Karma Yoga — The Yoga of Your Karma

Karma yoga is the yoga of action, the practice of using one’s own life circumstances, one’s actual duties, work, relationships, and daily conditions, as the vehicle for spiritual practice. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches it to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra as the response to Arjuna’s despair at the demands his life is placing on him. The teaching is not to escape the demands but to enter them fully, acting from a place of non-attachment to the fruits of the action.

The tradition holds karma yoga as one of the four principal yogas alongside jnana yoga (the yoga of knowledge), bhakti yoga (the yoga of devotion), and raja yoga (the yoga of meditation). Each is a complete path capable of taking the practitioner to the same recognition; they suit different temperaments and different life circumstances. Karma yoga is particularly available to householders and to anyone whose life does not permit the withdrawal that seated practices require.

Ram Dass frequently taught karma yoga as the practice that becomes available when formal practices are no longer sustainable, when children arrive, when demanding work takes the hours the cushion used to hold, when illness or age changes what the body can do. He described it as the yoga of your karma, using what has been given to you to do and to be as the vehicle for coming into the One.

The practice is difficult in a specific way. It has no external scaffolding. There is no timer, no zafu, no meditation room; the practitioner has to recognize the practice in the moment or the moment simply passes. But when it works, it works completely, and the transformation of the everyday into the sacred is its own kind of arrival, not a lesser one than what the cushion offered.