here was a period, somewhere in the middle of 2022, where I had stopped praying, stopped scripting, and mostly stopped trying to figure out what I believed. I was sitting on the kitchen floor a lot. Not in the dramatic way I had in March, the night everything broke open. Just sitting there because the kitchen floor was cool and Vesta would come find me and it felt easier than trying to hold a vision of a future I couldn't quite make myself believe in.
A friend had lent me a copy of the Bhagavad Gita sometime before that. One of those moments where someone slides a book across a table and says "you might want to read this at some point" with the careful tone of a person who knows not to push. I had carried it around for weeks without opening it.
I opened it that summer, sitting against the kitchen cabinets with my coffee going cold.
What I Expected the Gita to Say
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I want to be honest about my assumptions going in, because they're probably yours too.
I expected the Gita to tell me that desire was the problem. That wanting was the root of suffering, that the enlightened path was release, detachment, the gradual emptying of all the places inside you where wanting lives. I had enough Catholic guilt and half-digested Buddhist concepts floating around in my head to think that was roughly what all ancient spiritual texts agreed on: stop grasping. Let go. Be content with what is.
And I thought, reading that, that I would feel affirmed in my exhaustion. Like the universe was giving me permission to stop wanting the things I wanted. To stop feeling like a failure for not having them yet.
What I found was almost the opposite of what I expected.
What I found was a text that had a lot to say about action, about duty, about what you owe to the doing of a thing regardless of what you receive in return. But it was not a text that told Arjuna, the warrior at its center, to simply stop caring. That's the part people often get wrong about the Gita, and it's the part that hit me somewhere I wasn't prepared to be hit.
The Battlefield Is an Interior Landscape
For context, if you haven't read it: the Bhagavad Gita is a conversation between Arjuna, a warrior who freezes before battle because he can see the people he loves on both sides of the field, and Krishna, who is his charioteer and also, as the text unfolds, something considerably more than that. Arjuna's crisis is that he cannot make himself act when he can see that action will bring loss.
The battlefield is literal in the text and metaphorical everywhere else. Scholars and practitioners across centuries have read it as an allegory for the interior life. The enemy you are fighting is your own contracted self. The people on both sides of the field are the competing beliefs and identities you've built your life around. The paralysis is what happens when you know something has to change and you can't make yourself change it because you can see what you'll have to let go of.
I sat with the kitchen cabinet behind my back and I thought: yes. This is the moment I recognize.
Because what had frozen me wasn't failure. What had frozen me was that I could see, with terrible clarity, what moving forward required. It required believing I was allowed to want more. It required letting go of the identity I had built around sacrifice and productivity and suffering as virtue. It required becoming someone I didn't have a script for yet.
That's Arjuna's paralysis. He knows what the right action is. He can't take it because he cannot yet tolerate the weight of the consequences.
Yoga as a Practice, Not a Pose
The Gita introduces the concept of yoga in a way that has almost nothing to do with what the word tends to evoke now. In the text, yoga means a path, a discipline, a way of yoking yourself to something. There are three primary paths discussed: karma yoga (the yoga of action), jnana yoga (the yoga of knowledge), and bhakti yoga (the yoga of devotion). These are not competing options. They describe different facets of the same practice.
Krishna's instruction to Arjuna in the second chapter is the line that has probably been quoted more than any other from this text. "You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions," as it is often translated. Sometimes rendered more directly: do the work. Release the outcome.
I want to be careful here, because the way this gets paraphrased in popular spirituality tends to flatten it into either a productivity slogan or a nihilism. "Do your best and let go." That's not quite what the Gita is saying. The Gita is saying something harder.
It's saying that the quality of your action is ruined when you act primarily for the result. That the attachment to outcome is what creates the distortion, the grasping that pulls you out of alignment with what the action actually requires. And that the fullest version of action is one where you are entirely committed to the doing, entirely present in it, and entirely free of the anxiety about what it returns to you.
Sit with that for a second.
That is not the same as not caring. Arjuna cares. He cares so much he can't move. The instruction is not to care less. The instruction is to locate your caring in the action itself, in the integrity of the doing, rather than in the imagined possession of the result.
Where This Collided with What I Already Believed
By the summer of 2022, I had been working with Neville Goddard for a few months. Priya had sent me The Power of Awareness audiobook in March, and I had found in Neville's ideas about consciousness and assumption a framework that made sense to me when almost nothing else did. The core of Neville's teaching is that your imagined state is the only cause. That the version of you who already has the thing you want is real, right now, in consciousness. That the work is to inhabit that state, assume it, live from it, rather than looking at the gap between what you have and what you want.
Which, on the surface, could sound like pure desire-focus. Concentrate on what you want. Assume it's yours. Feel the feeling of the wish fulfilled.
The Gita complicated this for me in a way I needed.
Because what Neville is actually pointing at, when you read him carefully, is not the result itself. It is the state. The consciousness. The person. "Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled" is not really about the wish. It's about the state of a person who already lives in abundance, already knows herself to be loved, already occupies the life she was afraid to want. The wish is a door into a way of being, not a target on a wall.
And the Gita, from its completely different angle, arriving from Hindu philosophy and Vedantic cosmology, was saying something structurally similar. The quality of your relationship to what you're doing, to what you're becoming, to who you are in the process, is what determines the nature of the outcome. The person acting from wholeness, from detachment from fear and attachment to purpose, produces different results than the person acting from desperation and grasping.
The parallel landed quietly. I didn't expect it. I just noticed that I had arrived at the same place from two very different starting points.
This is one of the things that keeps me really interested in comparing these traditions, and it's why I'd also recommend looking at What Buddha Taught About Desire and Why It Matters for Manifestation if this angle is speaking to you. The conversation between these texts is real, and it's useful.
The Part About Desire They Don't Usually Lead With
Here's what I think gets lost in the popular summary of the Gita's position on desire.
The Gita does not teach the elimination of desire. It teaches the transformation of desire.
There's a long section in the third chapter where Krishna explains that action itself is driven by the nature of everything that exists. Nothing in the material world is static. To be alive is to act. To act is to want something, in some sense. The question is not whether you will have desires but what kind of desires you'll orient your actions around.
The lower-order desires in the Gita's framework are the ones driven by ego, by the fear of loss, by the hunger for external validation, by anxiety about status and safety. These are the desires that produce what the text calls the distortions, the blindness, the suffering. Arjuna freezing on the battlefield is a symptom of lower-order desire: the desire to be seen as good, to avoid pain, to preserve the version of himself he has constructed.
The higher-order orientation is toward dharma: one's purpose, one's duty, one's right action. Acting from dharma is not the absence of desire. It is desire refined into alignment. You want the right things in the right way for the right reasons.
I found, reading this, that I had been conflating two very different things in my own practice. I had been treating attachment and desire as synonyms. But they're not. You can desire something, want it with real feeling, work toward it with full effort, and still not be attached to it in the way that creates suffering. The attachment that creates suffering is the contraction, the desperation, the belief that you will be incomplete if you don't get it.
The desire that moves cleanly through a person is the kind that comes from fullness, from a sense of expansion rather than lack.
What This Looked Like in Practice
I want to be concrete about this, because I think the Gita's ideas can float into abstraction very easily, and abstraction was not what I needed on my kitchen floor.
What I had been doing in my manifestation practice up to that point was, I could see in retrospect, a lot of grasping in spiritual clothing. I was visualizing my freelance income and checking my bank account obsessively. I was scripting scenes of financial security while feeling the panic of someone who did not feel financially secure. I was saying the right words from inside the wrong state.
The Gita helped me understand this as a structural problem. I was acting from the ego's anxiety about outcome rather than from the quality of presence that produces aligned action. My attention was entirely on the result, which meant it was never on the work.
And the work, in Neville's framework, is the imaginal act. The living in the state. The being, right now, the version of you who already has it. But I had been doing that work while simultaneously, at some background level, tracking desperately whether it was working. Which is the thing that undoes it.
I stopped checking my bank account as often. That sounds small. It was not small. For someone who had been monitoring her finances with the anxious vigilance of a person who did not believe there would be enough, that was an act of real reorientation. I started putting my attention on the doing: the writing I was actually doing, the quality of the work I was putting out, the presence I brought to my freelance clients.
Six months later I had cleared a significant portion of the $40,000 I had owed. The work was paying in ways that surprised me, partly because I had stopped obsessively trying to calculate when and whether it would.
I'm not telling you that the Gita did this. I'm telling you that a text I read on a kitchen floor gave me a frame for a problem I hadn't been able to name, and that naming it changed something.
The Concept of the Witness Self
One of the other threads in the Gita that I've found really useful is the teaching about the witness consciousness, which Krishna elaborates in the later chapters as he gets into the nature of the self.
The Gita's Vedantic cosmology distinguishes between the field of action (the body, the mind, the material experience) and the knower of the field (the pure awareness that observes all of this). What you might call, in more contemporary language, the observer self. The part of you that notices your thoughts without being your thoughts. The part that can see your anxiety without being your anxiety.
Joe Dispenza talks about something similar in his work on consciousness and meditation, the idea that you can step into observer mode, that pure consciousness observing its own states is different from consciousness caught inside those states. Bessel van der Kolk's work on trauma gets at the same thing from the nervous system angle: the traumatized body doesn't have access to the witness. It is fused with the threat response. Healing involves the gradual recovery of the ability to observe what's happening rather than being entirely run by it.
The Gita puts all of this in a framework that is cosmological rather than neurological, but the functional description is the same. The self that is eternal, pure, unaffected by outcomes is the ground you stand on. The self that clings, fears, grasps, and measures is the ego-self that has mistaken itself for the whole.
Does this mean the ego-self doesn't matter? No. The Gita is not saying Arjuna should stop fighting. It is not saying desires should be suppressed. It is saying that the person who acts from the ground of the eternal self acts differently, more cleanly, with less distortion, than the person who acts from the ego's fear and hunger.
What that felt like, practically, was learning to check in with the part of me that wasn't panicking. To find the place underneath the financial anxiety and the grief about the years I'd lost to the agency and the uncertainty about whether any of this would work. There was something there that was not afraid. Not because it was enlightened but because it was simply present, simply watching.
I had been so identified with the anxious self that I had forgotten the watching self existed.
Niskama Karma: Action Without Selfish Desire
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The Gita's term for the kind of action it's pointing toward is niskama karma: action without selfish desire. I want to sit with this phrase because I think it's misread.
It does not mean action without desire. It means action without the particular distortion that comes from acting primarily for personal gain in a grasping, ego-driven sense. The warrior fighting for dharma is still fighting. The writer writing with full attention and love for the work still wants the writing to be good. The person doing the inner work of manifestation still wants the thing she is working toward.
But the orientation is toward the action itself, toward the rightness of the doing, rather than toward the ego's need to acquire and secure. And this is, I would argue, where most spiritual practice actually lives when it's working. The best version of the work is the version where you are fully present in it and fully released from the scoreboard.
I've talked to people who do the inner work with the kind of desperate focus that is, ironically, the thing that keeps the results from arriving. They script and they affirm and they meditate with white knuckles. They want it so badly that the wanting is all they can feel. And what they're broadcasting, at the level of consciousness, is not "I have it" but "I need it so badly I could break."
The Gita would say: you are attached to the fruit. You have forgotten the action. Get back in your body, get back in the present, do the thing that is yours to do from the fullness of who you are rather than the hunger of who you are afraid to remain.
That is a hard practice. I'm not going to pretend it isn't.
What I'd Say to Someone Bringing This to Their Practice
I get asked sometimes how to reconcile the Gita's teachings with Law of Assumption work, and the honest answer is that I don't think much reconciliation is required.
They come from different metaphysical frameworks, yes. Neville is working in a tradition of Western mysticism shaped by William Blake and Emanuel Swedenborg. The Gita comes from a Hindu cosmological tradition with entirely different assumptions about the nature of consciousness, time, and the self. The vocabularies don't map cleanly onto each other.
But the phenomenology, what both texts are describing about the interior experience of alignment and misalignment, about the difference between acting from wholeness and acting from lack, is close enough that reading them together is illuminating rather than contradictory.
What I'd say to someone bringing this to their practice:
If your manifestation work feels like white-knuckling, like desperate concentration on a result you're afraid you won't get, the Gita is the corrective. It will ask you to put your attention back on the action, on the doing, on the quality of your presence in the work. It will ask you who you are in the process rather than what you will possess at the end.
If your practice has drifted into passivity, into a kind of waiting-and-assuming without any grounded action, the Gita is also the corrective. Arjuna is told to fight. The warrior has a dharma. The text has no patience for spiritual bypassing, for using detachment as a reason to avoid the work that is yours to do.
The question the Gita keeps returning to is simple, though the answer takes a long time to arrive at. What is your action? Are you in it?
And then: can you do it without your fist clenched around the outcome?
Beatriz and I were talking about this over coffee a few months ago, her with her strong opinions about which Bushwick cafe gets it right and me with my usual order, and she said something I've been thinking about since. She said that her best work as an artist happens when she stops trying to make something good and starts trying to make something honest. The goodness, she said, tends to follow. The trying to make it good gets in the way of the honesty.
That's niskama karma. She didn't use the term. But that's what she was describing.
The Line I Kept Coming Back To
There is a line in the ninth chapter of the Gita that I've come back to more than any other. The translation I was reading rendered it approximately as: "Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer in sacrifice, whatever you give, whatever austerities you practice, do that as an offering to me."
The "me" in this context is Krishna as the divine, as the eternal, as the consciousness that underlies everything. But stripped of the theological frame, what the line is pointing at is something I find really useful: dedicate the action. Make the doing an act of devotion rather than an act of acquisition.
When I sit down to write something I care about, and I can feel the ego checking whether it will perform well, whether readers will share it, whether it will bring in work, I sometimes try to redirect. Just: do this well because it is worth doing well. Offer the care. Let the scoreboard go.
It doesn't always work. Some mornings I am entirely too attached to the scoreboard. But the practice of returning to it, of asking what it would feel like to do this from fullness rather than hunger, has changed something in me over four years that I find hard to articulate but easy to feel.
The Gita is not a manifestation manual. I want to be clear about that. Reading it as one would be a reduction of something that is really bigger than that. But as a companion text to the inner work, as a map of the interior territory that the work requires you to navigate, it has been, for me, one of the most honest and demanding things I have read.
And I read it for the first time with my back against a kitchen cabinet and my coffee going cold, which is probably not the context the text imagined for itself.
But then again, Arjuna found his teaching on a battlefield. Maybe context is the point.
Whatever you're going through, the store has a small curated catalog of products I'd point a friend toward.
The Ongoing Argument with Myself
I want to end here, not with a tidy conclusion, but with the argument I still have with myself about all of this.
Because the Gita asks a lot. It asks you to act from dharma in a culture that rewards you for acting from ego. It asks you to detach from outcomes in a world that is obsessed with metrics and results and the visible proof of your success. It asks you to locate yourself in the eternal witness self in a body that is tired and a bank account that is real and a life that does not pause for philosophical refinement.
I don't think the text pretends this is easy. Arjuna doesn't leave the battlefield enlightened. He gets back on his chariot and goes to fight. The teaching is given in the middle of the crisis, not before it and not after. That's the detail that makes the text feel true to me.
The practice is not arriving at the state of perfect detachment and then acting. The practice is acting, from wherever you are, and learning, over and over, to release your grip on what the action will return.
I'm four years into this work. I still clench my fist around outcomes more often than I'd like. But I know what I'm doing when I do it now. And knowing is, if not everything, at least the beginning of something.
The store has a small curated catalog of products that complement this kind of work, if you're looking for structured support alongside texts like this one.
