Aim High

Seek balance and happiness each day as you set your sights on yoga's four aims of life.

By Hillari Dowdle

The new year is the traditional time to stop and ask yourself an important question: Am I leading a well-balanced life? It's easy to get bogged down in the details, in setting goals that relate to how you think you want to look, or act, or be in this world. But consider bypassing all the particulars—the numbers on the scale, the bank account balance, the starting or stopping of habits—in favor of a deeper approach that can reshape your whole life in a positive way.

The yoga tradition offers a paradigm for such deep self-examination: the purusharthas, or four aims of life. They are dharma (duty, ethics), artha (prosperity, wealth), kama (pleasure, sensual gratification), and moksha (the pursuit of liberation). The purusharthas are the blueprint for human fulfillment, signposts that point us to a successful, satisfying, balanced existence in the world. Working with them can help you create a satisfyingly balanced life at the deepest and most holistic level.

"We all have a desire for a meaningful life. The purusharthas are the means that can help us achieve it," says ParaYoga founder Rod Stryker, who is working on a book about the purusharthas that's called The Four Desires. "They are, in a larger sense, what practice is really all about," he says, adding that the purusharthas offer a yogic perspective on how to engage skillfully in the world.

Cosmic Clues

The purusharthas are elaborated upon extensively in the Mahabharata, the epic Indian poem that contains The Bhagavad Gita, and are interwoven with yogic philosophy at the deepest levels. But they have their roots in the Rig Veda, the most ancient and revered of Hindu scriptures. "What the Rig Veda suggests is that the purusharthas are the inherent values of the universe," explains Douglas Brooks, a Tantric scholar and professor of religious studies at the University of Rochester. "The cosmos is considered a living being, and the issues of law, prosperity, desire, and freedom belong to it. These are not just human concerns or psychological concepts. When we engage them as human beings, we are aligning the microcosm with the macrocosm. The cosmos is all laid out for you; your job is to get with the program."

To fully grasp the purusharthas, Stryker says, it pays to parse the meaning of the word itself. Purusha means, roughly, "soul"—the essential Self that is unchanging, that isn't born and doesn't die, but belongs to the universe. Artha means "the ability" or "for the purpose of." Taken together, Stryker explains, purushartha means "for the purpose of the soul," and the very concept asks that you take the broadest view of your life. Are you managing the day-to-day in such a way as to support your inner work?

Each one of the purusharthas has many scriptures dedicated to it (the Kama Sutra, the Dharma Shastras, and the Artha Shastras, among others). To truly understand all four would require a lifetime of study. Still, learning the fundamentals is useful, especially to the contemporary practitioner who's simply looking to find more joy and meaning in life.

Here, we provide a guide for working with the four aims: dharma, artha, kama, and moksha. Once you have an understanding of the individual components of each of the purusharthas, you can assess the role they play in your life by contemplating the questions related to each one. You can then begin to analyze how well balanced they are in your life.

"The purusharthas are a sophisticated way of living in balance," says spiritual teacher and Yoga Journal columnist Sally Kempton. "But they demand reflection. You have to constantly ask yourself, Which of these areas am I emphasizing too much? Am I having a good time but not being as ethical as I could be? Am I a great yogi but haven't yet figured out how to make a living? Am I incredibly ethical but still at the mercy of every passing feeling or thought? Am I so rigid in my practice that if I can't do 90 minutes, my day is ruined? Anything you don't deal with will come back to bite you later."

Put simply, the purusharthas can offer a way for evaluating your life, making good decisions, and contemplating pragmatic dilemmas—like whether to spend time with your young child, or go back to work to save for her college education—in a way that honors the highest ideals of life. "At the end of your life, you will ask yourself, 'Did I live this life well?'" Kempton suggests. "And in my view, you will feel good about it to the degree that you balanced the purusharthas."

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