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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.