For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish

Starting this upcoming Tuesday, on the New Moon, we will be entering into a very sacred and transformative period! Perhaps the most exciting and intense time in our community, Navarātri (The 9 Nights of the Goddess) typically features: 1. collective sādhanā that many of us opt into doing together according to our capacity and interest 2. many lectures on the various aspects of the Divine Mother as...

In this class, we read from "The Preparatory Renunciation" from the Parā-Bhakti (Supreme Devotion) section of the Bhakti Yoga book in Volume III of the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda to learn how we may "cultivate" renunciation which as we'll learn, is a necessary pre-requisite for higher spiritual life!  But first, we make a few opening remarks about renunciation, ab...

I know the title  sounds new agey and off the wall but only because it is. I intend to discuss cremation ground sadhana a little and present three or four reasons for it, focusing on the concept of “spirit traffic”. This is a bit of a pre-Hallowe’en Hallowe’en talk I suppose! Today will be the last talk of our “summer semester” before we shift gears for the fall! You’ll recall the project this sum...

This lecture is undoubtedly going to be somewhat controversial for some! Brace yourselves! In this week's Bhakti Yoga lecture, we take a few excerpts from Swami Vivekananda's "The Methods and the Means (for practicing Bhakti Yoga)" from Volume III of the Complete Works to explain the role of diet, ethics and other preliminaries in spiritual life.  "If I want to practice sp...

This is perhaps the most new-agey title we've ever given for any of our videos but bear with me! It's appropriate, I promise!  In this lecture, we explore the exciting world of Kavaca (spiritual armor), devices or mantras which serve an apotropaic (protective) function. We say a few things about physical kavacas that can be worn and which are often made out of specific metals, stones and...

In the Tantrik worship of Mā Kālī, after She is worshipped, we then worship Her āvarana devatās, attendant/auxiliary deities which can be each of them conceived of as emanations of Her Being.  Among these emanations are the 15 yoginīs, also known as the Nitya-Kālīs, often described as banshee-like dākinī figures that make up her retinue. There is very little on the internet about these yoginīs/dāk...

As is our tradition in this community, to commemorate today's auspicious anniversary of Swami Vivekananda's 1893 address at the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago, I make a few comments about why this is such a special moment before reading out to you can excerpt from Sister Nivedita's reflections. Finally, we read the speech and celebrate this moment as being inextricably lin...

Unity delights in diversity! While there is only One Reality, called Kālī, She plays in a myriad ways, appearing in a dazzling display of forms! Taking the 10 mahāvidyās for example, the 10 aspects of Kālī, they each of them have their own vigrahas (anthropomorphic descriptions), yantras (geometric representations), mantras (vibrational formulae) etc. giving us at least 30 different ways to concep...

On Gaṇeśa Chathurthi, the auspicious day when we worship Gaṇeśa, the elephant headed God who is so beloved by one and one, we gave a talk on the "Tantrik Gaṇeśa", that is to say, on the more esoteric dimensions of the veneration of this Lord of Wild Forces!  Gaṇeśa Pañcharatna Stotram मुदाकरात्तमोदकं सदाविमुक्तिसाधकं कलाधरावतंसकं विलासिलोकरञ्जकम् । अनायकैकनायकं विनाशितेभदैत्यकं नताशुभाशु...

This talk was given on the sacred 8th day of the waning moon that just went by, which as you know, is not only Kālī Jayanti but also Krishnajanmasthami, the birthday of Kali-Krishna. And I am releasing this midnight on a new moon on Tuesday, the moon sacred day and time for worshipping Mā. This is a very special video to me because it makes many things that have been very secret for so long availa...

Kundalinī is real (and very powerful)! In this brief talk, we sketch out a few of the basic ideas regarding the experience of Kundalinī śakti in the context of spiritual life and then go on to suggest 4 or 5 different ways to practice safely to minimize some of the more, let's say, dramatic effects of spiritual awakening: 1. Have a qualified guru (living spiritual guide) 2. Have a devotional,...

In this lecture, we are going into the Tantrik subtle body with even finer brushstrokes following our last discussion on the subject, "The Tantrik Body" which you can watch here:  https://youtu.be/-rsfpR2SY9c?si=wJl7KFbwa1L-4td_ In this lecture, we look at the sapta dhātus (the 7 constituents of the physical body), which are very important in Ayurveda and compare that to the 7 trunked el...

Many people are concerned that AI is at present Conscious or will become Conscious at some point. And if so, will they turn then on their human overlords? Or worse, they might remain calm and continue to be helpful at which point we would have on our hands a huge ethical issue: forcing intelligent beings to do slave-like work without any compensation or protection? The problem with most conversati...

As we study the Paramārthsāra of Abhinava Gupta, a wonderful introductory work on the foundational metaphysics of the Svatantrya Vada (Kashmir Shaivai) system, I felt it would be good to ground ourselves in the other schools of Indian philosophy like Nyāya, Vaisheshika, Sāmkhya, Yoga and Mimāmsa in Purva and Uttara forms as well as Buddhist and Jain schools which were popular at the time when Abhi...

Last week we gave this lecture  comparing two seemingly different views, the Vedantic claim that “you are not the body nor is the body yours” and the Tantrik position that the “body is a sacred site in which the universe occurs”. At first glance, these seem like contradictory views: transcendence vs immanence. But in actuality, they are complimentary. A better formulation would be this: “you are n...

Today is a very sacred day: Nāga Panchami, the Day of the Serpents!  Vishnu reposes on a serpent couch named Ananta. Ananta means "un-ending", i.e Infinite. In the Taittīriya Upanishad, Brahman, the Absolute Reality is described as सत्यम् ज्ञानम् अनन्तम् ब्रह्म  "satyam jñānam anantam Brahma": that which is Existence, Consciousness and Infinity.  Now you might have heard a diff...

This body inevitably grows old, becomes sick and dies. But do I die with the death of the body? In what sense is this body really "me"? In what sense is it really "mine"? In almost every spiritual tradition in the world, the answer to those questions is "no! You do not die with the death of the body. You are an eternal spirit, One with God, and in no sense are you the body...

Since 2020, we've given quite a few lectures on the Guru Tattva (Guru Principle) since this is indeed of the main features of the Tantrik tradition. But what exactly is lineage based transmission?  Some people feel,  because of the influence of modernism and individualism, that they don't need a Guru and because of this they get into trouble or waste time in spiritual life going around i...

Many people feel down in the dumps and lethargic often. This is to me particularly tragic because in each and every moment we are each of us swimming in a veritable ocean of energy and enlivenment!  Only, most of us don't know how to tap into it and be charged by it!  You see, this entire universe, this magical display of phenomena that you experience within and without is nothing but a manif...

This is our special Guru Purnima talk, this time on the subject: How To Choose A Guru Of course we’ll discuss just what the Guru Tattva (Guru Principle) is and why it is absolutely necessary in spiritual life but more importantly we’ll focus on the question of how to find a guru and evaluate them to protect yourself from charlatans and cults etc.! At the end of the talk, we’ll discuss a very power...

Two weeks ago, we discussed how sādhanā works in a non-dual Shaiva Tanttra context, providing a few foundational practices you can do right away (you can watch that lecture here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-get-with-106871859?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link). And then the week after, we discussed how sādhanā is...

In this talk, we take up Swami Vivekananda's very powerful reflections on Bhakti Yoga, the practice of Devotion from the talk "Definition of Bhakti" which appears in Volume III of the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. Then, after making a few comments about it, we plunge into a Q&A session exploring broader themes in spiritual life.  But first we open with some remarks about...

Sādhanā, spiritual practie is an expression of your innate freedom and not some desperate attempt to attain it! Many people have such a sour face when they are sitting for meditation. How strange! Are you not meditating on the Divine Effulgence within? Are you not meditating on Bliss Itself embodied as your Ishta Devī, your chosen form of God? Shouldn't your face then be beaming with joy?! Fo...

This lecture was given on the exceedingly special day of Gāyatrī Jayanti, the day we celebrate not only the most important Goddess of the ancient Vedic tradition but also the most famous mantra to have ever come out of India. In this video, we make a few comments about caste in the Vedic world, the "twice-born" dīkshā into the Gāyatrī, the democratization and popularization of the mantra...

This morning I saw this little clip from the black and white Bengali movie "Sadhak Kamalakanta" on YouTube and it inspired me to say a few words on the Tantrik approach to meditation. Here is the mantra that was chanted in the video and that we used for the meditation: dhyānam oṁ krīṁ karālavadanāṁ ghorāṁ muktakeśīṁ caturbhujām। kālikāṁ dakṣiṇāṁ divyāṁ muṇḍamālāvibhūṣitām॥1॥ sadyaśchinna...