For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish
Episodes
403 episodes
Different Ways To Use Khaḍgamālā Stotram
We ended our last conversation (What Is The Śrī Cakra? | Yoginī Hṛdāya, Verses 1-18) with an invitation to start chanting regularly the Devī Khaḍgamālā which yo...
Getting Started With Śrī Vidyā: The Path of Beauty, Bliss & Eros
Since we recently took up a concerted study of a rather high level text in the non-dual śākta tradition, the Yoginī Hṛdāya (the last 3 chapters of a much larger work in the Śrī Vidyā tradition, Vāmakeśvarīmatatantra in 8 chapters) at our weekly...
Who Can Practice Tantra? | An Apology
Tantra has often been considered a closed tradition because its texts and the teachings transmitted in them on maṇḍala/cakra (geometric diagrams representing the retinue of deities as emanations of the central deity/ a ...
re: Dīkshā, Tāntrik Initiation
Because we are all of us different, naturally, we want different things out of life and out of spirituality and we so all come to it with different expectations and values and backgrounds. Often, this means we're going to have different (and eq...
How Did Yoga, Vedanta, Tantra & Kali Come To America? | Vivekananda's Legacy
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 st...
Spirituality for Nihilists, Hedonists, Materialists & Atheists
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...
Mantra For Kālī As Void
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 ...
Ecstatic Songs to Krishna | Mira As South Asian Baddie
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 birth...
How To Turn Every Word Into A Mantra
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 Gupt...
Why Do We Offer Flowers To God? | Mahārtha Mañjarī
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 th...
Why Are People So Mad on The Internet About Tantra?
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 ...
Should We Share Tāntrik Secrets On The Internet?
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 ...
How To Not Be A Cult | Protecting Your Autonomy in Spiritual Communities
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 ...
Is Kālī Lying To You? | & Why I Love Women Who Lie
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 tric...
Everyone Is Allowed To Learn Tantra | Punk Rock Tantra
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 "tradit...
Tāntrik Marxism | The Revolution of Redistributing Esoteric Wisdom
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-Euro...
Chinnamastakā & How To Actually Make Love
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...
Mātangī & The Poetry of Impurity | Sattva Maxxing in Vāmācara
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 r...
What is a Woman? | & Why God Is A Woman
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 ...
Partying As Spiritual Practice | Sukhopaya, The Path of Bliss
In this bold little talk, I wanted to discuss the ānanda-mīmāmsa section in taittirīyopanishad: are the three different types of bliss different in kind?/ is spiritual bliss different from "worldly" bliss so that I can articulate the poetical, ...
Two Transmission of Tantra | Jñānā vs. Kriyā, Meditation vs. Ritual
In Tantra, you find two separate transmissions that seem to be in tension with one another: one one hand, there are the Jñāna or contemplation oriented traditions (for example, the Vijñāna-Bhairava Tantra or Somānanda's śiva-drshti) that privil...
Kali, Christ & Sticking It To The Man | Who Can Teach Tantra?
After some ecstatic & triumphant kirtan (which you can watch in the
How Meditation Works | Classical Yoga vs Tāntrik Yoga
There are many ways to understand the word "meditation." Given that this is one of the central modalities of spiritual life and given the ever increasing interest in meditation, I felt a definition and discussion around meditation to clarify wh...
Śaiva Teachings in the Devī Māhātmyam
Since it was Chaitra Navarātri last week, as part of our last Friday morning Abhinava Gupta Paramārthasāra class, we explored some key śaiva ideas that appear in the opening teaching of the Devī Māhātmyam. In this talk, we first explain...
How To Start Your Daily Tāntrik Pūjā Practice
This is rather foundational discussion about the role of pūjā (ceremonial worship) in spiritual life in the modern age. As you know, the Tāntrik tradition is above all, when we consider the primary sources, about rituals and ceremonies. Now, th...
