THE BHAGAVAD GITA
An Ancient Conversation About the Questions We Are Still Asking
A 22-Week Live Online Contemplative Journey
What do we do when we don’t know what to do?
How do we act when every choice seems to have consequences?
How do we care deeply without becoming consumed by outcomes?
How do we remain steady when life changes around us?
What is our responsibility to other people?
What is the difference between what we want and what we are actually called to do?
And beneath our identities, accomplishments, fears, desires, and roles: Who are we, really?
More than two thousand years ago, the Bhagavad Gita was written about a human being confronting questions much like these. The text’s protagonist, the warrior Arjuna, stands between two armies preparing for battle. Looking across the field, he sees teachers, relatives, friends, and people he loves on both sides. Suddenly the certainty that brought him there collapses.
He cannot see a right way forward. He puts down his bow and collapses. Then a conversation begins. The conversation becomes one of humanity’s great explorations of action, identity, consciousness, devotion, responsibility, freedom, and the nature of reality.
The questions Arjuna asks are ancient. The predicament is not.
“I knew nothing about this text but after just the first chapter, I saw why so many are taken by the Gita. This course has brought me to deeper places to recognize who I truly am in unexpectedly embracing and uplifted ways.”
What Is the Bhagavad Gita?
The Bhagavad Gita (The Gita), “The Song of the Lord,” is the best known of all the Indian spiritual scriptures. It opens, dramatically, on a battlefield, as the warrior Arjuna turns in anguish to his charioteer and mentor, Krishna, for answers to the fundamental questions of life.
But The Gita is not what it seems – it’s not a dialogue between two mythical figures at the dawn of Indian history. The battlefield is a perfect backdrop, but The Gita’s subject is the war within, the struggle for self-mastery that every human being must wage to live a life that is meaningful, fulfilling, and worthwhile.
The Gita asks and answers the questions that you or I might ask – questions not about philosophy or mysticism, but about how to live effectively in a world of challenge and change. The Gita has been a personal handbook for life to millions of people, just as it was for Mahatma Gandhi.
The Battlefield Within
The Bhagavad Gita takes place on a battlefield, immediately before a devastating war. That setting matters. It is also possible to recognize another battlefield in the story: the battlefield within ourselves.
We can relate to Arjuna’s divided mind. One part of us wants to act. Another wants to run. One part knows what needs to be done. Another desperately wants a different answer.
We want peace while clinging to the very things that disturb it. We want freedom while remaining attached to familiar identities. We want certainty before acting in a world that rarely provides it.
Seen this way, Arjuna’s crisis becomes startlingly intimate. The battlefield is not merely somewhere in ancient India. It exists in our own lives.
This Is Not Simply a Course About a Book
We are not studying the Bhagavad Gita merely to understand the Bhagavad Gita. We are allowing the Gita to help us understand ourselves.
This is not an academic survey, a lecture series, or a book-club-style review in which we read a chapter and discuss what we thought about it. Each week, we encounter the text contemplatively.
We meditate. We read. We become quiet. We notice what resonates and what resists. We question. We bring the teachings into contact with our relationships, choices, fears, attachments, responsibilities, spiritual practice, and ordinary lives.
The question gradually changes from: “What does this teaching mean?” to: “What happens when I actually live this?”
That distinction is at the heart of this course.
Three Ways of Encountering the Gita
The Bhagavad Gita is simultaneously practical, mystical, philosophical, and deeply sacred. This course does not require us to flatten those dimensions into one interpretation. Instead, we allow ourselves to encounter the text through three complementary doors.
The Practical
How shall I live?
The Gita explores action, responsibility, desire, attachment, discipline, relationship, equanimity, and what it means to participate fully in life without being imprisoned by the results of our actions. This is the realm of karma yoga: the yoga of action.
The Mystical
Who or what am I?
Again and again, the Gita challenges our ordinary identification with personality, history, body, thought, and role. What remains when our usual definitions of ourselves begin to loosen? This is where the Gita meets contemplative traditions across cultures and enters the territory of consciousness, Self, non-duality, and ultimate reality.
The Sacred
What happens when life is no longer entirely about “me”?
The Gita also speaks unapologetically of devotion, surrender, love, and the Divine. We do not need to adopt Hindu beliefs to explore this dimension of the text. Nor do we need to explain it away. Some may understand the Divine as God. Some may experience the Divine as a representation of awakened consciousness, wisdom, the deeper Self, or reality itself. Others may simply remain curious.
You are not asked to believe. You are invited to encounter and make a determination for yourself.
“We’re less than half way through the course and I’m already experiencing awe in the world around me. That’s new. And it makes me wonder what’s to come. This little book is opening up so much for me – like more life.”
What We Will Explore
Across the eighteen chapters of the Bhagavad Gita, we encounter teachings concerning:
- action without attachment to results
- the nature of the Self
- meditation and the training of the mind
- desire, aversion, and the forces that shape our behavior
- knowledge and wisdom
- equanimity amid changing circumstances
- responsibility and dharma
- the different paths of yoga
- devotion and surrender
- the qualities that obscure or reveal our deeper nature
- death and what may lie beyond our ordinary understanding of it
- the relationship between the individual and the Divine
- freedom from the compulsions of ego
- what it might actually mean to become free
Some teachings may immediately make sense. Others may challenge us. Some may contradict what we believe. And some may need to remain unanswered for a while.
All of that is welcome.
What a Saturday Gathering Is Like
This is a participatory contemplative course rather than a webinar. Each gathering creates a space in which the Gita can move from something we read into something we experience. Our time together generally includes:
Meditation
We begin by becoming present and allowing the activity of the day to quiet down.
Encountering the Chapter
We explore the week’s chapter and the teachings Krishna is presenting to Arjuna.
Silence and Contemplation
Rather than immediately analyzing what we have heard, we give the teachings room to land.
Inquiry
We explore what the chapter evokes in our actual experience: insight, recognition, confusion, disagreement, resistance, curiosity, or perhaps something we cannot yet name.
Integration
We consider how the teaching might accompany us into the coming week, not as another idea to remember but as something to notice and test in life.
Between gatherings, brief reflections and practices help carry the inquiry beyond Saturday.
The real course therefore does not happen only during our time together. It happens during the week, when life supplies the curriculum.
“In this week’s chapter, we learned that consciously making a decision to not act is in fact an act in and of itself and has its own consequences. That gave me a whole new way to look at living. Thank you for bringing this text to life through this course.”
Is This Course for Me?
You may find this course especially meaningful if:
- you are spiritually curious but do not want someone telling you what you must believe;
- you meditate or follow another contemplative practice and want to explore the Gita experientially;
- you practice yoga and have wondered about the deeper philosophical and spiritual tradition behind it;
- you are interested in Buddhism, Advaita, nonduality, mysticism, comparative religion, or the world’s wisdom traditions;
- you are wrestling with purpose, responsibility, change, uncertainty, attachment, aging, relationship, or questions of meaning;
- you have read the Bhagavad Gita before but would like to encounter it as a lived teaching rather than simply a philosophical text;
- you have never opened the Bhagavad Gita and are simply curious about what this ancient conversation might reveal about being human now.
No previous knowledge is necessary.
You do not need to know Sanskrit. You do not need previous knowledge of Hinduism or Indian philosophy. You do not need to practice yoga. And you do not need to hold any particular religious or spiritual belief.
Curiosity and a willingness to look honestly at your own experience are enough.
Your Teacher
Kit Kanohoaloha Wynkoop (“Kanoho”) is the founder and principal teacher of Hoʻi ka Hā, a school devoted to helping people encounter the world’s contemplative wisdom as something to be lived rather than merely understood.
His approach has grown from more than five decades of meditation practice and study across Buddhist, Advaita, Hawaiian, and other spiritual and contemplative traditions. Rather than asking students to adopt a particular system of belief, his teaching continually returns to direct experience: What can we discover for ourselves, and what happens when a teaching is actually brought into our lives?
That is also his approach to the Bhagavad Gita.
Kanoho does not teach the Gita as a scholar of Hindu scripture or Sanskrit, and he believes that distinction is important to make clear. He approaches it as a longtime contemplative practitioner and teacher, drawing upon the text itself, Eknath Easwaran’s interpretation, and insights from other wisdom traditions when they help illuminate what the Gita is asking us to investigate.
The purpose is not to tell participants what the Bhagavad Gita means. It is to create the conditions in which we can encounter its questions, test its teachings against our own experience, and discover what this ancient conversation might reveal about how we are living now.
The Translation We Will Use
Our primary text will be Eknath Easwaran’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita.
Easwaran approaches the Gita not merely as philosophy but as a guide to transformation. His accessible translation and introductions provide an especially useful doorway for contemplative inquiry.
Participants are invited to obtain their own copy of the text so that they can read and revisit the chapters throughout the course.
A Course About Transformation Requires Participation
The depth of these gatherings depends upon the presence and engagement of everyone in the group. For that reason, this is not designed as a course to have playing in the background while doing something else.
Participants are asked to attend with video on, free from multitasking, and prepared to participate in meditation, contemplation, and inquiry. You do not need to speak constantly. Silence is participation, too.
But presence matters.
Over twenty-two weeks, we are creating a contemplative community together. The quality of that container depends upon each of us.
“The Bhagavad Gita has grown close to my heart through this course because each day now I can see it’s the best day of my life!”
Course Details
22 Saturdays: April 3, 2027 through September 18, 2027
There will be no class on the following dates: May 29 for Memorial Day Weekend, July 3 for “Independence” Day Weekend, and September 4 for Labor Day Weekend.
7:00am to 8:30am Hawaiʻi Time
10:00am to 11:30am Pacific Time
1:00pm to 2:30pm Eastern Time
Live online via Zoom. All time zones are welcome. Click here to calculate the day/time in your part of the world.
Before You Register
Please consider whether you can realistically make space for a 22-week journey. Perfect attendance is not expected. Life remains stubbornly unwilling to consult our calendars. But continuity matters.
This course works because we return, week after week, to the teachings, to one another, and to our own experience. If that kind of sustained exploration appeals to you, you are warmly invited to join us.
Tuition Options
Supported Tuition – $175
For those who need a lower threshold to participate at this time.
Standard Tuition – $350
The actual cost of offering this 22-class course and the rate most participants choose.
Sustaining Tuition – $525
For those able to help support others and strengthen the school’s work.
No one is turned away for financial reasons. If you have questions about that, email us at: “hoikaha [dot] school [at] proton [dot] me”.
How to Register
Complete this registration form. After submitting the form, you’ll receive a confirmation email with a link to pay your tuition. Enrollment is complete once your tuition is paid.
What Tuition Supports
- 22 live 90-minute sessions: 33 hours of class time
- guided meditation and inquiry facilitation
- course preparation and materials
- ongoing support for the school’s programs and scholarships
Cancellations/Refunds
Full refunds minus a $65 processing fee are available if we receive an email requesting cancellation by the end of business on April 2, 2027: kanohoaloha@proton.me. Once the course begins, withdrawals will receive a 70% refund until the end of business on April 17, 2027. After April 17, 2027, tuition is non-refundable. Exceptional circumstances may be considered individually. If the course is canceled by the school, all tuition will be refunded in full.
