Hi, everyone.  I’ve been so busy with my new job as Yoga Editor for Elephant Journal that I got way behind in posting Gita in a Nutshell here .  This will catch you up-to-date:

#11: The Yoga of Meditation.

#10: The Yoga of Understanding.

#9: Different Yoga Strokes for Different Yoga Folks.

#8: Does the Infinitely Wondrous Universe Give a Damn About You and Me?

#7: Is the Gita Asking Us to Repress Our Emotions?

#6: Gandhi’s Bible or a Call to War?

#5: Why Is the Gita So Upsetting At First?

Bob

Bob Weisenberg
Yoga Editor
Elephant Journal
@BobWeisenberg

Hi, everyone.  Lot’s of new things going on at Elephant Journal.

I just volunteered to become Elephant’s full-time Yoga Editor.  You can read all about it at:

The Future of Elephant: Yoga

To make it easier to follow all the great Yoga content on Elephant, I created a new Facebook page called, naturally enough:

Elephant Yoga

Please join the conversation whenever you can.

Best holiday wishes to you all.

Bob Weisenberg
Yoga Editor
Elephant Journal

Gita in a Nutshell #4:
Each of Us Is Already Infinitely Wondrous
(Divine if you prefer)

Gita in a Nutshell #3:
Focus the Mind

Gita in a Nutshell #2:
Experience Infinite Wonder in All Things

(This weekly discussion is based on

It’s a great revelation to read the Gita by major theme instead of in the order it’s written. Today let’s talk about the first major theme:

LIVE AND ACT WITH LOVE AND PURPOSE,
DETACHING EGO FROM RESULTS

The Gita contains many powerful passages on this theme, but they are scattered throughout the text. When you read them all together, as below, the main ideas jump off the page with crystalline clarity.

(Please continue at Elephant Journal.)

Gita in a Nutshell: Big Ideas and Best Quotations.

The key passages for each week will be included in the blog. (It will not be necessary to do any additional reading for this discussion, although, of course, you will also enjoy reading the whole Gita if you haven’t already.)

I am recruiting a number of regular committed participants to help add cohesion to the conversation each week. If you would like to be one of these committed regular participants, please let me know. Of course, we still welcome participation from everyone.

Stephen Mitchell’s Bhagavad Gita is the recommended text, and that’s the version I’ll be quoting each week. But some readers might prefer to follow along in their favorite edition, and that’s fine, too. (I have compared Mitchell to many other versions of the Gita, and the major themes all come out the same, regardless of the translation, even though some of the details might vary.)

There is no experience requirement. For Gita Talk we had everything from first time readers to Gita scholars, and everyone benefited from the great conversations. We will pay particular attention to the needs of new readers.

If you are intrigued but not sure if this if for you, just take a look at Gita in a Nutshell to see what it’s all about. We’ll be taking up each of these main themes of the Gita at one per week. I will quote the relevant passages in the blog itself with a few words of introduction. Then we’ll all talk about it.

And, of course, if you’re uncertain as to whether you should be reading the Gita in the first place, there’s always the Top Ten Reasons to Read the Bhagavad Gita, #1 of which is:

You were supposed to during teacher training, but only got through 20 pages.
And you’ve felt guilty ever since.

The first blog, Gita in a Nutshell #1, will be posted on Wednesday, November 10th.

Please let me know if I can help you in any way. You can contact me with a message below, on Facebook, or Twitter.

Over the past few weeks I’ve had the great pleasure of getting to know Gotham Chopra.  Yes, he’s Deepak’s son.  But it turns out that Gotham is equally interesting in his own right.

I’ve published two Gotham blogs on Elephant Journal, both of which I highly recommend.

The first is a guest article by Gotham about his new book, Walking Wisdom, which was originally going to be titled Spirituality for Dogs, to give you some idea of what the book is about.  The subtitle is “Three Generations, Two Dogs, and the Search for a Happy Life.”  I enjoyed the book immensely, even though I’m not a “dog person.”  It didn’t matter.  You’ll enjoy it, too.

The second blog is an interview I did with Gotham called Gotham Chopra on the Super Bowl, Yoga Classes, Foreign Wars, and Comic Books, which is also pretty descriptive too, isn’t it?  This is one of the most interesting and entertaining interviews I’ve ever done.  I hope you enjoy it, too.

There be more blogs about Gotham Chopra soon.  In particular I want to learn more about his project to bring the ancient Indian epics, like the massive Mahabharata (which contains the Bhagavad Gita as a very tiny part) to comic book and multi-media form.

See “Effortless Wellbeing”: Meditation as Everyday Life at Elephant Journal.

Of all the meditation approaches I’ve experienced and studied, the one I keep coming back to in the end is a little out-of-the-mainstream book called Effortless Wellbeing by Evan Finer.