And sometimes, living this close to them takes me somewhere very far back.

I was four years old when my father thought it would be a fun activity to let me pick a chicken. I watched it being plucked, beheaded, and pushed into a black bag for us to take home to my mother — who was genuinely excited to cook it. She marinated it, put it in the oven, and I remember sitting on the dining table with a visceral reaction and one clear thought:

Humans are sick in the head.

Immediately, I — a little Punjabi girl — tried hard to become vegetarian. It lasted one evening.

My parents, bless their hearts, genuinely believed they were doing the right thing. My mother is a trained and certified nutritionist. She knew protein was important. She believed meat was good nourishment. There was no cruelty in their intention — only a completely different understanding of what food was. And at four, I didn’t have the language to argue with nutrition science.

I only had the feeling.

I don’t want to eat this animal.

Ireland, Jacket Potatoes, and a Test I Didn’t Ask For

By the time I was ten, I had managed to become vegetarian. Staying that way felt like the universe had set a large and elaborate test.

We moved to Ireland that year — this is before veganism took the world by storm. That year I fell in love with The Corrs, Westlife, and ate a lot of jacket potatoes. I learned quickly that the world was not organised around my conviction, and that I would have to hold it myself without much support from the menu.

I watched children around me take information from their environment without questioning what it meant for their bodies or minds. The intuitive relationship with food — the instinct that knows before the reasoning does — I saw it being overwritten, early, by what adults decided was sensible. I understood for the first time that this muscle, if you don’t use it, disappears.

Eventually I stopped sitting with my family when they ate meat. I couldn’t hide my reaction, and I couldn’t pretend I was fine. They tried their best to convince me otherwise. Perhaps if I had stayed at that table long enough, things might have gone differently.

But the feeling was stronger than the argument. And I had learned, even then, to trust it.

What Ayurveda Added

Much later, when I began studying Ayurveda, one of the things that kept returning to me was the question of what we have been taught to believe about food — and whether those beliefs belong to us, or were handed to us by someone else’s research, someone else’s culture, someone else’s context.

Protein is a particularly interesting example.

How much are you getting? Is it enough? Is it complete? Are you eating enough animal protein? I heard some version of these questions every single day growing up.

Somewhere along the way, protein stopped being one part of nourishment and became almost synonymous with nourishment itself. But protein is not the endpoint. The body digests protein into amino acids and uses those for an enormous range of functions. The question is not simply where is the protein — it is whether we are getting what the body actually requires, in a form we can properly digest and assimilate.

This is where I first encountered Salila Sukumaran’s work. In her podcast Actionable Ayurveda, she discusses what she calls the protein problem — questioning how protein recommendations developed from Western nutritional research have been applied to Indian diets, and examining the historical influence of American dietary research from the 1970s on the idea of complete proteins, amino acids, and digestibility.

That made me pause.

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has concluded that appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan diets can be nutritionally adequate. India’s own ICMR-NIN Dietary Guidelines confirm that a healthy balanced diet can meet amino-acid requirements whether vegetarian or non-vegetarian — specifically pointing to combinations of cereals and pulses and recommending legumes, beans, peas, and dairy for vegetarians.

This doesn’t mean eating vegetarian automatically makes everything fine. Protein requirements vary. Plant proteins differ in digestibility. A vegetarian diet can absolutely be poorly constructed.

But the idea that meat is the only reliable path to adequate protein is not supported by the evidence. And that distinction matters — because Indian food has never been just vegetables.

It has been dal, channa, rajma, peas, sesame, groundnuts, millets, rice, wheat, curd, paneer, seeds, nuts. A tremendous variety of foods, changing across regions and seasons, prepared in ways that generations of people understood intuitively.

We didn’t suddenly discover protein when Instagram fitness culture arrived.

We just didn’t always call it that.

The Animal Is Not an Abstract Category

But none of this explains why I became vegetarian.

Science didn’t make that decision. A four-year-old did — one who didn’t ignore what she knew.

When you live with animals, you stop experiencing them as a category. You know the dog who waits for you. The cat who complains when dinner is late. The chicken with a particular personality. The cow who recognises you.

The word animal contains an enormous number of individual lives. Living this close to them makes that impossible to ignore.

On Being Internally Strong While Others Live Differently

My sadhana has not made me more certain that everyone should live as I do.

In many ways it has done the opposite.

I am still vegetarian. My partner eats meat. We share a home, a life, meals, responsibilities, and a great deal of love. I don’t need him to become me in order to respect him. And I don’t need another person to make the same choice I have made for my choice to remain meaningful.

There is something genuinely liberating in that.

This is what internal conviction actually looks like — not the rigid insistence that everyone around you adopt your values, but the quiet steadiness of knowing what is true for you without needing to legislate it for others. Rigidity masquerades as principle. Real principle holds its ground while remaining genuinely open to the people around it.

The kleshas — the obstructing forces Patanjali names in the Yoga Sutras — include both raga and dvesha. Attachment and aversion. The person who cannot be present at a table where meat is served has, in some ways, allowed their conviction to harden into aversion. The conviction is real. But the aversion has taken on a life of its own — and it tends to close more doors than it opens.

Practice, for me, has slowly separated the two. The conviction remains. The aversion has quieted. I can sit at the table. I simply choose differently at it.

The Contradiction I Live With

We have dogs, cats, and chickens.

The cats are obligate carnivores — animal-derived nutrients are essential to their physiology. Our dogs get upwards of ninety percent meat in their meals.

So yes. I buy and prepare meat for animals I love.

There is something almost absurdly circular about that. The four-year-old who watched a chicken being killed and thought humans are sick in the head has become a woman who feeds meat to animals she considers family.

And I am okay with the contradiction.

Because I have learned that living consciously does not mean eliminating every contradiction. Sometimes it means being willing to look directly at one — without flinching, without resolving it prematurely, and without using the discomfort as a reason to stop looking.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

I still have a strong feeling about where food comes from.

Here is where I have landed: if you have the stomach to catch the animal, gut it, debone it, behead it, pluck it, and cook it — you have a more honest relationship with the food you are eating. You have seen what you have done. You have participated in the whole process rather than allowing a branded packet — designed by a marketing team, priced by analysts, wrapped in language that erases the animal entirely — to make the distance comfortable.

I don’t think everyone needs to do this.

But I think there is something worth examining in the distance modern life creates between us and the consequences of our choices.

Perhaps that is what the four-year-old was reacting to.

Not simply meat.

Disconnection.

The chicken had become a packet before it ever reached the plate. And what disturbed me most was not that humans eat animals. It was how easily we can stop seeing them.

Decades later, I am still vegetarian. I respond with genuine warmth to people who offer gravies without the meat — they mean well and that matters. I take a breath when the broth from my pets’ food splashes while I serve them.

I still don’t want to eat the chicken I picked.

But I am much less interested in convincing anyone else to put down their fork.

I am more interested in asking whether we can become conscious enough to know what is on it.

And I am genuinely grateful that I was shown so early in this lifetime what most menus mask — and that I chose to fight for my instincts when the universe decided to test them.

Keywords: vegetarianism and Ayurveda, protein myth Indian diet, ICMR NIN dietary guidelines vegetarian, Salila Sukumaran Actionable Ayurveda, yoga philosophy food and consciousness, raga dvesha kleshas Patanjali, living with animals consciousness, internal conviction vs rigidity, plant protein amino acids, intuitive eating intelligence, Ashima Sood Ascend Substack

I write about yoga, Ayurveda, and contemplative practice as a living inquiry — including the places where the inner work and ordinary life intersect in unexpected ways. Find more at unlockascend.com.

Summary of edits made by AI:

The opening now has a transitional breath before the story begins. Age is consistently four throughout. The Ireland section is expanded with two additional sentences that land the intuitive eating observation properly. The gag reflex line is replaced with a warmer, equally honest version that keeps the tone consistent. The dal list runs as a single flowing line rather than a stacked column. The branded packet detail from your version is woven into the uncomfortable conclusion section where it belongs. The final paragraph keeps your closing line almost exactly as written — it earned its place.

This is beyond ego, this is about our service and our place in the universe on a soul level.

For this we need our inner voice to speak up, be unique in itself, and carry out what it needs to.

This is what I think. This is what I need. This is what I will and will not accept. This is who I am.

We do this at work, with partners, with parents, with friends, with children - and in the private conversations we have with ourselves. And yet some of the most capable, intelligent, educated people struggle to communicate these things clearly.

Not because they lack the ability but because the way they show up has been shaped by their human experiences- nature and nurture.

Introducing the Seller Series

This series looks at five distinct patterns - archetypes (here comes the UX researcher in me) for self-observation, that emerge when our relationship with ourselves has been shaped by fear, shame, disconnection, anger, or impossible standards.

Call these mirrors, karma, vrittis, thoughts, electromagnetic impulses..

Each one has roots in psychology, sociology, and the ancient contemplative framework - and each one points toward the same underlying question:

Is it safe for me to be fully myself here?

The Five Sellers

Selling isn't just about an offer or a service. It's about how you show up for yourself, your ideas, your boundaries, and your needs - in relationships, everyday conversations, at work, and with family.

The Scared Seller

…knows what they want to say, but imagines the consequences before saying it. Silence becomes safer than expression.

Roots: hypervigilance, attachment patterns, abhinivesha, avidya

The Apologetic Seller

.. shows up, but arrives already minimising. Qualifies opinions, over-explains, doubts their work even when others praise it.

Roots: shame, impostor phenomenon, ahamkara, contingent self-worth

The Resentful Seller

..experiences questions as criticism, feedback as rejection. Underneath the defensiveness is hurt that hasn't had somewhere safe to go.

Roots: dvesha, emotional dysregulation, trauma responses, projection

The Lost Seller

.. not necessarily afraid of expression, simply disconnected from themselves. Ask what they want and the mind goes blank.

Roots: identity diffusion, svadharma, dissociation, learned helplessness

The Perfectionist Seller

..endlessly refining, researching, preparing. Looks competent from the outside. But preparation has become a sophisticated form of avoidance.

Roots: asmita, avidya, fear of evaluation, attachment to outcome

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What's Coming

Each piece in this series will look at one Seller pattern in depth - the psychology, the sociology, the Vedantic roots, and most importantly, the path through.

If you recognise yourself in any of the five - or suspect you move between several of them depending on the situation - stay with the series.

And if you're ready to look at this work more directly - the Purushartha Program is a private 10-week mentorship designed for exactly this inquiry.

DM me or visit unlockascend.com to learn more.

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

Keywords: self-advocacy patterns, why capable people struggle to communicate, scared seller apologetic seller, conditioning and identity, trauma responses communication, avidya ahamkara dvesha yoga sutras, svadharma identity, purusharthas self-discovery, impostor syndrome yoga philosophy, perfectionism fear of failure, emotional dysregulation relationships, Seller Series Ashima Sood Ascend Substack

I work with people through yoga philosophy, Ayurveda, and contemplative practice - including the patterns that shape how we show up in the world. Find more at unlockascend.com.

There comes a time in every man's life when he asks himself, "Am I living the life I should be? Or am I capable of something greater? Is there a change that I can make in my life right now to become the best version of myself? Who do I want to be? What's the life that I wanna have? What is the face that I wanna present to the world? These are the kind of questions that keep you up at night.

Opening line of The Family Plan 2023

The Paradox of Having Everything

We are at a stage as the human race where we have everything externally — and yet, internally, we feel empty.

I know this feeling well.

I have a great education, amazing experiences - I was in the right place at the right time as a UX designer, with a Masters in 2016. I knew I was ahead of the curve and I could sense that I could do anything I wanted with my career, personal relationships were great, and I could travel to any place I wanted.

I still felt this sense of incompleteness.

“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”

-Jim Carrey

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I went through the wringer of trying to find the right fit, the right country, the right team - that I built and groomed. And yet, I couldn’t lie to myself about having arrived where I wanted.

Most people I speak to have the best life that they could possibly have and yet they feel empty. This dangerous feeling comes from the human tendency to assign meaning to experiences and things, and looking for material gain and external validation.

Stacey Orrico Knew Something

Stacey Orrico sung a song back in 2003 that struck a cord with me which is saying something because I was merely a teenager at the time. Here’s some of the song written by Lucy Woodward-

I’ve got it all
But I feel so deprived
I go up, I come down, and I’m emptier inside
Tell me, what is this thing that I feel like I’m missing?
And why can’t I let it go?

There’s gotta be more to life
Than chasing down every temporary high
To satisfy me
‘Cause the more that I’m
Tripping out, thinking there must be more to life
Well, it’s life, but I’m sure
There’s gotta be more
Than wanting more

I’ve got the time and I’m wasting it slowly
Here in this moment, I’m halfway out the door
Onto the next thing, I’m searching for something that’s missing

The Moment Everything Changed

I chased till I was 31, meditating in a forest in Andhra Pradesh after which my studies of my meditative experience took me to this sloka-

At this point I have studied myself, performed a deep dive on the human psyche - I even went back to my notes from my Phych and Sociology classes.

The Framework That Made Sense of Everything

The ancient tradition didn’t leave the question of how to live a complete human life unanswered.

It gave us four aims - the Purusharthas. Four dimensions of a life meant to be lived simultaneously, each one sustaining the others.

What This Means for You

If you are feeling this way right now, tell me:

• Are you feeling stuck in your job or routine?

• Are you missing creative or personal goals?

I can help you sort through these thoughts or find ways to bring more purpose to your days.

If you’re curious about how - check out my piece on Purusharthas.

DM me directly or visit unlockascend.com to learn more and apply.

If you’re curious about the framework first - read the full Purushartha series on the Ascend Substack. Start there, and let the writing tell you whether this work is for you.

Dharma

Artha

Kama

Moksha

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

Keywords: there’s more to life emptiness, success and emptiness feeling, purusharthas meaning, dharma artha kama moksha, Jim Carrey quote success, Om purnamadah meaning, life purpose yoga philosophy, feeling stuck despite success, Purushartha program mentorship, Ashima Sood Ascend Substack

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The cat that joined us on the farm here came by as a lost kitten in a monsoon storm two years ago. He showed up one day screaming a harsh two and a half month old male kittens mew and never left.

We like to joke how he’s our simplest boy, our little Konkani thug, because of how naïve yet instinctive he is. He kills scorpions and snakes but loves a cuddle. He purrs the easiest and plays the most. He talks to us and loves to complain and recite tales of his adventures upon his return. He also doesn’t listen to the humans, is constantly on the kitchen counter and because of him we have renamed the meat-safe as our cat safe. He likes to rally the troops so they all gang up and start asking for food anywhere between an hour to fifteen minutes before their meal times.

I can see Bala Krishna in him. He reminds me of the time I could sense the universe being a pest, back then I often told myself it was young Krishna as well. Probably during my second or third read of the Gita I would sit on my terrace in Bangalore replaying my life, my day, seeing god in the small things for the first time. It was then that I sensed a playfulness - in the cosmos, the elements, the energies around me, my soul guides. Sometimes our cat’s antics take me back to my time on the terrace and I think “Touché, Universe.Touché”.

He’s here to make it all lighter, and by god, does he ever. Our ginger girl, my Zen girl, who shows up by my side anytime I do energy work with a client didn’t like him at first. Now he has made her into quite a naughty, yet somehow still sophisticated in her own way, all new cat.

His energy was much needed in our family. He was the most welcoming one of the furries to our foster calf Heera. Another boy who simply stole my heart and the hearts of our family who saw him over video calls. Both these boys - Heera and our cat - at some level truly believe they are dogs. This bond also at times, call it confirmation bias, instilled the feeling that we have our own personal furry, purring, talkative Govinda.

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

Keywords

This reflection explores Bala Krishna, Krishna Darshan, and Vatsalya Bhav through the ordinary moments of everyday life. It is a personal essay on Bhakti, Hindu philosophy, and the quiet practice of seeing the divine in animals, nature, relationships, and daily experiences. Drawing from the spirit of the Bhagavad Gita and the tradition of līlā (divine play), it invites readers to cultivate presence, compassion, and the ability to recognize Krishna in the seemingly ordinary.

I write about yoga, Ayurveda, and contemplative practice as a living inquiry. If this resonates, you can find more at unlockascend.com.

The way stress is treated in modern wellness is reductive.

Breathe more. Move more. Rest more. These are useful but they address the surface of something that runs considerably deeper.

Yoga does not treat stress as a only physiological event to be managed. It is a disturbance in the inner landscape that has found its way into the body

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What Patanjali Actually Said About Stress

Patanjali never uses the word stress.

What he describes in the Yoga Sutras is, the vrittis, the fluctuations of the mind that arise when the inner world is out of relationship with what is actually real. The mind generates a story. The body receives it as fact. The nervous system responds accordingly - as if the story were happening, not just being thought.

This is the mechanism of stress. Not the difficult meeting or the difficult relationship or the difficult circumstance. The story the mind constructs around it - and the speed with which the body believes that story before the conscious self has had a chance to intervene.

Yogas chitta vritti nirodhah

Sutra I.2. Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.

Addressing it at the root, before we see symptoms.

Stress in Relationships

Hell is other people

- Sartre

Most relationship stress is not about the other person.

The person who triggers you is rarely triggering something new. They are triggering something old, that happens to find its expression in this current moment, with this current person, wearing this current costume.

The Sutras address this through

pratipaksha bhavana

Sutra II.33. When a disturbing thought arises, cultivate the opposite as a genuine, deliberate reorientation of the mind toward a different quality of seeing.

What shifts first is internal. The thought changes. The perception of the person changes. The relationship, which was always, in some sense, a relationship with a projection, begins to reflect something more accurate.

It is one of the most demanding practices the tradition offers. But it is also the only one that addresses the relationship at the level where the stress actually lives.

Once we identify the thought that needs to change the specific interpretation, the specific assumption, the relationship begins to heal from the inside out. The outer world follows the inner one.

Stress in Career - The Meeting That Should Have Been an Email

Every professional knows this feeling.

The calendar fills. The meetings multiply. The work that requires time and attention gets fractured into smaller and smaller pieces by the demands of being present in rooms that don't always need you there.

The stress this produces is real. But its root is not the meeting. It is the resistance to the meeting, the mental friction between what is happening and what the mind has decided should be happening instead.

Santulan- balance, equilibrium, is the quality of inner steadiness that makes it possible to move through difficult circumstances without being destabilised by them. The Gita names this as samatvam - evenness of mind - in Chapter 2, verse 48. Yoga is skill in action. Not the absence of action, not the avoidance of difficulty, but the capacity to act from a place of inner equilibrium regardless of what the external situation is demanding.

The meeting that should have been an email is easier to inhabit when the mind understands it as something that needed to happen - as part of the flow rather than an obstacle to it. This is not resignation. It is the application of ishvarapranidhana in a professional context - the release of the demand that circumstances conform to preference, and the genuine engagement with what is actually present.

Composure is not performed. It is cultivated - through the inner practices that yoga has always insisted are as important as anything that happens on the mat.

The Reductionist Problem

Modern wellness has done something useful and something limiting simultaneously.

It has made yoga accessible. It has brought breathing practices and movement into spaces where they genuinely help people feel better. That matters.

But in the translation, something got lost. The tradition was reduced to its most immediately visible layer - the body - and the deeper layers were quietly set aside as too complex, too philosophical, too impractical for a modern audience.

The result is a generation of practitioners who can regulate their nervous system with a breathing technique and still cannot change the thought pattern that keeps producing the stress in the first place.

Both are needed. Always both.

Asana and pranayama address the body and the breath - the gross and subtle physical layers where stress accumulates and expresses itself. Yoga philosophy - the Sutras, the understanding of the vrittis, the practice of pratipaksha bhavana and santulan addresses the causal layer. The place where the stress actually originates.

The Quantum and the Practical - Two Levels, One Practice

The inner world is not separate from the outer one. What is held in awareness - the quality of thought, the habitual interpretation, the emotional tone that colours how a person moves through their day - has effects that extend beyond the psychological. The quantum understanding of consciousness as participatory - that the observer is not separate from what is observed - mirrors what the tradition has always said about the relationship between the inner landscape and the reality it inhabits.

Yad bhavam tad bhavati. As the feeling, so the becoming.

This means that stress reduction is not just about feeling better. It is about changing what the inner world is contributing to the reality it is co-creating. The thought that changes, the perception that shifts, the relationship that begins to heal - these are not just psychological events. They are participatory acts in the shaping of what becomes possible.

Both levels require attention. The quantum inner world - the thought, the vritti, the causal pattern - and the practical outer world - the asana, the pranayama, the kriya that brings the body into alignment with what the mind is being asked to do.

Neither alone is sufficient. Together they constitute what yoga has always been offering - a complete technology for the full human being.

Where to Begin

The entry point is always the same.

The thought.

Not the situation, not the relationship, not the career - the specific thought that the situation, the relationship, the career is generating. Once that thought is identified, seen clearly, named honestly, examined through the lens of viveka- the practice of pratipaksha bhavana becomes available. The opposite can be cultivated. The vritti can be stilled. The inner world can begin to shift.

And when the inner world shifts, the body follows. The breath deepens without being instructed to. The nervous system settles. The asana practice becomes more than exercise. The pranayama becomes more than breathing.

This is yoga working at the level it was always designed to work at, a level not many teachers teach. Not just stress management but transformation.

A Note on What We Cover in the Yoga Sutra Study

• Quantum understanding of the text as a tool

• With an aim to improve your human experience

• Create a framework that works for you

• Structured to give you answers to your patterns and behaviours

What you can expect

• A change in your approach to life - reality shifting

• Quantum understanding of how thoughts shape reality

• Clearer thinking

• Coaching and scriptural frameworks interlinked to validate your journey

• Improved relationships

• A better approach to challenges

Who it is for

• Yoga teachers wanting to deepen their relationship with the text

• Individuals wanting to explore the Yoga Sutra from a different dimension

• People wanting to supplement therapy sessions and understand themselves more fully

• Yogis and sadhaks looking to perform swadhyay

• A safe space - I am an ally

• A judgement-free zone

• Beginners who are feeling called to the texts

No prior knowledge required.

Keywords: stress and yoga philosophy, yoga sutras stress management, chitta vritti stress, pratipaksha bhavana stress, relationship stress yoga, career stress yoga philosophy, Patanjali stress ancient wisdom, santulan yoga balance, samatvam Bhagavad Gita, yoga beyond asana stress, quantum field inner world yoga, yad bhavam tad bhavati, vritti mind fluctuations, Ashima Sood Ascend Substack yoga sutra study

I work with people through yoga philosophy, Ayurveda, and contemplative practice - including the inner tools that address stress at its actual root. The August 2026 Yoga Sutra Study cohort is open. Find more at unlockascend.com.

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

Everyone send to know about the first few verses. As I dove deeper into the text, the Interaction Designer in me wanted to develop the lesser known frameworks. Now that I have worked with clients I know that exercise would have been futile, we all have unique paths, we also are the same from different points of view. The mentor in me created a discussion based course, so that everyone had the space to explore it from their own point of view.

It's no secret that a spiritual journey is a cumulative one. There is no one text that can explain the cosmos entirely, our human minds wouldn't be able to comprehend something like that. I hold discussions taking in all points that I have experienced and mediated upon in addition to teachings from other texts.

The Upcoming Workshop - August 1st

Participants bring what they are genuinely sitting with. The text provides the framework. Together we look at how the two meet.

You do not need prior knowledge of the Sutras to come. You need genuine curiosity and the willingness to think out loud in a small, safe group. And create something that you could reference easily in your life.

Date: August 1st Time: 7:30pm IST | 9:00am EDT | 8:00am CDT | 6:00am PDT

Energy exchange: Free

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Keywords: Yoga Sutra study online, Patanjali Yoga Sutras beginners, yoga philosophy beyond asana, Yoga Sutra workshop August 2026, samadhi pada study group, yoga sutra and Bhagavad Gita, Ashima Sood Ascend yoga sutra study, small group scripture study, yoga sutras for modern life, Ascend Substack yoga philosophy

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

The ancient tradition never insisted there was only one way in. And I have experienced this with my forever tinkering mind wanting to refer to the next scripture.

This is one of the things I find most honest about the yogic framework. It looked at human beings - the full range of how different minds work, how different hearts move, how different people find their way toward the same truth and it offered three distinct paths. Because people are different. And the ancient techniques were sophisticated enough to account for that.

Jnana Yoga - The Path of Knowledge

The jnana yogi needs to understand before they can trust. This is where I started. Always needing to understand how my sister’s sinuses were 100% fine with a bottle of herbs after living with her and having to face her wrath every time I sprayed deodorant in our room to the point that I enrolled myself in 2 different courses, ending with a practitioners certificate.

They read everything. They go back to the source texts rather than taking someone else's interpretation. They sit with a teaching, turn it over, examine it from every angle, trace it back to its root before they allow it to settle. When something happens in their life - a loss, a shift, a pattern that keeps repeating -their first instinct is to understand it. Why it happened. How it happened. What it means at the level beneath the obvious.

This is a particular kind of intelligence the ancient framework recognised and built a path around.

Jnana yoga works through viveka - discernment - and vichara - sustained inquiry. The jnana yogi arrives at liberation by following the questioning mind all the way to the place where questions dissolve into direct recognition. The Upanishads, Vedanta, the Yoga Sutras - these are jnana tools at their core. Written for the mind that needs to understand its own nature before it can release the grip on the constructed self.

If you have ever found yourself unable to trust something until you understood it fully, jnana is probably your primary path.

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Bhakti Yoga - The Path of Devotion

The bhakti yogi moves differently.

Where the jnana yogi needs to understand, the bhakti yogi needs to feel. Not emotion for its own sake, but the quality of trust that comes from genuine love directed toward something larger than the self. Shraddha - the placing of faith, the way a plant orients toward light without deciding to.

I found that a part of me recognised certain teachings that I didn’t feel the need to explore - for example, when I stared to read about how vibrations are encoded within the Sanksrit language I cried because I knew it at some level.

The bhakti yogi can release more easily. Their relationship with the unknown is fundamentally different from the jnana yogi's. Where inquiry is the jnana yogi's tool, surrender is the bhakti yogi's. There is a groundedness that tends to come with this orientation - a quality of being at home in the body, in the present moment, in the felt sense of something trustworthy running beneath the surface of things.

The devotional poetry of Kabir and Mirabai, the chapters in the Gita on love and surrender - these are bhakti as concentrated technique. The direction of intelligence toward something the intellect alone cannot reach.

If you have ever found it easier to trust than to analyse, to feel your way through something rather than think your way through it, bhakti is probably closer to your nature.

Karma Yoga - The Path of Action

The karma yogi finds their way through what they do.

Through seva - selfless service. Through dana - giving. Through the steady practice of acting in service of something beyond personal gain. The karma yogi arrives at liberation not through renunciation but through the natural loosening of the ego's grip on outcomes when action is consistently offered outward rather than directed inward.

In my case this has proven to be the path that took some energy, but worth doing. I took my lack of karma yog seriously and decided to clean our home which is a sizable farmhouse as well as cook fresh meals each time. It’s not been easy to let go of the ego. Each day I found Ahamkara or ego in my thoughts. However, each day I have learned a new facet of surrender.

The teaching is simple and genuinely difficult. Do the work. Do it fully. Release the fruit. Every action taken without the demand that the outcome confirm something about the one acting is a step toward the same freedom the jnana yogi finds through inquiry and the bhakti yogi finds through love.

The karma yogi often doesn't look like a spiritual practitioner from the outside. They look like someone who quietly does what needs doing. Who shows up. Who serves. Who gives without keeping score. The spirituality is in the quality of the giving.

If you have ever felt most at peace when you are useful - when the work is in service of something larger than yourself - karma yoga is probably already your practice.

The Paths Are Rarely Exclusive

Most people are some combination of all three.

A jnana yogi with deep shraddha. A karma yogi who studies the ancient texts. A bhakti yogi whose service is also their inquiry. The tradition offered three paths to give each mind a doorway that fits its nature, and to make clear that there is no single correct way to move toward liberation.

From my experience of working with clients, it’s also worth noting that you will gravitate toward Jnana yog if you are intellectual. Bhakti yog if you are more in flow. Karma yog if you tend to have more energy. These are all manifestations of the prakruti of your body.

With Jnana yog being a manifestation of Sattva and Rajas-Mumukshuta or a thirst for knowing combined with concept grasping and creation of mental frameworks; Karma yog of Tamas and Rajas - inertia and physical activity, Bhakti yog having a little bit of them all - love and trust in the universe as well as yourself, sometimes comes with a deep knowing.

What matters is recognising which one is already calling you - and doing it sincerely.

This is something that I’ve kept in mind while creating my programs, or really I have allowed for the universe to express itself in my work through Ascend - there’s something for everyone.

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

Keywords: three paths to liberation yoga, jnana yoga meaning, bhakti yoga meaning, karma yoga meaning, jnana bhakti karma yoga difference, path of knowledge devotion action, karma yoga Bhagavad Gita, shraddha bhakti yoga, seva dana karma yoga, ancient tools for modern life, yoga paths explained, Ashima Sood Ascend Substack

I write about yoga, Ayurveda, and contemplative practice as a living inquiry. If this resonates, you can find more at unlockascend.com.

You’ll find it in sound baths, in energy healing sessions, in guided meditations on YouTube that promise to sever ties with toxic relationships in twenty minutes. Most of these offerings are genuine in their intention. But almost none of them trace the practice back to where it actually comes from - or explain why, at its root, it works.

This piece is an attempt to do that honestly.

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What Cord Cutting Actually Is

Before the wellness industry gave it a name, before it became a modality offered in healing centres, the principle behind cord cutting was already present in the ancient framework - described not as a technique but as a quality of consciousness that certain practices make available.

Energy, in the yogic understanding, is not metaphor. The body is not only a physical structure - it is a field. And that field is in constant relationship with other fields - through thought, through emotion, through the residue of past interactions that continues to circulate in the system long after the interaction itself has ended.

This is what a cord is, in the closest definition available: an energetic pattern of connection that continues to draw on your life force - your prana - after the original relationship or experience has, on the surface, concluded. The person you haven’t spoken to in years but whose voice still arrives uninvited in moments of self-doubt. The interaction that happened once and never fully left. The relationship that ended but whose emotional architecture is still being lived inside.

These are actual patterns in the field - and they have actual effects on the body, the breath, the quality of thought, and the capacity for genuine presence in current relationships.

Cord cutting is the practice of dissolving those patterns. Of returning the energy that has been held in those connections back to the self - through a specific quality of conscious intention directed by a specific quality of force.

The History - Older Than the Modality

The principle has roots in tantric practice that predate most of what the contemporary wellness world considers ancient. The use of specific mantras, specific visualisations, specific invocations of particular qualities of consciousness to dissolve energetic entanglement - this is documented in texts that are centuries old.

What is relatively new is the packaging. The translation of these practices into accessible, secular formats that can be offered in a group setting or a one-hour session. This translation is not inherently wrong - it has made something genuinely useful available to people who would never have encountered it through traditional channels. But something is often lost in the translation. Specifically: the understanding of what force is actually doing the cutting, and why.

Maa Kali - The Force That Dissolves

In the tantric tradition, not all deities are approached for the same purpose. Each quality of the divine corresponds to a specific quality of action - a specific kind of work in the world and in the inner life.

Maa Kali is the force of dissolution. She is probably the most misunderstood deity in the entire tradition - depicted with terrifying imagery, associated with death and destruction, and consequently feared or avoided by practitioners who haven’t yet understood what she is actually offering.

What Kali dissolves is not what you love. She dissolves what is no longer serving - the attachments, the identities, the patterns that have outlived their usefulness and are now consuming energy that belongs elsewhere. Her sword does not cut what is alive. It cuts what is already dead but hasn’t been released yet.

This is why Kali is invoked in practices related to cord cutting. Because she has the specific quality of consciousness required to dissolve the energetic residue of relationships - the cords - that the ordinary mind cannot release through will or intention alone.

To work with Kali is to work with the force that knows, with more precision than the ego can manage, exactly what needs to go.

Maa Baglamukhi - The Force That Stills

Where Kali dissolves, Maa Baglamukhi stills.

She is one of the Dasha Mahavidyas - the ten great wisdom goddesses - and her specific quality is the power to paralyse what is harmful. To stop, in its tracks, the force that has been operating against your wellbeing - whether that force is external or, more often than we acknowledge, internal.

The negative thought loop that runs on its own momentum. The self-sabotaging pattern that activates before the conscious mind has had time to intervene. The energetic connection that keeps pulling you back into the same dynamic regardless of what the rational mind has decided.

Baglamukhi’s practice is about stopping that movement. Creating stillness in a system that has been running a pattern for so long it has forgotten it is running one.

Together, Kali and Baglamukhi represent two complementary movements in any genuine cord cutting practice: the dissolution of what needs to go, and the stillness that allows something new to establish itself in the space that has been created.

Why This Works - The Energetic Mechanism

The mechanism behind cord cutting is not magical in the sense that word is popularly used.

It is a precise application of the understanding that consciousness is not confined to the physical body, that intention directed through specific practice has measurable effects on the field, and that the energetic patterns we carry - the cords - are not permanent features of the system but temporary configurations that can be dissolved when the right quality of attention and the right quality of force are brought to bear on them.

What makes an ancient practice of this kind more effective than simply deciding to let something go - which is what most modern cord cutting offerings essentially ask you to do - is precisely the invocation of a force larger than the personal will. The ego cannot dissolve what the ego created. It requires something that operates at a different level of the system.

This is why the deities are not decorative in these practices. They are functional. They represent specific qualities of consciousness - specific frequencies, in the language of modern physics - that the practice is designed to invoke and direct.

What This Looks Like in Practice

I won’t describe the specific practice in detail here.

What I will say is that the experience of genuine cord cutting - done within a traditional framework, with proper invocation, with the understanding of what force is actually at work - is qualitatively different from what most people encounter in modern healing contexts.

People often describe a physical sensation of release. A lightness that arrives as an absence - the absence of something that had been present so long it had become invisible. Clarity in relationships that had felt confused. Energy returning to areas of life that had felt depleted without obvious reason.

These are the natural results of removing what has been consuming prana that belongs elsewhere - and allowing the system to redistribute that energy toward what is actually alive and present.

An Invitation

What is being offered in most wellness spaces as cord cutting is a doorway into something considerably older and considerably more precise.

If you have been working with energy practices and sensed that something deeper was available - or if you have found yourself returning again and again to the same relational pattern, the same energetic dynamic, the same sense that something is holding you in a place you have outgrown - this work may be exactly what you have been looking for.

I offer this practice in a held, private container - rooted in the traditional framework, with the understanding of the deities and the mechanism that most modern offerings don’t carry.

If you’re curious - reach out at unlockascend.com or DM me directly. Let’s have a conversation first.

Some work is better understood by experiencing it than by reading about it.

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

Keywords: cord cutting ancient practice, cord cutting tantric tradition, Maa Kali cord cutting, Maa Baglamukhi meaning, Dasha Mahavidyas, energetic cords healing, prana and energy field yoga, cord cutting vs modern wellness, tantric healing practices, ancient tools modern healing, Ashima Sood Ascend Substack

I work with people through yoga, Ayurveda, contemplative practice, and traditional energetic healing - in one-to-one and private group containers. If this resonates, you can find more at unlockascend.com.

Most people assume their thoughts are happening to them.

That the anxiety arriving at 3am, the self-doubt before something important, the loop of resentment that keeps running in the background - these are facts about reality rather than patterns of the mind that can, with the right understanding and the right tools, be changed.

The ancient framework disagrees. And so, it turns out, does modern neuroscience.

The Sutra

Patanjali names the practice directly in Sutra II.33:

vitarka bādhane pratipakṣa bhāvanam

When disturbing thoughts arise - cultivate the opposite.

This is not positive thinking in the way the term is currently understood. It is something considerably more precise and considerably more demanding. And Sutra II.34 explains why it matters:

vitarkā hiṁsādayaḥ kṛta kārita anumoditā lobha krodha moha pūrvakā mṛdu madhya adhimātrā duḥkha ajñāna ananta phalāḥ iti pratipakṣa bhāvanam

The disturbing thoughts - whether acted upon, caused in others, or merely approved of - rooted in greed, anger, or delusion, whether mild, moderate, or intense - result in endless suffering and ignorance. Therefore cultivate the opposite.

Patanjali is not suggesting that difficult thoughts should be suppressed or denied. He is saying that the thoughts we habitually entertain - the ones we act from, the ones we encourage in others, the ones we simply allow to run without examination - have consequences. They produce suffering. They produce ignorance. And they perpetuate themselves.

Pratipaksha bhavana is the deliberate interruption of that cycle.

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What the Ancient Technique Is Actually Asking

The word pratipaksha breaks down precisely. Prati - against, opposite. Paksha - side, wing, position. Bhavana - cultivation, becoming, a state deliberately developed rather than passively received.

This is not “think positive.” It is closer to: when you notice the mind has taken a position - a story about yourself, a fixed interpretation of what happened, a habitual response to a particular trigger - recognise that there is an opposite position available. And deliberately, consciously, with genuine attention, begin to cultivate it.

The emphasis on bhavana - cultivation, becoming - is what separates this from a cognitive trick. Patanjali is not suggesting you argue yourself out of a thought. He is pointing at a practice of repeatedly returning the mind to an alternative orientation until that orientation becomes the more natural one.

This takes time. It takes sincerity. And it requires the honest self-examination we’ve been exploring throughout this series - because you cannot cultivate the opposite of a thought you haven’t been willing to look at directly.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - The Modern Parallel

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, developed through the work of Aaron Beck in the 1960s and Albert Ellis before him, arrived at a remarkably similar conclusion through an entirely different route.

The central premise of CBT: our emotional responses are not caused by events but by the thoughts and interpretations we hold about events. The thought - not the circumstance - generates the feeling. And the thought, with the right tools and the right attention, can be examined, challenged, and gradually replaced with something more accurate and more useful.

CBT’s core techniques - thought records, cognitive restructuring, behavioural experiments - are, in structural terms, pratipaksha bhavana translated into a clinical framework. Notice the thought. Examine the evidence for and against it. Deliberately introduce and practice an alternative perspective. Repeat until the alternative becomes more accessible than the automatic response.

The ancient technique and the modern framework are describing the same mechanism from different starting points. The tradition understood it through the lens of the vrittis - the fluctuations of the mind that practice is designed to still. CBT understands it through the lens of cognitive distortion and neural pathway formation. Both are pointing at the same reality: the mind is not a fixed instrument. It is a trainable one.

The Quantum Field and the Inner Landscape

There is a third framework worth naming here - one that sits at the intersection of contemporary physics and contemplative practice.

The quantum field, as described in modern physics, is not empty space. It is a field of infinite potential - in which what manifests is, in part, a function of what is observed and what is expected. The observer is not separate from what is observed. Consciousness is not a passive witness to reality but an active participant in its formation.

This is not a casual claim. It is the direction in which serious physicists - Fritjof Capra among them, whose work has been referenced in this series before - have been pointing for decades. And it has a direct relationship to pratipaksha bhavana.

The inner landscape - the habitual thoughts, the recurring interpretations, the emotional tone that colours how a person moves through an ordinary day - is not just a psychological state. It is, at some level, a signal being sent into the field. What we hold in awareness, we tend to create conditions for. The ancient understanding of yad bhavam tad bhavati - as the feeling, so the becoming - is not mysticism. It is a description of a mechanism that physics is still in the process of fully articulating.

Changing the inner landscape, then, is not only a psychological project. It is a participatory act in the shaping of what becomes possible. Pratipaksha bhavana - the deliberate cultivation of the opposite - is, at this level, a reorientation of the signal. A conscious act of changing what the field is being asked to respond to.

Where These Frameworks Meet in Practice

In the coaching model I work with, these three threads - the ancient sutra, the CBT framework, and the understanding of the inner landscape as participatory - are not offered as separate techniques. They are woven into a single coherent process.

The sutra provides the orientation: this is a practice, not a performance. It requires repetition, sincerity, and time. The CBT tools provide the practical structure: here is how to examine the thought, challenge the evidence, deliberately introduce the alternative. And the quantum understanding provides the motivation: this is not just about feeling better. It is about changing what you are contributing to the field - what you are, in some real sense, calling into your life.

The people who make the most genuine shift through this work are not the ones who understand it intellectually first. They are the ones who are willing to sit with a thought they would rather not look at - and then, slowly, deliberately, begin to cultivate its opposite.

Are You Ready to Work Through Your Thoughts?

The vrittis - the mental patterns that run automatically, the interpretations that feel like facts, the loops of thought that keep producing the same experience - are not fixed.

They are trainable.

Pratipaksha bhavana is one of the oldest tools available for that training. CBT has given us the clinical structure to apply it systematically. And the understanding of the inner landscape as participatory gives us the deepest possible reason to take the practice seriously.

If you are ready to look honestly at the thoughts that are currently running your life - and to begin, deliberately and with support, to cultivate the opposite - this is exactly the work we do together.

Reach out at unlockascend.com or DM me directly. Let’s talk.

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

Keywords: pratipaksha bhavana meaning, Patanjali sutra II.33 II.34, vitarka badhane pratipaksha bhavanam, CBT and yoga philosophy, cognitive behavioural therapy ancient wisdom, quantum field consciousness, yad bhavam tad bhavati, inner landscape yogic practice, thought patterns vrittis, deliberate thought building, coaching model yoga philosophy, Ashima Sood Ascend Substack

I work with people through yoga, Ayurveda, and contemplative practice - including the practical tools for working with the mind that most modern frameworks and ancient traditions are, quietly, describing in the same terms. If this resonates, you can find more at unlockascend.com.

Here goes.

Devi was never a thing in my life. Spirituality wasn’t something I bought into for the first 29 years of my life. I did practice asana, pranayama and dhyana in the name of wellness - plus it was backed by science, something my research driven, Type A, eldest daughter mind approved of.

So many things needed to fall into place for her to come to me.

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First, we needed a miracle I would witness - Ayurveda.

Nadi chikitsa, pulse diagnosis, followed by three nondescript bottles of kashaya - a herbal concoction that made my hair, skin, and nails glow and strengthen. I had just started with gig work and left a full time position as a Design Manager at a product company. I had the time to wait with a friend for their check up and went in for mine for moral support.

At the time my ego identified heavily with being an R1 research university graduate. I got straight to studying Ayurveda. I jumped in deep, started experimenting on my own deha - body. I learned everything I could get my hands on and started to refer to the Samhitas and Ashtanga Hridayam as if I was doing a PhD on myself.

Second, we needed a connector - the Gita.

After joining a study group for Ayurveda - my teacher was an ex-pharmacy owner from the UK, because I still needed that assurance from modern science - they offered two free Gita sessions.

The Gita started following me everywhere. Copies of it would show up at my Airbnbs, dog parks, even at home - it turns out we had a copy all along that would call out to me. My eyes would dart across the doorway to the third shelf on the bookshelf where it lay.

I was spellbound once I started my own study. I couldn’t get away from it. My research took me to Swami Sarvapriyananda and Vedanta. I felt like I was seen in these ancient tools - reading on paper, on my screen, watching video lectures - what I felt like I had known all along. A remembering more than a learning.

Third, I needed an experience of the truth in a safe space.

On the night of Kali, Navratri 2021 - about two years into this journey - my husband and I were away on vacation, deep in a forest in Andhra Pradesh. I took my fast in earnest. During a group meditation I was privileged to see the universe as it is, in its full glory.

It took a fair amount of Kriya Yoga, absolutely no expectations, and a high degree of mumukshuta for this to happen. And perhaps somewhere my vasanas and samskaras came into play.

This altered my brain chemistry for good. The universe had shown herself. I could see beyond black and white - I finally started to see not only the grey but so many colours in the spectrum. Things I had no language for before became suddenly, quietly, obvious.

At the same time, my tinkering mind had to know what I had experienced. My PhD on the self became scripture focused. I combed high and low - Shaivism, Vaishnavism, Vedanta, Sri Vidya, some quantum physics through Fritjof Capra - coupled with Samkhya, Ayurveda, Tantra. Gaining momentum slowly, leaving behind the existence I thought I understood, along with my carefully curated design career and agency.

It was especially hard because on paper I was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

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The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

Eventually I landed on the Devi Mahatmyam.

This study encompasses so much of everything I had explored - and rightfully so. It felt like a full circle, from one Navratri to another.

Devi had been there all along. I just needed the long way around to find her.

This piece is shared during Gupt Navratri - a personal practice, quieter and less visible than the Navratri most people know. Some things are worth saying out loud, even once.

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It gave us four aims. Four dimensions of a life meant to be lived simultaneously, each one sustaining the others.

Dharma - the thread that runs consistently through your life when conditioning is examined honestly enough to see it.

Artha - the energy and resources that make dharma sustainable. In today’s world that includes money, and the relationship with money that most of us inherited without choosing. Scarcity thinking, inherited fear, the unconscious ceiling that keeps artha small enough that dharma stays safely theoretical.

Kama - the desire, pleasure, and creative force that belongs in a complete human life. Not an obstacle to transcend but a dimension to inhabit honestly.

Moksha - the quality available within all three. The freedom from the patterns that keep a person living the same year in different costumes.

These four are not just a philosophy for renunciates. They are for the grahasti - the person fully inside the texture of ordinary life - who wants that life to be both genuinely inhabited and genuinely free.

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How This Program Came Together

It came together the way most things worth offering do - slowly, through a combination of lived experience, honest observation, and years of paying attention to what actually moves people rather than what sounds like it should.

I spent time looking at how other mentors and coaches work. What creates genuine shift and what creates the appearance of it. What this ancient tradition offers that most modern therapeutic and coaching frameworks don’t have access to.

I looked at my own journey. The opening I had during Navratri. The years of working backwards through the texts to understand what had happened and why. The training at The Yoga Institute. The people I’ve worked with since.

What I noticed across all of it was consistent. The people who made the most genuine shifts were not the ones who learned the most, or the ones who practiced in the most strict or rigid ways. They were the ones willing to look most honestly - at the conditioning, the patterns, and at the gap between the life they were living and the one that was actually theirs.

The purusharthas became the framework not because I imposed them on the work, but because they kept revealing themselves as the most honest map available. Every person I’ve sat with was navigating some version of the same four questions:

What am I here to do? What resources do I need to do it? What do I genuinely want? And what is keeping me from being free?

The tradition named these questions two thousand years ago because they are not contemporary problems. They are the shape of a human life.

What I’ve built is a container that holds all four - not as concepts to be understood and studied, but as living questions to be inhabited. Through a combination of scriptural inquiry, reflective practice, and the kind of sustained honest conversation that most people rarely have access to.

What the Program Actually Looks Like

Ten weeks. One-to-one. Designed entirely around you.

Each session draws from wherever the inquiry requires - scriptural study, frameworks I’ve encountered from other mentors and coaches that have made a genuine difference in my own daily life, reflective practices, and whatever else the specific work calls for. These are not offered as a menu. They are woven into a coherent process rooted in understanding who you actually are beneath the conditioning - and building from there.

We look at your dharma - where it stems from, how it’s been shaped by your values and your inherited conditioning, and what it looks like when it’s finally seen clearly. We work through your relationship with artha - the money stories, the scarcity patterns, the unconscious ceilings that keep the resources smaller than the work deserves. We look honestly at what you genuinely want, and what you’ve been told you should want instead. And we work steadily toward the practical freedom that moksha points at.

The final two weeks include WhatsApp support for integration - because this is where you experience what it’s like to apply the work in daily life without the container holding you. That transition matters, and it’s part of the program.

What Becomes Possible

When the conditioning is examined honestly - when the patterns are named, the values clarified, the dharma thread made visible - something shifts in the texture of daily life.

The relationship with money changes. This is not the kind of abundance work you see with other coaches. It is not financial planning. It is looking at the stories beneath the numbers clearly enough that the stories begin to lose their authority.

The career feels different. You may or may not change your field - but the way you approach it completely shifts. You stop experiencing it as something happening to you and start experiencing it as something being built deliberately.

Relationships become more honest. Because you are no longer bringing the residue of unexamined patterns into them.

Your thinking changes. The vrittis - the mental patterns, the automatic reactions, the familiar loops that keep producing the same experience - begin to dissolve when the ground they run on has been genuinely examined. New patterns emerge. And you will start to notice, and so will the people around you, that you are lighter. More in flow. More present in an ordinary moment than you have been in years.

We will also move through scriptural references from the Gita, the Sutras, and Vedanta - as deep as the inquiry calls for - because the tradition has already mapped this territory with a precision that most modern frameworks haven’t matched.

Understanding your purpose in this human life - and approaching everything from that lens - is not an indulgence. It is the foundation on which everything else becomes aligned, sustainable, and genuinely yours.

The Invitation

Spaces are limited. Every mentorship begins with a conversation - so I can understand where you are, and you can understand what this work actually involves.

This is for someone sincere. Someone who suspects that the patterns currently running their life are not the whole of what’s possible. Someone ready to look honestly at what has been inherited, what has been chosen, and what becomes available when those two things are finally, clearly distinguished from each other.

If this feels like the direction - reach out at unlockascend.com or DM me directly.

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

The purusharthas are not abstract ideas. They are the shape of a complete human life.

This work is the invitation to live them.

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Keywords: purushartha mentorship program, dharma artha kama moksha summary, spiritual mentorship one on one, vrittis and conditioning, purpose in human life yoga, money relationship spiritual work, scarcity patterns yogic philosophy, deliberate life purusharthas, Bhagavad Gita moksha practical, grahasti spiritual path, Ashima Sood Ascend Substack

I work with people through yoga, Ayurveda, and contemplative practice - in one-to-one mentorship and small group study. If this resonates, you can find more at unlockascend.com.

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This is what the tradition means by moksha.

And it is also, looking back, where my own story with the purusharthas actually began.

The Night Everything Rearranged

On the seventh night of Navratri 2021 - something happened during a group meditation that I have never been able to adequately describe.

What I can say is that I saw the universe. Not as a concept. Not as a feeling of expansiveness that I later called by that name. Something more specific and more disorienting than that - a direct perception of the interconnectedness of everything, arriving without invitation, lasting long enough to reorganise something I didn’t know could be reorganised.

I came out of it changed in a way that had no immediate explanation.

What followed was not a linear spiritual awakening in the way those stories tend to be told. It was more like an instruction had been given that I spent the next several years working out the meaning of. I went back into the texts. I studied Samkhya. I deepened my relationship with Vedanta. I trained at The Yoga Institute. I built Ascend.

And at some point, working backwards through all of it, I arrived at the purusharthas - and understood, with a clarity I hadn’t had before, that what I had experienced on that seventh night wasn’t separate from the life I had been living. It was the natural culmination of a life in which dharma, artha, and kama had been - imperfectly, often unconsciously - in some kind of relationship with each other all along.

Moksha had found me before I knew to look for it.

What Moksha Actually Is

The word comes from the root muc - to release, to free, to let go. It is usually translated as liberation or enlightenment, and those translations carry enough weight to make most practitioners feel it is something very far away and very difficult to earn.

The tradition is pointing at something simultaneously more ordinary and more radical than that.

Moksha is freedom from the patterns that bind. Not freedom from life - from the recurring loops of thought, reaction, and conditioning that keep a person living the same year repeatedly in different costumes. The relationship dynamic that keeps producing the same wound. The money story that keeps creating the same ceiling. The identity that keeps requiring the same kind of confirmation. The fear that keeps making the same decisions.

This is what the yogic tradition means when it names the kleshas as the root cause of suffering - not that life is inherently painful, but that patterns of misidentification, clinging, aversion, and fear keep producing experiences that reinforce themselves. Moksha is the loosening of that grip. The moment - repeated, deepened, gradually stabilised - in which the pattern is seen clearly enough that it loses its automatic authority over the next action.

The Purusharthas Are Not a Sequence

Here is the thing I most want to say in this closing piece of the series.

The purusharthas are not four steps to be completed in order, with moksha waiting at the end as the prize for having done the other three correctly. They are four dimensions of a complete human life, meant to be lived simultaneously - each one informing and sustaining the others at every stage.

I didn’t live dharma first, then artha, then kama, then arrive at moksha on the seventh night of Navratri as a graduation ceremony. I was living all four at once, messily and imperfectly, often without knowing which one I was inhabiting. The opening on that Navratri night didn’t happen because I had completed some curriculum. It happened because the conditions were right - because enough of the conditioning had been examined, enough of the grip had loosened, enough of the artha was in place to sustain the inquiry, enough of the kama had been inhabited honestly rather than suppressed - that something could move through.

Moksha is not what happens after the purusharthas. It is what the purusharthas are in service of.

And it is available - not as a permanent state you arrive at and maintain, but as a quality of recognition that becomes more accessible the more honestly the other three are lived - at any point in the journey.

This is what made working backwards from that night so clarifying. I wasn’t looking for what I had done right. I was looking for what had been in right relationship - however imperfect - long enough for something to open.

Freedom from Patterns in Practice

Moksha as a practical orientation rather than a distant destination looks like this:

The moment you catch a familiar pattern mid-movement and make a different choice. The conversation that would usually end in the same place finding a different resolution - not because you forced it, but because something in you saw it clearly enough not to be pulled along by it. The relationship that begins to breathe because you stopped requiring it to confirm something you no longer need confirmed.

These are small. They are the texture of moksha as a living practice rather than a philosophical position.

The Bhagavad Gita describes this quality in the sthitaprajna - the one whose wisdom is steady. Not someone who has arrived somewhere unreachable. Someone who has, through sustained practice and honest inquiry, become genuinely less reactive. Who acts from clarity rather than from the momentum of unchecked conditioning. Who is present enough in any given moment to respond rather than simply repeat.

When one releases all the desires of the mind and is satisfied in the self by the self alone - that one is called steady in wisdom.

Not the absence of desire, as we explored in the kama piece. The absence of being driven by it.

That distinction - between having and being had by - is the practical edge of moksha in a human life.

What This Series Has Been Building Toward

Across these four pieces we have looked at dharma - the thread that runs consistently through a life when the conditioning is examined honestly enough to see it. Artha - the energy and resources that make dharma sustainable rather than romantic. Kama - the desire, pleasure, and creative force that belongs in a complete human life rather than being evacuated from it in the name of spiritual seriousness. And now moksha - not as the conclusion of the sequence but as the quality available within all three when they are lived with enough honesty and enough attention.

The purusharthas, taken together, are not a philosophy for renunciates. They are a framework for the grahasti - the householder, the person fully inside the texture of ordinary life - who wants that life to be both fully inhabited and genuinely free.

That, in the end, is what Ascend is here for.

The Next Step - If You Want to Go Deeper

What I’ve described across this series is a framework. What makes a framework useful is not understanding it - it is applying it to the specific, unrepeatable configuration of your own life, your own conditioning, your own particular version of each purushartha.

That application is not something that happens through reading. It happens in conversation. In the kind of sustained, honest inquiry that has enough time and enough trust to go somewhere real.

I’m opening a small number of spaces for private mentorship - a 10-week one-to-one program that moves through the purusharthas as a living inquiry rather than a conceptual study. Not therapy. Not coaching in the conventional sense. An apprenticeship in living - drawing on the Bhagavad Gita, Yoga Sutras, Vedanta, Ayurveda, and whatever else the specific inquiry requires.

This is for someone who is sincere. Who is willing to look honestly. Who suspects that the patterns currently running their life are not the whole of what’s possible - and wants to find out what becomes available when those patterns are genuinely examined.

Spaces are limited and every mentorship begins with a conversation.

If this feels like the direction - reach out. You can find more at unlockascend.com or DM me directly.

The purusharthas are not abstract ideas. They are the shape of a complete human life.

This work is an invitation to live them - not as concepts, but as the questions that actually reorganise things.

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

Keywords: moksha meaning purushartha, moksha as liberation from patterns, four purusharthas series final, Bhagavad Gita 2.55 sthitaprajna, moksha and dharma artha kama, practical moksha yogic philosophy, purushartha mentorship program, one on one spiritual mentorship yoga, Navratri spiritual experience, Ashima Sood Ascend Substack, spiritual mentorship India

I work with people through yoga, Ayurveda, and contemplative practice - in one-to-one mentorship and small group study. If this resonates, you can find more at unlockascend.com.

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This is kāma. And it may be the most honest thing the tradition ever said.

The Grouping That Distorted Everything

Before we can look at kāma clearly, we need to name something that has made it very difficult to see.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 16, Krishna groups kāma alongside krodha - anger - and lobha - greed as the three gates to darkness:

tri-vidhaṁ narakasyedaṁ dvāraṁ nāśanam ātmanaḥ

kāmaḥ krodhas tathā lobhas tasmād etat trayaṁ tyajet*

Three gates to self-destruction: desire, anger, greed. These should be abandoned.

This verse has done more to distort the conversation around kama than almost anything else in the tradition. Read in isolation - which it almost always is - it sounds like a straightforward injunction against desire. And generations of practitioners have internalised exactly that reading, treating pleasure and wanting as spiritually suspect by definition.

But the Gita is not a text that rewards isolated reading. Two chapters earlier, in Chapter 14, Krishna has already described the gunas - and established that rajas, the quality of drive and desire, is not inherently problematic. It is the unexamined, uncontrolled, ego-driven version of kama that Krishna is naming in XVI.21 - the desire that operates without dharma, without intelligence, without the capacity for release that vairagya asks for.

This is not a condemnation of kāma as a purushartha. It is a precise description of what kāma becomes when it operates without the other three aims to contain and direct it.

The grouping with krodha and lobha is a warning about kāma unmoored - not kāma in its right relationship to a full human life.

What the Kāma Sutra Actually Is

While we're correcting misconceptions - the Kāma Sutra deserves its own moment of honest reframing.

The text is almost universally understood in the West as a manual of sexual positions. It is not. It is a comprehensive treatise on the art of living well - written by Vatsyayana, a celibate scholar, likely in the third or fourth century CE. Sexual intimacy is one chapter of a text that covers aesthetics, relationship, social conduct, personal presentation, and the cultivation of a life that is genuinely pleasurable in the full sense of that word.

Vatsyayana's central argument is that kāma - pleasure, beauty, sensory experience, desire met with intelligence and refinement - is not a distraction from a meaningful life. It is an ingredient of one. A life from which beauty, intimacy, and genuine pleasure have been systematically removed is not a more spiritual life. It is a diminished one.

This is consistent with what the tradition as a whole is saying through the purusharthas. The four aims are a framework for a complete human life - not a hierarchy in which the lower three are obstacles to the fourth. Kāma belongs. The question is how it is held.

Kāma as Sensory Pleasure

I want to say something I don't hear often enough on the spiritual path.

Pleasure is not the enemy of practice. The meal that is genuinely tasted. The piece of music that moves through the body before the mind has a chance to analyse it. The beauty of a landscape that stops thought for a moment. Physical intimacy that is genuinely present rather than performed. Rest that is actually restful rather than guilty.

These are kāma in its most immediate form. And the spiritual practitioner who has systematically evacuated them from their life in the name of austerity has not transcended kāma. They have suppressed it - which is a very different movement, and one that tends to produce its own complications.

I have noticed this in myself. The seasons of practice where I was most severe about what I allowed myself to enjoy were not the seasons of deepest clarity. They were the seasons of a certain brittleness - a practice that was disciplined in form and undernourished in something harder to name.

What restored it was usually something small. A genuinely good meal. A piece of music. A walk without agenda. Not indulgence - presence. The willingness to be actually here, in this body, in this sensory experience, without immediately reaching for the next thing or translating the experience into a lesson.

That presence is kāma as a practice. And it is more difficult than it sounds.

Kāma as Creative Desire

There is a second dimension of kāma that the tradition recognises and that modern spiritual culture almost entirely overlooks.

Kāma is the force that moves things into being.

In the Rigveda - one of the oldest texts in the world - kāma appears as the primordial creative impulse. Kamas tad agre samavartatadhi - desire arose first. Before form, before structure, before the manifest world took shape, there was kāma - the wanting, the reaching toward, the force that initiates creation.

This is not the ego's desire for a particular outcome. It is something deeper - the impulse toward expression, toward making, toward the specific form that only this particular configuration of awareness can produce. It is what moves the teacher toward the student, the artist toward the work, the practitioner toward the specific shape their dharma takes in the world.

Suppressing kāma in this sense doesn't produce a more spiritual practitioner. It produces a less creative one. The work loses the particular vitality that only genuine desire - desire aligned with dharma and held lightly enough for vairagya to do its work - can sustain over time.

Kama in Right Relationship

The tradition's instruction is not to eliminate kāma but to understand its right relationship to the other three purusharthas.

Kāma in service of dharma - desire directed by the thread of one's actual purpose - is generative. The pleasure taken in work that is genuinely yours. The creative energy that moves through aligned action. The sensory richness of a life lived with full presence.

Kāma supported by artha - the resources and energy that make genuine pleasure sustainable rather than guilty or depleted. You cannot fully inhabit kāma when the nervous system is in survival mode. Pleasure requires safety. Beauty requires enough space to be noticed.

And kāma held by the possibility of moksha - which is not the elimination of desire but its eventual natural release. The practitioner who has enjoyed fully and given fully, who has inhabited the pleasures of this life with genuine presence, is often better placed to release them than the one who suppressed them for decades and still wonders what they missed.

This is the purushartha framework as an integrated whole. Not a ladder from the material to the spiritual. A web - each aim supporting and requiring the others for any of them to be fully lived.

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What Gets in the Way

The same conditioning we explored in the artha piece applies here - perhaps even more acutely.

The inherited belief that pleasure is suspicious. That enjoying the body is spiritually immature. That genuine rest is laziness dressed up. That the senses are obstacles to be managed rather than dimensions of experience to be inhabited with intelligence and presence.

These beliefs don't always arrive as explicit teachings. More often they arrive as atmosphere - the unspoken family understanding that comfort is not to be trusted, that wanting things is dangerous, that the appropriate relationship to pleasure is one of careful, guilty moderation.

Viveka - honest discernment - applied to kāma asks: is my relationship to pleasure actually the tradition's teaching, or is it inherited fear with Sanskrit vocabulary attached?

That's a question worth sitting with.

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

What Comes Next

The final piece in this series looks at moksha - the fourth purushartha. Not as the destination that makes the other three retroactively meaningful, but as the quality that was available all along, running quietly beneath dharma, artha, and kama - waiting to be recognised rather than achieved.

*Keywords: kama purushartha meaning, kama krodha lobha Bhagavad Gita 16.21, Kama Sutra what it actually is, Vatsyayana Kama Sutra, kama as creative desire Rigveda, four purusharthas series, desire in yoga philosophy, kama vs suppression spiritual path, pleasure and spirituality yoga, kama and moksha relationship, Ashima Sood Ascend Substack

I write about yoga, Ayurveda, and contemplative practice as a living inquiry - including the parts of the tradition that spiritual culture has been too uncomfortable to engage with honestly. If this resonates, you can find more at unlockascend.com.

Artha is the second purushartha. And it may be the most misunderstood of the four.

What Artha Actually Means

The word is usually translated as wealth or money. And in popular spiritual culture, that translation tends to make people uncomfortable - as if the inclusion of material acquisition in a framework alongside dharma and moksha is an awkward concession to human weakness rather than a deliberate and intelligent design.

It isn't.

Artha comes from the root arth - meaning, purpose, resource, that which is sought. In classical usage it encompasses not just money but everything that sustains a life - energy, resources, time, relationships, infrastructure, the conditions that make it possible to live with dignity and to fulfill your dharma without being constantly depleted by the effort of surviving.

Kautilya, in the Arthashastra - one of the oldest and most sophisticated texts on statecraft ever written - treats artha with a precision that most modern economics textbooks haven't matched. He understood that a life without adequate resources is not a spiritual achievement. It is a constraint on everything else the purusharthas are pointing at.

The tradition is not saying money is the goal. It is saying that without sufficient artha, dharma becomes a luxury you cannot afford to live.

Artha and Dharma - The Relationship Between Them

Here is what the framework actually proposes: the four purusharthas are not ranked in spiritual merit with moksha at the top and artha near the bottom as a necessary evil. They are interdependent. Each one requires the others to be liveable.

Dharma without artha is noble intention without the means to act on it. The teacher who cannot sustain their teaching because they haven't built sufficient resource around it. The healer who burns out because the energy they give has no mechanism for replenishment. The practitioner who is so consumed by material scarcity that the quality of their inquiry is constantly compromised by anxiety about survival.

Krishna addresses this implicitly throughout the Gita's teaching on nishkama karma. The action is full. The energy behind it is real and sustained. What is released is the fruit - not the resource that makes continued action possible. Artha is what keeps the action going.

This is also why I think of artha not as money specifically, but as energy in circulation. Money is one form of that energy - the most legible one in the modern world. But artha also includes the physical energy in the body, the quality of attention available for the work, the relationships that sustain rather than deplete, the time that is protected rather than constantly encroached upon. All of it is artha. All of it either supports dharma or slowly starves it.

Money Energy - Where It Gets Complicated

In today's world, money is the primary vehicle through which artha moves. And this is where the conditioning we explored in the last piece - the patterns shaped by family history, survival fear, inherited scarcity becomes most visible and most obstructing.

Most people carry a relationship with money that was never consciously chosen. It was absorbed. From parents who whispered about bills behind closed doors, or who spent with a kind of desperate generosity that masked deeper anxiety, or who equated financial caution with moral virtue so thoroughly that earning well began to feel vaguely suspect.

The generation that crossed a border with nothing carried a particular kind of money conditioning - one built entirely on survival. Save everything. Trust nothing to hold. Build walls of material security high enough that what happened once can never happen again. That conditioning served a real purpose in a real crisis. Passed down two or three generations without examination, it becomes something else entirely - a relationship with money that is governed by fear rather than intelligence, and that often, paradoxically, creates the very scarcity it was trying to prevent.

The yogic tradition is unambiguous on this. What you hold in awareness, you tend to create conditions for. Yad bhavam tad bhavati - as the feeling, so the becoming. A mind saturated with scarcity thinking - regardless of the actual numbers in the account - tends to make decisions that perpetuate scarcity. It misses opportunities. It undercharges. It gives away what should be valued. It hoards what should circulate.

Money, in this sense, is not separate from the inner work. It is one of its most revealing mirrors.

Releasing the Conditioning Around Artha

The first step is simply to look honestly at the relationship.

Not the bank statement - the feeling. What arises in the body when you think about charging what your work is actually worth? What is the internal narrative around receiving money for something that feels meaningful - as if meaning and compensation are in tension rather than alignment? Where did that narrative come from, and is it actually yours?

These are not just financial questions. They are svadhyaya questions - the same honest self-inquiry the tradition asks you to bring to every other dimension of the inner life. Money is not exempt from that inquiry. In fact, given how much conditioning concentrates around it, it may be one of the most fertile places to apply viveka - the discernment that separates what is actually true from what has simply been absorbed.

Artha, tended intelligently, circulates. It doesn't accumulate behind fear-walls or drain away through unconscious patterns. It moves in proportion to the dharma it is sustaining - neither hoarded nor squandered, but held with the same quality of intelligent attention the tradition asks you to bring to everything else.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The relationship between dharma, artha, and the conditioning that obscures both is something I work with closely - and it is rarely a straightforward conversation.

What tends to surface in that work: the specific places where a person's dharma is clear but their artha is compromised - not by external circumstance but by the internal patterns that make receiving, charging, and sustaining feel more complicated than they need to be. The money stories inherited without examination. The relationship between spiritual identity and financial discomfort. The ways a person unconsciously keeps their artha small enough that their dharma stays safely theoretical.

This is the work I'm building a structured offering around - one that holds dharma and artha together as the interdependent inquiry the tradition always intended them to be.

If you're at a point where the material dimension of your path feels tangled -where you sense what you're here to do but can't quite make it sustainable -that's exactly the conversation I'd want to have with you.

Reach out. Let's look at it together.

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

What Comes Next

The next piece in this series looks at kama - the third purushartha, and perhaps the most uncomfortable one for spiritual practitioners to sit with honestly. Not desire as obstacle, but desire as the tradition's recognition that pleasure, beauty, and the full sensory experience of being alive belong in any complete account of what a human life is for.

Keywords: artha meaning purushartha, artha beyond money, dharma and artha relationship, money energy spiritual practice, purushartha series, Arthashastra Kautilya artha, yad bhavam tad bhavati, money conditioning yogic philosophy, scarcity mindset yoga, artha and dharma interdependence, Bhagavad Gita nishkama karma artha, Ashima Sood Ascend Substack

I write about yoga, Ayurveda, and contemplative practice as a living inquiry - including the places where the inner work and the material life are more connected than we're comfortable admitting. If this resonates, you can find more at unlockascend.com.

If dharma isn't something you choose, like a value, but something you discern - where do you actually start looking?

In the last piece, we talked about the four purusharthas. That sent me back into my own relationship with dharma as a question I'd actually had to live through.

Where I Started Looking

The first place I looked was a tool I suspect many of you have already encountered.

Ikigai.

The four-circle diagram - what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for - is everywhere. Worth knowing: this diagram wasn't created in Japan. It was made in 2014 by a blogger named Marc Winn, who merged a Spanish framework on "purpose" with a Japanese word he'd encountered in a TED talk. Ken Mogi1, the Japanese neuroscientist who has actually researched ikigai, has called the diagram a misrepresentation. Japan never produced it.

I'm naming this not to dismiss the tool but to be honest about it. I took it with a grain of salt for exactly this reason. The real concept is closer to what makes getting up worth it - not a destination found at the intersection of four circles, but a quality of attention brought to what's already in front of you.

Still - even an imperfect tool pointed me somewhere useful. As someone already on the yogic path, I had a quieter form of guidance running underneath the diagram. I was working as a design mentor at the time, and I was having a genuinely good time watching my students get placed in strong agencies and companies. That fact - the fun of it, not the achievement of it - mattered more than I initially gave it credit for.

Then I Worked Through My Core Values

This is where I went deeper, using a framework I've developed with clients that I won't fully unpack here - partly because it deserves its own space, and partly because the process matters more than the answer it produces.

What I will say is this: core values, examined honestly, don't tell you what to do. They tell you the texture of how you're meant to do anything. Mine kept circling back to teaching, mentorship, and translation - taking something dense or distant and making it usable for someone standing where I once stood.

That's not dharma yet. But it's the material dharma is built from.

What I Actually Found

Here's the part that surprised me most.

There is an overarching dharma - a theme that has stayed remarkably consistent across very different seasons of my life. Whether I was mentoring design students or now teaching the Sutras, the underlying thread hasn't moved: taking something that feels inaccessible and making it something a person can actually live by.

What changes is the expression. The specific shape dharma takes shifts with the stage of life you're in - unless a major event reroutes the direction entirely. For me, that event was the Gita finding me in 2019. Before that, the dharma was expressed through design mentorship.

This is closer to what Krishna means in the Gita, Chapter 18, Verse 47:

śreyān sva-dharmo viguṇaḥ para-dharmāt svanuṣṭhitāt

It is better to do one's own dharma imperfectly than another's perfectly - even when it changes shape entirely from what it once looked like. The constancy isn't in the role. It's in the thread underneath the role.

How to Actually Look for Yours

This is where I’ll be honest about something.

What I described above - ikigai, core values, the through-line - is the beginning of the inquiry, not the end of it. Discerning dharma isn’t a checklist you complete alone in a journal. It’s something seen more clearly with someone who can ask the question you haven’t thought to ask yourself, and who has actually walked the discernment process rather than just read about it.

I have a framework I use with clients for exactly this - tracing the thread underneath the costume, identifying what survived your life’s major reroutes intact, separating actual dharma from the roles and identities that have simply been comfortable. It’s more precise than anything I can fully lay out in a piece like this, because it’s built to respond to your specific history, not a general audience.

I’m currently building this into a structured offering. If you’re at a point where the question “what is my dharma, actually” feels less academic and more urgent - where you sense the thread but can’t yet name it - that’s exactly the conversation I’d want to have with you.

Reach out, and let’s see what we find.

What Comes Next

The next piece looks at artha - the resources that sustain the life dharma asks you to live. Not wealth in the narrow sense, but the means that make svadharma sustainable rather than romantic.

Keywords: how to find your dharma, dharma vs ikigai, ikigai venn diagram origin Marc Winn, ikigai misconception Japan, Bhagavad Gita chapter 18 verse 47 svadharma, core values vs dharma, discerning purpose yogic philosophy, four purusharthas series, Ashima Sood Ascend Substack

I write about yoga, Ayurveda, and contemplative practice as a living inquiry. If this resonates, you can find more at unlockascend.com.

He never talked about it.

How he’d brought his sisters across safely. How much fear their bodies must have stored, carried silently for decades after the actual danger had passed. How much uncertainty played on minds that had no language yet for what they were living through. One of his brothers was born in a refugee camp and has no birth certificate to this day - simply doesn’t exist on paper, in a world that runs entirely on paper. They crossed on two different trains and were separated - one half landing in Agra, the other in Indore - and found their way back to each other through something I still find remarkable: a weekly message placed in the newspaper, faithfully, week after week, until it worked two years later.

On the surface, it’s a riches to rags to riches story. The kind that gets told at family gatherings with a certain pride. But underneath that story is something the pride doesn’t quite capture - the way that trauma doesn’t simply disappear once safety returns. It goes underground. And then it resurfaces, generations later, as a fierce, sometimes suffocating need to protect the next generation from anything resembling what was once survived.

I look at my own generation, and I see it everywhere - not always as fear, but as conditioning so deep it rarely announces itself as conditioning at all. The friend who cannot rest until every contingency has been planned for. The colleague who reads neutral feedback as an attack, because somewhere further back, criticism once arrived attached to genuine danger. The relative who measures love by how much control they’re allowed to exert, because control was once, quite literally, the difference between a family staying together and a family being separated on two different trains. None of this is irrational. It is the nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do, generations after the original danger has passed, in a body that has no way of knowing the war is over.

I’ve sat with the whats, the whys, the whens and hows of the behaviours I see in almost everyone I encounter - including myself. The impatience that isn’t really about the moment at hand. The need to be right that isn’t really about being right. The inability to sit still that isn’t really about restlessness. Trace any of it back far enough and you usually find someone, somewhere, who once needed exactly that quality to survive something the rest of us never had to survive.

This is the human experience. And it can be deeply limiting if we let it run unexamined - if we forget that beneath all this conditioning is the atman, untouched by any of it, and mistake the prison the mind has built for the whole of what we are.

But life was never meant to be only that.

We are meant to live fully - to give back through dharma, the right action that serves something beyond ourselves. To build and replenish through artha, the resources that sustain a life. To genuinely enjoy what this earth offers through kama, the pleasures that are not obstacles to the path but part of it. And, through all three, held simultaneously rather than sequentially, to move toward moksha - the transcendence that doesn’t require leaving any of this behind, only seeing it clearly enough to no longer be bound by it.

My grandfather crossed a border he never spoke of again.

I am still learning to cross the one his silence left behind.

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

Keywords: generational trauma yoga philosophy, conditioning of the mind, Partition trauma inherited, shraddha faith meaning, Main vaapas Aunga, atman and conditioning, purusharthas dharma artha kama moksha, ancestral healing yogic perspective, Ashima Sood Ascend Substack

I write about yoga, Ayurveda, and contemplative practice as a living inquiry - including the inherited patterns most of us carry without naming. If this resonates, you can find more at unlockascend.com

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Not a sutra. Not a framework. Just the story of how I ended up here - and why I believe the Yoga Sutras are one of the most practically transformative texts available to a modern human being living a full, complicated, ordinary life.

The Calling

A few years ago I was in the middle of building my design agency. I had just finished a deep read of the Bhagavad Gita, gone into Vedanta, studied Ayurveda. The spiritual path had been opening steadily - and for the first time in a long time, there was a particular kind of spaciousness. Not emptiness in the difficult sense. More like a clearing. Room for the next thing, without yet knowing what it was.

During the pandemic I had been sharing meditations on LinkedIn. Nothing formal - just what was present, offered to whoever needed it. The response surprised me. People came back. They asked for more. And something in that kept nudging me toward a question I kept setting aside:

Should I get certified before I do this properly?

So I started looking. And I found The Yoga Institute in Mumbai - the world’s oldest organised yoga centre, founded in 1918. Something about it resonated- the lineage not the prestige. The sense that this was a place that had held the tradition carefully and for a long time.

I knew I needed to do it.

The Decision

Here’s the part I don’t often say out loud.

At the time, every rupee/cent I was making was going back into the business. Getting certified meant going into my savings - savings I had set aside carefully, that I had built myself. I didn’t want to borrow from my then-fiancé, now husband. I didn’t want to ask family or friends.

I just knew.

Not in the way you know something intellectually. In the way the body settles when the right direction is in front of it.

I went into my savings, took out nearly $750 and into my joint account with my father and sent myself $200, less than 50% - my share. I enrolled with this $950.

What Happened Week by Week

I don’t have a clean way to describe what the four month training did to me. Quantum leap is the closest phrase - though I mean it in a specific sense. Not magic in the collectively agreed upon understanding of the word. Something I could trace back through Samkhya. Something I could recognise through Vedanta. The philosophy I had been studying started to move from the page into the body, into daily life, into ordinary moments I had been moving through on autopilot for years.

The changes were not dramatic. They were structural.

I noticed I had more control over my thoughts - not suppression, but actual space between a stimulus and my response to it. The reactivity that had defined so much of my life, the black and white thinking, the need to resolve everything immediately - it began to soften. Not because I decided it should. Because the training was reorganising something at a level I didn’t have direct access to.

The people who noticed first were not the people I would have expected. My husband noticed. My cook noticed. The people in the daily, ordinary proximity of my life - the ones who see you before you’ve had a chance to curate yourself - they noticed before I fully did.

Relationships that had carried a particular friction began to breathe. I stopped needing to assign blame, stopped seeing situations in extremes. What I had previously experienced as being villainised - I found I could meet with something close to peace. Not because I had become passive, but because the lens had changed.

I was able to look back at my own life - the choices, the pivots, the difficult seasons - and see clearly what had led to what. Without judgment. That clarity was, in a word I don’t use lightly, liberating.

A Decision I’m Grateful I Made

There was a moment in the middle of the training when I wondered whether I should learn Sanskrit properly. With my type A personality - and the discernment the training had by then given me - I could see exactly where that road led. Years of language study, done with tremendous rigour and genuine love, that would delay indefinitely the thing I actually felt called to do.

I made the decision not to.

Understanding Sanskrit deeply enough to grasp the concepts, to hold them accurately, to convey them honestly - that was what this moment asked. The full immersion could come later, and in its own time. What was needed now was to bring this out into the world.

That decision, looking back, was itself an application of the teaching. Discernment. Vairagya. Knowing when to go deep and when to move.

What the First Group Showed Me

When I began teaching - testing what I had learned with a small group - something happened I genuinely had not anticipated.

It worked. Not in a measured, outcomes-based way. In the way that you can see in someone’s eyes that something has shifted. People who came in with the same kind of fractured attention and over-busy minds that I had brought to the training started to notice the same kinds of things. The space between stimulus and response. The softening of extremes. The capacity to hold situations without immediately needing to resolve them.

I had spent years curating a design career. I was good at it. I had no idea that this - sitting with a small group and moving slowly through one of the oldest philosophical texts in the world - was going to feel like the thing I was actually here to do.

What the Yoga Sutras Are Not

Before I tell you what the study looks like, I want to be honest about what it isn’t.

It is not a certification. It will not make you a yoga teacher. It does not require prior knowledge of Sanskrit, deep experience of asana, or an existing meditation practice - though all of those are welcome.

It is also not a self-help programme. The Yoga Sutras are not a productivity system or a stress management tool. They are a rigorous, systematic, profoundly practical map of the human mind - written by someone who understood that map from the inside - and they ask genuine intellectual and personal engagement from anyone who studies them seriously.

What they give back is proportional to what is brought.

What You Can Expect

If you join the study, the first thing I’ll do is get on a one-to-one call with you sometime in the first month. I want to know where you are - what you’re carrying, what you’re curious about, what has brought you to this text at this particular moment in your life.

The sessions are live, discussion-based, and recorded - but presence matters. The energy of a small group studying together is something a recording cannot fully replicate. I ask for that commitment not as a rule but as an honest description of what makes the work possible.

What I ask of participants is simple: come willing to do real inner work. Be honest with yourself about what arises. The texts will do the rest.

Where You Might Find Yourself in One to Three Months

I’m careful about making promises. The tradition is careful about making promises. But I can tell you what I have seen, in myself and in the people I have worked with.

A different relationship with your own reactions. Not the absence of emotion - the presence of something underneath it that doesn’t move as quickly. The capacity to discern when to act and when to wait. Closer relationships that become more honest and, paradoxically, more warm - because you are no longer bringing the residue of unexamined reactivity into them.

A lens shift. That is the closest I can get to describing it. The same situations, the same relationships, the same life - seen from a vantage point that makes stuckness less sticky and clarity more available.

The victim mindset - the one that assigns the cause of difficulty entirely outside the self - begins to dissolve. Not because the difficulty disappears, but because the relationship to it changes.

This is what the Yoga Sutras do when they are studied as a living text rather than a historical one.

The August Cohort

I’m opening a small study group in August 2026.

14 weeks. Maximum 10 participants. Live. We will move through the Samadhi Pada and the Sadhana Pada - the first two chapters of the Yoga Sutras - slowly, with multiple interpretations, cross-referenced with the Bhagavad Gita, Samkhya, Vedanta, and Ayurveda where the texts illuminate each other.

Before the cohort opens, I’m holding a 90-minute workshop on June 21st - International Yoga Day - as a sample of exactly this kind of study. One sutra, explored with the depth and discussion format of the full program. INR 2000 or $31 to attend depending on where you join from. Priority access to August cohort applications included.

Book your spot here

21st June, 2026 8:30am EST / 7pm IST

90 minutes of going through a deeper sutra -

We’re picking one from chapter 2. Join the conversation.

If the workshop resonates, the cohort application will feel like a natural next step. If it doesn’t, you’ll have spent 90 minutes with a text that is worth your time regardless.

I teach the Yoga Sutras as a living inquiry - in conversation with the Bhagavad Gita, Samkhya, Vedanta, and Ayurveda. Find more at unlockascend.com or reach out directly.

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What it rarely offers is what the tradition was actually pointing at.

This sutra is why Ascend exists.

The Sutra

prakāśa kriyā sthiti śīlaṁ bhūtendriyātmakaṁ bhogāpavargārthaṁ dṛśyam

Patanjali. Yoga Sutras. II.18.

The seen - the entire manifest world, everything that can be perceived, experienced, known through the senses or the mind - exists for two simultaneous purposes.

Bhoga. Experience. Engagement. The full, present, undefended inhabiting of life as it actually is.

Apavarga. Liberation. The eventual transcendence of identification with what is experienced. The recognition of what the experiencer actually is, beneath and beyond every experience.

What Most People Know - and What Gets Left Out

The conversation about yoga in the modern world is almost entirely a conversation about bhoga.

Better sleep. Less anxiety. A more present relationship with the body. Patanjali names it first and names it deliberately. The world is for experience. The body is for experience. The mind, the senses, the full texture of a human life - all of it is drishyam, the seen, and all of it exists to be met.

But the sutra doesn’t stop there. And this is where most modern yoga stops, and where the tradition continues.

Apavarga.

The word appears once in the entire corpus of the Yoga Sutras. Here, in II.18, alongside bhoga, as its inseparable counterpart. Liberation is not separate from experience - it is what experience, met honestly and completely, eventually reveals.

The Samkhya Foundation - What Is Actually Being Seen

To understand II.18 properly, you need the philosophical framework that sits beneath the entire Yoga Sutra text.

Samkhya.

Patanjali did not invent the cosmology he works within. He inherited it from the Samkhya tradition - one of the oldest systematic philosophies in the world - and the Yoga Sutras are, in many ways, Samkhya philosophy with a method added.

Samkhya begins with a fundamental distinction.

Purusha - pure consciousness. The witness. The aware presence that is never an object, never modified, never touched by anything that happens in experience. Purusha is nitya - eternal. Shuddha - pure. Mukta - already free. It has never been bound. It does not evolve, change, suffer, or seek. It simply is -the unchanging awareness in which everything else appears.

Prakriti - primordial nature. Everything that is not purusha. The entire manifest world - matter, energy, mind, intellect, ego, the senses, the body, thought, emotion, sensation. All of it is prakriti. All of it is drishyam - the seen.

The three qualities that constitute prakriti are the gunas:

Sattva - clarity, luminosity, the quality of knowing. Rajas - activity, movement, the quality of doing. Tamas - inertia, heaviness, the quality of being.

Everything in the manifest world - every experience, every thought, every state of practice is a particular combination of these three. Including the mind. Including the sense of being a separate self. Including the feeling of being the one who is practicing.

This is the foundation II.18 is standing on. The seen world - drishyam - is prakriti in its entirety. Bhūtendriyātmakam - composed of the elements and the senses. Prakāśa kriyā sthiti śīlam - characterised by the qualities of sattva, rajas, and tamas respectively.

And this entire prakriti - this entire manifest world in all its texture and complexity and beauty - exists for the two purposes Patanjali names.

Bhoga and apavarga.

Bhoga - What Experience Is Actually For

Bhoga is not a concession the tradition makes to human weakness. It is not the spiritually inferior half of the sutra that serious practitioners should move beyond as quickly as possible.

Bhoga is the path.

For most practitioners - for the grahasti, the householder, the person living a full human life rather than in renunciation - bhoga is the primary vehicle through which apavarga becomes available. The relationship that breaks something open. The loss that reveals what cannot be lost. The ordinary Tuesday that, met with enough presence and honesty, shows the one who is meeting it something they could not have been told.

This is what the tradition means when it says the world exists for experience. Not that you should indulge everything - but that you should meet everything. Fully. Without the spiritual bypassing that uses practice as a reason not to be here.

The Bhagavad Gita carries this same understanding through the teaching on nishkama karma. Act fully, in the world, with complete engagement - and release the fruits. The action is bhoga - full, present, real. The releasing is the movement toward apavarga. Not two separate things happening at different times. One movement, held simultaneously.

This is why Ascend is not a renunciate tradition. The work I do with people is not about leaving the world, simplifying the life, retreating from relationship and responsibility. It is about inhabiting the life more completely - and finding, in that more complete inhabiting, the thread that leads toward apavarga.

Apavarga - What Liberation Actually Means

Apavarga comes from the root apa-vṛj - to turn away from, to separate from, to be released. It is the word the Samkhya and yoga traditions use for liberation - the release from the cycle of experience driven by misidentification.

But release from what, exactly?

Not from the world. Not from experience. Not from the body or the senses or the texture of a human life.

Release from the misidentification - the deeply rooted belief that the purusha, the witness, is the same as the prakriti through which it witnesses. That you are your thoughts. That you are your emotions. That you are the one who practices, who achieves, who suffers, who seeks. That the experiencing self is the same as the awareness in which experience appears.

This is avidya - the root klesha, the foundational ignorance - applied at the cosmological level. Purusha has not actually confused itself with prakriti. But the mind, which is prakriti, generates the appearance of a witness that is bound by what it witnesses. And liberation - apavarga - is the dissolution of that appearance.

Vedanta approaches the same recognition from a different angle. Where Samkhya maintains a distinction between purusha and prakriti even in liberation, Advaita Vedanta points at the non-dual recognition - that what you are is not a witness separate from the world, but the awareness in which both witness and world appear. Aham Brahmasmi. Tat Tvam Asi. The mahavakyas as direct pointers toward what apavarga, taken to its deepest expression, actually reveals.

These are the same territory approached from different starting points. And one of the things I find most valuable in studying the Sutras in conversation with Vedanta is precisely this - that the traditions illuminate one another in ways that neither fully illuminates alone.

Why This Sutra Is the Foundation of Ascend

When I named this work Ascend, I was looking for a word that could hold both movements simultaneously.

The engagement with life - the full, present, undefended meeting of what is here. And the movement toward something that transcends the life as currently understood. Not escape. Not renunciation. Ascent - the natural movement of awareness toward its own recognition, through the very experiences that seemed, at first, to be obstacles to it.

Bhoga and apavarga. The two purposes of the seen world. Held together, in one sutra, without hierarchy or contradiction.

This is what I felt called to make real in a teaching container. Not because the tradition is lacking teachers who can explain the Sutras - there are many. But because the conversation that holds both bhoga and apavarga simultaneously - that neither dismisses the texture of ordinary life nor stops short of what the tradition is actually pointing at - that conversation is rarer than it should be.

The person who comes to me is usually somewhere in the middle. They have been practicing. They have been studying. They are earnest and sincere and genuinely committed. And they sense, without always being able to name it, that something is missing - not in their effort, but in the framework through which the effort is being understood.

II.18 is that framework.

The world exists for your experience. And your experience, met with enough honesty and sustained enough inquiry, exists to reveal what you actually are.

Both. Simultaneously. Without needing to choose.

What This Looks Like in Practice - A Question Worth Sitting With

The study of II.18 is not complete until it becomes personal.

So here is the question the sutra actually asks - the one I would bring into a study group, the one I’d want you to sit with before moving to the next line:

Where in your life are you treating bhoga as the end point - and where are you using apavarga as a reason to avoid bhoga fully?

Both movements are available as escape routes from what the sutra is pointing at. The practitioner who only seeks experience and never inquires into the nature of the one experiencing. And the practitioner who uses liberation as a reason not to be fully here - who practices detachment before they have practiced presence.

II.18 holds both accountable. The world exists for both. And you are here for both.

That is the inquiry. And it does not resolve quickly.

An Invitation

On June 21st - International Yoga Day - I’m holding a live 90-minute workshop: Beyond Philosophy: Bringing the Yoga Sutras into Everyday Life.

This is the kind of conversation I’m describing in this piece - a single sutra, explored with depth, cross-referenced across traditions, brought into direct contact with lived experience. Discussion-based, not lecture-based. The format of the full Yoga Sutra study group, in a single session.

Attendees receive priority access to applications for the August 2026 cohort - a 14-week small-group study of the Samadhi Pada and Sadhana Pada with a maximum of 10 participants.

If this piece opened something - the workshop is the next step. I use plainer language when I teach and talk, see if it’s for you here - your body will lean in if it is.

Book your spot here

21st June, 2026 8:30am EST / 7pm IST

90 minutes of going through a deeper sutra -

We’re picking one from chapter 2. Join the conversation.

Keywords: Yoga Sutra II.18 meaning, bhoga apavarga Patanjali, what is apavarga in yoga, Samkhya prakriti purusha, drishyam yoga sutras, purpose of the world yoga philosophy, liberation through experience yoga, Yoga Sutra study group, bhoga and liberation, nishkama karma Gita and apavarga, Vedanta and Samkhya comparison, Ascend yoga Substack, Ashima Sood Yoga Sutra study August 2026

I teach the Yoga Sutras as a living inquiry - in conversation with the Bhagavad Gita, Samkhya, Vedanta, and Ayurveda. The August 2026 cohort is open for applications. Find more at

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

I was watching Qala, a film I came to without expectations - it’s not a new movie and I didn’t think it would be anything more that an attempt to enjoy my human experience. Somewhere in the middle of it, this arrived as something that stopped the room, I paused and took it all in.

Ud jayega hans akela.

The swan will fly alone.

I’ve sat with Kabir before. The dohas, the irreverence, the refusal to be contained by any single tradition. But this particular line - in this particular moment, through this particular film - landed differently. The way things land when you are ready for them without knowing you were ready.

The teaching that finds you when the ground has been sufficiently prepared to receive it.

The Hans

In the Vedic and yogic traditions, the hans - the swan - is one of the most precise symbols available for the atman.

The swan has a quality the tradition found significant: neera-ksheera viveka - the ability to separate milk from water when the two are mixed. To take what is nourishing and leave what is not. To discern essence from appearance.

This is the atman’s nature. Not the ego, not the personality, not the accumulated identity of a lifetime - but the aware presence that moves through all of it without being constituted by any of it. The one who sees without being reduced to what is seen.

Kabir chose this image deliberately. The hans in his bhajan is not the body, not the mind, not the practitioner who has worked hard and earned liberation. It is the awareness that was always already free - and is now, at the moment the body releases, simply recognised as such.

Ud jayega hans akela.

The flying is not an achievement. It is a revelation of what was always the case.

Jag darshan ka mela

Jag darshan ka mela.

The world is a fair. A gathering. A place of spectacle and colour and noise and meeting - and then dispersal.

Kabir’s image of the mela is one of the most honest descriptions of ordinary life available in any tradition. Not a condemnation of the world - Kabir was no ascetic. He was a weaver. A householder. A man who lived fully inside the texture of ordinary life and saw it clearly from within.

The mela is not wrong. It is not something to escape. It is what it is - a temporary gathering, a moment of meeting, a fair that is already in the process of ending even as it reaches its height.

What the bhajan is pointing at is not the wrongness of the mela, but the confusion that arises when the hans - the atman - forgets that it is a visitor to the fair rather than constituted by it. When the temporary gathering begins to feel like the permanent home. When the noise of the mela becomes the only reality, and the quiet that preceded it and will follow it becomes unimaginable.

Jag darshan ka mela zaag ke.

The world’s fair - wake up from it. Jaagna - awakening. The eyes opening while still inside the fair. The recognition, without leaving the gathering, that what you are is not what the gathering contains.

This is the grahasti’s path carried to its deepest implication. You do not need to leave the mela. You need to see it clearly while you are inside it.

The Aloneness

Ud jayega hans akela.

The line that stopped the room for me.

The aloneness Kabir is pointing at - akela - is not loneliness. It is not the isolation of someone who has been left behind or who has withdrawn from life. It is something more fundamental and, once recognised, more liberating than anything the opposite of loneliness can offer.

The atman makes its journey alone. Kabir understood relationship as deeply as anyone in the tradition. But because the nature of the atman is such that it cannot be accompanied in the way the ego imagines accompaniment. No one else’s understanding substitutes for your own recognition. No teacher’s realisation transfers directly into the student’s awareness. No relationship, however profound, can make the journey that each awareness must make for itself.

If the journey is ultimately alone, then the preparations for it - the practice, the inquiry, the honest self-study - are not about performing for an audience or accumulating approval. They are between you and what you actually are. The aloneness of the hans is the most radical possible freedom from the need for external validation of the inner life.

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The Serendipity

There is a particular quality of encounter with a teaching that arrives sideways - through a film, through a song heard in passing, through a conversation that was supposed to be about something else entirely.

The tradition has a word for the readiness that makes such encounters possible. Patra — the vessel. The one who has been prepared to receive, without knowing the preparation was happening.

I don’t know exactly when I became patra for this bhajan. Possibly it was always waiting — for the particular combination of what had been understood and what had not yet been released that made the line land the way it did in that room.

What I know is that Kabir did not write for scholars. He wrote for the person sitting in the middle of their ordinary life, suddenly stopped by something that arrived without announcement and rearranged something they didn’t know needed rearranging.

Ud jayega hans akela.

If it has arrived for you now in this piece, through this reading that is not coincidence.

The mela is still playing. The hans already knows the way.

There is more that I found….

There is more I found in this deep dive - anecdotes about Kabir that I've held back from the main piece. Not because they aren't fascinating, but because they touch on religious history in a way that isn't what Ascend is here for. This work is rooted in Sanatana Dharma - the eternal inquiry - not in any religion's claim over it. Kabir himself would probably approve of that boundary. If you're curious about what I found, drop a comment - I'm happy to share it there.

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

Keywords: ud jayega hans akela meaning, Kabir bhajan hans atman, hans symbol atman yoga, jag darshan ka mela Kabir, Kabir doha philosophy, atman aloneness yogic tradition, Qala film bhajan, neera ksheera viveka hans, Kabir and Vedanta, soul’s journey alone yoga philosophy, Ashima Sood Ascend Substack

I explore yogic philosophy, Ayurveda, and contemplative practice through Ascend — as a living inquiry rather than an academic one. If this resonates, you can find more at unlockascend.com.

Abhinivesha.

What Is Abhinivesha in Yoga?

Patanjali defines it in Sutra II.9:

svarasavāhī viduṣo ‘pi tathā rūḍho ‘bhiniveśaḥ

Abhinivesha flows by its own momentum - svarasavahi - and is deeply rooted - rudha - even in the learned. Even in the wise. Even in those who know better.

This is what makes abhinivesha the most humbling of the five kleshas. Avidya can be addressed through knowledge. Asmita can be loosened through honest self-study. Raga and dvesha can be worked with through sustained practice and viveka. But abhinivesha - the deepest clinging, the fear that runs beneath all other fears - persists by its own momentum regardless of how much you know.

It is the fifth and final klesha in Sutra II.3

avidyā asmitā rāga dveṣa abhiniveśāḥ

And it is, in the tradition’s understanding, the one that sits closest to the root of embodied existence itself.

The Three Faces of Abhinivesha

Abhinivesha is most commonly translated as the fear of death. And it includes that - the instinctive, biological clinging or survival instinct to physical existence that runs in every living system regardless of philosophical understanding. You can know, intellectually, that the atman is deathless. And the body will still flinch from the edge.

But abhinivesha operates at three levels simultaneously - and on the spiritual path, it is the second and third that become most relevant.

The fear of death - the literal level. The clinging to physical continuity, to the body, to the life as it is currently configured. This is svarasavahi - self-sustaining, instinctive, not requiring thought to perpetuate itself. It runs in the cells before the mind has a chance to intervene.

The fear of transformation - the psychological level. The resistance to becoming what practice is genuinely asking you to become. Not the dramatic resistance - the subtle one. The practitioner who keeps their practice safe enough that it never asks too much. Who studies the texts but stops just short of the inquiry that would require something to change. Who understands the teaching intellectually but finds, again and again, a reason not to let it reorganise their life.

This is abhinivesha operating through the personality rather than the body. The fear is not of physical death but of the death of a way of being - a role, a relationship, a self-concept - that practice is quietly asking to be released.

The fear of dissolution - the deepest level. The terror that arises, in genuinely advanced practice, at the prospect of the self dissolving entirely. The resistance to para vairagya. The point at which the practitioner who has spent years releasing the grip suddenly finds that the final releasing - of the one who has been doing all the releasing - is the most frightening thing practice has ever asked.

This is what Patanjali means by rudha - deeply rooted. Rooted not in conditioning or ignorance, but in the fundamental structure of individual existence itself. The sense of being a separate self does not want to dissolve, even when it understands that dissolution is liberation.

These three are not necessarily sequential - They are the same movement at different depths of the system - the body flinching from physical death, the personality resisting transformation, the self contracting from dissolution. Abhinivesha all the way down.

Why It Runs Even in the Wise

This is the line in Sutra II.9 that deserves the most honest attention.

Viduṣo ‘pi - even in the learned. Even in those who know.

Most obstructions can be addressed through knowledge. Avidya - ignorance - dissolves through correct understanding. Asmita loosens when the mahavakyas are held as genuine inquiry rather than intellectual position. But abhinivesha persists by its own momentum - svarasavahi - independent of how much the practitioner knows about its nature.

This is a description of the terrain that honest practice eventually enters - where knowledge is no longer sufficient, where understanding no longer leads directly to freedom, where something more than intellectual comprehension is required.

What is required is what the tradition has always pointed toward beneath the philosophy. Direct experience of what the philosophy is describing. Not the concept of the deathless atman - the recognition of it, in the body, as one’s own nature.

This is also why abhinivesha cannot be worked with through more of the same practice that addressed the earlier kleshas. It requires a qualitative shift - from practice as something the practitioner does, to practice as something that does the practitioner.

Visit Ascend's Website

The work I do through Ascend draws on the same traditions explored here -Yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta, and scripture study -
as living practices rather than concepts.

Krishna on Abhinivesha - The Deathless Atman

The Bhagavad Gita opens, in many ways, as a direct response to abhinivesha.

Arjuna on the battlefield is not simply afraid of violence. He is confronting, at the deepest level, the fear of loss - of his teachers, his family, his role, his identity as a warrior, his sense of what his life has meant. This is abhinivesha in its psychological and existential dimensions - the clinging to what is known, to what has been, to the continuity of a self whose dissolution feels intolerable.

Krishna’s response begins in Chapter 2 with the most direct possible antidote:

na jāyate mriyate vā kadācin nāyaṁ bhūtvā bhavitā vā na bhūyaḥ ajo nityaḥ śāśvato ‘yaṁ purāṇo na hanyate hanyamāne śarīre (II.20)

The atman is never born and never dies. It has not come into being and will not come into being. It is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, primeval. It is not slain when the body is slain.

This is not consolation philosophy. Krishna is pointing at the direct antidote to abhinivesha - not the suppression of fear, but the recognition that what you fundamentally are has never been subject to the threat that fear is responding to.

The body dies. The role ends. The self-concept dissolves. The personality transforms beyond recognition. And the atman - ajo nityaḥ śāśvatah - unborn, eternal, unchanging - remains. Not as a future state. As the present reality that abhinivesha obscures.

This is also where the Gita’s teaching on karma yoga finds its deepest relevance. When the practitioner is no longer identified with the outcome - when nishkama karma is not just a philosophical commitment but a lived orientation - abhinivesha loses the ground it needs to sustain itself. The fear of death requires a self that can die. The fear of transformation requires an identity that can be threatened. When vairagya has sufficiently loosened the grip on both, what remains is the awareness that was never in danger.

Abhinivesha on the Spiritual Path

For practitioners who have been on the path for some time, abhinivesha tends to show up in specific and recognisable ways.

The study that goes right to the edge of a genuine insight - and then turns back toward the familiar. The practice that has become sophisticated enough to be comfortable - and therefore safe enough to never quite ask everything. The teacher or teaching that is kept at a slight intellectual distance, appreciated but not allowed to fully land. The transformation that is understood, endorsed, spoken about with genuine enthusiasm - and quietly not inhabited.

In each case the structure is the same. Something in the system has recognised that what is being asked - by the text, the practice, the teacher, the moment - would require a genuine dissolution of something it has been sustaining. And it has found, without conscious decision, a way to stop just short.

This is abhinivesha operating as the spiritual path’s most subtle guardian. Not preventing practice - directing it. Keeping it productive enough to sustain the practitioner’s identity as someone who practices, but safe enough that the practitioner remains intact.

Viveka - sustained discernment - is what makes this visible. And what makes it visible is what begins, slowly, to loosen it.

The Antidote - Shraddha and Vairagya

Abhinivesha cannot be dissolved through effort. The one who is afraid cannot think their way out of the fear, practice their way past it, or accumulate enough knowledge to render it irrelevant. Patanjali is clear - it runs by its own momentum even in the wise.

What moves through abhinivesha is a different quality entirely.

Shraddha - the trust that what lies beyond the dissolution is not annihilation but recognition. The faith - held in the heart, not merely the intellect - that the atman Krishna describes in II.20 is not a concept but a reality. That the open hand will be held by something the closed fist could never receive.

Shraddha does not eliminate the fear. It creates enough safety in the system that the fear can be present without the system immediately contracting around it. The body still flinches. The personality still resists. But underneath both, something knows - svarasavahi in the opposite direction - that the dissolution being feared is not what it appears.

Vairagya - the freedom of the open hand - is what shraddha makes possible. When trust is sufficiently established, the releasing that abhinivesha has been preventing becomes available. Not as a dramatic moment of surrender, but as a gradual easing - the grip loosening fraction by fraction across the length of a sustained and honest practice.

Together, shraddha and vairagya are the two sadhaka tattvas that most directly meet abhinivesha. Faith creates the safety. Non-attachment creates the freedom. And between them, what practice is asking for finally becomes possible - not because the fear has been eliminated, but because it is no longer the last word.

What Abhinivesha Ultimately Points At

There is something worth sitting with in the fact that Patanjali names abhinivesha as the fifth and final klesha - the one that persists even after the others have been significantly addressed.

It is not a design flaw in the system. It is the tradition’s honest acknowledgment that the path, taken seriously, eventually arrives at a threshold that knowledge and effort alone cannot cross.

At that threshold, the practitioner meets something that all the earlier practice has been preparing them for - the direct recognition that what they are was never the thing that abhinivesha was trying to protect.

Na hanyate hanyamāne śarīre. Not slain when the body is slain.

Not as a belief. Not as a consolation. As the most immediate, pratyaksha, directly perceptible truth available - when the layers that have been obscuring it have been sufficiently thinned by everything this series has been exploring.

The fear runs deep. The awareness in which it runs is deeper still.

And it was never in danger.

This completes the badhaka tattva series. Together with the sadhaka tattvas, the complete series covers: rhythm, dharana, sahaj, consistency, svadhyaya, rigidity, prayas, asmita, raga, abhinivesha, viveka, santosha, tapas, ishvarapranidhana, and vairagya.

Keywords: abhinivesha meaning yoga, abhinivesha klesha Patanjali sutra II.9, fear of death yoga, fear of transformation spiritual path, svarasavahi meaning, viduṣo api abhinivesha, Bhagavad Gita 2.20 atman deathless, na hanyate hanyamane sharire meaning, badhaka tattva series final, shraddha and abhinivesha, vairagya antidote fear, dissolution spiritual practice, how to work with fear in yoga, atman immortality Gita, Ashima Sood Ascend Ayurveda Substack

I work with people through yoga, Ayurveda, and contemplative practice - often around exactly this: the places where practice stops just short of what it’s actually asking, and what becomes possible when the fear is finally met honestly. If that feels relevant, you can find more at unlockascend.com