Understanding the Koshas

One of the things I love most about yoga philosophy is that it gives us maps. Not rigid instructions or dogma, but frameworks — ways of understanding ourselves that feel both ancient and completely relevant to how we’re actually living right now.

The Koshas are one of my favourite maps – so simple and yet profound.

The Kosha model comes from a text called the Taittiriya Upanishad — one of the classical Upanishads, which form part of the Vedas, the oldest body of yogic wisdom we have. We’re talking somewhere around 600 to 300 BCE. So this is not a new idea. People have been using this framework to understand themselves for a very, very long time.

In this text, the sage Varuna guides his son Bhrigu through a progressive inquiry into the nature of the self — peeling back layer by layer, asking at each one: is this what I truly am? It’s a beautiful piece of teaching, because it doesn’t give you the answer. It walks you toward it.

The Sanskrit term is Panchamaya Kosha:

• Pancha means five
• Maya means made of
• Kosha means sheath, covering or layer

Why the Koshas Matter — Especially Now

Here’s what strikes me about this teaching every time I come back to it: it was written thousands of years ago, and yet it describes something that feels so relevant to modern life.

Most of us in the West have been taught — not always explicitly, but definitely implicitly — that we are primarily our minds. We live in our thoughts, our plans, our worries, our endless internal commentary. And when something feels wrong, we tend to try and think our way out of it.

The Koshas give us a way to ask better questions. Not just what’s wrong but where is this showing up, and what kind of practice actually meets me there?

That shift — from trying to fix things at the same level where they appear, to understanding which layer needs attention — that’s where yoga becomes genuinely transformative rather than just a nice thing to do on a rubber mat, once a week! Yoga provides us tools to reduce our suffering to recognise our humanity and embrace the totality of this beautiful rich experience of living.