Lectures

Yoga Stories

April 22, 6:30-8:30pm at Yoga Sole in Windsor Terrace, BK

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This talk introduces the surprisingly entertaining story-literature of ancient India on yoga and yogis.

Indian literature is filled with stories about yoga and yogis, yet these stories remain relatively unknown in the West. They present us with a somewhat different picture from what we get by reading the philosophical texts familiar to students of yoga in the West. In this lecture we will hear some of these entertaining tales and discuss their themes and relevance to yoga. 

We will learn about great sages living in forest huts surrounded by animals made tame by their benevolent influence, sages who impart their wisdom to eager seekers or to troubled souls who draw them into worldly affairs. We will hear about yogis who, through their prolonged austerities, amass such spiritual power that the gods, threatened, retaliate by sending celestial nymphs to seduce them and thereby dissipate their accumulated power.

In particular, we will hear the story of the great god Siva, the archetypical yogi, who meditates on Mt. Kailasa for eons but who is eventually won over by the beautiful goddess Parvati when she demonstrates her superior mastery of yogic concentration. We will learn too about Siva and Parvati's stormy marriage which reveals the tensions in traditional Indian society between the ideals of ascetic transcendence and those of fulfilling one’s duties in this world.

Finally, we will hear the stories of less edifying yogis who seek not spiritual liberation but “magical” powers, such as aerial flight, superhuman strength, invisibility, and the ability to invade other bodies—all used to bewitch, rob, cheat, deceive, and seduce for their own personal gain and aggrandizement.

 

Energies of the Divine: Mind, Body, and Cosmos in the History of Indian Yoga

This lecture will provide an overview of the history of yoga in India by focusing on the key idea of energy in its various permutations—physical, mental, biological, and spiritual. 

  • How did traditional Indian yoga during its major phases of development understand the energies of mind and body and their relationship to each other?
  • How were the energies of the individual’s psycho-somatic system believed to be connected to the surrounding energies of nature and to the cosmos as a whole?
  • How were these energies believed to be related to the divine?
  • How were these energies used, in practice, to assist in the goal of liberation?

We will explore these ideas through the rich imagery of Indian painting, iconography, and sculpture.

Yoga and Self Understanding

This lecture will explore the crucial relation between yoga and self understanding. 

No civilization has explored the self and human consciousness as deeply and persistently as has India’s. Much of Hindu philosophy believes that knowledge of the "true" self is the key to liberation and that yoga is the means of discovering that self. This lecture will explore this ancient quest and its relevance for us today. We will touch on the following questions:

  • What were the various Indian ideas about the nature of the self?
  • How was yoga seen as a method for contacting and knowing the "true" self?
  • What techniques were used for self-observation?
  • Why was the ego seen as a major obstacle to self-realization and how was it to be overcome?
  • Why was self-understanding thought crucial to enlightenment and liberation?

 

Yoga and the Divine Feminine

This lecture will explore the central role of sakti, or sacred female power, within Indian yoga and the Hindu goddess traditions in general.

Traditional Indian society is notoriously patriarchal. Yet India has produced the most developed, varied, and long-lived goddess traditions in the world—from a single, all-powerful great goddess, to a range of pan-Indian goddesses, to a multitude of local village goddesses.

Some of these goddesses are gentle, benevolent, and nurturing, others dangerous, violent, and fickle.

In this lecture we will look at the span of goddess powers, focusing on divine female energy—sakti—as it is manifested in, and through, women and the female body. We will appreciate not only how this sacred power was understood but how it was used and manipulated in yoga practice in order to transform body and mind for the purpose of enlightenment.

 

The Inward Turn: Yoga and Meditation in Early India 

An exploration of the shared background and parallel developments within Hindu and Buddhist contemplative traditions.

We often speak about “hindu yoga” and “buddhist meditation” as if they are two entirely distinct entities—different religions, different practices.

This lecture, however, explores their common origin and the ground they shared until Buddhism died out in India in the thirteenth century.

We will see how both these traditions, always in dynamic interaction, produced classic formulations of their contemplative practices in the fourth and fifth centuries—the Hindu Yoga Sutra of Patanjali and the Buddhist Visuddhimagga of Buddhaghosa—and note the forces that shaped their distinctive meditative theories, goals, and practices.

Cosmos and Soul in Indian Yoga

This talk will explore the fundamental connection believed to exist, in Indian religious thought, between the universe and the individual. 

In the West, the individual is seen as existing independently of the surrounding universe which serves only as a vast, cold, and indifferent backdrop to human concerns and aspirations. In India, however, from the time of the earliest hymns of the Vedas into more recent times, the human being is seen as an intimate part of the universe, a microcosm of the macrocosm.

Knowledge of the greater whole was considered crucial to self knowledge, offering much needed perspective and a sense of the larger realities that unify man, nature, and spirit.

The practice of Indian yoga was firmly set within this framework: its ideas of the body and of consciousness, of meditational states correlated with the levels of the cosmos, of its practices to reverse the process of creation and affect the self’s ascent and return to the un-manifest source of existence, etc..

This lecture will explore this cosmic framework and the place of yoga within it, a perspective often overlooked by Westernized students of yoga.

 

Lectures can be presented to supplement training programs or simplified for a general audiences.   

 

 

 

Image credits (from top to bottom): Yogi Jallandharnath and Princess Fly Over Palace Pool (detail) Amardas Bhatti, 1830 Mehrangarh Museum Trust; Shiva as Nataraja, Lord of Dance 18th century bronze from South India Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (21.1828); Woman gazing into mirror. Attributed to the painter Nathu Rajasthan, late 18th century; Great Goddess Absorbs Energy from Male Gods From a Devi Mahatmya manuscript, late 18th century, Indian state of Guler Lahore Museum; Head of Buddha Chunar sandstone, 5th century CE Sarnath, Uttar Pradesh National Museum, Delhi (47.20); Equivalence of Self and Universe (detail) From the Siddha Siddhanta Paddhati Painting attributed to Bulaki, 1824 Mehrangarh Museum Trust