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Abhyāsa — Decoded (why the reading never took)
Abhyāsa is the word most self-help skips: not the insight, the repetition. Sutra 1.13 defines it. Sutra 1.14 refuses to say how long. The...
Vairāgya — Decoded
Vairāgya gets translated as dispassion, non-attachment, and indifference. Those are three different instructions. The sutra's own word is vaśīkāra — mastery. You build that....
Trāṭaka: what the candle studies measured
The eyesight claim for candle gazing has one case report and an unfinished trial behind it — no good evidence, and eyes are a...
The 3am spiral has a Sanskrit name — vṛtti
Vṛtti is usually translated "thought wave". It's closer to a rut — a groove the mind keeps turning in. The Yoga Sutras don't ask...
Niṣkāma karma: why the win lands flat
You got the win. It lasted about an hour. The verse doesn't say stop wanting the result. It says the result was never the...
Gita 18.63 — advice for the next choice, not the last...
Krishna argues for seventeen chapters, then refuses to decide for Arjuna. Reflect fully, then act as you wish — Bhagavad Gītā 18.63. It's a...
Tapas Decoded — heat, not self-punishment
Tapas gets printed as "austerity" in most English translations, and that one word turned a discipline into a punishment. The root tap means heat....
More to explore
A few more from across Peruze, picked at random.
The intelligent investor
The modern investing landscape is a chaotic, high-speed storm. Financial news blasts from every screen, "hot tips" promise instant riches, and online brokers urge us to trade anywhere, anytime, because "every second counts." Wall Street has turned the stock market into a nonstop national video game, and most people are losing. We are drowning in data, but knowledge is nowhere to be found
Muditā — the word for gladness at someone else’s luck
Muditā is gladness at someone else's good fortune — the fourth thing the comparison trap takes from you. Yoga Sūtras 1.33 lists it as one of four attitudes that clear the mind. It calls it something cultivated. It does not promise the feeling on demand. Ten seconds, one person, before you type the congratulations.
Detachment Isn’t Coldness: What Vairāgya Actually Means
You tried caring less, and it made everything worse — flatter, more distant, and no calmer. In this episode of Ancient Answers, I take that trap to the tradition's own vocabulary. The Sanskrit word behind 'detachment', vairāgya, isn't about distance at all: it's built on rāga, a word for dye. What the texts target is the stain a want spreads over everything — not the caring itself.