You've probably already 'done' the Bhagavad Gītā.

If you're a Yoga teacher, there's a very good chance the Bhagavad Gītā was somewhere in your YTT.

You probably learnt about Karma Yoga and Jñāna Yoga and Bhakti, talked about dharma and non-attachment and maybe the guṇas. You might even use some of those teachings in your classes from time to time.

And that's great.

But there's a difference between being introduced to a text and actually spending time with it.

Have you ever sat down with the Gītā like you would with a really interesting friend and asked it a whole lot of questions?

What do you actually mean by dharma? Why are you telling Arjuna to fight? What does surrender actually mean? Why is Karma Yoga so important? And how do we reconcile all of this with what Patañjali says about ahiṃsā?

Welcome to the Gita Chat Club.

Six live conversations about the Bhagavad Gītā, using different translations, commentaries and interpretations as a jumping-off point.

I'll bring the material and the questions. Then we'll see where the conversation takes us.

I have a LOT of books about the Gītā

And I have been reading them.

One of the things I love about these old texts is that you can read the same passage through the eyes of different people and suddenly you're looking at something completely differently.

We'll use Eknath Easwaran as our main text and I'll bring in some of the other books I've been reading, including Ram Dass' Paths to God, Devdutt Pattanaik's My Gītā and Douglas Brooks' Wheels of Grace.

Ram Dass is one of my absolute favourites and his approach is mystical, devotional and deeply experiential.

Pattanaik gives us a very different perspective, particularly around Indian culture and the way the Gītā has been interpreted outside India.

Douglas Brooks brings a philosophical and Tantric lens and is particularly useful when we want to question some of the assumptions we may have picked up through modern Yoga.

And there are other books on my shelves too, so who knows what else will make an appearance.

The point isn't that one of these people has the 'right' answer.

I'm much more interested in what happens when we put a few different interpretations on the table and start talking about them.

Sometimes they'll broadly agree.

Sometimes they absolutely won't.

Sometimes I'll read something and think, 'Well... that's one way of looking at it.'

That's where the fun starts.

We're not going chapter by chapter

We're not going to work our way obediently through all eighteen chapters of the Gītā.

Instead, we're going to start with an interesting question, find some interesting bits of the Gītā that have something to say about it, see what different people think and then talk about it.

That's the course.

We'll explore questions like: What do you do when there is no good choice? Can you actually act without being attached to the result? What does it mean to do your dharma when you don't know what your dharma actually is? Is desire really the problem? What does surrender mean and what exactly are we supposed to surrender to?

We'll get into householder life, Karma Yoga, Jñāna, Bhakti and the guṇas. We'll look at what the Gītā actually says rather than simply repeating the version many of us picked up in Yoga teacher training.

And then we'll get into the juicy stuff.

How do we reconcile Kṛṣṇa telling Arjuna to go and fight with Patañjali's teaching of ahiṃsā? How do we read the Gītā without watering it down to whatever we already want it to say? Who gets to interpret it? How do we know when we're genuinely interpreting a text and when we're just putting our own ideas into it?

And what happens when two commentators read exactly the same passage and come up with completely different ideas about what is going on?

That's the stuff we're going to chat about.

This is a ‘chat’, not a ‘book’ club

You do not need to own all these books.

You don't need to buy a Bhagavad Gītā beforehand and you don't need to have read any of the texts I'll be drawing from. In fact, you don't have to do any reading at all if you don't want to.

I'll bring the passages, the different perspectives and whatever context you need to join the conversation. There might be something you want to read afterwards because you've become fascinated by a particular idea, but there is absolutely no homework requirement.

The books are there to give us things to talk about.

The chat is the point.

And yes, this is a Yoga nerd-out

At this stage I'm proud to admit that I'm a massive Yoga nerd.

I've been practising Yoga since I was eight and teaching since 2009, and I've spent a ridiculous amount of time reading about Yoga philosophy, mythology and the traditions that sit behind the Yoga we practise in the West.

I like this stuff.

A lot.

I like the mythology. I like the philosophy. I like the arguments and contradictions and the bits that don't resolve themselves into a nice little takeaway. And I like sitting around with other people who are interested in the same things and talking about them. So that's what we're going to do.

It's a full Yoga nerd-out and everyone is welcome.

This is especially for you if you've ever thought...

You've learnt about the Gītā in your YTT but don't feel like you really know it.

You've been teaching Yoga for years and would love to go back and properly explore some of this stuff.

You like philosophy and mythology but don't necessarily want to enrol in a university course about them.

Or you're simply a bit of a Yoga nerd who enjoys a long conversation about something interesting.

You don't need to know Sanskrit. You don't even need to have read the Gītā.

You just need to be curious and ready for an explore and some good conversation.

And I'm deliberately spreading the sessions out because I want there to be some space between conversations. You can think about what we've talked about, notice what comes up and perhaps come back to the next session with a completely different question.

Here are the details:

Dates

Thursdays, 6-7:30am Melbourne (Australia) time.

November 5 & 19

December 3 & 17

January 14 & 28

All sessions are live online and run for 90 minutes. All sessions will be recorded and available to rewatch.

Investment

$120 AUD

(approx. €74.22, £63.22 or $86.02 USD)

I've deliberately made this a pretty no-brainer price because I want this to be accessible to people who are interested in the Gītā and want to spend some time exploring it, even if you can't make every session live.

You'll get access to all the recordings as well as the live conversations.

Or you can join my Yoga Teacher Circle on Patreon for $20/month and Gita Chat Club is included as part of your membership.

The Yoga Teacher Circle is where I'm creating a space for Yoga teachers to talk about the stuff that doesn't always fit neatly into a standard training: teaching, students, relationships, philosophy, mythology and all the weird and wonderful questions that come up when you're actually doing this work.

Come and try it first

I'm running a free Gita Chat Club taster session on Thursday 29th October 2026.

This isn't a presentation about the program. We'll actually do some Gītā Chatting!

I'll bring a passage from the Gītā and a few different ways of interpreting it, and we'll see what happens when we put them side by side and start poking around.

No homework. No need to know anything beforehand. No obligation to join the full series.

Just come along, have a bit of a Yoga nerd-out and see what you think.

Once you register, I'll send you the Zoom details.