Yoga Research Foundation The Teachings of Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda

The Teachings · The archive home

Six decades of recorded teaching. Two ways in.

Every recorded lecture the Foundation keeps, free — Vedanta and the great scriptures of India, taught line by line across sixty years. Most people arrive one of two ways: carrying something about their own mind, or looking for a teacher to study a text with.

Which brought you here?

Both doors open onto the same archive. They differ only in where they set you down first.

My mind will not settle

Racing thoughts, thin sleep, worry that has become the weather of the day. Start with one short teaching on how the mind steadies — not the catalog, and not a reading list.

Begin with one teaching

I want to study a scripture with a teacher

The Yoga Vasistha, the Gita, the Yoga Sutras, the Ramayana — taught in sequence, verse by verse, by a teacher who has kept the text for a lifetime. Begin with a lecture, not a summary.

The lectures, by scripture

New to Swamiji and unsure which is which? Begin with A First Week with Swamiji — seven lectures, a few minutes a day. Full-text search across the recordings is still being built; until it opens, the shelves below are the catalog.

Thirty-four lectures you can watch right now.

Grouped by the scripture each was taught from, with the chapter, section or doha it expounds. These are the recordings that have been published and checked, not the whole collection — digitization continues, and this list grows with it.

Narada Bhakti Sutras

1 lecture

Narada’s aphorisms on devotion.

  1. Why Anger Directed at God Brings LiberationLesson 34 · Sutras 61–63

Each opens on YouTube, where the Foundation keeps the recordings. Free, with no account needed.

Three ways into the same library.

The collection is one; the doors are three. Come in by the subject on your mind, by the format you prefer, or by the great commentaries taken whole.

By scripture & topic

Start from the text you want taught, or from the question you are actually carrying.

By format

The same teaching lives in several media. Choose the one that fits your day.

Every entry carries its date, its place, and the text it was taught from.

By series

Whole scriptures, taught lecture by lecture across years. The long way — and the deep one.

The full register of series is below — with where to begin in each.

The great commentaries, taken whole.

Whole scriptures, taught lecture by lecture — some across four decades in the same hall. The counts below are facts about the collection, not assignments. Where lectures have been published and checked, the link opens the list of them.

  1. Series 01 · Vedanta

    The Yoga Vasistha

    The longest sustained commentary in the collection — one scripture, taught across four decades in the South Miami lecture hall. The archive's spine.

    Recorded over four decades

    See the published lectures
  2. Series 02 · Scripture

    The Bhagavad Gita

    The Gita verse by verse — action, devotion, and knowledge treated as one teaching, not three moods. The most-recommended entry for readers who want the source text.

    189 lectures on the eighteen chapters

    See the published lectures
  3. Series 03 · Practice

    The Raja Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

    The classical manual of meditation, taught sutra by sutra. If your question is how to practice, this is the series the librarians point to.

    50 lectures on the sutras

    See the published lectures
  4. Series 04 · Vedanta

    The Upanishads

    The oldest strata of the teaching, where the question "Who am I?" is first asked in earnest. Swami Jyotirmayananda teaches from the Upanishads constantly inside the other commentaries — the Mundaka's two birds on one tree appear in the Yoga Vasistha lectures listed above — but no Upanishad has yet been published as a series of its own. Nothing on this shelf can be opened today, and this entry will say so until something can.

    None published yet digitization continues

    Hear the Upanishads inside the Yoga Vasistha lectures
  5. Series 05 · Still being taught

    The Ramayana

    The one series that is not finished. Swami Jyotirmayananda, at ninety-five, is still teaching — so this shelf of the archive keeps growing.

    Still growing See the published lectures

Counts are the catalog's, kept current as digitization continues.

Four collections, kept by the librarians.

Each shelf gathers teachings from across the decades around one question. Open one and you are searching the archive itself — not a shortlist of ours.

Collection I

For the mind that will not settle

Restlessness, worry, the thinking that gets louder when you try to rest. Swamiji has taught on the mechanics of the mind — and what stands behind it — for sixty years.

Open the collection
Collection II

Meditation, taught from the beginning

Not an app's three minutes of calm — the practice itself, taught plainly and in order by a teacher who has kept it for a lifetime. Posture, breath, concentration, and what they are for.

Open the collection
Collection III

Who am I? — the central question

The question the whole archive circles. Vedanta's account of the Self, taught not as philosophy trivia but as something to be verified in your own experience.

Open the collection
Collection IV

Death, grief, and what does not die

The teachings people ask for when philosophy stops being optional. Swamiji speaks about mortality the way the scriptures do — directly, and without dread.

Open the collection

Four ways in, each opening onto the recordings themselves.

The voice in the catalog is still teaching.

Most archives outlive their teachers. This one has not. Swami Jyotirmayananda, at ninety-five, is still teaching — and each evening a recorded teaching from the collection premieres on YouTube as a shared watch. The archive is still growing.

Six decades on, the teaching continues and new recordings still join the collection.

Meet the teacher

You were never meant to read the whole library.

Twelve thousand hours is the Foundation's responsibility, not yours. Take one week, and find out whether this teacher is yours — the catalog will still be here.

Start Here — A First Week with Swamiji A welcome and seven lectures. A few minutes a day.

Or let the library come to you — one teaching a week, by email, with its date, its place, and a few lines of context.

One teaching a week, from the archive.

Each week the Foundation selects one recording and sends it with its series, its place in the scripture, and a few lines of context. This week's arrives as soon as you subscribe. The archive itself stays open to anyone — there is no paywall in front of the recordings.

Free. One email a week. Unsubscribe whenever you wish.