Let’s be real — our attention is under attack. Between scroll culture, constant notifications, and never-ending to-do lists, it’s hard to focus on what actually matters. In this episode, I’m inviting you to pause and reflect on where your precious energy is going.
We’ll explore how ancient yogic and Vedantic texts can help us reclaim our attention — not just as a productivity tool, but as a sacred spiritual practice. If you’ve been feeling scattered, stuck, or overstimulated, this one’s for you.
We’ll look at how:
🔹 Attention is energy — what you focus on creates your reality
🔹 Ancient wisdom can help anchor you in a noisy world
🔹 Modern distraction fragments our energy and dilutes our power
🔹 Silence and depth are medicine for the nervous system
🔹 We don’t need more input — we need more inner connection
This is a gentle but powerful reset for your inner compass. Let’s remember what’s truly worthy of our focus.
🎁 Grab my new book: Healing with Somatic Yoga: A 6-Week Journey to Release Emotions, Rewire Your Nervous System, and Reclaim Your Body → https://amzn.to/3WGulGG
Leave a book review and claim your free gift https://www.brettlarkin.com/somaticreview/
🌀 Explore more of these principles in Embodied Yoga Life Coaching: https://www.brettlarkin.com/somatic-yoga-training-certification/
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Relevant Blog: 15 Life-Changing Yoga Books To Deepen Your Yoga Practice
Relevant to Today’s Episode:
✅ 200-hour Online Yoga Teacher Training
🎧 Also Listen to:
#279 – Yoga Sutras of Patanjali Summary – BOOK ONE Explained
#283 – Dismantling the Kleshas: The Actual Aim of Yoga
#358 – Intro to The Bhagavad Gita: How Do You Navigate Moral Dilemmas?
© 2026 Uplifted Yoga | BrettLarkin.com
Transcript:
Welcome to the Uplifted Yoga Podcast, where ancient yogic wisdom meets modern business strategy. I’m Brett Larkin, creator of Uplifted Yoga, where I’ve certified thousands of yoga teachers, built a multi-seven figure business, and guided over half a million students on YouTube. Here’s the truth.
You don’t have to choose between embodying deep yogic wisdom and building a thriving, freedom-based business. This podcast is your space to integrate both. Because yoga isn’t just what you do on the mat.
It’s how you show up in every part of your life. Whether you’re here to deepen your yoga practice, grow your teaching career, or align your energy with your purpose, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in.
Hello, yoga family. Let’s get clear about something, especially as we enter this new year. Our attention is under attack.
Between scroll culture, constant notifications, and never-ending to-do lists, it’s hard to focus on what actually matters. And in today’s episode, I’m inviting you to pause and reflect on where your precious energy is going. This is so timely, especially as we kick off a new year.
We’ll explore today how ancient yogic and Vedantic texts can actually help you reclaim your attention. Not to reclaim your attention as a productivity tool, but actually as a sacred spiritual practice. If you’ve been feeling scattered, stuck, or overstimulated, this episode is for you.
A few reminders before we kick off. I want to remind you that my new book, Healing with Somatic Yoga, A Six-Week Journey to Release Emotions, Rewire Your Nervous System, and Reclaim Your Body is available worldwide. And as of the time of recording this podcast, we still have some beautiful somatic desk calendars.
So this is actually a calendar that goes on your desk that you can see each day with somatic mantras and affirmations for this year, 2026. I ship this to you completely free when you leave a review of the book. So if you haven’t done that yet, grab one of the last few calendars we have at brettlarkin.com/somaticreview
And lastly, deeply related to what I’m going to be talking about on today’s podcast, I am finally starting a book club. Yes, many of you have requested this. And we are beginning with the Yoga Sutras.
I’ve created the most beautiful interdisciplinary guidebook to take you deeper. This goes way beyond journaling prompts, my friends. We’ll also be exploring key Sanskrit words, comparing sutra translations, weaving in major schools of philosophy, looking at poetry, artwork, and reflection, all through a carefully curated 25-day journey.
This guidebook’s designed to take what you hear on the podcast and braid it into your daily life so this wisdom stops just being something you think about in your head and starts integrating into your nervous system, into your relationships, into how you actually live. And while you can absolutely just get the sutra’s guidebook, if you want to go deeper, we’ll also be gathering once a month in circle to discuss the sutras because in my experience, real change happens when we’re in community. So know that this is coming and stay tuned for more details.
And now let’s jump into this week’s episode. There is a phrase that we hear a lot. I’m sure you’re familiar with it.
It’s where attention goes, energy flows. What’s wild is that yogic and vedantic texts have been saying this for thousands of years, not as a productivity hack, but as a spiritual warning because yogic and vedantic texts understood attention as sacred currency. The question wasn’t, what are you focused on today? It was, what are you going to give your life force to? Ancient traditions were obsessed with attention because they knew something that we’re now just rediscovering, which is that attention creates reality.
And unfortunately, modern culture isn’t neutral. It’s designed to fragment your attention as fast as possible because distracted people are easier to influence, easier to sell to, easier to keep stuck. I want to talk about this today, especially as we enter a new year together and what you can do, what I’m doing to counteract all of this.
I think the yoga sutras and Vedanta are so popular right now in our modern culture because it was almost like they were predicting the attention economy culture that modern life is. And these texts talk about attention, not just as a habit, but the actual steering wheel of your consciousness. So let’s look at a couple texts that back this up.
And then I want to introduce to you this invitation of something you can focus on this year, a way that I’m spending my attention this year, that’s helping my health, that’s helping my family, that’s helping how I choose to place my attention. And it was almost comical when I went and started digging to pull a line to quote here about where attention flows, energy goes, because it’s so obvious. It’s the big yogic premise.
It’s so simple that it’s literally the second yoga sutra. Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. Vritti is the mental movement, distractions, and loops that run in your mind.
Yoga isn’t about adding more focus. It’s a reductionist philosophy, which we’re going to be talking a lot more about this year on the podcast. It’s not about adding more focus.
It’s not about spreading your attention anywhere. It’s literally learning where not to put your attention. So we just looked at Yoga Sutra 1.2, Yoga Citta Vritti Nirodha, Yoga Sutra 1.12. The fluctuations of the mind are stilled through practice and non-attachment.
You’ve got to train your attention. Yogis understood attention as the movement of consciousness, and consciousness determines your experience. So where attention goes, energy flows.
It’s not like just some modern slogan. It’s a very beautiful actual summary of a lot of classical yoga philosophy. Here’s another one from the Gita.
So we’ve actually read this together. If you were with me last year on the podcast, where we read chapters of the Gita together on this show. And actually, I got too excited.
While this is very clearly referenced in the Gita, it’s actually referring to the Katha Upanishad. It’s the chariot metaphor, right? The body is the chariot. The mind is the reins.
The senses are the horses that are running in all different directions. The self, the Atman, is the passenger. This beautiful image from the Katha Upanishad, we literally see it.
It is the Gita, right? It’s the setting for the Gita with Arjuna in the chariot with the horses. Bottom line, when the mind, the reins are loose, the horses, the senses run wild. So the Upanishads are saying that if you don’t hold the reins of your attention, you’re going to get dragged everywhere.
They’re literally describing like TikTok 2,500 years early. And classic Vedanta is really clear about the cost of distraction. It teaches us about ignorance, avidya.
And they say avidya, ignorance, isn’t a lack of intelligence. It’s misplaced attention. And if you haven’t listened to my episode on the kleshas, I absolutely recommend you do that because it ties into this exact idea.
From a Vedantic view, suffering isn’t caused by bad luck or bad people. It’s all caused by attention aimed in the wrong direction. So yogic tradition and texts train attention.
They focus on training attention because they believed attention when placed properly was a key step in liberating the soul. And this is very different from our modern culture, which literally extracts attention from us because it fuels profit. So if we look at attention from this ancient viewpoint, attention is sacred.
Attention is finite. Attention is something that is precious. It’s deliberately trained.
Silence is medicine. And the goal is depth. The question is like, what leads to freedom? What leads to freedom from suffering? Let’s contrast that with how the modern world thinks about attention.
Attention is monetized. Attention is mined. Attention is fragmented.
Think about all the things the algorithms push forward. It’s the stuff that fragments us, the stuff that gets us fighting and arguing in the comments. Silence is avoided and uncomfortable for many.
Novelty is the thing that’s constantly rewarded over depth. Speed is usually the goal. The question isn’t what leads to freedom.
The question is what keeps you scrolling. So we have this ancient system that’s literally built for us and designed to help us protect our attention. And then we have our modern system, our modern culture that’s asking simply like how to capture it.
This is such a different worldview, the worldview of ancient systems, the fact that you’re actually weakened by distractions, while the modern paradigm or system would be like, you’re strengthened by stimulation, by more stuff, by shiny object syndrome, yoga, Vedanta, Buddhism, Christianity. They all disagree with modern culture on this point. And I’m going to say it again because this is really important.
The lie, the trap that modern life, modern culture is feeding us is that we are strengthened by novelty and stimulation. But all of those ancient systems actually say we’re weakened by distraction. Living in the world we’re living in, in this day and age, is like living inside the static of a TV.
Remember, I’m dating myself, but like when sometimes the TV wouldn’t work and you just get this like static white noise and white and black on the screen, that’s what we’re living in. It’s like we’re fish in an ocean of that. But what’s so amazing is that when these ancient texts were written, and this is something I’ve really come to appreciate, when these ancient texts were written, the channel was clear.
There was so much more signal back then. Those wisdom traditions were about like tuning the signal, while the culture we live in now is all about like maximizing the noise. And so I think a huge part of spiritual maturity is like knowing the difference, knowing that we don’t really need more information, we need fewer inputs.
And this is a big time wake up call, warning signal for me as well. Like I’m living this with you of like, what have I been giving my attention and life force to that I don’t need to be without realizing it? All right, quick pause, because I need to tell you something exciting. My new book, Healing with Somatic Yoga, a six-week journey to release emotions, rewire your nervous system, and reclaim your body is finally here.
If you’ve been listening to this podcast and thinking, I wish I could go deeper, I wish I had all this information about the nervous system and somatic yoga and healing in one place. Well, this book is the nervous system guide I wish had existed when I was struggling. It’s practical, it’s gentle, it’s nervous system healing designed for yogis and filled with the exact tools I teach inside my trainings.
And because you’re part of this podcast community, I’m giving you something special. If you leave an Amazon review for the book, I’ll ship you my 2026 somatic desk calendar for free. It’s gorgeous, filled with month-by-month reminders and nervous system grounding cues to support your whole year.
Enjoy the book, then screenshot your review, submit it at brettlarkin.com/somaticreview. Thank you for helping this book reach the yogis who need it. And now back to the episode.
Your attention is shaping your life, whether you’re aware of it or not. Ancient paths, ancient teachings trained attention so that people could wake up and stop suffering and experience the divine. Modern systems are extracting your attention so you can stay busy, so you can be easily manipulated.
So what do we do about all this? This isn’t just bad news. I’m inviting you, if you’re open to it, to make a commitment with me this year to dive deep into an ancient text. I don’t even care which ancient text you choose, but the most recent Instagram post is seconds old and driven by algorithms.
The Yoga Sutras are about 1600 years old. The Dhammapada is 2300 years old. The Upanishads are 2800 years old.
The Bible spans from around 2000 to over 3000 years old. These books are time-tested foundations. These are books that have guided people for millennia.
They’re not passing trends. It’s hard to put a date on the Upanishads because they’re like a collection, but some date as far back as 800 BCE. That’s close to 3000 years old.
And I think we can fall into this trap as yogis or spiritual seekers where we really get caught up in what the latest trend is. What’s the latest fad? What’s the latest fashion? It’s cold plunges. It’s vagus nerve stuff.
It’s kundalini. It’s somatic yoga. It’s anusara yoga.
It’s, and you know, if these things are helping you, that’s great. That’s fine. But I think something I want to invite all of us to go deeper into this year, if you’re on a spiritual path, is to also take an ancient text and go deep with it.
Not a self-help book that was written yesterday. Not some substack or Instagram post about how to lead a happy life that’s like 20 minutes old and probably written by AI and is probably like copied off someone else’s post or trend from a couple of weeks ago and is actually being surfaced to you on the internet or on socials because the algorithms know that you’re going to click on that type of thing. So it’s like essentially manipulated engineered content designed specifically to catch your brain’s attention.
Not that stuff. Picking a book that is old. Everything you’re seeing on social media and the internet is basically a few seconds or a few weeks old.
It’s part of an algorithm. It’s not grounded in anything time-tested. It’s fleeting.
It’s like building your house on sand. Meanwhile, the Dhammapada has been around for two millennia. Upanishads for even longer.
The Gita, the Bible, thousands of years. These are texts that have been meditated on, lived by, proven across generations. And the people who wrote these texts back in the day, let’s just be honest, they had fewer distractions.
Their minds were less scattered by constant information and notifications. So I truly believe that they could connect more deeply with these teachings than we can living in TV static like we do now. There is such beauty in going back to these ancient sources that have this timeless clarity.
So that’s my invitation to you this year. Pick a text and spend time with it. Be intimate with it.
Instead of scrolling on TikTok or Instagram, open up the Gita. Open up the Dhammapada. Open up the Bible.
Open up something that’s been around for a really long time. Where your attention goes, energy flows. It’s so comforting for me to know that the people who wrote these things, that their brains were not being shaped by technology the way ours are.
Think about it. Countries around the world are starting to pass laws to protect kids from too much social media use because it’s been completely proven how harmful all this rapid, constant scrolling is. How it shortens our attention span.
How it makes it harder for people to focus. I’m not anti-technology, but I am pro-consciousness, pro-discernment. And if you’re getting your advice or discerning things from social posts, how might your life be different if you redirected your attention away from that and toward something? Any text.
You choose which one. We’re going to be reading the next six chapters of the Gita for sure this year here on the podcast. I have podcast reading guides on the Yoga Sutras.
But to get intimate, meaning you’re reading it every day, maybe even twice a day. For me, it’s often like morning and bedtime. And letting yourself immerse and saturate in that.
Maybe you want to read it with commentary. Maybe you want to read it along with me, listening to some of these podcasts. We’ll link up some ideas for you in the show notes.
Maybe you do want to leverage the internet to ask a question about the text or help you understand a certain passage a little bit better. But you’re going back to source material that’s thousands of years old as opposed to seconds. So I’ve already told you that this year on the podcast, we’re definitely going to be continuing our series of the Gita.
We’re starting soon our second big arc of the Gita, where we move out of karma yoga and into some of the different types of yoga that theological scholars and experts on Vedanta really identify as this like second big arc of the Gita. And I’m going to keep pulling in as much as I can, like texts and wisdom that is ideally thousands of years old for us to look at, for us to examine, for us to analyze together. Because I think we’re all craving this sense of being grounded.
I feel like this is like the new word. It gets tossed around all the time. I toss it around all the time.
I’m guilty, guilty. It’s like grounded. We want to be grounded.
You want to be grounded when you’re teaching. You want to be grounded when you’re coaching. You want to be grounded when you’re holding space for others.
You want to be grounded as you’re moving through your life. And it’s like, okay, how do we get grounded? And if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably have a lot of nervous system techniques. Hopefully you’ve read Healing with Somatic Yoga, my new book in which I detail all of those.
Hopefully you have yoga techniques, all the obvious ones, breath, movement, sound. But I think the missing layer can come in where it’s like, well, what are my principles? What are my philosophy? Having a philosophical framework is incredibly grounding. And any of the books that you choose to dive into that I’ve mentioned today are going to give you that.
They’re going to give you a philosophical framework, which you might agree with. And that would be fantastic. Even if you don’t, it’ll be incredibly enlightening to see what these frameworks are as you maybe start figuring out what fits for you in theology and philosophy.
There’s four questions, four key questions that I want to cover with you before we close that are really considered the bedrock lenses through which someone interprets reality. And the first of these pillars is what is real? What is real? We might also choose to call this like metaphysics. What’s real? What’s actually going on? Those of you more familiar with the yogic philosophy, this would be like talking about Maya, right? Maya, Avidya, Samkhya philosophy, the Guna’s like, what’s real? What’s actually going on here in this manifest plane? Pillar number two, epistemology.
How do I know what’s true? What’s true? Like I might say, I love my husband. Okay, how do I know that’s true? How I answer that question is going to showcase like my philosophical worldview. Third question, what is good? We might also call this ethics.
Like what’s a good life? What makes someone good? And then the fourth pillar is how should we live together? Like how do we do this life thing together? And some might call that politics or social philosophy, but it’s kind of like, how do we do this together? What do we owe one another? Like at some point it was like, we need stoplights. Red light means stop. Green light means go.
That’s going to help us organize and like live together. So whatever text you choose to dive into, if you take me up on this invitation, it’s going to help you answer these questions or at least show you how people thousands of years ago who were much less distracted by us and whose writings still exist today because they were considered so valuable and good. I like, I also really want you to think about that.
Like the odds of an ancient text, like making it to now, these things were written on palm leaves. It was incredibly expensive. They were copied by hand.
So like the crappy stories and the stuff that didn’t work, I promise you, like it all got filtered out because no one was like, I’m going to spend, the next week and a half copying this onto a palm leaf so someone else can read it. Like these more ancient texts that we’ve had handed down were considered so, so precious. The amount of like human time and effort to curate them and keep them.
It would be like as if 5,000 years from now, it’s like only three Instagram posts still existed because all the others, I don’t know, got deleted or maybe that metaphor doesn’t work. But I hope you understand what I’m saying. Like when I say that these things have survived the test of time, other humans have endorsed these in saying like, these are so valuable that we’re going to copy, preserve them, travel with them, spend money on ink and paper, which is incredibly scarce and keep these things handed down because these are valuable texts that are helping humans understand what is real, what is true, what is good, how should we live together? Because they’re answering deep, deep, deep philosophical questions.
So like, who do you want to be influenced by? Some influencer or like the people who wrote these texts that have been like survived and proven many close to 3,000 years. So I know if you’re here, you’re probably already doing yoga. I know if you’re here, you’re probably already meditating.
I know if you’re here, you probably already have a lot of discipline. My question for you is this year, like what ancient text are you falling in love with? What ancient text are you going to look at to try to make sense of the world that you’re in, whether you know it or not? You know, we all have a view on reality, like what is real, what is not real. We all have some sort of system that we use for discerning what’s true and what’s not true.
That would be our epistemology. Is something true if you read it online? Is something true if you just happen to feel it in the moment? Like what’s your system for discerning what’s true? Like all of these ancient texts are going to give you a system. Ethics, what is good? How do you determine what is good? For you is what’s good, whatever feels good in the moment.
Is what’s good kind of like a moving target? Like this feels good and now this feels good. Now this other thing feels good. Or is it more fixed? Like I determine what’s good through the lens of the yamas and niyamas or through Buddha’s criteria or through the 10 commandments.
What’s your philosophy for how we should live together and all get along? Like how much thought have you put into that? Pick a text, start going deep. Sutras, the Gita, a Upanishad, the Bible, the Dhammapada. Retraining your attention on a text like this instead of being on your phone each day is probably one of the most radical counterculture things you can do.
Do you want to be spending your time with texts that are all about how you can experience freedom, liberation, love? Or do you want to be on your phone where it’s just all about like what keeps you scrolling and traps you? So remember, most of us don’t need more. We need fewer inputs. We need to focus on the texts that have survived the test of time that potentially really matter, that can ideally help us answer these big questions.
Your attention and how you use it is shaping your life. Whether you’re aware of it or not, it’s your most valuable currency. I hope today’s episode inspired you.
I hope you pick up a book and I hope you join me this whole year on the podcast. Share it with a friend. There are incredible podcast companion guides on the sutras, on the Gita right here ready for you on the show.
Until next week, take some time, be in some sort of ancient text and take care of you. Before you go, I want to remind you that my new book, Healing with Somatic Yoga, a six-week journey to release emotions, rewire your nervous system, and reclaim your body is officially out in the world. If this podcast has supported you, inspired you, or helped you feel even a tiny bit more home in your animal body, this book is the safe hug that your nervous system has been longing for.
Inside, I take you through my full six-week rest method, somatic shaking, decoding your survival responses, breath and safety, the whole journey. It’s everything I teach in my trainings distilled into something that you can curl up with on your couch. And here’s my little thank you gift to you.
If you buy the book and leave an Amazon review, heartfelt, honest, short or long, I will send you my brand new 2026 Somatic Deaths Calendar for free as a gift. This calendar contains monthly somatic reminders and little nervous system love notes to keep you regulated all year long. Go to brettlarkin.com/somaticreview to claim your calendar.
Your reviews really truly matter. They help more yogis discover somatic yoga and finally feel safe coming home into their bodies. Thank you for being here and I’ll see you in the next episode.
