Tri Sarira

The Three Bodies You Are Living In Right Now

A teaching from Master Ketut Arsana

Follow your grumpiness far enough and it will take you all the way down. One irritable thought becomes a hundred. People bury themselves under sadness, fear, and anger — sometimes dying from the sheer weight of it — long before the body itself ever gives out. It's an uncomfortable truth about being human, and most spiritual conversations dress it up before they'll say it out loud.

The old yogic teachers had a map for this. They called it Tri Sarira, the doctrine of the three bodies. It is one of the most practical ideas in all of yoga philosophy, and yet it's often buried under Sanskrit and abstraction.

This particular telling of it comes from Master Ketut Arsana — the founder of Kundalini Tantra Yoga, a healer born in the village of Padang Tegal in Ubud and descended from a long lineage of traditional Balinese shaman healers known as Balian. He shared these teachings on Tri Sarira during his 100-Hour Kundalini Tantra Yoga Teacher Training, held from 24 May to 5 June 2026 at Om Ham Retreat & Resort in Ubud, Bali. What follows is drawn from that talk — his way of explaining the three bodies not as a tidy diagram, but as a description of the life you are actually living, in the body you are actually sitting in, right now.

Three bodies in Tri Sarira, one you

You are not one thing. You are three, nested one inside the next.

The three bodies, nested — with the still point of the Self at the centre.

The first is the sthula sarira — the gross or physical body. This is the obvious one: the skin, the bones, the gut, the flesh of you. It's built from the elements, it gets hungry, it gets sick, and one day it stops. In the yogic view this body is material — and “material,” by itself, doesn't know what to do. Left to its own devices it just reacts: hungry, tired, angry, afraid.

The second is the sukshma sarira — the subtle body. This is energy rather than matter: the breath, the emotions, the chakras, the felt sense of being alive that you can't point to on an X-ray. When Master Ketut Arsana says spirit is “positive” and matter is “negative,” he doesn't mean good and bad. He means it the way a battery does — two poles that have to meet for anything to light up. The subtle body is the current running through the wire of the physical one.

The third and innermost is the causal body — the true Self, the Atman, what Master Ketut Arsana simply calls “God inside.” This is who you actually are underneath the hunger and the moods and the story. The whole point of the practice is not to escape the other two bodies but to let this one take the throne.

That throne matters. Here is the line that holds the entire teaching together:

The subtle Self should sit on top of the brain. Not the brain sitting on top of the Self.

Most of us have it backwards. The brain — clever, anxious, endlessly narrating — runs the show, and the deeper Self gets dragged along behind it. Reverse that order, and everything changes.

Why you keep getting stuck in the second body

If the three bodies are a stack, most human suffering happens on one particular floor: the subtle body, and specifically the second chakra — the seat of emotion.

The teaching is blunt about the statistics. Out of a hundred people, ninety are blocked here. Trauma, stress, grief, fear — it all lands in this emotional centre first, like everything draining into a single clogged sink. And when it's blocked, you can read it on a person instantly. The grumpy face. The short fuse. The story they keep retelling about what was done to them.

This is the “second brain,” and it talks constantly. You can say something sweet with your mouth while this lower voice is screaming something else entirely — which is why people can feel, almost physically, when you're not telling the truth. The body doesn't lie even when the lips do.

So the real work isn't to add more spiritual ideas on top of the pile. It's to unclog the sink. To let the energy that's stuck in the emotional body rise — through the heart, toward the crown — so that the higher centres and the lower centres finally connect. That connection is hard. Nobody pretends otherwise. But it's the whole game.

Working with fire instead of being burned by it

Here's where the teaching gets wonderfully concrete, because Master Ketut Arsana describes his own anger like weather he has learned to forecast.

Okay, there's the anger. I'm feeling grumpy. I'm going to breathe. He names it. He notices the fire rising. And then instead of pretending to be sweet — which never works, because the inside is still burning and everyone can feel it — he gives the fire somewhere to go. Cold water. Ice. Stillness. Breath. He cools the body deliberately so the blood can move, so the heat doesn't get trapped and turn into something that hurts him or the people around him.

The instruction underneath all of it is almost embarrassingly simple:

When the fire comes, just be quiet. Let it pass out. Smile if you can. And if you can't even do that — run.

There's no shame in walking away from your own storm. Running isn't losing. Staying and erupting is.

Finding your ground — and where it actually is

Everyone talks about “grounding.” Walk barefoot on the earth, eat root vegetables, get out of your head. Fine. But Master Ketut Arsana pushes back on all of it: that's still surface. You can ground in your feet and still be miserable. You can read every holy book ever written and never once find what you're looking for.

Real grounding, he insists, happens in the deep heart. Not in the head, not even in the body, but in the quiet centre where you actually meet yourself. And this, he points out, is what every genuine tradition has been pointing at the whole time.

The Christian finds the ground at the foot of the cross. The Muslim finds it in Allahu Akbar — and notice, he says, that you raise your hands up to the sky and then bring them back down to the earth, taking the divine and planting it here, in the material world, in yourself. The yogi finds it in the breath and the mantra. Buddha found it by going inward until there was nothing left to cling to.

When you find God here, inside, you'll find God everywhere outside. Otherwise you're just repeating words.

It's the same mountain. People are simply arguing about the names of the paths.

The point of the body is not to transcend it

This is the part that surprises people. A teaching about the soul that refuses to be sniffy about the body.

The whole reason you have a physical body, Master Ketut Arsana says, is to learn through it. He learned the hard way — fasting on nothing but chili and water for a month at a time as a young man, eating wild plants to find out what healed and what poisoned, getting it wrong, getting sick, and surviving to teach the difference. “If I don't try it,” he says, “how can I tell anyone else?” The body is, in his words, the best teacher there is.

You don't reach the inner Self by hating the outer one. You reach it by using the physical body well — keeping it healthy, keeping it grounded, treating it as the vehicle that lets the soul actually do something in the world. A daily rhythm matters: rising early, warm water with lemon and lime to clear out the night's toxins, sun salutations to greet the source of all the energy on this planet. The body becomes the boat. The soul becomes the one steering.

And the steering image is the right one. The brain is just a tool — a brilliant tool for manifesting things in the physical world, but a terrible captain. Let the deeper Self hold the wheel and the brain becomes what it was always meant to be: not the driver, but the hands.

The four roads up the mountain

So how do you actually climb from the outer body to the inner Self? Yoga, in its oldest sense, isn't poses on a mat. It's four overlapping roads, and the teaching is clear that you can't get there on just one of them.

There's karma yoga, the yoga of action and service — doing the work of your life as practice, meditating, showing up. There's bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion and surrender, which in this age the teacher calls the most direct road of all, though it's nearly impossible without a true teacher to surrender to. There's jnana yoga, the yoga of knowledge — the long, patient discipline of study, of reading the holy books and comparing what they promise against what you actually experience, until theory and life finally agree. And there's raja yoga, the “royal” road, whose entire purpose is to crown the subtle Self as king so that the five senses stop dragging you around by the nose.

Most people, sensibly, walk several of these at once. You meditate (karma), you serve (karma), you surrender to something larger than yourself (bhakti), and you keep learning (jnana) — checking the map against the territory as you go.

What it looks like when it works

Master Ketut Arsana offers Jesus as the clearest example — not as a doctrine but as a demonstration. A person whose selfishness had gone all the way to zero, who gave himself completely, who held the two outer bodies so lightly that no material thing could pull him off course, and who is still teaching long after the physical body was gone. That, stripped of any single religion, is what it looks like when the inner Self sits firmly on the throne.

But you don't have to aim for sainthood to feel the difference. Master Ketut Arsana's promise is smaller and more believable than that. As the three bodies come into alignment — physical grounded, emotional unblocked, the inner Self in charge — you don't suddenly get a life with no problems. In fact, he warns, you may attract more. The difference is that you stop being afraid of them.

Where is the problem? Find the answer. Find the way. Don't be afraid of the problem.

A blocked person sees a problem and freezes. A grounded one sees the same problem and simply asks: where is it, and what's the way through? The sun, he says, is always shining. Worry, anger, fear, and stress are just clouds. They block the light; they don't extinguish it. The work of the three bodies is mostly the work of clearing the sky.

Where to begin

You can read about this forever — there are whole libraries, and Master Ketut has even written his own book — but he'd be the first to tell you that the book is not the thing. Knowledge that stays in the head just gives you sore arms from carrying it around.

So begin where the physical body already is. Tomorrow morning, get up before the sun. Drink the warm water. Move the body and let the breath slow until it turns into something more than oxygen — until it becomes prana, energy with a spark of the divine in it. Notice the fire when it rises, and instead of feeding it or faking calm, just get quiet and let it pass. Ground yourself not in your feet but in your heart.

And then — this is the real instruction hidden inside all of it — be a little sweeter. To the people around you, and especially to yourself.

God is happiness. God is love. When you are full of love for yourself, then you can create love outside. That's how you meet God.

Three bodies. One Self underneath them all, patiently waiting to take its seat. The whole of Tri Sarira is just learning, slowly and clumsily and over many ordinary mornings, to let it.