Six passages to explore slowly, each with its place in the conversation and one practical question to carry into your day.
You can prepare carefully and still receive an answer you hoped not to hear. Bhagavad Gita 2.47 asks how to remain responsible for your action when its results cannot be possessed in advance. Its final instruction matters as much as its famous opening: do not become attached to inaction.
Read the versePraise can lift your whole day; criticism can seem to undo it. In Bhagavad Gita 2.48, Krishna asks Arjuna to act with steadiness through success and failure. The verse calls this evenness yoga and places it within a relationship to the divine.
Read the verseYou sit down to read and discover that you have spent several minutes rehearsing tomorrow. Bhagavad Gita 6.26 describes a mind that wanders and the repeated act of bringing it back. Returning is part of the practice described here, rather than evidence that the practice has gone wrong.
Read the verseAfter a mistake, the way you speak to yourself can either support repair or make it harder to begin. Bhagavad Gita 6.5 uses the language of friend and enemy to examine the self's relationship with itself. Its setting is the discipline of yoga, with meanings deeper than modern self-esteem.
Read the verseAn unpleasant moment can fill your attention so completely that it feels permanent. Bhagavad Gita 2.14 points to the changing nature of sensory experience: heat and cold, pleasure and pain arise and pass. It invites endurance within Krishna's wider teaching about the enduring Self.
Read the verseYou have written the reply, and each rereading makes it sharper. Bhagavad Gita 2.63 describes a sequence in which anger clouds understanding and undermines discernment. Read with the preceding verse, it invites attention to the chain that forms before an impulsive action.
Read the verse
The Gita You Live