But because it was mine, and I had spent long enough pretending otherwise.

---

Leaving wasn’t a single decision. It was a series of small, irreversible ones.

What followed was years of learning — how to leave a community I had belonged to for three decades, how to build something independent, how to step from nivritti (the inward-turning path I had lived for so long) toward pravritti (engagement, action, the world). Every lesson the Gita had given me in the garden, I had to apply now to my own life: watch the light before you dig. Know the bigger picture before you act. Do what you can do, offer it, release the rest.

I came to Louisville. To a new city, a new garden, a new beginning.

I am still at the threshold. Still watching the light, reading the ecosystem, learning the land before I touch a shovel. This is buddhi yoga. This is where every cycle begins.

---

A Different Way to Understand the Bhagavad Gita

Gita’s Garden is what I learned on that land and in that loss. It’s a framework for understanding the Bhagavad Gita — not as a battlefield text about a warrior’s duty, but as a gardener’s text about the cycles of cultivation, the nature of right action, the practice of love, the sharpening of wisdom. Four yogas, four seasons: buddhi as the bird’s-eye view of autumn, karma as the active work of spring, bhakti as the abundance of summer, jnana as the deepening discernment of harvest.

The Gita was designed to meet you exactly where you are. You don’t have to start at the beginning and wonder why everyone is on a battlefield. When you open the Gita, you are already in a garden. You are already in a place of cultivation — a place designed for you to flourish, if you’re willing to do the consistent, imperfect, ongoing work of tending it.

That is what I am here to offer. Not the Gita as performance or credential or inspiration-content. The Gita as the text that stood by me through exhaustion and exile and loss, that taught me to see the land clearly, that gave me a language for what was happening when my dog died and the snow wouldn’t stop and the silence of the mountain became, finally, the only honest teacher I had left.

It’s a very practical text, once you know how to read it.

This became the foundation for a workshop I’m opening this spring: The Gita’s Garden.

A way of entering the Bhagavad Gita not as something to decode – but as something to live.

---

I’m opening that doorway this spring.

Gita’s Garden is 90-minute workshop offering a clear, lived way into the Bhagavad Gita through the four yogas.

Hari Om.

What the Bhagavad Gita’s Most Famous Verse Really Teaches About Karma, Action, and Inaction

Meeting on Zoom is nothing like sitting in the shaded forests of the Upanishads. And yet – something essential can still happen there.

In our first gathering of the Women’s Gita Circle, I watched it happen in real time: a space opened up, unhurried and honest, where women who have both lived life and studied the Gita could speak plainly about what its teachings actually ask of us. This has been a long dream of mine – not a study group in the passive sense, but a genuine philosophical conversation among practitioners who are willing to sit with hard questions. What we found, even through a screen, was exactly that.

We began with verse 2.47 – one of the Gita’s most quoted and most misunderstood verses:

“You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction.” — tr. Eknath Easwaran

In the West, we tend to hear this as something like a productivity ethic: do the work, don’t obsess over outcomes. Admirable advice. But read the Sanskrit, and something older and stranger comes into focus:

karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana mā karma-phala-hetur bhūr mā te saṅgo ‘stv akarmaṇi

The subject here is not your career. It is karma in its classical sense – continuous action, the force that binds living beings to samsara, the very thing that yoga exists to address. Not postures. Liberation from suffering. The Gita is not a self-help text that arrived early. It is a philosophical intervention into the deepest mechanisms of human bondage.

I want more women reading it this way. Not because Sanskrit fluency is a prerequisite for meaning – it isn’t – but because the moment you encounter the original language, even haltingly, something shifts. The text stops being a translation of someone else’s understanding and begins to speak directly. Editions like Feuerstein or Sargeant reward this kind of encounter. I know not every practitioner will want to go there – but some do, and feel stopped before they start. That is a threshold worth crossing together.

Our contemplative question for this first circle was simply: Where in your life right now is inaction the easier choice and what might be asking you to act anyway?

What I can tell you is that the Gita has a particular quality when it meets a real question from a real life. It cuts through personal narrative with what I can only call a velvet blade – precise, and somehow not unkind. Krishna frames everything as a riddle you cannot quite solve, which means the verses become long-term contemplative meditations rather than answers. You carry them. They work on you.

What was said in the circle stays in the circle. But I will say this: writing publicly, teaching openly, and bringing this circle into existence was, for me, the easier thing not to do – for a long time. Verse 2.47 asked me to act anyway.

I believe in the Gita’s capacity to gather people around essential questions – about action, about suffering, about what it means to live with integrity inside an ordinary life. That belief is what this circle is built on.

If you’ve been sitting at the edge of something like this, wondering whether it’s for you – consider this an invitation.

The Women’s Gita Circle meets biweekly. Learn more at kamalaroseyoga.org.

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.

On Yoga, Voice, and the Quiet Power of Philosophical Literacy

This essay was first published on Substack. I’m archiving it here because it represents a central conviction of my work: that women deserve access to the intellectual foundations of yoga. It expands the dialogue on women’s voices in yoga philosophy found on A Woman’s Gita podcast, the threshold we must cross, and why voice matters.

The world has been burning since before I had language for it. War, corporatocracy, the casual brutality of patriarchy — by the early 1990s, I felt like a conscientious objector to the whole thing. Sensitive people absorb that violence in their nervous systems, and I was no exception. I went looking for a life where compassion, care, and meaning were still possible.

But even in refuge spaces, the struggle followed me. Not the struggle to believe — I have always believed in the possibility of something better — but the struggle to speak. What Carol Gilligan calls the threshold of voice: that moment when a woman knows something is true, feels it in her bones, but hesitates to say it out loud. Gilligan writes, “At the threshold of voice, a woman knows and cannot speak. She remembers and cannot tell. She feels compelled and silenced at the same time.” I know this territory intimately. The throughline of my life has been approaching that threshold, retreating from it, and slowly, steadily, crossing it.

I entered monastic life because I wanted a world organized around ethics rather than profit, around contemplation rather than domination. I had experienced the uneven burden placed on women — the pay gap, the expectation that we hold everything together, the exhaustion of watching men rise while women carry. I longed for a communal alternative to the nuclear family, a place where compassion could be practiced, not merely admired.

But longing for compassion is not the same as understanding it.

For years, I lived inside devotional translations of sophisticated philosophical ideas. They were cohesive and comforting, but over time I began to see what had been blurred. Essential distinctions had softened. Boundaries dissolved. “Compassion” was interpreted as infinite availability. “Selflessness” became self-erasure. Exhaustion was framed as a virtue. The more deferential I was, the more spiritual I seemed.

It took years to understand that what had been blurred was agency.

Without philosophical clarity, compassion becomes a mandate to disappear. Without structure, service turns into depletion. Without intellectual grounding, women — especially in spiritual communities — are quietly encouraged to stay small so others can shine.

The cost is real. I felt it. In my body. In my health. In the way my own voice thinned and trembled over time.

This is what happens to yoga teachers today when philosophy is withheld from them. They trail off mid-sentence. They feel fraudulent. They sense there is something profound under the surface of what they teach, but they don’t have the tools to articulate it. The emotional toll is not minor — it is erosive.

To reclaim my own voice, I needed to go deeper. Not into more sentiment, but into philosophy.

And that is when I ran headlong into Sanskrit.

Even in the ashram, I realized that my access to philosophy had been filtered through a single interpretive lens. When I stepped outside that lens, I could feel how unsteady I was. The words in italics — yoga, dhāraṇā, vṛtti, nirodhaḥ — formed a wall. I could repeat inherited interpretations, but I could not encounter the text directly. I could not test the meaning for myself.

For a woman already struggling to speak, that wall mattered.

“At the threshold of voice, a woman knows and cannot speak. She remembers and cannot tell. She feels compelled and silenced at the same time.” – Carol Gilligan

Eventually, I found Srivatsa Ramaswami. His training was rigorous, grounded in classical Sāṃkhya philosophy, unapologetically textual. He had a way of saying, “Let’s hear what this bloke Patañjali has to say. You don’t have to agree — but let’s hear him on his own terms.” Not through devotion. Not through marketing. Not through oversimplified wellness language. Just the text. The words. The philosophy.

That changed me in ways I am still discovering.

Learning to read IAST (the International Alphabet of Sanskrit transliteration). Learning the sounds. Reading the sūtras word by word. Understanding Sāṃkhya as a complete philosophical system rather than a vague spiritual backdrop. Bit by bit, I felt something return: intellectual footing. Discernment. The capacity to say yes here and no there. The ability to interpret instead of defer.

Philosophy did not diminish compassion — it gave it structure. It allowed it to become relational rather than martyring, ethical rather than exhausting. It returned me to myself.

And in that restoration, I could finally see the larger pattern.

Women are already doing the emotional labor of yoga. We hold the spaces. We track the energy. We make the rooms safe. But men have dominated the philosophical narrative — men like Deepak Chopra and the countless male gurus who lowered the bar while keeping the real tools behind closed doors. Some abused power outright; others simply benefited from the assumption that authority belonged to them.

If women do not have access to the intellectual foundations of the tradition they’re holding together, we are left carrying the emotional labor without the structural strength.

That is not empowerment. That is an imbalance.

Leaving monastic life was not rebellion. It was honesty. My voice was asking for a larger room. I had spent years speaking through a borrowed vocabulary, staying small so others could shine. Only now, after many years of contraction, am I rediscovering my creative voice. What I’m building here is that larger room — a room where women can encounter yoga philosophy directly, rigorously, without apology.

Because I believe this: philosophy is not a gate to be guarded. It is a birthright. It is one of the few tools that return women to themselves — ethically, intellectually, spiritually.

If you have ever trailed off mid-sentence when someone asked about philosophy… if you have felt the subtle shame of not quite knowing how to ground what you teach… then you know what the threshold of voice feels like.

And you deserve to cross it with your dignity intact.

This is why I created Sutra to Self. Not to replace traditional teachers — but to build the stairs women were never offered. This is my part in shifting the future of yoga: giving women the tools that return agency, clarity, and voice.

If you’re ready to step across your own threshold, you can learn more about Sutra to Self here.

Reflections from our Women’s Gita Podcast: Chapter 3 – On Karma, Consumption, and Conscious Living

Sitting with the Stuff

I’m sitting in my new place surrounded by boxes, and honestly? I’m confronting every single thing I own. Having just moved, the question of what’s necessary versus what I’ve been carrying – sometimes literally – has become impossible to ignore.

All I have are books and clothes. Books are a different metric – they’re shreyas, the higher good. But clothes? Preyas. Gratifying. Looking at them now, I find myself asking: who is this person?

In our latest Women’s Gita podcast episode, as Nischala Devi and I explored the opening verses of the Bhagavad Gita’s Third Chapter and Arjuna’s crisis on the battlefield, this question kept surfacing: How do we know when we’re taking more than our share?

It’s the same question Arjuna is essentially asking Krishna: If the higher Self exists equally in all beings, what am I doing here in this decisive action? What’s the right relationship between my philosophy and my participation in the world?

For most of us, that battlefield looks different from ancient Kurukshetra. Mine, right now, looks like moving boxes and the accumulated weight of stuff. Yours might be the closet you can’t quite close, the storage unit you haven’t visited in years, or that 4 a.m. moment when you’re scrolling another online sale, wondering if you really need it.

The Teacher I Didn’t Expect

I left monastic life officially a month ago. I’m accustomed to austerity – probably more than most people reading this. And yet, re-entering what I half-jokingly call “the world of hustle” has been its own education.

Over the last few years, in anticipation of this move, I’ve become what you might call a junk hustler: Poshmark, yard sales, thrifting, redistributing – a job for the marginal, like monks and yoginis. And here’s what surprised me: this practice has become one of my most profound teachers about prakriti (PRAK-ri-tee)- about nature, matter, the manifest world, and our relationship to it.

My teacher, Srivatsa Ramaswami, once said something that never left me: there’s a point where you’re taking more than your share from prakriti. You’re taking too much from nature.

This idea goes completely against the Western myth of perpetual growth – the American Dream of more, bigger, better, always. We know intellectually it’s not sustainable. But living that knowledge? That’s the gap Arjuna is standing in.

It’s Not Always Summer

Here’s what prakriti teaches when we pay attention: it’s not always summer.

Look at nature around us – there are seasons. Accumulation has its time (autumn’s harvest), but so does release (winter’s composting), renewal (spring’s emergence), and abundance (summer’s growth).

Prakriti’s intelligence is circulation, not accumulation. She moves, cycles, transforms. Nothing stagnates in her healthy systems.

But we’ve created a culture of perpetual summer – constant growth, endless harvest, no fallow time. Fast fashion embodies this perfectly: fifty-two “micro-seasons” a year, constantly producing, never resting. When I sort through donations at local mutual-aid events and see clothing with tags still on, I’m witnessing the consequences of breaking prakriti’s rhythm.

Who told us it was okay to buy something to wear once? When did we agree to this?

The Violence We Don’t See

Fast fashion is not ahimsa – not non-violence.

There’s violence to the workers – often women and children – in sweatshops. Violence to the earth through pesticides, dyes, microplastics, and water pollution. Violence to our own consciousness through disconnection from consequences. Violence to future generations inheriting our landfills and our climate.

When the Gita asks us to consider the impact of our actions, this is what it’s talking about – not abstract philosophy, but the actual wake we leave in the world.
I say this not from a place of having it figured out, but as someone who just moved and had to reckon with every single item I thought I needed. The overwhelm is real. The seduction of abundance is real. And the difficulty of knowing where the line is – that’s real too.

Prakriti as Teacher: The Samkhya Thread

In Samkhya philosophy, prakriti loves purusha – nature performs for consciousness, supports its evolution. When the yogi becomes realized, nature herself becomes the means of liberation. She is yoga’s method and teaching.

I see this now in the secondhand economy. When I’m thrifting or facilitating clothing swaps, I’m participating in prakriti’s own movement – witnessing her abundance, learning from her intelligence, and discovering what truly circulates.

This isn’t renunciation for its own sake. It’s right relationship.

Vairāgya – etting go – doesn’t mean rejecting the world; it means loving something, using it, appreciating it, and releasing it when it’s time. It means joining prakriti’s flow instead of damming it through hoarding.

Mutual Aid, Not Charity

Through our Mountain Area Mutual Aid work, we’ve redistributed tons of clothing, food, and housewares. We’ve cared for neighbors’ needs. But mutual aid transcends the charity model – it’s not hierarchical, not about feeling good for giving to “the less fortunate.” It’s reciprocal: neighbors helping neighbors, each of us responsible for the circulation.

This is shreyas, not preyas – the higher good, not ego gratification.

The Katha Upanishad asks us to know the difference between shreya (what serves the highest good) and preyas (what gratifies the ego). That discernment helps us see whether we’re taking more than our share.

I ask myself constantly: Is this good, or is it gratifying? Is this necessary, or am I filling some other emptiness?

I don’t always get it right. That’s not the point. The point is asking.

Closet as Battlefield

So here I am, standing before my unpacked boxes, asking Arjuna’s question in my own way. If I understand these teachings – about taking only my share, about circulation and ahimsa – then what does “necessary action” look like?

For me right now, it looks like:

• Renting instead of buying
• Actually wearing what I own before considering anything new
• Participating in clothing swaps with friends and neighbors
• Using services like Trashie to keep textiles out of landfills
• Repairing instead of replacing
• Supporting local mutual-aid networks
• Teaching resale skills to others who want to learn

I’m not prescribing this for anyone else. You stand on your own battlefield, with your own questions and your own prakriti. What I am suggesting is that we keep asking.

Black Friday: A Different Kind of Battle

Consider making the Friday after Thanksgiving a Buy Nothing Day.

Not as punishment. Not as moral superiority. But as practice.

As an experiment in asking:

• Do I need this, or am I gratifying my ego?
• Is this shreyas or preyas?
• Am I taking more than my share?
• How can I participate in circulation instead of extraction?

Instead of lining up for deals, what if we:

• Organized clothing swaps in our communities
• Shared tools and equipment with neighbors
• Repaired something we already own
• Made, cooked, or upcycled something
• Offered our skills in exchange for others’
• Simply rested—honoring the fallow season and letting the earth breathe

This is karma yoga: necessary action with self-transcending motive, for the world’s welfare.

Not perfection, but participation.

Not renunciation, but right relationship.

The Question That Keeps Returning

How often do we consider the impact of our actions?

Prakriti is always teaching, if we’re willing to listen. She shows us the rhythm of enough—the seasons, the cycles, the natural intelligence of circulation. She shows us, through the mountains of discarded clothing and the climate crisis, what happens when we break that rhythm.

This isn’t about guilt. It’s about relationship. About remembering that prakriti loves purusha—that she serves our awakening – and that when we honor her intelligence, when we take only our share, she becomes both teacher and liberation.

So this season, as marketers gear up to convince us we need more, maybe we can step off that battlefield and into the circle of circulation instead. Maybe we can ask: What’s necessary? What’s enough? What does right relationship look like now?

The boxes will eventually empty, but prakriti’s teaching remains:

it’s not always summer.

And there’s profound relief in finally moving with her seasons instead of against them.
This is one of the Gita’s most fundamental invitations – not to shame us, but to wake us up. To bring us into conscious relationship with our choices, our consumption, our footprint in prakriti’s web.

The battlefield is wherever we are. The choice is always now.

I’m still learning. Still balancing the austerity I know with the world I now live in. Still making mistakes and buying things I don’t need. But I’m asking – and in the asking, something shifts.

By Kamala Rose, published on August 7, 2025

As yoga practitioners, we often speak of peace. The kind that lingers after savasana, that spaciousness between breaths in pranayama, that elusive stillness that sometimes visits us in meditation. But Shanti, as described in the Bhagavad Gita, is not simply a moment of calm – it is a complete and radical reorientation of consciousness. In the final verses of Chapter 2, Krishna offers something deeper than tranquility. He speaks of the absolute state, a state of being that is not just undisturbed by the noise of life but fundamentally free from the delusion that the noise is all there is.

Verse 2.72 declares that this state leads one “from death to immortality.” Not metaphorically, but existentially. From a life rooted in fear, desire, and the small self to one anchored in what the text calls Brahma Nirvana—a condition of complete clarity and absorption in the truth of being. This is not transcendence as escape. It is transcendence as participation.

And it begins, paradoxically, by walking in the opposite direction of the world.

“That which is, night to all beings, in it the sage is awake; where all beings are awake, that is the night for the sage who knows the Self.“(2.69)

This verse – borrowed from the Katha Upanishad – is one of the most haunting and beautiful in the Gita. It suggests that awakening involves a complete reversal of values. What most of us chase – the accolades, the desires, the frantic daylight of worldly striving – is night to the awakened. And what the world ignores or fears – the silence, the interiority, the dark unknown – is where the sage begins to see clearly.

In practice, we taste this. There is a shift that comes with time and devotion. I remember when, early in my path, success meant how long or how still I could sit. But over the years, through discipline and surrender, something softened. My measure of yoga became less about doing and more about being. Less about progress and more about presence. In those moments, I began to understand the sage’s “night vision” – a kind of inner luminosity not dependent on anything external. The Upanishads call it the unflickering flame in the heart cave of all beings. That is where this journey takes us.

Krishna speaks of peace not as a mood but as an identity shift. In verse 2.71, he describes,

“One who lives completely free from desires, without longing, devoid of the sense of “I” “me” and “mine,” attains peace.” (2.71)

The ego does not vanish through suppression – it dissolves in the radiance of a broader awareness. Like watching a sunset and realizing the sun doesn’t actually set – the earth moves. The self doesn’t disappear; it reframes itself within a much greater field. As practice deepens, the breath begins to breathe us. The pose holds us. We start to sense that yoga is not something we perform, but something we are being performed by.

There is a moment in A Woman’s Gita – our podcast – where we ask a question that is both playful and profound: Is the sun conscious? Rupert Sheldrake poses this same question in earnest in his paper by that title. If human consciousness emits an electromagnetic field, and if the heart itself is a broadcaster of measurable energy, what of the sun – billions of times more powerful than any human mind? Could it be that the sun, long revered in the Vedas, is not only the physical source of life but a spiritual presence as well?

When we bow in Surya Namaskar, we do more than stretch and flow. I believe we participate in one of humanity’s most ancient gestures: reverence for light, for clarity, for the central truth that warms, nourishes, and guides. Whether or not the sun salutation asana series dates back to antiquity (historians disagree), the symbolism is timeless. We turn our bodies and breath toward what is eternal. Perhaps the sun is not a metaphor. Perhaps it is kin.

The Bhagavad Gita’s final verse in Chapter 2 introduces Brahma Nirvana – a state in which the limited, individual identity merges with the whole. Not erasure, but expansion. Not detachment, but total integration. Krishna offers this not as some abstract mystical attainment but as a practical realization, something accessible to all who are willing to release the tight grip of “I” and awaken into what serves the whole.

In this state, there is:

• No fear of death, because what you are was never born
• No fatigue in service, because you act from the inexhaustible
• No anxiety about outcomes, because you see clearly what is
• No need to control or cling, because you trust the rhythm of dharma

Many of us have already had glimpses – while walking in nature, while sitting in meditation, while holding someone’s hand at just the right moment. These moments come, and they go. What the Gita asks of us is not merely to taste peace, but to become established in it.

This is why we practice. Not to escape the world, but to see it clearly. Not to transcend the body, but to inhabit it as sacred. Not to perfect the pose, but to awaken the flame that was already burning long before we began.

The battlefield where Arjuna receives this teaching is not incidental. It’s a symbol of the complexity of modern life – family obligations, ethical conflicts, personal despair, political firestorms. Shanti is not a luxury. It is the only true clarity from which to act.

When we stabilize in this peace:

• We love without possession
• We serve without burnout
• We lead without power struggles
• We create without comparison
• We walk through grief, through beauty, through uncertainty with grace

Each breath, each mantra, each morning you show up—this is how you prepare your body and mind to receive what has always been present.

The light is already within you. Let’s walk toward it together.

→ Learn more about Sutra to Self, my guided immersion into yoga philosophy and practice.

With reverence and clarity,

Kamala Rose