Karma yoga

The word

Karma is Sanskrit for action or deed, from the root kri, to do. Over time it also came to mean the consequences that follow from action.

Karma yoga uses the first meaning. It is the yoga of how you act, and the path most easily carried into a working day, which is why it sits naturally beside yoga for stress and burnout.

Origin and texts

Karma yoga is taught most clearly in the Bhagavad Gita’s dialogue. The setting is a battlefield.

The prince Arjuna, facing relatives and teachers on the other side, loses his nerve and wants to walk away. His charioteer, Krishna, answers him over eighteen chapters.

One of Krishna’s first answers is that giving up action is not the way out. Nobody can stop acting entirely, he says, even for a moment. What matters is the spirit in which you act.

In paraphrase: you have a right to your work, but not to its fruits, so do not let the reward be your motive, and do not let that turn you toward doing nothing. The Gita’s third chapter, often titled Karma Yoga, develops this idea at length.

The text also describes yoga as skill in action and as evenness of mind, staying steady in success and failure alike.

Acting this way, it says, frees a person from the anxious grip of wanting a particular result.

In the late nineteenth century, Swami Vivekananda wrote a book on karma yoga and presented it as one of four main paths, alongside bhakti, jnana and raja yoga.

What karma yoga asks of you

Put simply, karma yoga asks three things:

1. Do what is yours to do, and do it with care.
2. Let go of the need to control how it turns out.
3. Offer the work to something larger than yourself: your family, your community, or, for many people, the divine.

It is sometimes called the path of selfless service, and the Sanskrit word seva, service, is closely linked to it.

Selfless or self-seeking action: what is the difference?

Later teachers often explain karma yoga with a pair of terms.

The Gita does not ask anyone to stop caring about doing good work. It asks you to let go of the grip on the reward. The three gunas, the qualities of nature, are used in its later chapters to describe the spirit in which actions are done.

What karma yoga is not

• It is not unpaid work. Earning a salary is fine. The attitude to the work is what counts.
• It is not passivity. Letting go of results does not mean not trying. Krishna’s whole point to Arjuna is to act.
• It is not only charity. Service projects are one expression, but karma yoga applies to ordinary tasks too.

A daily check for working days

1. Morning: name one task that is yours to do today, and decide to do it with full attention.
2. Before a meeting or hard call: take one slow breath out and drop the need for a particular outcome.
3. During the commute: notice where you are already rehearsing praise or blame, and let the rehearsal go.
4. Evening: ask yourself two questions. Did you do your part with care? Can you let the rest be?

How it shows up in a modern practice

On the mat, karma yoga is less visible than a posture or a breath. It shows up in small ways: practising for the practice itself rather than for how a pose looks, putting props away for the next person, or helping someone set up.

Many yoga communities organise service projects under this name.

Off the mat, it is the part of yoga most people can use at work.

Staying steady whether a meeting goes well or badly is exactly the evenness the Gita describes. The yamas and niyamas give a practical list of how to treat others and yourself along the way.

Karma yoga in a class

In a class, karma yoga is more likely to come up as a way of framing the practice than as a technique. When a student is chasing a pose, a gentle reminder to do the work and let the result come can take the pressure off.

For someone carrying a heavy workload, the idea of doing one thing at a time, fully, can sit alongside the breathing and the postures. Yoga for a stressful week has simple practices to start with.

For the wider idea of action and consequence behind the path, see what the word karma means. The Sanskrit yoga glossary explains the other terms here.