Karma yoga
karmaThe yoga of action. Quoted in class whenever the theme is doing your best and letting go of the result.
The Bhagavad Gita's central move is taking yoga off the meditation seat and into a working life. Its most famous line is an instruction about where your business ends:
The Gita's most quoted line: you are entitled to your work, never to its results. Do the thing, release the outcome, and don't use detachment as an excuse to do nothing.
“Thy business is with the action only, never with its fruits; so let not the fruit of action be thy motive, nor be thou to inaction attached.”
The original Sanskrit
karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana | mā karma-phala-hetur bhūr mā te saṅgo 'stv akarmaṇi
Three verses later it compresses the whole idea into a definition you could carry into any workday:
Yoga as competence: acting from a steady mind is "skill in action." Equanimity is not withdrawal from work; it improves the work.
“United to the Pure Reason one abandoneth here both good and evil deeds; therefore cleave thou to yoga; yoga is skill in action.”
The original Sanskrit
buddhi-yukto jahātīha ubhe sukṛta-duṣkṛte | tasmād yogāya yujyasva yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam
Yoga is skill in action. Not withdrawal from the world; a way of being in it without being owned by the outcome.