The philosophy that made
your practice

The Yoga Sūtras are the philosophical backbone of everything you practice. Every breath linked to movement, every instruction to still the mind, every idea of what yoga is actually for — all of it traces back to this text. Yet most practitioners have never studied it directly, verse by verse, with a scholar who has spent a lifetime inside it.

Dr. Nagaraja Rao takes the entire text verse by verse, weaving in Sankhya, the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad Gītā, and allied commentaries to show how the Sūtras actually work — in the mind, in relationships, in daily life. His gift is making the subtle clear without making it simple.

This is not academic yoga philosophy. It is the text as this lineage has always read it.

The Bhagavad Gītā is the most widely read philosophical text in the yoga world — and the most frequently misunderstood. Stripped of its context, it becomes a collection of inspiring passages. Studied within its tradition, it is something far more precise: a complete teaching on the nature of action, devotion, knowledge, and liberation, addressed to a practitioner standing at the threshold of practice.

Dr. M.A. Alwar does not teach the Gītā as literature or philosophy from the outside. He transmits it as it has been understood within this paramparā for nearly a millennium — with the depth, precision, and warmth of a scholar who has lived inside this text his entire life.

To study the Bhagavad Gītā with Dr. Alwar is to receive it through the same philosophical understanding that guided Śrī Kṛṣṇamācārya — and that has shaped the yoga the world now practices.

Sankhya is the philosophical system that underlies the Yoga Sūtras, the Bhagavad Gītā, and virtually every other foundational text in the tradition. Its vocabulary — puruṣa, prakṛti, the three guṇas, buddhi, ahaṃkāra — runs through everything you practice. This course gives you that foundation, verse by verse through the Sankhya Kārikā.

Sankhya is the theory of yoga. Yoga is its practical application. You cannot fully understand one without the other. Dr. Rao makes this technically precise system genuinely clear — with examples, metaphors, and the kind of depth that only a scholar formed inside the tradition can offer.

The Yoga Sūtras, the Bhagavad Gītā, and the Sankhya Kārikā are not three separate texts. They are three angles on a single integrated understanding — one that the tradition has always taught together. The Trilogy brings them into conversation with one another, taught by the scholars who have spent their lives inside all three.

If you want to understand not just what these texts say but how they form a complete system of practice, philosophy, and liberation, this is where that study begins.