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The Five Koshas: A Practical Framework for Wholeness

Satchidananda — Escuela de Yoga Satyam, Uruguay — February 9, 2026

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The Five Koshas: A Practical Framework for Wholeness

Talk by Satchidananda

Hosted by Escuela de Yoga Satyam

February 9, 2026

Note on This Transcript: This document was created through human-AI collaboration using Whisper transcription technology. The original talk was delivered in English with real-time Spanish translation. While efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, transcription errors may occur. Please refer to the original video recording as the definitive source: https://youtu.be/SvQ1YbnS_Ow

New to the yoga terms in this talk? See the Glossary of Terms.

Opening Remarks

Hari Om Tat Sat. Welcome to everyone.

My name is Satchidananda. Before we begin, I want to make clear that I'm not a doctor or a psychologist. I'm in no way certified as a healthcare practitioner. I'm also not an official representative of the ashram or any school.

I have been studying under the Satyananda Yoga tradition for many years, and yoga in general for almost double that time. Everything I share tonight is based on life experiences. My experiences should not be taken as a guide for what your experience may be or what you have already experienced. This is an invitation for you to use your discernment and your own awareness regarding any techniques I may suggest you try, or any idea that I present as good or insightful. Please run it through your own filters and your own common sense to determine if it's good for you.

It's important for me to say this because my concentration may be in other areas than watching or considering each and every person in the room.

PRACTICE: Opening Shanti Patha

We'll now start with a formal Shanti Patha.

Please take time to place yourself in a comfortable posture. You can use the assistance of cushions and pillows, taking an asana that you can maintain for three to five minutes. Of course, you're welcome to move as needed, but there is value in coming to stillness.

Continue to arrange your body so that the spine is comfortably upright. The shoulders and arms in a relaxed position, with the hands in a mudra or gesture of your choice. A simple one is to touch the tip of the thumb to the first index finger, with the palms up or down, resting on the knees or thighs. The neck and head in alignment with the lower spine.

Bring your awareness into your whole body and really feel for the balance between left and right sides. Feel for that balance in the feet, knees, hips, torso, shoulders, neck and head. Make any subtle adjustments to bring yourself closer to physical balance if required.

Once you have found some stillness, start to focus on the movement of the breath. Without changing it by force, just read it, the quality of it at this time of the day. Notice if it in any way reflects the activities of the day, and if any impressions of the day are moving through the mind or the emotions. Consider neither feeding them nor resisting them, letting them move through you like clouds and preferring to focus on the breath.

Begin to deepen the breath in both directions gradually, progressively, so that over a number of breaths you find that you are exhaling more completely and inhaling more fully.

Add to this more complete breath a mental exercise: the frontal psychic passage. An imaginary line or tube in the front part of the torso that goes from the navel through the sternum to the throat pit. As you inhale, guide the breath through that tube up to the throat. On the exhalation, guide the breath downward to the navel. If it doesn't travel along that path, that's fine. Continue focusing your mind on the breath in a gentle manner.

With the next inhalation, continue past the throat to the eyebrow center. Maintain your attention at that point, bhrumadhya. Even the eyes can turn inward and slightly upward, looking from within. Imagine that you are looking at the flame of a candle. Sometimes the image appears, sometimes not. You can always draw the silhouette or shape of the flame. Imagine the color or form of the flame that you have, of a candle that you truly have.

Imagine that this flame represents the intuitive knowledge available within us, always available if we look inward.

We'll chant the mantra Om three times together, followed by the Shanti Mantras. If you know the mantras, you're welcome to chant with me or simply to listen.

Take a slow, deep breath to chant the mantra Om.

[Three rounds of Om chanting]

[Shanti Mantras]

Sit for just a few more moments in stillness and reflect on what brings you to this talk this evening—any aspirations or questions or intentions that you may have.

Bring the hands together in pranama mudra in front of the heart, then move into a round of palming. When you have warmth to share with the eyes, bring the hands in front of the closed eyes and keep them there for a few moments. Notice if there are any patterns or colors in chidakasha, the space of the mind.

Take a deep breath in through the eyes into yourself. Exhaling, you can lower the hands and slowly open the eyes.

Introduction: The Genius of Shanti Patha

Hari Om Tat Sat.

I hope wherever you have come from today, you feel a little bit calmer in this space that we are in.

The Satyananda Yoga tradition and Swami Satyananda Saraswati in particular, for me, is genius. You take a practice like Shanti Patha which is done at the beginning and the end of every event, and it is almost a perfect sequence of moving through the koshas.

A lesson taught to me through my kung fu teacher was to pay attention to the techniques that are included the most by a tradition. And in this tradition, it's chanting the mantra Om and Shanti Patha. So that's a good hint that that technique can be taken out of a class and be applied to any moment in life where you need to reconnect with your whole self.

THEORY: The Whole Self and the Kosha Model

And that's the topic of this evening: what is the whole self in terms of the yogic model that invites us to look into the koshas, or the five yogic bodies.

How many people here have heard of that word, koshas? [show of hands] And now I'm going to flip the question—how many people is that a new word or term for? [show of hands] Good, thanks. How many people are working with the koshas in a daily habit? [a few hands] Okay, good. At least one or two or three hands.

I want to inspire more of you to keep the koshas in daily awareness.

Evolution vs. Enlightenment

Words in the spiritual traditions like "enlightenment" are loaded with promise—promise of this moment of glory and emancipation or freedom. My very slow evolution has suggested it may look differently, and that the real work of evolution is turning on the light in many places, in as many places as we can actually find.

For that we need to go on a search. And luckily many have taken on that journey before us and drawn out maps. The kosha model is one such map.

Maps help us avoid crashes in the same way they helped sailors avoid crashes. Maps help us find treasure in the same way they've helped sailors find treasure.

Theory Must Become Personal Practice

So I'm going to present some ideas around koshas that hopefully are new to you. As long as yogic ideas remain theory, they will not be relevant to our personal lives. As long as they're theory, they're not going to be the most practical.

We're all of the same cookie cutter mold, but we all bake differently in the oven. We really need to customize spirituality and spiritual practice to ourselves.

How many of you all have heard of chakras? [most hands] And how many of you have never heard of gunas? [some hands] Okay, great. So a very yoga-aware group here.

The Continuum from Gross to Subtle

So one of the first ideas of kosha is: even though it's five yogic bodies, it represents a continuum from gross to subtle.

And before we even get into the five yogic bodies, there are three bodies that come before it. They're often called gross, subtle, and causal. I won't go deep into this, but:

The Five Koshas

For those of you who have never heard of the koshas or the five bodies, we're just going to quickly go over them now. Keep in mind that they are just a subdivision of these three.

Whenever I say one of them, please take your awareness into it. Don't let it be a word. Let it be an experience.

  1. The physical body
  2. The energetic body
  3. The mental body
  4. The intuitive body (for the moment I'm going to use the word psychic)
  5. The causal body (also referred to as blissful)

Sanskrit Names and Their Meanings

I'm going to say the words in Sanskrit because they indicate what these bodies are made of. For those of you who have been studying yoga and integrating it into your lives, I really recommend that you start entering into some Sanskrit terms.

This year in particular I have started to do that with mantras and chants and it's a whole new dimension. The cultures that have used Sanskrit for spirituality put a lot of effort to accurately describe what they're talking about. They made it very precise.

  1. Annamayakosha - The physical body. Anna means food. The physical body is made up of food—it makes sense, the food body.

  2. Pranamayakosha - The energetic body. Prana can mean energy or life force. This is my preferred understanding. One more useful word is vital or vitality.

  3. Manomayakosha - The mental body, referring to the mind.

  4. Vijnanamayakosha - The intuitive/psychic body. Vijnana means both wisdom or science. If I remember to talk about this in greater detail, it's so interesting as its own topic. And in case I forget to say it many times, this is what makes us human, I believe.

  5. Anandamayakosha - The causal/blissful body. This is sometimes referred to as blissful, but I was reading in a satsang from one of our gurus that it means undifferentiated.

The Koshas and the Evolution of Reality

I want you to consider for a moment that there is this science-based idea that things originated from the Big Bang—some moment where everything was the same in potential form. From that, structure and laws of physics exploded and came into being.

From that, life started on Earth. Energy systems like photosynthesis came into being. Life evolved until our current form as humans.

When we look at the koshas, in one way it encompasses the evolution of reality as we know it, a reality as we understand it right now. For me this is very profound—that the entire history of the universe is contained in this yogic model.

Conscious, Subconscious, Unconscious

Let's consider a yogic model of the mind: conscious, subconscious, and unconscious.

We are invited to go back to where we came from. Not necessarily because that's the goal, but because that's part of our life history.

I grew up in America from a small age, but at some point I felt called to go back to Nepal because I wanted to understand what was influencing my personality.

How the Layers Interact

Everything that we're experiencing at a conscious level is usually an amplification of the layer just underneath it.

For example, the energy in my physical body usually reflects the quality of energy that I consumed earlier in the day. Those choices are usually an amplification of my mental condition.

If I'm feeling tamasic or slow and heavy, I'm more likely to go for ice cream and potato chips. Just me, I'm not saying about you. If I'm feeling very energetic, I'm more likely to go for watermelon or a sports drink. If I'm feeling balanced and I don't want to disrupt that, I'll go for a food that I know doesn't change my mental state.

Those internal preferences are largely influenced by things like culture, education, and media.

I want you to see—consider that things from lower levels build until we make a choice. So if we find ourselves in any life situation and wonder, "How did I get here?" then the koshas as a map say, "I think we can discover that together."

And this is where the various yoga techniques become very useful lenses for systematically analyzing and remediating any imbalance in any of these five—I'm going to say four levels for now, because it's assumed that the fifth represents an already balanced state.

So at a high level, this is one of the ideas on how to use the koshas in a real way.

PRACTICE: Spinal Movement Sequence

[Note: Time check - transitioning to movement practice]

We've been sitting for a few moments already. And because the talk is supposed to be experiential as well, we're going to do some movements.

I'm always trying to think what techniques can we do in a short talk that are beneficial to the physical body, and that usually resolves to: what movements will move the spine in the most directions?

The spinal cord is deeply connected to our energetic system and to our brain. So if you know anyone in your network who wants to improve their overall condition but claims they don't have much time, as a yoga practitioner, please give them practices that touch multiple koshas.

Why Shatkarma Touches Multiple Koshas

This is one reason I start every retreat with shatkarma. You cannot flush water out of your body through your anus without wondering what's going on inside your physical body. It will not only help you feel the internal plumbing, but it usually brings immediate change in energy, either low or high.

When you've washed all the food out of your system, many people are able to feel a shift in the mind.

Internationally, indigenous cultures have used plants as medicines and exploration tools. Many of those ceremonies ask the individual to fast. Many people think it's to reduce the amount of vomiting if the medicine invokes that, but the subtler aspect is: you can't feel the influence of your psyche if food is changing the way the mind behaves.

So how do you know if what insights you have are from the energy of the food or from your unconscious?

Shivaratri and Fasting Practices

Shivaratri is this coming Saturday. Traditionally, even now, people will fast for 12 to 24 hours. Some people fast from eating. I know people who fast from drinking a drop of water for 24 hours. Some fast from sleeping for 24 hours.

These types of practices stress these bodies. When the systems are stressed, they tend to push out what was accumulated. That's one of the biological benefits of food fasting—it detoxes the digestive system.

But what is energetic or pranic fasting? What is mental fasting for you? What is psychic or intuitive fasting?

These are the questions I want you to walk away with.

Applying Techniques Across Koshas

Any technique can be applied to any kosha, especially the first four. We tend to work with the physical body because it's the most accessible. But as you gain more experience and mastery, we want to enter into more subtle levels.

Once you've achieved mastery in a physical asana, see if you can do it in your dream as well. If you've never done a yoga class in your dream, why not?

You have to train yourself to wake up while you're sleeping and have the focus of mind to do your sadhana when you could be flying or diving under the ocean. That takes a lot of willpower—that when you can do anything you want, you choose to do asanas. But the effects are unique. You can do things with your astral body that you can't do with your physical body.

The Power of Will (Sankalpa)

That willpower is one of the ways to increase the bliss body or access it.

I've asked almost every person I encounter the following question: If you try to lift your hand from your leg, by what power are you able to do that? What is the power that allows you to lift your hand from your leg?

You can try it now. How were you able to do that? And what was it that sent that instruction to the mind to do that?

A desire, an intention. You heard the words and you thought, "Okay, I will." That intention is an act of one's will.

To my knowledge, there is no scientific, biological way to explain intent or will. In yoga and the tantric tradition, the first Shakti, energy, is Iccha. First there was the intention that something comes into being.

Willpower comes from a very, very ancient source. Willpower can overcome physical limitations. Willpower can overcome energetic limitations.

In Australia, a 12-year-old boy jumped into the ocean to save his family who were in the sea. When they asked him how he did it, he said it was willpower—he simply wanted to save them. They didn't have much chance of surviving otherwise.

Willpower also allows you to overcome mental limitations. Willpower will also connect you with solutions that come from education, from culture, from other places.

Sankalpa Practice

One of the best tools that the Satyananda tradition gives us is that of sankalpa. The first practice we do when we get up: sankalpas for the morning mantras. Ideally, also the last thought in your mind when you go to sleep: the sankalpa.

Ideally, repeated each time we engage, before engaging in any action. We practice this with asanas and pranayama—to visualize what we're going to do, even before doing it.

But if we only limit that practice to the mat, we're missing the point of why we're teaching it.

I heard that when Swamiji saw one of the temples that was built in Australia, he finally saw it and said, "Ah, just as I imagined it." And the Chaya Samadhi of the Bihar School is well documented as how he conceived it and manifested it. And the same regarding the works of Swami Satyananda.

They had very developed visualization and willpower. If the seed is sufficiently developed with a vision, it will manifest according to that plan.

The whole point of that was for the practice. Welcome to my mind. All of this was to introduce the practice.

PRACTICE: Squatting Asanas

[Movement practice instructions]

I'm still working on a number of koshas. So I want to see—can anyone not come into squatting? I will provide an alternative. We'll just do two movements that are very good for everyday development of the spine. You can do it from sitting and you can try it from a chair if you'd like.

First Practice: Namaskar Asana

The first practice is namaskar asana with the hands in pranam mudra. The head starts in a relaxed downward position. As you straighten the spine, bring the hands to the chest and push the knees open. If your spine comfortably allows, push the sternum up and look up. Then reverse back to the starting point—knees closed, arms stretched.

Do up to three more times on your own, with awareness in the spine and spinal sensations.

That's it for the first practice. Wherever you are, make this your last round.

Second Practice: Forward Fold Variation

For the second practice, place your fingers underneath the soles of the feet from the inside of your legs. We're going to look up, breathe in. Then exhaling, straighten the legs any amount and head towards the knees.

Do that up to three more times.

When you're finished, you can sit in a comfortable cross-legged position and close the eyes for a few moments, the hands in a mudra.

Reflection

Reflect on those two practices. Which parts of your physical body did you actually feel? Whether it was in the bones or muscles, tendons or ligaments, organs, including the skin.

If you were to design a practice that touched every body system, which practices would you include? Imagine that for a few moments. How does that compare to the current practices you have? Is there anything you would be willing to change in your sadhana to bring you closer to a deeper connection to your body's systems?

Take a few deep breaths in and out. Bring the hands into pranam mudra and then palming. Notice how much the hands are moving. Notice how much warmth can be felt. Try and intensify it.

When you bring those palms to the eyes, feel the heat or warmth on the skin. When you breathe that warmth in through the eyes, imagine the color of light moving into the brain. Exhale that warmth and prana down the whole nervous system. Then gently lower the hands.

Hari Om Tat Sat.

Finding Your Key Practices

That type of approach is one way you can deepen any practice. My experience is we're given dozens of techniques not to master all of them, but to discover the two or three that work as keys for our individual koshas.

Meru Dandasana, where you balance on your tailbone in a V position—I know from experience that can calm my mind even if I'm feeling rage. It has been tested multiple times. I'm not going to do another asana because I found one that goes into different koshas immediately.

I know that Kumbhaka after Kapalabhati with Padmasana will bring me much closer to Vijnanamaya Kosha. I know because I've tried five different meditation asanas and many pranayamas for weeks with a journal.

So please find those practices that bring you into contact with each of these koshas.

If you don't have that map or key for yourself, then you have to question: for how long are you just going to follow someone else's instruction? Most of us do not want to live our lives just doing what someone else tells us to. And yet on the spiritual path, that's where many of us stay.

THEORY: The Metabolic Pattern Across All Koshas

I want to go into an idea of how each of these bodies takes input the same way—how we consume. I want you to question what I'm saying to see if that seems true to you, and if not, to push back on me in a moment.

Is everyone doing okay so far with the level of the talk? I'm not changing it now, so you have to say yes, but still I'm curious.

The Five-Step Process

  1. Intake (Ingestion)
  2. Digestion
  3. Filtering and sorting
  4. Integration
  5. Elimination

Everyone okay with the words?

The Four Ashramas (Life Stages)

This is really interesting from the perspective of the four ashramas, the four life stages. Some of you have heard of the four life stages?

  1. Brahmacharya - The first ashrama. The stage of the student or the learner. Childhood.

  2. Grihastha - The householder. I'm going to call that "living." First you're learning about life, and now you're living your life.

  3. Vanaprastha - The third stage. It means forest dweller. What's the difference between people who live in the city and people who live in the forest? Many. People in the forest usually have less stuff. Between these two stages there's a lot of filtering and sorting. What do I need? What do I want?

  4. Sannyasa - Renunciation or detachment.

So look for a moment between:

Taking in, chewing and integrating, at some point deciding what's useful and what's not, and then pushing out everything that doesn't help growth.

Daily Cycles

Even though these are talked about in terms of one whole life, we actually go through these stages every single day.

We all go through the morning where there's something that we want to do. We review how yesterday went or the week. We act out those goals, we experience them. We reflect on what got done, didn't get done, what worked or didn't work. And hopefully by nighttime we let it go, knowing that we get another day or another life to start the process again.

Application to Each Kosha

This same process happens in the physical body: you eat, you digest, you sort, you build your body, and then you eliminate.

This can be done for the energetic body. Let me skip this for a moment and look at the mental body.

In yogic perspective, we don't just eat through this orifice—we eat through all the holes in our body.

Everything that goes in is going to be digested, hopefully filtered and sorted well, integrated, and hopefully the unuseful eliminated.

If filtering and sorting is not working well, what you integrate may not be of great quality. And if elimination is not working well, life becomes unsustainable.

The Problem of Accumulation

How many people—you don't have to raise your hand—how many of you know someone who rents extra storage because there is not enough space to contain what you already have?

I have five hard drives of data I will never revisit. And when one of those finally dies, I grieve deeply. I really do, because it represents years of memories and effort. It doesn't matter that I never open any of those files. I'm deeply attached to them and so I carry the baggage that one day these will disappear.

The ashram life is really good at bringing this back into a state of health. You're constantly being told to move rooms. You get tired of carrying stuff. And over a number of years you learn to live with what is essential to you.

That's practical sannyasa. It's not a high spiritual idea. What do I need to lead a simple, happy life? That's sannyasa.

But those needs are going to be different for each body. And so that raises the question: What is required for each body? What nourishes each kosha? And the same question: what happens when they're undernourished?

The Table Metaphor: Measuring Kosha Balance

I want to present a model for you that has worked really well for me.

Last year I gave talks in Uruguay related to an experience I had with acute anxiety and depression. It really surprised me because I was physically fit. I thought I had a really high level of energy. But all of a sudden, my mental and psychic condition collapsed.

It happened so suddenly, it forced the question: How did this happen outside of my awareness?

Visualization: The Four-Legged Table

I want you to imagine a four-legged, square table. Each of these legs represents the first four koshas: physical, energetic, mental, intuitive.

Scenario 1: Missing Leg

If you take away just any one of these legs, does the table fall or does it remain standing? It's a square table. It's standing because it has a triangular base.

There is a big "if" there.

If you put anything on the corner with the missing leg, that table falls.

So what can happen—and has happened in many of our lives—is we have three legs and the table is stable because nothing has been put on that fourth corner. And as soon as something unexpected happens—job loss, death in the family, heartbreak—if that was your psychic or mental leg, that can be enough to have a momentary breakdown.

Scenario 2: Uneven Legs

Let me give you another type of table. It's one with four legs, and they're all of different lengths. How many of you have a table like this in your house? Really? Almost nobody, because those tables don't hold things well.

So you buy a nice crystal bowl, you put it on that table, and it falls off a few seconds later.

How many of you have experienced this in life? You work hard to achieve something, and within weeks or years it just seems to come out of your life even though you want it to stay.

If that has happened to you, please measure the legs of your tables.

Yoga as Diagnostic Tool

The yogic tools are partly measurement tools. They're diagnostic tools.

These are all some ways of assessing the health of our koshas.

There are dozens of yogic tools for measuring each of these kosha legs. Satyananda Yoga is particularly good at emphasizing developing all of them, because at some point, as we begin to move into our whole being, we want these to be as balanced as possible.

That's the metaphor of the table.

PRACTICE: Mental Nadi Shodhana

I have one more model for you, but just before we do, to give the mind a break, we're going to do a simple meditation.

Give your legs a stretch if you've been sitting cross-legged for a bit. Then come back into any comfortable sitting asana, ideally something stable that creates balance through the whole body.

Hands in a mudra of your choice, resting somewhere on the legs or lap. Feeling the position of the neck and head.

Take a deep breath in, feeling the whole body expand. When you exhale, imagine that all the muscles soften around the bones. Do this two more times on your own.

Use the mind and the visualization along with the actual breath to create a state of softness and relaxation in the physical body.

After the third breath in that manner, move into subtle, full yogic breathing. In this breath, it is soft, almost silent, but you are still filling the lungs with air without strain.

Left Side Awareness

Feel the whole left side of the body. Imagine only the left half. Feel the sensations amplified in the left half of the body. In the mind's eye, feel the whole right half is blacked out and feel and see the left half.

Right Side Awareness

Now switch to the right half only. In the mental visualization of yourself, there is no left half, only right side. In your physical awareness, you are concentrating on the right half only, amplifying or experiencing sensations on the right side.

Alternating Practice

Now move awareness back to the left half. As you feel the body and the sensations in the left side, imagine that the left nasal passage is the only one that breathes in.

When you breathe out, shift the focus to the right side—physical awareness, sensory awareness, breathing out the right. Then inhale through the right. Switch completely physical to visualization with the left.

Continue this for a number of rounds: Mental Nadi Shodhana, using physical awareness of that side of the body that's breathing, aware of the breath in that half only, and visualizing that half only.

If any one kosha begins to dim, become less present, it's no problem—just be aware of that. Sometimes we lose physical awareness. Sometimes we lose pranic awareness. Sometimes there is an absence of mental focus. Sometimes there is an absence of the deep feeling or visualization.

Return to Whole Body

The next time you exhale from the left side, begin to breathe in through both nasal passages. Imagine and feel your whole body—the expansion and contraction of your whole body with each breath in and out.

Follow each and every breath from the moment it enters to the moment it leaves the body, and the feeling of your life being extended by another five minutes with each breath.

Closing

Bring the hands into pranam mudra and move into a round of palming. Notice if the temperature has stayed the same or changed. When you have heat to share, bring them close to the closed eyes. Notice any patterns or colors or shapes that may or may not be present.

Inhale that warmth back into you through the eyes. Exhaling, you can lower the hands and open the eyes slowly.

Beyond the Breathing Pattern

Almost all of us, maybe all of us, have done Nadi Shodhana. I have found that so much emphasis remains on the breathing pattern that we never experiment beyond that.

The pranas are so subtle. In 20 years, I have distinctly felt prana—without a doubt—maybe twice. I mean very distinctly, like something. Not just general energy. If we run, we feel hot—that's a change in prana. But to feel apana moving down, or samana moving back and forth, or udana moving through the outward limbs—I find those are harder to contact because I'm not demanding that of myself.

The Table Metaphor Continued

Before I introduce the second model, I want to say two more things about the table metaphor.

We talked about one way of toppling the table is if a leg is missing. More often, it's that our legs are of different lengths, and so the table is imbalanced.

Scenario 3: Weak Leg Under Stress

But there's another case where the legs are the same length but not all of the same strength. This goes back to that intake, digestion, integration process.

For example, if the quality of prana we intake is low or tamasic based on what we're eating, the air we're breathing, and whatever we're consuming with our other senses including the mind, what can happen is: for a long time we start to add to our intake, add things to the table with confidence, not realizing that this leg is stable but has a maximum weight it can carry.

And even though the whole table is doing a good job, we put one more thing on the compromised leg and it shatters. Because there's weight everywhere, the table falls.

This is almost the worst situation to be in because it gives a sense of false confidence.

And yet I have found myself multiple times in that situation. Nearly every time I look back at what compromised that leg—what compromised that yogic body—it was because I was not selective or careful about how I was nourishing it.

Mapping the Subsystems

We won't have time tonight, but I want to give you all a simple practice, or exercise rather. Luckily we live in times where access to information is fairly easy with books and the internet.

The exercise is to take each of the yogic bodies, especially the first four, and write down everything that you believe is a subsystem or component of that body.

Example: Annamaya Kosha (Physical Body)

Let's take an example like the physical body, the Annamaya Kosha. What are the subsystems?

This is what happens when you go to the doctor. This is modern biology. They're really good at the Annamaya Kosha. X-rays, PET scans, MRIs, sonograms—we can see so many layers now of the Annamaya Kosha. They can tell you, "Oh, you had a stroke ten years ago in this part of the brain." It's amazing.

Example: Pranamaya Kosha (Energetic Body)

What are some of the subsystems of the energetic body, the pranic body?

[Note: Discussion continues but appears to have some audio gaps here]

The point I want to make is we have some classical ones. For example, the five sub-pranas. If you look at the mind in the yogic model, even the mind is broken down into classical four categories.

The Four Parts of the Mental Body

If we go to the mental plane, we see that even the mind is categorized into four subsystems:

  1. Manas
  2. Chitta
  3. Buddhi
  4. Ahamkara

The same applies to the psychic body, which includes the chakras.

Kosha Scanning

When someone asks you, "How are you doing?" we have very general responses: "Okay, fine."

But when you ask yourself—which I hope you are doing at least twice a day, because the beginning of the day can feel very different than the end of the day—we want that question to automatically go into a process of checking: How am I feeling? How am I feeling? How am I feeling? How am I feeling?

That is kosha scanning.

In the beginning that might feel like work because we haven't exercised it. But when that becomes familiar, it's like doing a talk with Zoom on, with a translator and people in front of you. Each of us are aware of so many things right now, including:

We are all supercomputers calculating a lot. But a lot of that mental awareness may not be directly benefiting our connection to ourself.

If you find that's the case for you based on your table toppling, then you have at least one simple exercise to just check what your awareness of each body actually is.

Bringing Awareness to Each Body

If you find that there is a lack of awareness in any of these bodies, the question is: How do I bring awareness into that body?

That essentially is what yoga is. We don't need so many techniques—I don't want this to feel overwhelming, it doesn't have to be. But it has to be intentional. That intention and the quality and degree of it will carry through the remainder of the bodies.

Q&A: The Five Sub-Pranas and Four Mental Categories

[Question from chat about the five sub-pranas and four parts of the mental body]

The five pranas, which are available in all the Bihar School of Yoga books like Prana and Pranayama and online, are:

  1. Apana - Moving down (navel downward)
  2. Prana - Moving up
  3. Samana - Side to side
  4. Udana - In the limbs
  5. Vyana - Around the whole body, the buffer prana

You can find this very well explained in the books.

The four parts of the mental body we mentioned: Manas, Chitta, Buddhi, and Ahamkara. This is also more complex. We can give you some reference in the books to investigate further.

Have you heard these terms of how the mental body is classified? They're really worth visiting, because for many of us in this room who are over 30, some categories of our mental body are going to start showing lack of maintenance:

Available Practices from Our Tradition

I'm going to read some practices that we have available from our tradition. This may seem obvious, and that's good if it seems obvious. If not, it's food for thought.

Many of these techniques benefit multiple yogic bodies:

Karma Yoga and Seva

And one of the best is Karma Yoga and Seva, because that reflects how well integrated we are in actual daily life.

You might lift weights perfectly in a gym, but if you can't lift boxes between rooms, what's the point? And that goes for the other bodies as well. Sometimes the skills we have in certain situations aren't transferable.

Karma Yoga invites us to develop skills that are applicable to all aspects of life. It helps us sort, filter, and eliminate what's worth developing and what may not need to be developed in our current life stage.

Closing Remarks

That's the time we have for now.

I really hope that you heard something that makes you think or feel differently about the koshas, about your personal sadhana, and about your relationship to the entire Yoga Vidya.

There are no rules or limits on how you can make this knowledge your own. I want to thank you for letting me share some of my own connections I've made.

Upcoming Retreat

There is a retreat at Yoga 104 from the 13th to the 17th, I think. Each day we're focusing on a particular kosha, and we've invited speakers from the community to talk about their experience with that kosha.

I really wanted to hear from someone who cuts into the physical body—an autopsist. I think Janardhan found a doctor who has that experience. We have someone who works with cancer patients and how that has revealed to them something about the human spirit. We have a speaker who's worked with autism in children and she will come on the Manomaya day.

And very exciting, we have 24 hours of kirtan from Saturday at 5pm until Sunday. We need your help. It's going to be a mix of dancing, mantra, bhajan, Yoga Nidra—so that in the 24 hours we also give rest to each of the bodies.

If any of you want to have this experience or know someone, you're invited with all our heart.

PRACTICE: Closing Shanti Patha

And with that we will do a short Shanti Patha.

Bring the body into any comfortable position, one where the spine is upright in alignment with the neck and head. Hands in a mudra of your choice, eyes and mouth gently closed.

Bring the awareness to the eyebrow center and visualize a steady golden flame or a bright point of light.

With our awareness on that inner light, we will chant the mantra Om three times together, followed by Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti, Hari Om.

Take a slow, full breath in to chant the mantra Om.

[Three rounds of Om chanting]

[Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti]

Hari Om.

Final Thanks

Thank you all very much. I did not leave time for questions and answers, but if you connect with Bhaktimayi, I will definitely answer every question by text of what I know.

Hari Om Tat Sat.

Notes on Transcript Quality

Sections where audio may have been incomplete:

Practice Sections Included:

  1. Opening Shanti Patha (full meditation sequence)
  2. Spinal movement asanas (namaskar asana variations)
  3. Mental Nadi Shodhana meditation
  4. Closing Shanti Patha

Theoretical Framework Covered: