Sohamlab is a bee. We fly between several flowers, gather pollen, and bring it home to make honey. The honey is not the pollen, and we will not pretend the bee invented the flowers. Here is the honest list of where the pollen comes from, and what we take from each.
Buddhist (Theravāda and Mahāyāna)
From the Buddhist lineages we take the vocabulary for attention — the most precise language any tradition has produced for what the mind is actually doing moment to moment. We borrow mindfulness (sati) as the basic move: noticing what is here, without reaching to fix it. We borrow the three marks — impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, non-self — as a diagnostic lens. When something hurts, one of those three is usually involved.
Christian contemplative
From the desert fathers, the Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, and the modern centering-prayer revival, we take silence as the primary practice. The apophatic stream — the via negativa — insists that the deepest part of the path is what you stop saying, not what you start saying. Our silent-sit slot in the daily structure is borrowed straight from this. So is the willingness to let an experience be wordless.
Other living traditions
Other living traditions point at similar concepts — devotion as engine, embodied repetition of a sacred name, the cycle of dissolution and abiding. We honour them without going deep into specifics we are not qualified to teach.
Vedic
From the Vedic stream we take mantra as carrier wave, the daily ritual structure (sandhya), and the cosmology of the operators — Brahma / Vishnu / Shiva and their consorts as functional roles in a vector field, which the Cosmic Navigator course grounds in. The whitepaper we work from is Vedic in flavour. We treat its deities as one excellent personification of universal archetypes, not as the only personification.
Stoic
From the Stoics we take three things. Prosoche — the discipline of attention to the present action. The evening review — Seneca’s nightly audit of the day, which is the bones of our reflection slot. And amor fati — the surrender move, loving what is given rather than fighting it. Marcus Aurelius arrives at this posture from a direction quite different to the devotional traditions, and lands in a strikingly similar place.
Sri Aurobindo (Integral Yoga)
From Aurobindo and the Mother we take the Aspire / Reject / Surrender frame as our organising structure for daily practice. We take it because it is clean, teachable, and survives contact with a normal life. We do not take it as a metaphysical commitment to Aurobindo’s larger system — that is a separate question.
What we are not claiming
We are not a Buddhist app, a Christian app, a Vedic or Stoic app, and we are not Aurobindo’s lineage. Each of those traditions, practised in its full integrity by a serious teacher, is more than what we are doing. We collect moves that work across traditions and assemble them into a daily practice a modern parent can sustain.
An invitation
If you have practised in one of these streams already, find the move from your home tradition above and use it as your way in. The foundational course is built so a Christian contemplative, a Theravāda sitter, a contemplative practitioner from another tradition, a Stoic, and a Vedic ritualist can all read it without flinching. Begin there.