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