Living the Three Essentials

A Four-Week Journey Home

Tuesday evenings, 7:15–8:45pm | Roots to Wings, Newbury
with Devarshi Steven Hartman — author, longtime teacher, and former Dean of the Kripalu School of Yoga

Reading about freedom is one thing. Living it is another.

Over four Tuesday evenings, we'll take the Three Essentials off the page and put them where they actually belong — into your life, your relationships, your Tuesday. Not as ideas to admire, but as practices you can reach for in traffic, in an argument, in the middle of a hard week.

These aren't lofty truths reserved for monks and mountaintops. They're three simple principles you'll recognize the moment you hear them, because some part of you has always known them:

Be Here Now. Feel It Fully. You Are Infinite, Eternal and Whole.

Simple enough to remember. Powerful enough to change the trajectory of a life.

What to expect

Very little sitting and listening. A whole lot of doing.

Each night is built around direct experience — guided movement, breath, partnered inquiry, meditation, and honest conversation in a small circle of people who are all, it turns out, working on the same things you are. You'll be on your feet. You'll be in your body. You'll talk to people you didn't know four weeks ago and discover you know them better than some people you've known for years.

You'll also laugh. A lot. Devarshi has spent five decades in this material and nearly ten years living in an ashram, and has yet to find any evidence that transformation requires solemnity. His rooms are alive — part inquiry, part practice, part revelation, part comedy hour that occasionally turns into something you didn't see coming.

Come as you are. No yoga experience required. No philosophy background required. No flexibility of any kind required, except in the mind — and we'll work on that together.

The four weeks

Week One — The Map
We begin with a question that seems easy until you sit with it: What do you actually want? From there, we lay out both maps you'll use for the rest of the series — the Three Essentials, and the ancient yogic map of the Five Koshas, the layers of the self. You'll leave night one already having experienced something, not just heard about it.

Week Two — Be Here Now
Presence isn't a concept. It's a muscle, and most of us have let it go soft. Tonight we use it until you can feel it working — through movement, breath, and a partnered practice that has a way of dropping people into the present moment whether they intended to go there or not. You'll leave with three simple anchors that turn ordinary moments into doorways.

Week Three — Feel It Fully
The heart of the work. You'll learn BRFWA — Breathe, Relax, Feel, Watch, Allow — the single most useful tool Devarshi teaches, and the one students come back and thank him for decades later. We build it first on physical sensation, where it's safe and obvious, and then let you apply it to something that actually matters to you. You choose your own depth. Nobody goes anywhere they haven't already been.

Week Four — You Are Infinite, Eternal and Whole
We go big. A guided journey from the inside of a cell to the edge of the known universe and back, followed by a question worth carrying for the rest of your life: if you truly knew you were infinite, eternal and whole — what would you do? We close with commitments spoken out loud, in a circle, to people who now know you well enough to hold you to them.

What you'll leave with

✨ A daily presence practice that takes sixty seconds and fits into a life you already have

✨ BRFWA — a complete, portable tool for meeting difficulty without being flattened by it

✨ The Five Kosha map, experienced rather than memorized, as a lifelong orientation to being human

✨ A meditation practice you'll have built quietly across four weeks without anyone calling it homework

✨ Real language for what you're feeling, and real permission to feel it

✨ The creative energy you've been quietly spending on doubt, worry, and self-judgment — returned to you

✨ A small circle of people who saw you clearly and liked what they saw

Come with someone

Here's the honest truth about this kind of work: it goes deeper when you're not doing it alone, and it lasts longer when someone in your daily life speaks the same language.

Much of what we do happens in pairs. Having someone in the room you already trust changes what's possible — you'll go further, faster, and with more courage. And when the four weeks end, you'll have someone at your kitchen table who knows what you mean when you say "I need thirty seconds to BRFWA this." That's the difference between a lovely experience and a permanent shift.

Bring your partner. Bring your closest friend. Bring your sister, your neighbor, the person from Tuesday class you keep meaning to have coffee with. Come separately and make a friend — that works too. But if there's someone in your life you'd love to be more awake alongside, this is the invitation.

Who this is for

You're curious. You're human. You suspect there's more available to you than you're currently living.

That's the entire list.

Details

When: Four Tuesdays, September 29, October 6, October 13 & October 20, 7:15–8:45pm
Where: Roots to Wings, Newbury
Investment: $175 | $195 with Signed Copy of Book
Space is limited to keep the circle intimate. Registration closes after week one — this is a closed group, so that trust has room to build.

Reading the book beforehand is welcome but not required. Everything you need happens in the room.

Come home to yourself. Four Tuesdays. Let's find out what you're made of.