The Song That Found Me
- May 30
- 7 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
A personal reflection on the Bhagavad Gita.
उद्धरेदात्मनात्मानं नात्मानमवसादयेत् ।आत्मैव ह्यात्मनो बन्धुरात्मैव रिपुरात्मनः ॥
Let one be lifted up by one’s own self; let one not lower oneself;
for the self alone is one’s friend, and the self alone is one’s enemy.
~ Bhagavad Gita, VI:5
How I First Came to the Bhagavad Gita
I was five years old when I first learned to chant the Gita Dhyanam, the meditation on the Gita.
My mother had learned it from her father, and she passed it on to me the way such things tend to be passed: during bath time, when she was helping me get dressed, at bedtime. She would chant and I would try to echo. I did not know what those nine verses in Sanskrit meant, but somehow, at that age, I memorized the whole thing. I even won a prize at school for reciting it.
And then I forgot about it, until I was about twenty-nine, when something stirred and a desire to study the Gita arose in me. I picked up the copy of the Bhagavad Gita that my beloved Guru, Nitya Chaitanya Yati, had given me in my early 20s when I had visited him at the Narayana Gurukula in Fernhill near Ooty in India.
Inside, in his handwriting, he had written addressing me as Ammu, my pet name among loved ones:
To Dear Ammu. Feel free to give up However, you will not be given up Love, Nitya.
I had carried that book with me for years without opening it. At the beginning of the book, before the first chapter was the Gita Dhyanam. I read it two or three times, and the whole chant came flooding back. I was astounded that these memory imprints, verses in Sanskrit, a language that was not part of my surface consciousness, could return almost perfectly after just a few readings. It was as though some hidden spring within me had been touched, and what had been flowing silently underground all those years suddenly rose to the surface.
I felt it was important to find a qualified teacher to guide me through the text. We were living in Los Angeles at the time. I had heard that a Swamiji at the Chinmaya Mission in Anaheim was teaching the Bhagavad Gita. I faithfully drove an hour each way to Anaheim every weekend to listen to the Swamiji’s teachings. The teachings somehow didn’t land for me. I then tried the Hollywood Vedanta Temple, closer to me. Those classes didn’t take either.
Guru Nitya had written, feel free to give up. I gave up. More than once.
Just around that time my friend Shraddha, a fellow disciple of Guru Nitya, at the Bainbridge Island Gurukula, began making copies of videos of classes that he had taught at a family home in Crown Point, Indiana, in 1980. All eighteen chapters of his classes in 26 VHS tapes. She mailed them to me one by one.
So I first studied the Bhagavad Gita sitting in my own living room, watching Guru Nitya teach it. Clear, precise, profound teachings, evoking in me a deep appreciation for its brilliance, depth and applicability to my own life. It was as if he had come back to teach me personally. He had said …you will not be given up. He did not give up on me. I think he knew exactly what he was writing when he wrote that inscription.
What Is the Bhagavad Gita?
The Bhagavad Gita appears in the Bhishma Parva, the sixth of the eighteen books of the ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is more than 100,000 verses long, one of the largest works of literature ever composed. It is a vast canvas of families and kingdoms, loyalties and rivalries, war and exile, with stories nested within stories. And then, somewhere about a third of the way through, the narrative pauses.
The Pandavas are going to war with their cousins, the Kauravas, to remedy years of accumulated injustices. It is the morning of battle. Arjuna, the greatest warrior among the Pandavas, stands in his chariot between the two armies. Beside him is Krishna, his friend, guide, and charioteer. Across the battlefield are not strangers or faceless enemies, but the people who have shaped his life: his revered teacher, Dronacharya; his grand-uncle and patriarch of the family, Bhishma; his cousins, relatives, elders, and friends.
In that moment, Arjuna sees the full human cost of what is about to unfold. His bow Gandiva, a gift of the gods, slips from his hands. His body trembles. His mind reels. The peerless warrior breaks down in the middle of the battlefield. He does not want to fight. He does not want to be complicit in fratricide. It is here, at the point of unbearable moral and emotional crisis, that the highest teachings are given in the 700 verses and 18 chapters of the Bhagavad Gita.
Arjuna is us. He is anyone who has ever stood in the middle of life feeling confused, divided, and desperate for clarity. On the surface, his question seems to be, What should I do? But beneath that question lies something deeper: How do I meet my suffering? How do I become free from it? This is the question the Buddha asked. It is the question every honest human being is eventually brought to ask.
To answer it, we have to look more deeply into the nature of our own existence. Who are we? What is this world? How does this world come to be? Why are we here? What is our relationship to what we call the world? Far from being abstract, philosophical questions, they are the living questions beneath our longing for purpose, meaning, joy, and fulfillment. Throughout the Gita, Arjuna asks Krishna a series of searching questions, and Krishna answers each one with patience and completeness.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna stands in the place of the guide, the wisdom principle, the Absolute. His relationship with Arjuna unfolds gradually through the text. At first, Krishna is Arjuna’s kinsman and beloved friend. Despite being a king and renowned warrior himself, Krishna chooses to serve Arjuna as his charioteer, offering to hold the reins in the midst of battle. When Arjuna collapses into a moral crisis, he turns to Krishna for guidance. In the second chapter, we see Arjuna surrendering to Krishna as his Guru, one who can show him how to see clearly and lead him from darkness to light.
Finally, in one of the most awe-inspiring passages in Sanskrit literature, Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna in the Vishvarupa Darsanam as the cosmic reality, the Absolute that contains all Forms, all Beings, all of Time itself. It is this chapter that stopped J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Trinity test site in 1945, bringing to his mind the words: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. What begins as human crisis leads to revelation.
The word Gita means song. Bhagavad means ‘of the Lord.’ But as Guru Nitya liked to say, it is not a song in the way we ordinarily mean. He likens it to the ‘hymn of dialectic’ in Plato’s Republic. Although there is no hymn there, it transports your mind to the sublime as if you were listening to a hymn. It is in that sense that the Gita is a song. It is the song of the Absolute, by the Absolute, for the Absolute.
My Favorite Verses in the Bhagavad Gita
My own North Star in the Gita has long been these two verses:
One who is the same to foe and friend, and also in honor and dishonor, who is the same in cold and heat, in pleasure and pain, and who is free from attachment, to whom censure and praise are equal, who is silent (in manner), content with whatever happens to come, having no fixed abode, mentally constant – such a person of devotion is dear to Me. ~ Bhagavad Gita, XII:18 & 19
This is a high bar, and one I continue to aspire to. What has always interested me is that these verses appear in the chapter titled Bhakti Yoga. Bhakti means devotion. So the question becomes: how does devotion lead one to this perfected state of equanimity?
For me, devotion here is not limited to devotion to a particular God or deity. The unitive vision of the Gita invites us to see everything as an expression of the One Truth, a truth from which we are not separate. When such a vision begins to open in us, everyone and everything becomes precious. When the world itself becomes adorable, we are in a state of devotion.
Then we can engage wholeheartedly with our lives, being fully ourselves, caring deeply for others, yet not clinging to anything or anyone. Nothing is outside of us. Nothing is truly separate. This is the way of seeing the Gita is trying to restore.
The Gita continues to speak across cultures and generations because both Arjuna and Krishna are universal. Arjuna’s condition is the human condition. It belongs to no single time, place, or tradition. And what Krishna represents as the Absolute is equally universal. Although the Gita is cherished as a sacred text, I have never experienced it as belonging only to one religion. Truth is truth, regardless of the tradition through which it is carried. The Bhagavad Gita can become a lifelong companion, a source of wise counsel we carry with us, helping us untangle the tangles of our own lives. It is for anyone who finds themselves in Arjuna’s position, confused, conflicted, and longing to know how to live. Which is, more or less, all of us.
We all deserve to know that we will not be given up.
The Living Wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita Retreat, August 7–9, 2026
This is the spirit in which I want to return to the Gita this August, as a wise companion in this life of ours.
I will be leading the Living Wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita retreat at Mount Madonna Retreat Center in Watsonville, California: a weekend of guided meditation, wisdom teachings, chanting, mindful movement, and time in the redwood hills above Monterey Bay.
The retreat draws on Ramana Maharshi's Gīta Sāram, his distillation of the Gita's essential verses, as a way into the heart of the teaching. No prior knowledge of Sanskrit, Advaita Vedanta, or the Gita is required. You are invited to sit with this text, to let it ask its questions in you, and see what opens.
If you have been curious about the Bhagavad Gita but did not know where to begin, you are welcome. If you have studied it for years and want to go deeper, you are welcome. This text meets each of us where we are. It always has.
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Related Reflections
Resources:
Links to the books referenced above.
Nitya Chaitanya Yati. Bhagavad Gita, commentary. D.K. Printworld, 2002.
Plato. The Republic (trans. G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve). Hackett Publishing, 1992.
Guru Nitya was the wisest, most genial expositor of the Gita in our time--possibly any time. You received the the most magnificent hidden blessing from him, and it has served you well, Ammu.
Loved it!