For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish

Earlier this year, on Vivekananda Jayanti, I gave a talk on the early days of the Vedanta movement in America, when a few enthusiastic Americans in New York in 1895 gathered in a one bedroom apartment to hear this strange man from India with strange and exciting new ideas talk for hours on end. This is an especially exciting story if you are participating in yoga in any capacity and even more exciting and inspiring if you are, or are aspiring to be, a teacher of yoga, vedanta, tantra or any other Eastern spiritual tradition that emerged in America since then. Mainly though, this talk shows us that times now are not that different from how they were then. This talk is meant to, in looking back, inspire us to look forward and pick up where Swami Vivekananda left. Let's get to it then... Hit Me Up xSupport the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM

We gave this talk on Swami Vivekananda's birthday in January of 2026. Today, in 1902, Swamiji kicked his mortal body with great triumph. So I felt it was fitting to post this now, given that it is perhaps one of my most experimental and radical talks! May this be an offering to Swamiji and to this manifest universe, to all animate and inanimate beings, to the sum total of all souls, the one God Swamiji taught us to worship! May we live up to his ideal. Jai Mā! Jai Guru! Jai Swamiji! Hit Me Up xSupport the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM

Some time ago we gave a talk on  How To Turn Every Word Into A Mantra where we explored the phonemic foundations of Tāntrik mantras, to work out how every word in every language can be empowered (i.e "mantricized) to create change in the world within and without. In this talk, we take some of those ideas to their logical extreme to articulate a mantra for Mother Kālī in her pure void aspect, before whom even Śrī Arjuna trembled in fear in Chapter XI of the Bhagavad Gītā! In this talk, we see how Mā in this aspect is not scary at all but when approached in this way, is actually thrilling, exciting and empowering. This might be my most ambitious and exciting lecture yet since this idea is something I've been just chewing on and playing with for a few days and I don't think any idea has quite excited me as much as this one! Jai Mā!Hit Me Up xSupport the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM

A full moon (Kabir Jayanti) special lecture on the ecstatic devotional poetry of medieval India talking Bhakti, Tantra and the liminality of both as my offering at the feet of the baddies of this world, Mira & also Emma Goldman, whose birthday it happened to be that day!Hit Me Up xSupport the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM

Recently, we've been having some discussions around the finer, more esoteric ideas around mantra sādhanā from the very refined manuals and exegetical works of the 10th and 11th masters of classical Tantra like Maheśvarānanda & Abhinava Gupta and others. In How Mantra Works & My Favorite Śakti Mantra we explained mantra-sādhanā in a properly śaktādvaita (non-dual) context and then extended from there in Kālī Gāyatrī Mantra | & How To Use Mantras to consider how the mantra can then be applied in a more traditional ritualistic, contemplative and meditative context (which Abhinavācharya might call "ānavopaya" or what we might recognize as more exoteric, mainstream Tāntrik sādhanā). In this class, we turn to an even finer and subtler approach regarding mantra which considers the phonemic foundations to make a claim about how bījā mantras are formed. Most of this material appears in Abhinava's Chapter III of the Tantrāloka & Tantrasāra but the precedent for this is in primary sources like the Nandikeśvara Tantra and even the Maheśvara Sutras from Pāninī which offer very early analysis on Sanskrit phonemes and the logic around how mantras arise and how they work. Once we do this kind of deconstruction (or rather, once we understand things at this level of resolution which arguable is the closest zoom in to mantra sādhana we've ever done together) we should be able to see how all sounds are mantras and how all words, in all languages can not just be empowered as mantras and used accordingly but also how they can be recognized to be inherent mantra whose meaning is Consciousness, i.e You.Hit Me Up xSupport the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM

An important talk looking at some key ideas from a very esoteric, advanced Tāntrik text from the Non-Dual Kaula Śākta (left hand path) tradition to completely revolutionize how we see pūjā, ceremonial worship (by investigating the meaning of the Sanskrit word for "flower", the central offering in pūjā) and how we see spiritual life as a whole. This talk slaps, you guys, if I may say so myself... Hit Me Up xSupport the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM

My work on the internet has been polarizing for various reasons but one feature that regularly comes up is individuals questioning whether we have a right to share what we tend to share publicly and freely, given that a lot of this material is usually kept quite secret in institutional hierarchies that carefully curate distribution and access. (not to mention of course that I'm young and cute and spiritual teachers are apparently supposed to be old and grumpy and serious and virtuous or something...) Now, when some of my friends started posting their own content on the internet, along the lines of what I had been sharing with them, the backlash they got was twice as fierce! I suspect this is because as an Indian man, it's bad enough that I'm talking so freely and recklessly about guarded topics, what to say about the rancor when someone who is not Indian tries to do something like this? Anyway, I was proud of my friends who kept posting about what they loved despite the hate, harassment and death threats and inspired by them, I did this little bit on why I think people have such a problem and what I think we ought to do about it, if anything. (This talk was given right when we got home to LA after the Punk Rock Tantra/ Kentucky Fried Tantra retreat so it reviews some of the material from those talks too.) Hit Me Up xSupport the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM

Right after Punk Rock Tantra/Kentucky Fried Tantra retreat where we gave a series of fiery talks with revolutionary fervor about the effort os redistributing esoteric spiritual knowledge to one and all along the highest standards of accessibility while remaining sensitive to the subtle nuances that make secrecy important and unavoidable to some extent in the Tāntrik world, we were all crashing out together at Bhairavī Tārā Ma's and I gave this little spiel about how there is a clear precedent both classical and contemporary for sharing secret teachings like we are doing. Also, we talked a little about why what exactly we mean by "secrets". And maybe most importantly, we start the talk with the important question: "why Tantra at all?" Hit Me Up xSupport the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM

It is very, very easy even in a community centered around anti-establishment revolutionary values for hierarchies to emerge spontaneously: its usually the weirdest, most eccentric clown that rises to the status of outcast king of the clowns in a circus gathering of weirdo outcasts that we call "sangha". And after all, what is a spiritual community but a gathering of weirdo outcastes for whom community and sense of belonging have been withheld by mainstream society?Its this very need to belong, this very human craving for connection that is often leveraged against you to stay in communities that you should have long since left. The point of school is to graduate but we often don't want to because it means entering into a world that once harmed us and rejected us and because it would of course, naturally, be safer to stay in the supposed safety of the school yard. The point of a community is to make us all individuals and yet how often do we sacrifice that sovereign individuality in order just to fit in? As a consequence, spiritual communities, even those with high ideals reacting to the problems of society, become micro societies with the exact same problems (and because of their insular nature, often much more exaggerated versions of the same problems). To this we say, lovingly: fuck all that. Let's be self aware, vigilant, ruthlessly independent and unafraid of entering and (more importantly) leaving spiritual spaces and communities that no longer serve us. Here's a somewhat self-aware talk about protecting autonomy & sovereignty. We will not "animal farm" up in this bitch, okay?! Here are the talks from the retreat + some other talks we gave immediately before and after the retreat that are related:https://www.patreon.com/collection/2206631Hit Me Up xSupport the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM

The ephemeral and fleeting nature of Māyā (the manifest world) leads many traditions (who are all of them totally valid by the way because different strokes for different folks) to the conclusion that the world of a void, an illusion and a trickster out to get you and rob you of your true inheritance: joy, bliss, peace, blessedness etc. Even in Eastern traditions that don't have room for the Devil, we tend to make a devil out the world; we demonize its dynamism because we haven't understood it or how to worship it & we cherish (often times escapist and life-negating) views that fetishize silence and stillness. In this talk, as per our somewhat provocative title, we say that Kālī does indeed lie and trick but as part of a game, as part of an art project (the idea of art as "artifice) and as part of her feminine power of concealment, veiling and secrecy which do not detract from, but add to her beauty. We contemplate the role of the "veil" and the use of magic, make up and subtlety of speech in our idea of the Divine Feminine to argue that all the things that we tend to problematize in the world are actually to the credit and glory of this Divine Enchantress and Mistress of Magic. Also, I just offer some anecdotes from my own dating situation to show how this understanding of Kālī shows up in my romantic preferences haha! You'll find all the lectures for this retreat here + some other talks we gave immediately before and after the retreat that are related here:https://www.patreon.com/collection/2206631Hit Me Up xSupport the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM

When you feel an interest arising in you to learn and practice Tantra, you will very soon encounter vitriolic gate keeping (by those who are themselves often outside the gates). You will come up against established hierarchies and rigid "traditions". People, often internet strangers, will almost always have something to say about your practice and as if they were the highest authorities on the subject, offer their opinions (whether asked or unasked) about what you can or cannot do. What human being is allowed to have power over any human being, though? When did we accept that as natural and alright and when did we decide to give away our power to those who claim to know better. If there's anything to learn, we must learn for ourselves following our svadharma, our inherent nature and the inclinations of our own heart, which is often (and this is sometimes scary to hear) wholly unique and wholly different from anyone else. What you have to do in your own journey has never been and will be never done. What model then exists to guide you but your own inspiration and whimsy? Everyone is valid and everyone's truth is true in their own context, given their own predilections, but just because something is true before and is true for someone else does not mean it is true now or true for you. Why do we cling to the way things used to be? The ideas of 10th and 11th CE India (and a lot of the times these are distorted by 700 years of Mogul rule and after that a wave of Christian apologetics during the British Rāj, e.g the Brāhmo and Arya Samāj movements of 19th CE ) are like beautiful but antiquated coins. They worked before for different people in a different time but they have no currency now. We are now, and we are different and so these ideas need to be re-evalutated, re-interpreted and re-contextualized, to preserve the best and incinerate the rest!You are a sovereign being! You can do whatever the fuck you want. And because you value radical freedom in yourself, you will by nature value it in others and be perfectly ethical, peaceful and loving, giving others the space to express themselves the way you express yourself freely. It is only when you deprive yourself the right to radical, authentic expression that you start to judge others and feel negatively towards them. Unethical action comes from repression and fear. Stop letting people suppress you! Stop letting the fear mongering and superstition on the internet scare you away from doing the things you love. You see, when you come to Tantra, out of genuine love and curiosity, especially when you have an interest in the "darker" side of our tradition (the left hand path, fierce Goddesses like Kālī, the radical world-affirming and life-embracing Advaita of the Mahārtha, i.e Śākta tradition), you will sooner or later come up against established hierarchies and self-appointed pontiffs telling you what you can or cannot do, keeping a gate closed to a city they have often themselves never entered.To this, we say, lovingly: fuck all that. Lets storm the gates, loot the city and redistribute the wealth (esoteric wisdom) which is the common property of every being everywhere regardless of race, nationality, religion, caste, gender, sexual-orientation, life-style choices etc. But what would such an anti-establishment, punk-rock, outlaw Tantra look like? We try to articulate what such a revolution would take n this first installment from our "Kentucky Fried Tantra" retreat of 2026.No masters, no leaders, no rules. Take back what's yours. Reclaim your power. Do what you want and leave others to do what they want. Freedom! Radical freedom! We will settle for nothing else, we who are the rabid ganas and Bhutan of our Lord and Lady, Shiva and Kali, who are the themselves Revolution Incarnate. You'll find all the lectures for this retreat here.Hit Me Up xSupport the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM

Because we gave this talk on May 4th, we start by exploring the relationships between Star Wars, Jospeh Campbell & Ramakrishna's Tāntrik philosophy. We then map this comparative mythology to the Tarot, to deities across the Indo-European world and also, interestingly, Marxism to see how this Ramakrishnan approach is the necessary response to a post-modern, post-truth increasingly relativist world in which many are lapsing into nihilism, atheism or conversely, religious fanaticism. Because May 1st is the day the Ramakrishna Math & Mission was founded, we spend some time reflecting on what institutionalization means for Swami Vivekananda's mission of making available to everyone esoteric spiritual knowledge which gains especial nuance and complexity when it comes to Tantra given its emphasis on secrecy, lineage, mantra-dīksha (initiation into the mantra) and the human gurus. A lot of this talk is my personal reflection on how our community fits into the very complex socio-political marketplace of ideas that is the modern internet-age. In a somewhat candid fashion, I reflect on my place in the Ramakrishna lineage and how I'm navigating the complexity of teaching this stuff in the face of some backlash and misunderstanding while trying to stay true to my understanding of what Vivekananda & Ramakrishna were all about.May this be an offering to all rebels, in the Star Wars universe and beyond!Hit Me Up xSupport the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM

Over the years, we've done quite a few lectures on Mā Chinnamastakā, one of the most mysterious and often among the most feared from of Mā with a very complex rasa-profile, at least as far as Her iconography is concerned. In 2024, in Goddess Worship in Tantrik Buddhism | The Buddhist Chinnamastā we looked at a Tibetan Buddhist tantra for Vajrayoginī & compared it to a "Hindu" tantra for Chinnamastakā to demonstrate that the Goddess tradition is the same across sectarian lines! Then, in 2025 we did How To Decapitate Yourself | Chinnamastā Jayanti a thrilling inquiry in the motif of decapitation that is pretty ubiquitous with Mā in many of Her representations. This lecture was like a hand grenade to destroy all vikalpas, differentiating thought constructs (the head) that obscure the mad joy of non-dual experience (headlessness) to allow the blood (bliss and power) to flow and imbue all aspects of life, now understood correctly in the light on non-duality. Going off the previous year's lecture, we engage a lot of Buddhist void and mind-only philosophers like Nagarjuna and Vasubandha alongside Gaudapada and more extreme non-dual masters like that. Now, I want to consider the two streams of blood to the left and right and by comparing them to the Idā, moon-channel and Pingalā, sun-channel and by comparing that in turn to the image of Kāmadeva and Rati making love on the horizontal plane, the seat of the rising Kundalinīin the Sushumnā nādi, I think we can say a few exciting things about why its important to still hold your head (maintain rational, grounded, controlled thinking, i.e jñāna) after decapitation, the mad ecstasy of devotion, i.,e bhakti! Here are all our videos on the Mahāvidyās over the years. Hit Me Up xSupport the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM

We start with a little review of rasa vada, the theory of aesthetic "flavors of Consciousness" that are very much emphasized in our Tāntrik iconography & poetics before presenting Mātangī Devī as a a radical invitation to reclaim those rasas, or "flavors" which are commonly rejected as impure or unspiritual or unwholesome in the name of a deeper, more inclusive & capacious non-dual understanding. And to discuss the ucchistā approach (the spirituality of impurity/trangression), we need to say more about śānta-bhāva, Abhinavagupta's 9th meta-flavor that imbues all the other flavors (even the "unspiritual" or disturbing ones) with poetic and aesthetic (read also: spiritual) meaning. The discussions around śānta-bhāva which engage Bharata and Anandavardhana, two important aesthetic philosophers that influence Abhinava's Tāntrik exegesis, present a new understanding of "sattva" as that luminosity inherent in consciousness itself and not just a feature of the mind nourished by food purity, yogic disciplines & spiritual practices. The thesis then is as follows: contemplating Mātangī and the spirituality of impurity is contingent upon an understanding of the meta-flavor of Śānta-bhāva which itself present a sort of meta-sattva that does not negate rajas, agitation or tamas, inertia but rather includes them and exalts them! As such, I can say that all spirituality (and Vāmacāra is no exception) is about sattva maxing only in this lecture, I want to refine our understanding of just what it is we mean by "sattva", as per the interpretations of Kaula masters like Somananda, Abhinava & others. Also, we indulge in a long digression at the top of the lecture on the nature of bhoga, enjoyment, the Vedic orientation toward bhoga and the age old question of is bhoga mutually exclusive with yoga, spirituality? Here's a playlist of all our videos on the daśamahavidyās with a Śri Vidyā orientation. Hit Me Up xSupport the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM

Isn't interesting that around the same time that the narrative of the quintessential serpentine representation of the divine, dark feminine, chaos embodied, Tiamat's evisceration by Marduk, the male storm God par excellence gained mythological dominance, Hammurabi hammers the "law" into his stone, thus enshrining the role of the conscious, analytic, externally-oriented & physicalist mind as more important or "holier" than the feminine, subconscious, interiorized, symbolic & archetypical mind? Isn't also interesting that after this mythological narrative gained dominance, and after this major historical event, the religious traditions of the late neolithic era and up the present day have been shifting further and further away from Goddess worship (i.e an immanence-oriented, world embracing, embodied approach to religion) in favor of the more transcendentalist, world hating, body-denying, struggle-oriented "father sky" idea? In this talk, after we explore some ideas about Sanskrit as a gendered language and the widespread implications of that, and after we make a few claims about shifting our discussions on gender to a more interiorized, psychological place, and certainly after some long digressions on feminist theories of the 19th century (Virginia Woolf, Vivekananda etc.), we turn to one of the most important things we could ever discuss as a śākta (I.e, goddess oriented) community: what is a woman? And more importantly: in what sense is God a woman?Really, this lecture is just three hours of us unpacking the rishikā, Ariana Grande's mahavākya: God Is A Woman.Hit Me Up xSupport the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM