For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish

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 ...

Besides the fact that Sri Krishna and Ma Kali share the same bīja mantra and besides the significant historical and cultural overlap between these two traditions in Bengal, there is a certain esoteric "bħāvic" connection between these two deities, one of madness and ecstasy that we see so perfectly expressed in Sri Ramakrishna. In this talk, we explore that bhāva of mad love, with some important digressions into the Tāntrik understanding of Deity and of Mantra. Happy Holika/Kama Dahanam...

Śiva is often described as "vicitra", strange and wonderful! Having touched upon this idea off Śiva's weirdness a little bit in our Shiva, Paradox Personified lecture, we go in with some finer brush strokes to make a point about how all the various depictions of Śiva in Pauranic literature might be pointing to a very unique, mind-boggling kind of theology that is wholly unlike anything else you might have heard in the world of comparative religion! We gave this talk as part of our Śiva ...

I'm a little late on this video (I had meant to get it out before the festivities this year) but hey, maybe this is for next year and if you're particularly hardcore, for next month (since there's a śiva rātri every month the night before the new moon)! In this talk, we go over some rituals and practices for observing śiva rātri for people asking questions like, "when/what is śiva rātri?", "what should I do all night?", "what is fasting and how to do it?" etc. Here is a playlist of all ou...

In this talk, we ask the question "which deity should I worship?" & "does it even matter?" going off last week’s reflection on how Tantra works and our conjectures about Swami Brahmananda’s Ishta (chosen deity). Naturally, we end up discussing some of the nuances and complexities around the central claim of our lineage: "all religions are true" which for Tāntrikas shopping for an Ishta, comes across as "all deities are different forms of the One Absolute Reality" pointing to t...

Since we are in the lineage of Sri Ramakrishna and since you will be interacting with his life and teachings quite a bit in our community, it’s important at this point to say that no one interpretation of Sri Ramakrishna and of his lineage can ever be absolute or definitive. A lot of what you will hear us say about Sri Ramakrishna might be markedly different from what some other places that represent Sri Ramakrishna are saying and that’s just fine and as it should be to show the many colors ...

Here is a particularly inspired and lively discussion from our Atlanta retreat in which we sketch out the Sāmkhya, Yoga & Śaiva Siddhānta traditions & thus, prepare the foundations for understanding Non-Dual Śaiva/Śākta tantra, in both theory and practice, in a much deeper way. By Ma's grace, this talk turned out to be all at once a good introduction for absolute beginners, a helpful review for intermediate practitioners/students and a subtle, direct path teaching on the higher dimens...