Nine Poisons, Nine Medicines, Nine Fruits - Sarasvati Shambhavi

Nine Poisons, Nine Medicines, Nine Fruits is a traditional spiritual teaching text about the obstacles, remedies, and rewards we can expect to encounter as we seek relaxation and wisdom through practices such as yoga, mantra, and meditation.

The nine poisons are habits of body, emotions, and mind that distract or delay us from discovering who we really are. The nine medicines are the circumstances that help us to recover from limiting patterns. The nine fruits are wisdom virtues, such as compassion, that naturally appear on their own once obscuring conditioning is dissolved.

With great humor and a long-time practitioner’s insight, Shambhavi charts our habitual responses to life and how they gradually resolve as a result of spiritual practice. Along the way, She pays special attention to the obstacles of pride, intellectualizing, and attachment to the Western psychological idea that the self can be essentially damaged.

Nine Poisons, Nine Medicines, Nine Fruits is a guide for practitioners seeking to discover greater freedom of self-expression, greater spontaneity, and more precision and skill in relating to others.