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Karma: What the Word Actually Means
Karma is not a moral scoreboard, and it is not the universe getting even. The word means action. That is all it means, before any doctrine is attached to it. Karman, from the root kri, to do or make. In the earliest Vedic usage it refers specifically to ritual action, the correct performance of sacrifice.…
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The History of Meditation: From the Vedas to the Clinic
Somebody sat down deliberately, closed their eyes, and tried to do nothing with their attention. We do not know who, or when, or where. Meditation leaves no artefacts. A pot survives. A wall survives. A person sitting quietly leaves nothing for an archaeologist to find, which means the history of meditation begins only when somebody…
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Mudras: The Real History of Yoga’s Sacred Gestures
There is a bronze Shiva in the Metropolitan Museum, cast in south India around the eleventh century, dancing inside a ring of fire. He has four arms. Each hand is doing something specific. The upper right holds a small drum, marking the beat of creation. The upper left holds fire, which destroys. The lower right…
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The Five Koshas: Yoga’s Map of the Human Being
A person, in this scheme, is five things wearing each other. The image the tradition uses is a sheath, kosha, the way a sword sits inside a scabbard. Each layer covers the one beneath it, and each is subtler than the last. It is one of the oldest attempts anywhere to map what a human…
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Pranayama: The History of Yogic Breathing
Breath is the only autonomic function a person can take over voluntarily. The heart cannot be stopped by deciding to stop it. Digestion continues regardless. But breathing runs on its own until the moment you attend to it, and then it is yours. Indian traditions noticed this very early and built a great deal on…
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What Does Yoga Really Mean?
Open the Rigveda, composed somewhere between 1500 and 1200 BCE, and the word yoga is already there. It mostly means harnessing horses to a chariot. Yoking The root is yuj, to join, to yoke, to harness. It is cognate with the English yoke, and the two words descend from the same Proto-Indo-European source. In its…
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Moksha: Liberation and the Real Goal of Yoga
Ask what yoga is for and most modern answers describe a better version of the life you already have. Calmer. Healthier. More focused. The tradition’s own answer is that yoga is for getting out. The Problem It Solves Moksha means release. It comes from the root much, to free or let go, and it is…
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Kundalini: The History of the Serpent Power
A coiled serpent sleeps at the base of the spine. Wake it, and it rises through a central channel, piercing a series of energy centres until it reaches the crown of the head, where it produces liberation. That description is repeated so consistently in modern yoga that it can seem timeless. It is not. Nearly…
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Bhakti Yoga: The Path of Devotion That Changed India
Kabir was a weaver. Ravidas worked leather, an occupation that placed him at the bottom of the social order. Tukaram sold groceries. Namdev was a tailor. Mirabai was a Rajput princess who walked out of a palace. Andal was a girl in ninth-century Tamil country who wrote thirty verses and refused to marry any human…
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Karma Yoga: The Path of Selfless Action
A surgeon operates for six hours and the patient dies anyway. A teacher spends a year on a student who drops out. A farmer ploughs, plants, weeds and waters, then watches hail flatten the whole field in twenty minutes. The Bhagavad Gita is addressed to exactly this situation. Its answer is not that these outcomes…
