“All secrets tonight will be revealed.” An evening public talk at the Mahasukha Center in Los Angeles on the missing teachings of yoga. With some 25 million people doing yoga in 2008, Lama Marut asks what is still secret about it. He suggests that it is nearly everything beyond the poses. Āsana was always meant to go hand in hand with an inner method, and the ultimate purpose of yoga was far more radical than exercise.

Working from the Yoga Sūtra, he lays out the “whole enchilada”: the three trainings of ethics, meditation and wisdom. He goes through the yamas and niyamas (non-harm, truthfulness, not stealing, contentment as “entry-level happiness”) with karma as their foundation; meditation as taking control of the mind and its afflictions; and wisdom as overcoming ignorance, which mistakes what is impermanent for permanent. The real secret: everything we know comes to us through our own minds, so to change the world, change yourself.