Five Seats of Power : Discovering the Best You Can Be through the Mahabharata

In Five Seats of Power, Raghu Ananthanarayanan uses insights from the Yoga Shastra and the Mahabharata to offer principles and practices to enable behavioural transformation. Transformation that, in turn, will ignite an individual’s natural genius. He presents each of the five Pandavas – Yudhishthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula and Sahadeva – as an archetype of a particular kind of power: of order and stability, passion and action, and curiosity and knowledge, among others. Drawing on each of these archetypal energies, he explores the functional and dysfunctional aspects of the use of power. He examines how, in order to mobilize one’s heroic potential, a person must celebrate their desirable qualities, while resolving the dark and compulsive energies within themselves.