We recently completed Chapter 6 of the Bhagavad Gita — a raw and honest moment where Arjuna admits, “My mind is more restless than the wind.”
But before we dive into Chapter 7 (where everything shifts), I want to pause and explore an important question that naturally arises right here:
How do the yogic teachings on Ananda (bliss) compare to the Christian understanding of grace — and why do these two paths feel so different in the body?
This episode is a bridge — between effort and surrender, empowerment and comfort, self-regulation and devotion — as we explore this question from a comparative, academic, and curious lens.
This is not to prescribe belief, but to deepen understanding and set the stage for what’s coming next in the Gita.
🔹 Why yoga teaches bliss is uncovered through discipline
🔹 Why Christianity emphasizes grace and relationship
🔹 Effort vs. surrender — and how both live in the nervous system
🔹 How this sets the stage for Bhakti Yoga in Chapter 7
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🎧 Also Listen to:
#297 – What is Samkhya Philosophy and How is it Different from Yoga?
#358 – Intro to The Bhagavad Gita: How Do You Navigate Moral Dilemmas?
#387 – Book 4 of the Yoga Sutras: The Mystical Path to Liberation Explained
© 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.
My mind is more restless than the wind. Have you ever felt that way? Like your thoughts, your mind, is more restless than the wind and the weather? Well, Arjuna, who’s the stand-in for us in the Bhagavad Gita, felt that way in Chapter Six. We saw that raw and honest moment.
And before we dive into Chapter Seven of the Gita, where everything truly shifts, I wanted to pause and explore an important question. Because I really think this question will help set the stage for what we’re going to learn about bhakti yoga in Chapter Seven and onward in the Bhagavad Gita. So if we can deepen our understanding of this, it’ll really set the stage for what’s coming next.
Those of you who’ve been following along with this Bhagavad Gita podcast episodes with me, and if you’re just joining, welcome. You can jump in absolutely right here. What’s been happening in the Gita is we’ve been talking about effort and surrender and empowerment compared to comfort.
But now we’re really going to be looking at, as we move forward, this idea of devotion. I wanted to explore with you all how the yogic teachings on ananda, or this bliss state, compare to the Christian understanding of grace or connection with God. We’re going to see the God word coming up a lot this next arc of the Gita.
So I thought it might be a nice moment to zoom out and compare Vedanta compared to Christianity, and how bliss, grace, and the divine show up in these two spiritual paths. If you love comparative theology like me, if you love ancient texts like me, I want to invite you into the Uplifted Book Club. We’re starting with the Yoga Sutras, Book One of the Yoga Sutras, and you can get all the information at brettlarkin.com/bookclub
All one word, I’ve created a really beautiful cross-disciplinary, meaning art, poetry, ancient texts, contemplation journal for you to use for the next 25 days. And we’ll also be meeting live to connect in circle and have some accountability around these ancient teachings. If that’s something that’s calling to you, go to brettlarkin.com/bookclub to learn more.
Welcome back, my friends. If you are a yoga philosophy nerd and have been following along, we just completed chapter six of the Bhagavad Gita not that long ago here on the show. It’s one of the most honest, tender, psychologically revealing chapters, I think, in the entire text, because in chapter six, Arjuna finally voices what every single meditator has felt at some point.
He says, my mind is more restless than the wind. And he’s literally like, how am I supposed to do this? And Krishna, his companion in the dialogue, meets him with just so much compassion and clarity and gives us real techniques, real encouragement about how to meditate and a mind works when we sit down to practice. And before I continue this Bhagavad Gita series and move forward into chapter seven, which begins an entirely new arc of the Gita, I wanted to pause because something major is about to shift in this text.
Chapters one through six so far have been about effort, discipline, purification, self-regulation, doing the inner work, skill in action, and the psychology of meditation. But starting in chapter seven, Krishna is going to pivot towards devotion, towards intimacy, towards grace, and he’s going to reveal a far more personal dimension of the divine. So this right here between chapter six and seven is a really beautiful moment to explore, I think one of the deepest questions that’s been on the top of my mind this year.
And I just want to preface and say, you don’t have to have been following along with the Gita and all the different episodes I’ve done around it to jump in. You can just join me for this central question that’s been on my mind this year, which is essentially how do the yogic teachings on the self and Ananda bliss, which we’ll unpack in a little bit, compare to the more traditional Christian teachings on grace, salvation, and how do both of these models talk about our relationship with the divine? And more specifically, why do these two traditions create such different felt experiences in our body? So more on that in a moment. Before we dive in, I want to offer a brief disclaimer, which is essentially that we’re exploring these ideas right now from an academic theological lens.
I’m not prescribing beliefs, not telling anyone what to think or what to practice. This podcast is a space for curiosity and cross-cultural understanding. So you get to take what resonates and leave the rest and stay rooted in whatever tradition feels most authentic to you.
But I’m sharing this episode now because I believe it will hopefully be a really enriching conversation, but also really set the stage for everything that’s coming next in the Gita. Because once Krishna begins speaking as he is going to soon as the beloved, the friend, the support, the indwelling presence, it’s going to naturally raise the question about how different wisdom traditions, different religions understand the divine and how we as modern practitioners and seekers can choose to relate to that presence. So that’s what this conversation is about.
Today we’re going to explore the distinction between Ananda, the yogic teaching that bliss is your essence and can be uncovered through practice, versus grace, the Christian teaching that salvation and peace come through a relationship, a relationship with God or Jesus, not through achieving anything. And I wanted to talk about this now because this episode sits right at the hinge point between the Gita’s path of effort and the next big section we’re going into, which is devotion. Let’s dive in.
So let’s look at this yogic model, Ananda, bliss, as achieved through a process of subtraction, because that’s what these teachings are offering to us. The core teaching in most of these yogic texts are that you are already divine, bliss is your essence, and ignorance, avidya, is covering it up. In the yogic worldview, especially in Vedanta, the fundamental truth about you is that you are not broken, sinful, or damaged.
You are actually what is called sac-chit-ananda, truth, consciousness, bliss. You don’t create this bliss, you don’t have to earn it, you uncover it. So yoga tells us the bliss we long for is already inside us, that we simply have to peel away the layers of conditioning to reveal our true nature, to reveal this sac-chit-ananda.
And let’s look at some actual texts to back this up. So Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7, we see tattvam asi, thou art that, which is basically saying like you are truth, consciousness, bliss. For those of you familiar with the Kundalini tradition, even like Satnam, like truth is my identity, is tying back to this idea.
In the Taittiriya Upanishad, Book 2, Verse 7, we see the self is bliss. In the Gita, which we’ve been reading together, Chapter 5, Verse 24, we recently looked at this, if you’ve been listening to the podcast, we have the verse, one who rejoices within, who is illuminated within, attains brahman. You hopefully have listened to all the Yoga Sutra episodes here on the pod, but Yoga Sutra 1.3, then the seer rests in its own true nature.
Yoga is the removal of the vritti, the mind stuff, it’s the quieting of the mind stuff. So what’s fascinating to me is that the yogic model of subtraction is fundamentally, ironically, achievement based, even though we don’t talk about it that way. But think about it, it requires discipline, purification, tapas, which I translated my book Yoga Life as like cultivating the opposite, doing the harder non-habitual thing.
It requires detachment, meditation, prana control, like control of our breath. The one thing in our body that happens naturally without us having to think about it, we actually have to control that. It requires self-study, it requires witnessing consciousness, which is not easy.
So it’s a refinement model, it’s a remove what blocks your light model. The somatic interpretation could be like, you regulate, you refine, you peel back the layers until the nervous system quiets enough for the self to be revealed, or going back to the classic lake analogy, it’s like you’re calming the lake so that the clear waters of the lake can reflect the truth of the beautiful blue sky and the sun. But most of us have a very ripply, noisy lake.
So this path is essentially saying you can get there on your own, you can achieve ananda, bliss, on your own, you just need the right tools and you need to have this system of discipline, purification, detachment, meditation, prana control, self-study, witnessing consciousness, all these things. So let’s compare and contrast that now, this yogic model of bliss, ananda, through subtraction, removing all the things that cover our bliss, which is quite a lot of work to do, with the Christian model, which is salvation through relationship and grace. Here, the core teaching is that you just can’t save yourself.
So all the discipline, purification, tapas, detachment, meditation, breath control, self-study, sure, try it, but you can’t save yourself. You need grace. The contrast is stunning.
In Christian theology, the problem is in ignorance, avidya. It’s the fall, it’s the rupture, it’s the separation, it’s the wound in the relationship between humans and God. It’s essentially, you know, the fall is like humans aren’t programmed towards God.
We have something salty in us that like Adam and Eve before the fall didn’t have. Eve ate the fruit, we got cast out of the Garden of Eden, and since then, it’s like, it’s not easy for us to connect with God. If you read Genesis, like at the beginning, we’re walking with God in the fields, through the apple trees.
It’s like he’s a friend who’s just right there next to us, who we can talk to, who we can be with. And after the fall, that relationship is permanently ruptured, and the solution to be able to walk with God again is not more discipline, not more purification, it’s grace. Christianity says you can’t get there on your own.
You need grace. You need a savior. Hey there, sorry to interrupt, and we’ll get right back to the show, but if you’re curious about Kundalini Yoga, but want an approach that’s grounded, trauma-aware, and relevant for modern life, my online Kundalini Yoga teacher training honors the roots of the tradition while teaching it in a way that’s safe, embodied, and deeply human.
You’ll learn how to work with breath, mantra, movement, and energy without bypassing the body or overwhelming the nervous system. This training is for practitioners and teachers who want an integration of anatomy with energetic systems, know how to design and adapt kriyas to support personal growth, prioritize nervous system regulation, as well as feminine energy, somatics, and nervous system science. This training is open year-round and fully online, so you can move at your own pace.
It also has an interactive live component, so you can get supported. Explore the curriculum at BrettLarkin.com. And I think this is one of the most important, least discussed distinctions in comparative theology. So in Yoga Vedanta, we have a path of ontological realization.
Ontological simply means relating to the fundamental nature of being or existence or reality. Questions like, what does it mean to exist? Or exploring the concepts of reality versus illusion, or basically all my favorite concepts could fall under this category. So, Yoga or Vedanta is a path of ontological realization, while Christianity is a path of relational redemption.
So we have two different maps, each correspond, I think, to a very different nervous system posture. So we have Yoga, which is about effort, refinement, purification, discipline, inner work. And I’m talking about the yoga we see in the Upanishads, Vedanta.
I know we have Yin Yoga, restorative yoga. That’s asana. We’re not talking about that right now.
If we look at Kriya Yoga or the Eight-Limbed Path of Yoga, we have effort, refinement, purification, discipline, inner work. In contrast to Christianity, where we have surrender, receptivity, helplessness, helplessness. It’s like, I totally just realized I can’t do this on my own.
So helplessness met by grace. So yoga saying you are already divine, remove what covers it. Christianity says you are separated from God and only grace can bridge it.
And everything else flows from that. Looking at some other verses, the Bhagavad Gita, chapter six, which we read recently, verse 23, let the yogi strive diligently. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, if we did want to look at some postural texts, 1.67 says success in yoga comes to the one who is energetic and persevering.
And then later, 2.6 in Hatha Yoga Pradipika, through practice, purification occurs. So in the yogic worldview, it’s like, you’re a diamond covered in mud. And if you remove the mud, the diamond shines.
The thing to realize is that removing the mud takes a lot of work. We have to do all these practices. So really, it’s an achievement-oriented ontology, whether yogis want to be excited about that or not.
The more I study comparative theology, I see that yoga is asking us for skill, discipline, svadhyaya, abhyasa. You literally work your way into clarity. And this is such a beautiful model.
However, it’s also beautiful in the Christian model that salvation is a gift. It’s not an achievement. Grace isn’t something you can earn.
It’s received. Humans are inherently separated from God because of sin, because of the fall. And sin, we could translate to mean a separation from God, like a breach in our friendship with God.
And we can’t bridge that gap ourselves. We’re too limited. We’re too flawed.
So we just have to become really good receivers of grace. In the New Testament and the Bible, we see this everywhere. Ephesians 2, verse 8 to 9, by grace you have been saved, not by works, so that no one can boast.
So literally, the God of Christianity isn’t interested in your achievements at all. Matthew 11, 28, Jesus says, come to me, all you who are weary, and I will give you rest. So Jesus’ core teachings are about childlike faith, dependence, trust in him, receiving the Holy Spirit, letting God act in your life, grow fruit in your life, surrender.
It’s not a refinement path. It’s a receptivity path. It’s radical humility to basically be like, I just can’t do this by myself.
And we’re going to see later in the Gita, Krishna offering a little bit of this as well, this idea of relational surrender. So instead of like, I’m going to polish myself to become a diamond, it’s this texture of like, I can’t save myself. I’m helpless.
And we see this in the 12-step programs, like, I can’t save myself. My addictions are too strong. I need something bigger than myself to believe in.
And I think we’re all addicts. We’re all addicts to something, whether you’re addicted to work or addicted to substances, whatever it is. So Vedanta is saying, do this inner work and you will uncover bliss.
And the Christian theology is saying, you can’t do it. You have to let God into your life. You have to open your heart and let God come to you.
So yoga is kind of like this effort to refinement, to discipline, to this gradual awakening, while the Christian model is more like surrender, softness, dependence, right? Dependence on God, dependence on Jesus, and then belonging. Step one of the 12 steps, the most successful healing system in the world, according to many, it’s like it’s built on surrender. It’s not built on effort.
Step one is we admitted we were powerless. Not I’m going to perfect myself through yoga, meditation, pranayama, and tapas. No, it’s like, I can’t, I need help.
I surrender. And it requires so much humility. It’s Christian theology, but it works, I think, for people of many faiths because psychologically it’s profound.
Like we can’t achieve our way out of suffering. At some point, all of that effort collapses into grace. And I think for me, as someone like at midlife, at this point, this concept feels very resonant.
I’ve efforted so much, but I also am very interested at this point in the second half of my life to really collapse into grace. So these two different worldviews land differently, I think, in the body, and this is something I’ve really been ruminating on. So the yogic model, yoga cultivates agency, endurance, discipline, capacity, non-reactivity, witnessing.
It’s about training, refining, regulating, mastering, peeling away, inner management, becoming skilled at awareness, the quiet pride of spiritual competence. It’s not egoic, but again, it has this achievement-colored piece that I think we often don’t look at enough. The Christian theology feels more like helplessness, helplessness met with love, laying burdens down, being carried, the like, God, I can’t, please do it in me, receiving a gift that you didn’t earn, deep intimacy with a benevolent other.
So it requires a profoundly receptive nervous system and a lot of humility. So if you’re someone who’s exhausted from striving, striving to fix, purify, regulate, perfect yourselves, this model can be interesting. And even within the Gita, we’re going to see the shift to this model in the next arc of the upcoming chapters.
And I don’t think this is an either-or, I mean, I think both of these models have so much to offer us as seekers. So to keep doing this kind of compare-contrast, yoga, Vedanta, we have that non-dual ontology. So salvation means realizing your identity with the absolute, right? With Brahman, or with universal consciousness, or you shining the sky as a perfectly clear lake.
The absolute is within, and what you’re doing is you’re stripping away the non-self, you’re stripping away the avidya, you’re stripping away everything that’s not that. Well, the Christian theology is very much personalist, personalist theism. Salvation isn’t about realizing your inner identity as truth, consciousness, and bliss.
Salvation is about being reconciled to a person, Jesus, God, someone who is other than you, not identical to you. That is a really key point. And that union happens through relationship.
So here are some quotes from theological scholars that I pulled. Yoga removes the veil, Christianity removes the distance. Or Vedanta saves by knowledge, Christianity saves by love.
Or in Vedanta the problem is ignorance, in Christianity the problem is sin. Sin is a really hard word to wrap your head around, but I definitely, if it’s something you’re interested in, something I suggest you looking at a lot of various translations of the word from both the original Greek and Aramaic because you really have to dig into each of these core concepts and words looking at a lot of different translations if you want to get to the bottom of what feels resonant for you. So comparing and contrasting again some theological scholars, yoga says the self is already free, you must realize it.
The self is already free, we just need to figure it out, we just need to get there. And Christianity is saying like you’re not free, only God can free you, only this deeply personal relationship with a savior can free you. So at the end of chapter 5 in the Gita, Krishna says, I am the receiver of all offerings, the lord of the universe, and the friend of all beings.
And this three-part identity, when I read it, I was like, hmm, this sounds astonishingly close to the Christian trinity. Krishna’s revealing himself as cosmic, as personal, and as like a companion, as a creator, as a savior, and a friend. And so if you have been following along with us reading the Gita, the Gita is about to shift in this next big arc.
So the first six chapters were all about karma yoga, which is all about action, right? How do we take action in the world? How do we act? How do we purify ourselves? How do we meditate? But now, this next arc, we’re going to be talking about jnana and bhakti yoga. And by the time we get to chapter 12 in the Gita, Krishna is going to pivot and he’s going to say in verse 7 of chapter 12, he’s going to say, fix your mind on me alone, and I will take care of the rest. And that’s basically the closest Hinduism gets to the Christian grace model.
It’s still not the same, because Krishna never says you need atonement or redemption. In Hindu cosmology, there’s no fall or getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden. There’s only forgetting.
So arc one of the Gita, chapters one through six, were very much focused on karma yoga, discipline, self-regulation, inner purification, renunciation of attachment. So there’s karma yoga, a little bit jnana yoga, and then this arc two is going to be very much bhakti yoga, intimacy, devotion, surrender, divine relationship. Krishna’s going to reveal himself coming up.
So it’s almost like his first act or his first arc in this incredible text is how to act, how to meditate, how to regulate, how to understand reality. And the arc we’re moving into in the story now is Krishna saying, let me show you the divine as the beloved, the source, the support, the protector, the inner presence, the friend. And it’s a moment, the second arc is where Krishna stops sounding like a teacher and starts sounding like a personal relational God.
And that might be something you love about the Gita or don’t love. But this next section of the Gita is where bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, is going to become center stage. Krishna’s going to become personal.
He’s going to speak in the first person as the sustainer of the universe, the origin of all beings, the indwelling presence in everyone, the refuge for those who seek him, again, really paralleling a lot of Christian theology. And he’s going to redefine the map of spiritual progress. The Gita is also going to offer a relationship-based path, loving, trusting, surrendering, offering, remembering, seeking.
And Krishna is going to sound in this arc, I think, a lot like Jesus, where he’s offering intimacy, friendship, unconditional love. And just to back up, because I know some of you might not be as familiar with these terms, the Gita talks about three kinds of yoga, karma yoga, the yoga of action, janana yoga, the yoga of wisdom. So janana yoga is like discernment, philosophy, a discrimination between what’s real and unreal, meditative inquiry, sort of like, who am I? I’m not the body.
I’m witness consciousness. Those ontological questions, that is janana yoga. And then bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, is that intimacy, surrender, love, devotion, being held.
So janana yoga is asking us to discern, and bhakti yoga is asking us to trust. Another way you can think about this is like the first big arc of the Gita taught you how essentially to discipline your mind, which is also very much what the first two books of the Yoga Sutra deals with as well. The second arc of the Gita is going to be about how to open your heart.
So the first arc is like all about training your inner witness, and the second arc is going to introduce you to your inner beloved. So to try to tie this into a bow, we’re kind of like the core ideas we’ve explored. Yoga tells us, bliss is your essence, peel away what obscures it.
And the Christian theology is telling us, bliss is God’s gift, receive it through relationship. So to me, the yoga path is one that empowers you, while the Christian model, or we could say the more bhakti yoga path, is one that comforts you. So one’s about empowerment, one’s more about comfort.
One is more about achievement, like you can do it. And the other is like, no, I can’t do it without the help of the divine. And I think most humans need both.
I think many modern yogis feel exhausted by effort. It’s like we’ve been practicing for years, but we’re still dysregulated. There’s this subtle pressure to fix yourself.
And I write about this in my book, Healing with Somatic Yoga. It’s like yoga, in many circles, has become just like another form of self-improvement, physical self-improvement or spiritual achievement. And if you want to be your own savior, that’s great.
But you don’t have to only use that model. Even within the yogic model, we have this bhakti yoga. So as we move into chapter 7 and beyond of the Gita, you are going to hear Krishna begin to sound less like a meditation teacher and more like a God inviting devotion.
And I think it’s really beautiful that what we’ve been exploring, this bridge between effort and grace, is written right in to one of yoga’s oldest texts that we’ve been reading together on the podcast. 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.
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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.
