A Note from the Creator
I’m a working mom of three, a longtime yoga practitioner and teacher, and someone who has spent more than 20 years working in technology. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, where I still live, work, and teach yoga.
I’ve practiced yoga for more than 20 years and taught professionally for the past 12. I came to yoga through its physical practice, but years of teacher trainings, philosophical study, and time at the Sivananda and Satchidananda ashrams gradually deepened my interest in its spiritual traditions. I love kirtan, the epics and Purāṇas, and the many different approaches Hindu traditions offer to life’s fundamental questions.
Growing up in the United States, I assumed Hindu religious traditions were primarily polytheistic and quite different from the Judeo-Christian traditions around me. Through study and practice, I learned this wasn’t the case and discovered many points of connection between Eastern and Western religious thought. I came to appreciate the idea of many paths up the same mountain, with philosophical study providing a framework for exploring them and practice offering opportunities for direct experience. Both have taught me the value of remaining a student and an observer.
The seed for Vedanta Atlas was planted during a course with Dr. Edwin Bryant through Jacob Kyle’s Embodied Philosophy. We studied passages from the Brahma Sūtras and compared how different philosophical masters interpreted them. I loved the rigor of the commentarial tradition: the structure of the arguments, the pūrvapakṣa, and the almost legalistic reasoning applied to questions that are ultimately so esoteric and boundless.
My interest in Vedānta, Sāṃkhya, and Yoga philosophy continued to deepen. Reading the Upaniṣads, along with reading and rereading Professor Gavin Flood’s Hindu Monotheism, drew me further into the ontology of Vedānta: the nature of reality and how God, the individual self, and the universe relate to one another.
In the years after the course, I wanted to return to that kind of comparative study but lacked a simple, consolidated way to do so outside a formal learning environment. As a working mother, I also had less time to travel, attend retreats, or participate in regular study groups. I wanted a way to continue my sādhanā and philosophical study wherever I could find the time, whether at home or on the go. I also missed the sense of saṅgha and hoped this project might offer a way to connect with others who shared those interests.
With my background in technology and the emergence of new tools that made building something like this possible, I saw an opportunity to create one.
I built Vedanta Atlas for my own study, but also in the hope of connecting with others who share these interests.
A note about AI: I used AI extensively to develop the site, organize and align publicly available translations and source material, and help create some of its explanatory content. I haven’t personally translated these texts or written everything here. This is an independent, noncommercial study project, built on freely available sources and modern technology. I also feel internal conflict about the environmental resources consumed by the technology I’ve used to make it possible. My hope is that it becomes a starting point for something more collaborative, with contributions and commentary from students, teachers, and scholars who bring deeper expertise.
I welcome corrections, feedback, and ideas for where Vedanta Atlas might go next. If this resource is useful to you, I’d love to hear from you at hello@vedantaatlas.com.
Oṃ Namaḥ Śivāya. Thank you for studying with me.