What if the world itself could become your meditation object?
In this episode, we explore Chapter 10 of the Bhagavad Gita, known as Vibhuti Yoga — the yoga of divine manifestation and sacred seeing. This chapter explores how to train our perception and helps us stop dividing life into “spiritual” and “not spiritual.” The sunset, the breath, the body, the mountain, even impermanence, all can become doorways back to the sacred.
It also marks a turning point in Arjuna’s relationship with Krishna. Until now, Arjuna has known Krishna as his friend, cousin, mentor, and charioteer. Here, he begins to realize that Krishna is not just wise, but divine reality itself.
Inside this episode, I explore:
🔹 What Vibhuti Yoga means and why Chapter 10 is about sacred seeing
🔹 How Krishna teaches Arjuna to recognize the divine shining through the world
🔹 Why awe, beauty, and attention can become spiritual practice
🔹 How your body, breath, and everyday life can become doorways into devotion
My hope is that this episode helps you look for the spark this week.
Not by chasing a mystical experience, but by letting ordinary life become holy again.
If this episode speaks to you, come practice with me inside Uplifted Membership, where we weave yoga philosophy, meditation, somatics, and embodied ritual into practices you can actually feel and live.
https://www.brettlarkin.com/uplifted/
📖 Different translations explored:
Barbara Stoler Miller: https://www.amazon.com/Bhagavad-Gita-Krishnas-Counsel-Bantam-Classics/dp/0553213652
Godsong by Amit Majmudar: https://www.amazon.com/Godsong-Verse-Translation-Bhagavad-Gita-Commentary/dp/1524733474
Eknath Easwaran: https://www.amazon.com/Bhagavad-Gita-2nd-Eknath-Easwaran/dp/1586380192
Bhagavad-Gita As It Is by Swami Prabhupada: https://www.amazon.com/Bhagavad-Gita-As-Bhaktivedanta-Swami-Prabhupada/dp/0892131233
FREE Practice: Easy Kundalini Yoga for Women | Kriya to be DIVINE LOVE EMBODIED
Relevant Blog: What are Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras?
Relevant to Today’s Episode:
📚 History of Yoga
🎧 Also Listen to:
#381 – Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali Explained – BOOK 3: Psychic Superpowers & Samadhi
#398 – [Meditation] Taking in the Good
#427 – What Is Bhakti Yoga? Krishna’s Most Confidential Teaching (Bhagavad Gita Chapter 9)
© 2026 Uplifted Yoga | BrettLarkin.com
Transcript:
Brett Larkin:
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. If you’re listening to this podcast, you probably know what vinyasa yoga is, and bikram yoga is, and kundalini yoga is, and definitely what yin yoga is. But my guess is that you probably don’t know what vibhuti yoga is.
Vibhuti yoga is the yoga of divine manifestation and sacred seeing. And we’re going to explore it today by looking at chapter 10 of the Bhagavad Gita. You don’t need any familiarity with the Gita to join us for this episode.
You can jump right in. And if you’re loving what you’re learning on the podcast, I want to invite you to join me for 200-hour yoga teacher training this fall, because registration is closing very soon for both of our September cohorts in both vinyasa yoga and kundalini yoga. So if either of those trainings are of interest, go in the show notes, check them out on my website, book a call to see if it’s a good fit for you.
And please know that you do not need to want to teach to take either of these trainings. These are really beautiful community group experiences where we move through philosophy and asana, not so you can necessarily be a studio yoga teacher, although maybe you want to do that, but the majority of people are there because they want the life skills that yoga gives us. They want to learn how to be more patient with their kids, to prevent injury, to age more gracefully, to really get a blueprint manual for our body, both the physical body and the energy body, all the things that we don’t learn in traditional school or college.
Learn more at brettlarkin.com and let’s dive in to today’s episode. Welcome friends. Today we are entering chapter 10 of the Bhagavad Gita.
And this is such a turning point in Arjuna’s relationship with Krishna. So Arjuna is the stand in for us as humans in this story. He is a warrior who needs to choose whether to fight or not in this civil war that has erupted.
And the problem is the people on the other side of the civil war are his first cousins. So that kind of puts him in a difficult place. He needs to defeat his cousins because they’re pure evil, but of course he loves them because they’re his family.
And with him is his mentor, his friend, his cousin, his charioteer, Krishna. And up to this point, Arjuna sees Krishna exactly this way as a friend. Secretly Krishna is actually God.
Here in chapter 10, Arjuna is beginning to recognize this. He’s beginning to recognize like, hey, this cousin, this friend that I’ve been talking to that I had essentially a nervous breakdown with at the beginning in the opening chapters and who I’ve been talking to for the past, you know, nine chapters is actually not just a really wise friend and not just a really great guru, but he’s actually God. He’s actually divine reality.
So Arjuna hasn’t yet seen the full cosmic form of Krishna that’s coming next in chapter 11, but he’s kind of starting to see here in chapter 10 who Krishna really is. This chapter of the Gita really stands out to me as significant because it’s ontological in nature. Ontology is a fancy word for what we believe is ultimately real.
And every spiritual tradition has a map of reality that tells us what is God? Who am I? What is the world?
What is the matter with humans? What’s the path we’re supposed to take? And here in chapter 10, Krishna is giving Arjuna and us through reading the text a new way of seeing reality.
He’s saying essentially, I’m the source of everything. I’m present in the brilliance and beauty and intelligence and power and radiance of the world. And wherever you see splendor in the world, well, that’s you actually seeing me.
But this is important. Krishna’s not just saying I’m the world. He’s saying I shine through the world and I am more than the world.
So to me, this chapter is really about seeing. It’s trying to teach us how to look. Chapter 11 coming up next will show us what Arjuna sees when that vision fully opens and Krishna reveals himself fully as God.
He takes off the cousin costume and is going to blast us with his bedazzling light. But right now here in chapter 10, this is a chapter about training our spiritual perception. And we’ll notice in how Arjuna talks to Krishna in this chapter too, he’s no longer relating to Krishna as like my friend who’s helping me through my life crisis on this battlefield.
He’s now relating to Krishna as like God revealing himself. And so Arjuna asks a very human question. He says like, how do I remember who you are?
How do I look for you? In what form should I try to meditate on you? And that’s really the heart of this chapter.
He’s Arjuna saying like, OK, I see that you’re more than a guru. I see that you’re more than a spiritual teacher. I think you are actually the divine.
How do I now see you in the middle of my life, my messy life? You’re listening to this. Maybe you’re like me.
Your life is somewhat messy. And it’s especially messy for Arjuna because he’s standing in the midst of a civil war battlefield where everyone’s waiting on him to start the fighting or slink away. So let’s open the way we always do by looking at how different translations title this chapter, this chapter 10.
So Barbara Stoller Miller translates this 10th teaching as fragments of divine power. Interesting. The Bhagavad Gita as it is calls this chapter 10 the opulence of the absolute, the opulence of the absolute.
The Godsong translation calls this chapter expansive glories. So quite big differences in how translators are translating this chapter. However, we actually don’t need to worry too much about that because this chapter 10 is also known or called Vibhuti Pada.
And those of you who’ve been around the block with me probably recognize that word Vibhuti. This is the same Sanskrit word we see in the third book of the Yoga Sutras, Vibhuti Pada. You can even listen to a whole podcast on the third book of the Yoga Sutras here on the show.
So I’ll make sure to link that up in the show notes in case you want to go into this concept of Vibhuti a little bit more. What does it mean? Well, Vibhuti means divine manifestation, power, splendor.
So in both the Yoga Sutras and the Gita, this word Vibhuti is pointing towards power, splendor, extraordinary capacity. But the framing’s actually quite different. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, it’s often a warning.
It’s like, don’t get distracted by these powers that you might attain on the yogic journey. Here in the Gita, the invitation is actually, let these extraordinarily beautiful, splendorous things in the world remind you of God. So this chapter is giving us the practice of sacred seeing.
And as we move through the verses, I will try my best to give you modern life applications for all of this. Chapter 10 of the Gita can sound very theological, and it is, but it’s also perception training. Krishna’s trying to teach Arjuna, and therefore also us, how to see the world, how to turn comparison into reverence, how to use beauty as meditation, which is something we actually do in the somatic training and uplifted world all the time.
How to find God in ordinary moments. How to recognize divine intelligence in your own body. How to let all the natural world soften the ego and open the heart.
And this is, I think, what’s so amazing about the Gita is because it really is pulling in so many different themes and threads that you are going to come across in your healing journey as a yogi. So Krishna’s going to be saying, we need to see the world around us. We need to see the sacred in everything around us and then act in alignment with the sacred.
And that is, pop quiz, what is that? What is that? Starts with a D, dharma, right?
That is dharma. It’s having the discernment to see all of life is sacred, then figure out what is in alignment with that that is righteous, which is revealing the divine, and to resist the things that obscure the divine. Cruelty, greed, violence, domination, all the stuff that’s represented by the guys on the other side of the battlefield.
Because remember, this convo is taking place in the middle of a battlefield where Arjuna is being called to fight the civil war, where he is on the side of dharma, righteousness. So the Gita has this rich tension where Krishna is saying, I’m everything, I’m the fabric of reality. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no right or wrong or that you get to be morally passive.
It actually means you need to have incredible discernment to understand what is sacred, what is divine, what is righteous, and act in alignment with that and reject the things that obscure my true nature or obscure the divine. Chapter 10 is really saying the world can become a doorway, like a spiritual doorway for you if you learn to see properly. I’m going to lean a lot on the Godsong translation today because this is a very poetic section of the Gita.
And I think this translation is the most poetic. We’ll bring in Barbara Stola Miller, too. But it opens like this.
So the blessed Lord, a.k.a. Krishna, says to Arjuna, hear my highest word again, Arjuna, because I wish your welfare. I will tell it to you, the one I love. No crowd of gods or visionaries knows how I have come to be.
I am the source of gods and visionaries everywhere. Whoever knows me, no birth, no beginning, the world’s great Lord. He alone is an enlightened mortal from all his sins released.
Wow, sin. I was not expecting sin to come up. Let’s see what Barbara Stola Miller says about the opening.
This is her translation. Lord Krishna says, great warrior, referring to Arjuna, hear again my word in its supreme form. Desiring your good, I speak to deepen your love.
OK, that’s poetic, Barbara. I like that. Neither the multitude of gods nor great sages know my origin, for I am the source of all the gods and great sages.
A mortal who knows me as the unborn, beginningless, great lord of the world is freed from delusion and all evils. So Barbara does not use the word sin. She says freed from delusion and all evils.
And this opening of Chapter 10, it’s going to list many divine manifestations, the sun, the moon, the mountains, the rivers, the sages, warriors, mantras, qualities of being. And as we go into like the listicles that are coming and I won’t read them all, the thing to keep in mind is that before Krishna gives the list, he’s clarifying something to us in these opening lines. He’s saying, don’t mistake these expressions of me for the source.
Beauty is divine, but it is not the whole of the divine. So a beautiful mountain or a beautiful sunset, let’s say, that is divine. But the divine is more than just that mountain or just that sunset.
He’s also saying a wise teacher might carry like this incredible glow or this incredible wisdom. You might be very attracted to them. They help you so much.
But again, source is beyond even the teacher. So in modern life, I think the lesson here is essentially be in awe of the world. Awe happens when our mind encounters something larger than itself.
The night sky, the ocean, a newborn baby’s, you know, beautiful eyes, a moment of synchronicity, like music, maybe that gives you chills. Right. Like these are examples of us as humans having our mind encounter something that’s so much larger than itself.
But what Krishna is saying is like, that’s great. But don’t stop at the object, the music, the baby, the night ocean, the sky. Let the object be a reference point for you of something beyond itself.
The mountain is not just the mountain. Beauty is not just beauty. The teacher you love is not just a teacher.
That moment that gives you chills is not random. It’s actually all pointing to the divine. It’s a doorway.
So when something really deeply moves you, something you can ask or what I think Krishna is telling us we can ask is like, what is this pointing me towards? Right. It’s pointing you towards hopefully what you believe in, what you see as God.
You can think, what is the sunset reveal? What is this beauty reveal? What is this wisdom reveal?
What does this moment remind me of? This is verse eight in Barbra Stoller Miller’s translation. He says, I am the source of everything and everything proceeds from me, filled with my existence.
Wise men realizing this are devoted to me. Verse nine, thinking and living deep in me, they enlighten one another by constantly telling of me for their own joy and delight. Verse 10, to men of enduring discipline, devoted to me with affection, I give the discipline of understanding by which they come to me.
So that’s interesting because he’s saying in this verse, to men of enduring discipline, like people who’ve learned practice and non-attachment and all the stuff we covered in like the first many chapters of the Gita, that first arc. So to men of enduring discipline. And then the next line says, devoted to me with affection.
So this is where the Gita is like straddling this huge tension. It’s like practice and non-attachment and all the things we learned about in the earlier chapters. But now we’re moving towards this like bhakti yoga idea of like also being devoted to a personal deity, right?
Devoted to Krishna with affection. Krishna says to those people who have both, like both discipline and affection for me, like are in a personal devotional relationship with me. To people who have both, I give the discipline of understanding.
Let’s look at a different translation of verses eight and nine. This is the Bhagavad Gita as it is. Verse eight, I am the source of all spiritual and material worlds.
Everything emanates from me. The wise who perfectly know this engage in my devotional service and worship me with all their hearts. Verse nine, the thoughts of my pure devotees dwell in me.
Their lives are fully devoted to my service and they derive great satisfaction and bliss from always enlightening one another and conversing about me. The commentary here says, for pure devotees, their minds cannot be diverted from the lotus feet of Krishna. Their talks are solely on the transcendental subjects.
The symptoms of pure devotees are described in this verse specifically. Devotees of the Supreme Lord are 24 hours daily engaged in glorifying the qualities and pastimes of the Supreme Lord. Their hearts and souls are constantly submerged in Krishna and they take pleasure in discussing him with other devotees.
All Vedic literature agrees that Krishna is the source of Brahma and Shiva and all the other demigods. So as you’re listening and hearing these verses where he’s like, I’m the source, all gods and creatures come from me. This is referencing the Atharva Veda, where it’s written that Krishna, who was in the beginning, instructed Brahma in Vedic knowledge and who disseminated Vedic knowledge in the past.
And then we see in other places in the Upanishads, from Narayana, Brahma is born and from Narayana, the patriarchs are also born and from Narayana, Indra is born and from Narayana, the eight Vasus are born. And then the Rudras are born. Verse 10, Sanskrit of this verse has the word buddhi in it.
And if you remember, the buddhi are like our intelligence, right? So introduced in this verse is this concept of buddhi-yogam, OK? It’s like intelligence that’s yoked to Krishna or Krishna consciousness as being like the highest intelligence.
Now, the commentary goes on to say that someone who’s devoted to Krishna should always be engaged in this Krishna consciousness with love and devotion, doing acts of service, but should also perform some sort of work, potentially work in the world, just like Arjuna’s work is to be a warrior in battle right now, but that it should be done with love. If you’ve been loving all the yoga philosophy we’ve been exploring on this podcast, but sometimes feel like you’re missing the bigger picture, my History of Yoga course is basically your best friend. It gives you a clear visual timeline of how yoga actually evolved from the Vedas to the Upanishads to the Bhagavad Gita, the Yoga Sutras, Hatha Yoga, all the way through to modern postural yoga.
I’m talking slides, printable timelines, a gorgeous manual. Everything finally clicks into place. If you want context, not just concepts, you can explore it at brettlarkin.com/history or grab the course at the link in the show notes. If you’re super confused right now, another way to think of these two paths, which I think can be helpful, is that one is the path of the heart and one is the path of the mind. And that’s really beautiful, right? Because it’s like the head and the heart aren’t enemies.
They can actually work together. Let’s look at verses 8 through 10 in the God Song translation, just because these verses are the most devotional verses in the chapter. They’re like the heart of the whole chapter.
So I’m spending a little extra time here on purpose. So the God Song for verse 8, it says, I bring it all to be and from me all evolves. The wise and the meditative think this as they worship me.
Thoughts on me, living me and breathing me, each one enlightening another, always discussing me. They find contentedness and joy. I give them intellectual yoga by which that’s the booty yoga that we’ve been talking about, by which they come to me constantly yoked in loving worship.
Compassionately, I destroy the dark of their unknowing from my place in their own beings. I shine a lamp of knowledge. So he’s saying, like, I’m a lamp that goes inside you and then I can shine out this knowledge.
That’s like the Krishna consciousness that we were talking about. At a high level, I think what he’s saying here is like love clarifies perception. He’s saying what you pay attention to, you begin to love.
So if your attention is constantly on fear or comparison or scarcity or what’s missing, you know, that’s like the altar to which you’re devoting your life to. But if your attention returns again and again to beauty, truth, courage, wisdom, the awe that we were talking about earlier, then those things are your altar. So if it feels like everything’s kind of mixing together, like these different styles of yoga and it’s like your brain’s exploding, it’s like I think the thing to think about is like when you remember the divine, well, then, yes, your intelligence is also changing.
Your discernment is changing. Your choices are changing. Your nervous system is changing.
Your life begins to organize around a different altar. We’re always worshiping something with our attention. So the question is like, what are we worshiping?
So verses one through three, Krishna’s saying the divine is this source that’s beyond ordinary knowing. Then verse four or five, he’s saying all human qualities arise from the divine. And he gave us some really big lists.
It’s like pleasure and pain, fear and fearlessness, birth and death, all the raw material of human existence arises within the field of divine. This is really comforting because it means that nothing in the human experience is outside the scope of spiritual practice. Fear can become practice.
Your confusion can become practice. Your longing can become practice if we bring Krishna or this Krishna consciousness into it. So verses six and seven are saying knowing the divine helps you create steadiness in your life.
Krishna essentially says that someone who understands this becomes established in this unwavering yoga, basically recognizing that the divine is everywhere, creates this steadiness for you. When you understand that splendor and power and wisdom and these things that cause you awe are all arising from the divine, you become less easily shaken. Why?
Well, because you stop feeling separate from other things. You stop thinking you have to manufacture strength and wisdom and courage from your tiny personal ego self. Instead, you begin to sense yourself as participating in a much larger intelligence.
And then these verses eight through eleven, which I’ve been spending so much time on, is basically Krishna saying that when we orient towards the divine like this, our love is going to grow. Our wisdom is going to grow. Krishna’s describing people who delight in in him, whose minds are absorbed in him.
So we need to think about where we’re placing our attention. What are we worshiping? Now, in verses 12 through 18, Arjuna asks, OK, cool.
How do I remember to do this? Well, first, Arjuna responds in praise. So let’s go back to Barbara Stoller Miller.
But Arjuna says, you know, you are supreme. You are the infinite spirit. You are the highest abode.
You are the sublime purifier. So he goes on with many, many essentially like praiseworthy compliments of Krishna. And then he asks a very practical question.
He says, how can I know you as I meditate on you? In what diverse aspects can I think of you, Krishna? That’s verse 17.
So Arjuna is saying, like, OK, how do I meditate on you? How do I know you? In what form should I think of you as?
Basically, like, tell me more. How do I remember all of this while living in this crazy world? And this is a question you’ve probably asked, because it’s one thing to feel connected and at peace during meditation or yoga class or yoga retreat or a prayer.
You know, your prayer time or a beautiful moment in nature that you’re having. It’s much harder to remember the divine in the middle of your inbox or parenting or conflicts or illness or decision making or grief or when you’re feeling ambitious or on a literal battlefield like Arjuna. Krishna responds with a very lengthy speech about all the different things that he is.
Essentially, he’s telling Arjuna, like, OK, you want to know how you should think of me? Well, let the world remind you, because I am all these things in the world. So he’s basically saying you can create touch points like the divine isn’t just in one place or it’s not just one thing.
It’s like your breath can become a reminder. The beautiful morning light coming in your window can become a reminder of me. The sound of a bell can become a reminder.
The moment before opening your laptop, if you pause and, you know, become conscious of the beauty in this world, that can be a reminder. The tree outside your window can be a reminder. A mantra can be a reminder.
Here’s verse 20. Krishna says, I am the self abiding in the heart of all creatures. I am their beginning, their middle and their end.
I am Vishnu striding among the sun gods, the radiant sun among the lights. I am the lightning among wind gods, the moon among the stars. I am the song in sacred lore.
I am Indra, king of the gods. I am the mind of the senses, the consciousness of creatures. I am gracious Shiva among howling storm gods, the lord of wealth among demigods and demons, fire blazing among the bright gods.
I am golden Muru towering over the mountains. Arjuna, know me as the god’s teacher, chief of the household priests. I am the god of war among generals.
I am the ocean of lakes. And he goes on and on and on. You know, he says, I am the eternal syllable of Om.
I am the sacred fig tree. Skipping down to verse 27, he says, among horses, know me as the immortal stallion born from the sea of elixir. On verse 29, he says, I am the endless cosmic serpent, the lord of all sea creatures.
I am the chief of the ancestral fathers of restraints. I am death. Verse 34, I am the death, the destroyer of all, the source of what will be the feminine powers, fame, fortune, speech, memory, intelligence, resolve, patience.
I am the great ritual chant, the meter of sacred song, the most sacred month in the year, the spring blooming with flowers. I am the dice game of gamblers. The brilliance of fiery heroes.
I am victory and resolve, the lucidity of lucid men. So essentially, there is no end to Krishna’s manifestations. If there’s anything we can take from this quite lengthy speech, which is very beautiful, is that basically any time we think we have fully captured what the divine is, these verses in chapter 10 are gently reminding us like, yes, but it’s all still just a doorway.
It’s not the whole thing. And it’s so much bigger than we could ever even imagine. Going back to verse 20, where we started, this is an important one.
Krishna saying, I am the self abiding in the hearts of all creatures. I am their beginning, their middle and their end. This is poignant because Krishna is saying not only is the divine out there and the sun and the moon and the mountains and the stars and all this awe-inspiring stuff, but the divine is also in here, as in in ourselves, in the deepest self, at the beginning, middle and end of our existence.
Because a lot of the rest of this can read like sort of like a grand cosmic poem. But this opening is making it clear that it’s also very personal. It brings everything into the heart of each individual.
And if Krishna is saying that the self is seated in the hearts of all beings, then the divine is not absent from from your body. Your body is actually one of the most intimate places you can encounter the divine. So the divine is not only in the beautiful mountain or sunset.
It’s in your inhale. It’s in your exhale. It’s in your pulse.
It’s in your tremble. It’s in your sensation. So in this huge speech, Krishna is essentially turning the whole world into a meditation object.
He’s inviting Arjuna and us into a very practical exercise, which is like look for the divine everywhere, not just in huge mystical experiences, but in little sparks like the warmth of the tea in your hands, the beautiful intelligence of your body taking care of you by digesting your food, the steadiness of a tree that you’re looking at, the sound of your own breath that you listen to as you’re falling asleep at night, the miracle of your cell phone and how it can connect you to someone you love that you want to talk to. Everything is a meditation object. And there’s a lot of like seemingly oxymoron type things that he has in this speech, right?
Like he says he is death. He’s the destroyer of all, but he’s also the source of all future beings. He’s not only the sun and moon, he’s also time and he’s also death.
So he’s this force that brings things into existence, but also the force that takes existence and form away. But he’s also language, memory, intelligence, forgiveness and sacred rhythm. Like he literally says he’s also the Gayatri meter, which is the meter that the sacred hymns were written in at that time.
So the message here is that the divine is not only in what comforts us, it’s also in things that are also changing and essentially impermanent. Time and death are also expressions of the divine order, according to this speech that Krishna’s given. So in saying that death is part of the divine order, that really forces the question, like what’s precious, what’s important for me to do today?
If time is so sacred, like how do I want to spend my attention? How do I want to spend my time? So seeing God or seeing the divine is not just through the awe of looking at a sunset.
It’s also in like appreciating the impermanence of life. And in this speech, Krishna also includes qualities and things we might not label as spiritual. Like I think I read this verse aloud, but he talks about how he is in verse 36, I am the dice game of gamblers.
So he’s like the gambling of the fraudulent. And translators think like what he’s getting at here is, you know, he’s saying he’s strategy, he’s victory, he’s discipline, he’s effort, he’s knowledge. And he’s even like gambling.
He’s the skill or power within a certain activity. And the reminder is that that activity comes from the divine and therefore should be handled consciously. In verse 39, Krishna says, Arjuna, I am the seed of all creatures, nothing animate or inanimate could exist without me.
And he concludes in verse 42 by saying, I stand, sustaining this entire world with a fragment of my being. And this is really nuanced, but it’s like Krishna’s saying he’s the seed of everything. He exists everywhere.
But he’s also like the power grid or the generator or the cloak that’s wrapping around and powering everything like nothing can move or be born or die or exist without him. He’s the seed and the source. OK, I think that’s easy to wrap our heads around.
But then what he’s saying is he’s also the sustaining essence of all of existence, meaning that everything that moves, everything that’s dead, everything everywhere depends on him. So truly nothing is outside of the field of sacred possibility. In verse 41, this is the second to last verse, Krishna says, whatever is powerful, lucid, splendid or invulnerable has its source in a fragment of my brilliance.
So basically, whatever is glorious, beautiful, prosperous in this world, know that it arises from a spark of Krishna’s splendor. So to close, I think a lot of us believe that we need to make something happen in order to have a spiritual experience. But so much of what this chapter is saying with its very seemingly like strange to us like lists of stuff that Krishna is saying he is, is really just saying, like, notice that life is here.
There is so much that you can use to fill yourself with awe. And I think the overarching meta lesson is like you can’t understand how big the divine is or how big Krishna is because he like pervades everything, is everything and is also encompassing everything, but then is also more than that, like all of that is just a fragment of who he is. So if it feels kind of like you’ve been through a painful brain teaser, which it sort of does for me, it’s like that’s kind of the point, because I think a lot of these kind of paradoxical comments that he makes is helping us see that like the divine is bigger than anything that we can actually wrap our little human brains around.
And we don’t need to chase figuring that out. We just need to recognize that the sacred is actually already shining through everywhere in all of life, in nature, in a person we love, in a moment of beauty, in our own body and breath. So this chapter is about Krishna trying to train Arjuna’s perception and ourselves.
He starts out with number one, don’t confuse manifestation, aka the beautiful sunset or the beautiful lover or the beautiful forest with the divine. OK, that thing’s a reflection of the divine. So let awe point you towards the divine, not worshipping the sunset itself.
Then he goes on in verses four or five to say the full range of human experience from pleasure and pain and birth and death can become a spiritual practice. So we don’t need to divide life into spiritual and non-spiritual because it all points us back to the divine source. Verses six and seven talks about how seeing the world this way, seeing everything is sacred, can actually be incredibly stabilizing for your mind.
Verses eight and eleven, which is where we spent a lot of time in this episode, is where Krishna says he’s the source of all and that devotees can delight in remembering him, which feels, you know, more kind of traditional theology. But Krishna gives us this like buddhi yoga that can help us train our attention because our attention is always worshipping something, whether we’re cognizant of it or not. Then we have Arjuna pop in with his little question.
He’s like, OK, cool. How do I remember how to do this on the regular, like in my daily life? Then we go into, you know, Krishna’s huge closing speech where like his manifestations are endless.
But all of these things are a doorway for us. And some of the things that he describes, which you would not think of, is teaching us this lesson that we shouldn’t make the sacred too small. Like everything can be sacred.
The world itself is a meditation object. And he makes sure to include that the divine includes impermanence. And he closes by saying, even though I’ve listed all of this stuff, that’s still just one teeny tiny fragment of who I am.
I’m also so much more than that. So look for the spark this week. Look for aliveness.
Even if it’s not like your traditional meditation practice, just let your mind settle on something that fills you with awe and feel what happens in your body when you breathe that in. A really simple practice I like to do is look at something beautiful or something that fills me with awe or even a beautiful memory. If you’re an Uplifted member, we have this great meditation in the app called Taking in the Good.
But it’s essentially like me guiding you through breathing that beautiful thing in on the on the inhale and then distributing it up and down your spine on the exhale. This is based on the work of Dr. Rick Hansen. And there’s so much research behind why this is an excellent meditation to do in terms of countering the brain’s negativity bias.
But it’s also like exactly what this chapter of the Gita is about, this idea of devotion. Thank you so much for being here all the way to the very end. And until next time, make sure to spend some time on your mat in meditation.
Take care of you. Loving what you’re learning on the podcast, apply the ancient science of yoga to your daily life, surrounded by incredible peers in my Uplifted 200-hour online yoga teacher training. Or grow into your role as a leader of others in my 300-hour professional program for yoga teachers, which is also a high-level business mastermind.
At any time, I would love to welcome you into my Yoga for Self Mastery course to help you uncover your personal blueprint to serenity. Or join my Uplifted Yoga membership for an all-access pass to my most popular yoga courses, thematic class plans and practice calendars. Don’t forget to prioritize your well-being and get on your mat today.
From my heart to yours, namaste.
