What is karma yoga?
Yoga comes from the Sanskrit word for yoke, Dr. Sharad Wagle explains: binding yourself with your own self, the Atman. The Gita gives three paths for this, one for each kind of person. Karma yoga is the path of action, for the person who says: I work with my body, that’s all I know. Karma means something to do, and in practice he says it means going out and doing service for your fellow human beings.
Its heart is Chapter 2, verse 47: your right is to the action, never to its fruits. A farmer ploughs and sows for months, then waits for rain he cannot control. Karma yoga is doing the work well without being driven by the reward. Even if you cannot give up every desire, the Gita asks you to give up one thing: the anxiety for the fruit of the action. In his reading, even a little karma yoga frees a person from many fears.
Read more in The Bhagavad Gita on anxiety and fear, or join the Gita Study Group on WhatsApp. The episodes are below.
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The senses are superior to the body and superior to them is the mind.
Beyond the mind is the intellect, and even beyond the intellect is the soul.
