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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.