The Smoke That Covers the Self: Bhagavad Gītā 3.38 in Iyengar’s Light on Life
Bhagavad Gītā live course begins April 2027 → In chapter 5 of Light on Life, B.K.S. Iyengar reaches the impurities that can remain inside
Knowledge, Practice, and Healing
Knowledge, Practice, and Healing
I first read Light on Life in 2011, during my teacher training course in Jerusalem. The book spoke to me because Iyengar connects the five kośas (the sheaths of the person) to the practice on the mat and to the life we live around it. I came back to it in 2023, in a season when I needed more light in my life. My own practice held me like an anchor, and I still wanted something to read, a voice that could sit beside the practice. The book did that work. Two readings, twelve years apart, taught me the same lesson from two sides: Iyengar asks every reader to begin from the place where she stands.
The Preface opens with a claim about who may practice. “By persistent and sustained practice, anyone and everyone can make the yoga journey and reach the goal of illumination and freedom” (p. ix). He then offers his own life as the evidence:
“I am a man who started from nowhere; I was heavily disadvantaged in many ways. After much time and effort, I began to reach somewhere. I literally emerged from darkness to light, from mortal sickness to health, from crude ignorance to immersion in the ocean of knowledge by one means alone, namely by zealous persistence in the art and science of yoga practice (sadhana). What held good for me will hold good for you too.” (p. ix)
The word sādhana names that persistence. It comes from the root sādh, “to accomplish,” and it describes practice as a daily craft whose results arrive through repetition. The Introduction gives the details of the starting point. Iyengar arrived in December 1918, during the influenza epidemic, to a mother who carried the illness herself. “So frail was I, in fact, that I was not expected to survive” (p. xvii). He adds that “A deep melancholy often overtook me, and at times I asked myself whether life was worth the trouble of living” (p. xvii). The teacher whose name now stands for precision began with a frail body, a head he had to lift with great effort, and a mood that sometimes sank.
These moments of clarity, what we call “aha” moments, come unexpectedly. Tradition teaches that deep meditation brings them about, but truly, they can arise at any time, in any place.
The sentence I return to most often sits a page later, and it speaks to the reader directly:
“You, my readers, must understand that you are already starting from somewhere. You have the beginning already shown to you, and no one knows in what wholeness and felicity you may end. If you take up any noble line and stick to it, you can reach the ultimate. Be inspired but not proud. Do not aim low; you will miss the mark. Aim high; you will be on the threshold of bliss.” (p. x)
This passage changes the question a reader brings to a book. Many of us open a new text hoping to catch up, to fill a gap, to improve. Iyengar says the beginning already stands in front of us. The phrase “a noble line” keeps the invitation open: any honest line of work, sustained over time, can carry a person a long way. The warning “inspired but not proud” belongs to the same teaching. Inspiration lifts the effort, and humility keeps it steady.
Iyengar also tells us how beginnings look from the inside. Describing the moment he began his training with his brother-in-law and teacher in Mysore, he writes: “Like for so many people, these pivotal moments pass with no great fanfare, but instead become the starting point for years of steady work and growth” (p. xix). The big turn arrives quietly, and only years of practice reveal it.
The Preface closes with the line that gives this essay its title:
“Fifty years after my first trip west and after so much devoted yoga practice by so many, I now wish to share with you the whole of the yoga journey. It is my profound hope that my end can be your beginning.” (p. xii)
The final page returns to the same sentence. After more than two hundred and sixty pages, Iyengar writes: “I do pray that my ending will be your beginning” (p. 266). The book frames itself with one promise at both ends. A teacher can take that frame seriously. Iyengar spent seven decades making discoveries, and he hands them over as ground to stand on. A reader who treats the pages as ground can start further along the road than he did.
The Introduction places the whole project in a human setting:
“If you are interested to understand what it means to be a human being, placed between earth and sky, if you are interested in where you come from and where you will be able to go, if you want happiness and long for freedom, then you have already begun to take the first steps toward the journey inward.” (p. xvi)
Notice the verb tense: “have already begun.” Interest itself counts as the first step. He adds a joke that I enjoy sharing with new students. The effort pays “benefits commensurate to the time and effort we put in, the lowest being our ability to tie our own shoelaces when we are eighty and the highest being the opportunity to taste the essence of life itself” (p. xvi). The range of rewards starts at the humble and ends at the infinite, and every reader can find a place on it.
In the Yoga Readers cycle we read slowly, with the body in the room and the book open on the lap. I invite you to bring one question to the first session: what in my life, right now, asks to be a beginning? Leave the answer unpolished. A beginning usually looks modest.
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Agi Wittich is a yoga practitioner since two decades, and is a certified Iyengar Yoga teacher. Wittich studied Sanskrit and Tamil at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, completing a PhD with a focus on Hinduism, Yoga, and Gender. She has published academic papers exploring topics such as Iyengar yoga and women, the effects of Western media on the image of yoga, and an analysis of the Thirumanthiram yoga text.