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Rane: Hello. My name is Rane and this is the Flow Artists Podcast. Together with my co host Jo Stewart, we speak with extraordinary movers, thinkers and teachers about how they find their flow and much, much more. Before we dive in, we want to take a moment to acknowledge and honour the traditional owners of the unceded land where this episode was recorded, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. We pay our deepest respects to the elders, both past and present, and acknowledge the emerging leaders within their community. In our latest episode were speaking to Dr Shyam Raganathan, a field changing researcher, scholar, author and teacher of philosophy at York University, Toronto. His website, yogaphilosophy.com, is a wealth of information and resources relating to yoga ethics and philosophy. He's the author of over 50 peer reviewed publications and several books, including a new translation of Patanjali's yoga Sutra based on his PhD research findings. However, in this episode we're focusing on his latest book, Yoga -Anticolonial Philosophy, An Action Focused Guide To Practice. This book combines an accessible introduction to moral philosophy, the topic of yoga, South Asian philosophy and western colonisation, with an insightful unpacking of how white supremacy shows up and how yoga philosophy is often presented today in both in classes and academic settings. His translations and explanations opened up a lot of deeper meaning of the yama and niyama, which was often quite different to commonly presented explanations and he also linked these principles back to the way we live today. We found this to be a powerful, thought provoking and thoroughly enjoyable conversation. So let's get into it. All right? So, Dr Ranganathan, thank you so much for speaking with us today. It's great to get the chance to have a conversation with you. So if you could please just start by telling us a little bit about yourself and where you grew up.

Shyam: Thank you. So, thank you for having me. I'm from Toronto. I was born in Toronto, Canada and, yeah, so that's where I'm from. I'm a philosopher and along the way I became a South Asianist and then along that way I translated the yoga sutra and that kind of really jump started my formal study of yoga. But yoga was definitely in my family background. My parents are from South India and so bhakti and yoga was very much part of my ancestral tradition. But I don't think I really started appreciating what that was until I started doing the work I'm doing now.

Jo: So I was wondering, when did you decide that you wanted to be a philosopher?

Shyam: Oh, yeah, I was pretty young. I was 17 when I decided that. So in a previous life, I was a musician. So I was born very musical, and, like, I was just one of those kids that could pick up an instrument in, like, ten minutes, play you something. I was really a drummer, but my parents didn't like that. They put me in violin so I could play a string instrument. I was very frustrated. I felt like I had all sorts of ideas, and I couldn't make it work. Probably I was too young. Other people weren't. Like, if I just waited long enough, I would have connected with people that I could have really had fun with. But I got frustrated with that, and then I decided philosophy. It was just this thing when I was 17, and I haven't looked back.

Jo: And so I was wondering if, like, say, just in your family dynamics and with your friends, like, did you grow up with a lot of family debates and philosophical conversations?

Shyam: Yes and no. I mean, so my mom actually has two master's degrees in philosophy, so it's not entirely foreign, but she. We didn't really talk a lot, but my parents had this wild library in the basement that they stock with, like, all sorts of, like, you know, the Upanishads and the Gita. And I just had all this stuff in the background that I could peruse. And I think just also, if you're not. I mean, there's a couple of different ways that you could. You could kind of do the immigrant experience, which is just like, this is our way, and that's their way. But my parents were far more, I think, because they really took their tradition seriously. It wasn't just something they followed. It provided them reasons for their choices, like simple things like not eating meat. Right. That wasn't just a cultural thing. That was an ethical choice. I know for some people, they treated it like a cultural, just a cultural thing. But those were also kids that would just easily. They just started eating meat. It was just because there was no reason presented to them as to why they should not. Right? But, like, those conversations were part of my, like, you know, when I felt the peer pressure, I felt weird, kind of being the only kid that has never eaten. This is the seventies. This is a long time ago, right? It was a different world. And, you know, these philosophical conversations would come up, and they had everything to do with reasons. It's weird now they're normal conversations. But back then, those were conversations I had with my parents about choice and responsibility and compassion and thinking about, you know, other beings that could suffer. These were all things that were just kind of. But they weren't, that wasn't new to them, that was just part of the tradition that they inherited. Right. So I think. I think that background kind of disposed me to be sympathetic to philosophy.

Jo: And so you recently published a new book, Yoga Anti Colonial Philosophy. And I really learned so much reading it, including, like, the idea that philosophy itself is anti colonial because it raises awkward questions and it encourages people to think for themselves and to problem solve. And I like. I love the line, yoga is the original decolonial practise. It allows everything except for our internalisation of oppression. Would you like to unpack this idea a bit?

Shyam: Sure. The yoga being the original decolonial practise. Yeah, yeah, sure. So just backing up, I absolutely do think philosophy is decolonial upset. Like, if you look at the western tradition, which is the global dominant colonising tradition, it starts with the murder of a philosopher, Socrates. And then you have these public intellectuals executed Jesus. And then all sorts of other people who just kind of said things or wanted to question, like engage in ethical discussions that were uncomfortable with the dictators in power, right? And South Asia was so different at the very start. You could be weird and ask questions and go do your thing. And then people thought that was cool, they wanted to hang out. Like the Buddha was someone who just opted, he went and came up with the system, right? That was very normal in the South Asian tradition. So when I think about philosophy, I know a lot of people like to think about decolonization as recovering culture. I think that's a very superficial form of decolonization because that's almost a western tradition. It makes everything about language and culture. I think there's a more basic willingness to ask questions and make decisions ourselves about how we should live is empowering and also decolonizing. Now, yoga is a specific philosophy that says that the right thing to do is to be devoted to the ideal of sovereignty, Ishra. And then we have to engage in the practise of what that is like. So we practise being unconservative, that's tapas. And then also making our own choices, choosing our own values, that swadyaya. That allows for a lot of exploration and a lot of possibilities. But what you're choosing not to do is just see the world and then assume those are your only options, right? Which is what happens when we internalise our experiences. So there's a sutra, book two, sutra three, where talks about when we start off with ignorance, we're not being responsible for itemising and discerning options. We construct a sense of self asmita, egotism on the basis of these experiences. And then that's like a prison we inhabit, where we confuse our interests with the politics of the world, and then we try and defend it as though we're defending ourselves. So that's the one thing you're not doing in yoga, because you're consciously deciding to do your own thing. But that's, that's quite open in many ways, right? It allows for all sorts of experiments and different possibilities.

Jo: And from what you're saying, it doesn't. It's not even just allowing for all of those experiments and different possibilities. It's like that's kind of the point. Like it's a continual, like, looking within and looking beneath the thoughts that you might have and the assumptions you might have and questioning them.

Shyam: Yeah. So it's. It's even maybe even a more bit more radical, because you, you start to see that you are responsible for understanding, understanding options. So it becomes less about you and more about, well, what are the options? And the more we start to live that way, the less we live this life of samskaras, what are called samskars, where we just kind of have these habits of interpreting the world according to our beliefs. The last, we kind of live this world internally in our psychology, and the more we live it socially out with others, we can contemplate the same possibilities together. Right. They're not really idiosyncratic. There's something for us all to ponder together.

Jo: I really like the way that you explained the samskaras in your book, the way that it's like, it's always a circle. Like, it's a method of authority in your thinking, but it supports and justifies itself by enforcing itself. So that idea of, like, I think this. So it must be true. And it's the only way that things can be. Like, I think that's.

Shyam: And then you structure all of your interactions according to those assumptions, and then that allows you to confirm, in your weird view of the world, that you were right all along.

Jo: And so, like, it is a circular argument and a thought pattern. Like, how do we get out of it? Like, how do we see things?

Shyam: Right? So, you know, I think this is the genius of yoga. Like, you know, there's some things that just don't work. Like, you know, yelling at a wall, right? Like, there are things that just, like, you you. And you get more angry. You yell at it more, and the echo will be even louder. So when we try and battle our samskaras, we're like, that we're like turning inwards, yelling at a corner. It doesn't get better. We just have to do something else radically different. And that's why the basic practise is devotion to Ishvara, sovereignty. And then we take on the responsibility of, like, trying that out ourselves. And, you know, it's a work in progress, but when we put our energy there, we stop fighting these internal battles that are basically the life of affliction and trauma, and we start living more independent and autonomous lives.

Jo: And so your translation of Ishvara, it's kind of different to what I remember from what my teacher training was and what I've read in some other kind of yoga philosophy books. And it's a lot more active. Like, previously I'd kind of seen it translated like, Ishvara Pranidana. I'd seen it translated as, like, surrender to the divine. Like, I hadn't seen it really described as sovereignty until I read your work. And it really, like, it adds a whole new dimension to the meaning. Yeah, it's much less passive.

Shyam: Absolutely. Well, you know, usually the standard translation is the Lord or lordliness, which is pretty close to sovereignty, but potentially actually provides a definition of Ishvara Sutra 24, book one. And it's very clear what Ishvara is. And so if you look at that, the divine is a really kind of vague. It doesn't map onto the very specific. You know, it's something that doesn't have baggage and is not afflicted. So what does that mean? It means that it's free of its past. Its past isn't holding its back. It's held back. And it's free to, like, choose and do into the future without opposition. And that sounds pretty sovereign, right? Nothing is going to get in its way. Nothing stops it from choosing or doing. So it has a kind of healthy relationship to the past and the future. I came across sovereignty accidentally. I was teaching someone who was a yogi, but also a philosophy professor from Brazil, and he's like, I don't like the Lord. I don't like the connotations. It sounds bad. And I stopped for like a minute. I'm like. I said, well, how about sovereignty? He's like, I'll take it. And I started using it since then because I think it's easier for, you know, you have to do the work no matter what. You have to always go back and go, well, there's this word we're using for this idea, but what does it mean? Like, what in this theory, what is it doing? But sovereignty just makes it a little easier, that process of recovering what Patanjali's talking about.

Jo: And it's not gendered, like lord. Sounds patriarchal to me.

Shyam: No, no, it's not. Yeah, yeah. Even in Sanskrit, Ishvara is not gendered. In English, Lord is, it is gendered, so. Yeah, true.

Jo: And so the other translation of yours that added, like, a whole new dimension to my understanding was about tapas, because the way I've kind of understood it was definitely like the generating heat, but also associated with discipline and, like, more self discipline. But you describe it as really, like going against the grain and being unconservative, which in some ways is the opposite of being disciplined. And I see how that meshes much more with an anti colonial outlook versus following rules, essentially.

Shyam: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. If being disciplined is about following rules, then yes, because tapas is about it. The metaphor. It's a. It's a metaphor because it means, like, heat production. Right. So we do that when we. We do act like physical exercise. Right. But everything in the yoga sutra, in the philosophy of yoga has, like, at least two levels. There's, like, a very literal level, but then there's a wider level with respect to, like, life as such. Right. And, you know, how do you generate heat? You generate it by friction, so there has to. There's a kind of pushback involved in the generation of heat. And if you think about that, then. And it is interesting, because people who are kind of interested in physical practises sometimes get really woozy and they get really kind of caught up and I. Expectations, and usually they get hurt, something bad happens. And I think the idea of tapas really saves you from that. You know, it's not just about repeating the same thing, it's about really pushing your boundaries. So, you know, if you did something a whole bunch of times, maybe it's time to do something else. So it's less of a kind of obsessive compulsive, the discipline, and more. More making room for creativity.

Jo: Yeah, I can see how that really links back into the samskara. Like, if you tell yourself you have to do this really extreme practise every day, because that's your tapas and that's what you need to do, because that's what you tell yourself that you need to do.

Shyam: Yes, absolutely. When I first got into the world of teaching yoga practitioners, I remember going to some of my friends, like their Astanga studio, one friends Astanga studio, and they would wake up at crazy hours to practise, and all I heard was about how everybody was hurting themselves all the time. I'm like, this doesn't sound right. Like, why are you walking? Oh, I just do have my back. And I just did. And, you know, they had this kind of expectation that they had to master something. And at the time I just thought, this can't be good for you. But now I do think that, like, this is part of the colonialism. Like, we get. Yoga gets retold into some type of project of conformity to expectations instead of really becoming independent and strong as an agent, which is very different projects.

Jo: And I get as well how sometimes if someone has a lot of stress in their life and a lot of tension in their body, it's like they feel like they need an intense physical practise to get to the place where you can let that go and just melt into a puddle on the floor and be at peace. Like, I can get how sometimes it's a way of dealing with your experience of being in the world that, you know, intense things are happening mentally. So physically, you want to, like, process that through your body for sure, but.

Shyam: Then you're doing something different. It's always about the doing something different. So because you were kind of so psychologically focused, you're going to break that by doing something physical. But then, you know, if you make that the point of your life, then you'll suffer in different ways. Like, there has to be this kind of dynamism in an independent life for it to be healthy.

Jo: And so do you have an internal system of checking in to kind of feel whether you're in a pattern or so?

Shyam: Yeah, I don't have anything that looks like a standard yoga practise according to anybody. Like, you know, I don't have a time of the day where I do it. Like, I don't have. I see my yoga practise as continuous with my life. So it's kind of constantly. I'm constantly going, why are you doing this? Is that right? And, you know, maybe you could do something different. Like, it's just this constant. And then you start noticing weird patterns and habits and, like, that weren't working out well, you know, why am I. What? How can I revolutionise this? Right? And it's not easy when you are, you know, looking in because it is just like a mirror. There's like nothing else but you there. And so it's a very, you know, you think you're gaining ground, but you're just. But, you know, I do find, like, with myself that, like, I go for long periods of time when I've been working on something and then that becomes a new habit and then I have to go and just break that by doing something else. That kind of happens in epochs of years. But. But, you know, one thing I can say is that I think my life, like, I'm getting healthier as I get. I'm getting older, which was not what I was expecting would happen. And, yeah, I'm just feeling less weirdly more optimistic. It's very strange. You start, you stop feeling. You stop feeling that dread because you're not allowing yourself to be stuck in ways that would have been really frightening before.

Jo: That sounds like a really positive message that things are going well, things are heading in a good direction.

Shyam: The interesting thing is, like, not everything is like, you look at the world and it's very frightening. But at the same time, I feel myself less incompetent, less powerless, because you also get it. You also get a healthier sense of your own boundaries. And so then you put your energy into what you can do and you stop wasting energy on things that you have no direct control over. And that's. That's the way really positive change happens, when people start to change. So, you know, it's neat to see that happen in yourself, too.

Jo: I think that's really great advice. It's like there's so much happening that's out of our hands, especially in the world right now. So focusing on the stuff that you can do with your hands and with your mind here and now.

Shyam: Yeah. In that you don't, you have no way of knowing what kind of positive impact that can have, that ripple effect can have in the. Into the future. Right? So there might not be a direct way that you can solve climate change and war, but, you know, if you can be part of a positive ripple that starts to change the way people choose and act, then real change can happen.

Jo: Writing a book on philosophy, great way to do that.

Shyam: You know, it's funny, this is the first book I wrote for you. Become an academic and you get into this weird game of, like, writing for reviewers and your colleagues. And then I was, you know, told Point blank by a colleague. Just finished. I was at the International association of Yoga Therapists in 2022, and I delivered a keynote, and I was talking to the other keynote speaker, Dr Catherine Cook-Cottone. And she does stuff on, she's a psychologist, she does stuff on yoga and trauma. And she's like, you know what? You can write academic books, but, like, two people will read it. You should write something for yoga students and so this is like, you know, probably the first book I've written where, like, I pretty sure people are reading it. The Yoga Sutra translation. I know people are reading it, but I've written other books where I wasn't really sure they're published, they're still available and, you know, by, like, prestigious academic presses, and you never know. So this feels, you know, this is.

Jo: Nice, and I really appreciate everything that you write and everything that you share. Like, I've learned so much from your website as well. And beyond what I've learned about yoga philosophy, you really shine a light on some of the racist layers of academia as well. And that's something that you've kind of written about in your book as well, how, like, the same positions or ideas are seen as philosophy if they come from a western source, or religion if they come from an eastern source. And do you want to just unpack some of the implications of this?

Shyam: Yeah. So, you know, I think yoga has taught me, I didn't appreciate it, would teach me this. But you start to think historically, because you can understand that people are making choices, things just don't happen. People make choices and then a lot of times they make passive choices to just accept whatever's been done in the past, and then they just think that's just the way the world is. But it could have been different. But we don't, you know, but to think about that, how could it have been different? Is Ishvara Pranidana. You really have to be kind of devoted to Ishvara to allow yourself that space to think, well, how could have things gone differently? Very early in the western tradition, the Romans developed this idea of religio, religion as a term that they used for pockets within their colonial sphere that they would tolerate. But these were not ever to be, like, the same as the bureaucracy. And so we get our idea of religion in the secular from there, there's something kind of for everyone, and then there are these pockets of traditions. And so what happens then is that as the western tradition spreads as a colonial tradition, it either wipes out others or it, in earlier times, it engages in what's called, what you could call exploitative colonialism, where instead of, like, settler colonialism, where you go and you try and just take the space for yourself and get rid of the native. You want to be the native, right? Exploitative colonialism. There's more of. You realise there are more of them than you, but if you could somehow render them subservient, that's a huge pool of labour and wealth, and so you know, allowing traditions to be recognised, peoples to be recognised as having a religion, as a way to subordinate them. So the Jews early on were recognised as having religio, but early Christians weren't because the Romans killed Jesus. And it was a very kind of threatening thing to the colonial powers. And so lots of things had to change before the Romans became christian, including I think these doctrines in Paul where Romans, where the crucifixion becomes God's idea and no one's perfect, so you can't blame the Romans. So then they can be Christians, right? But what's happened in this kind of transition is that we get this convention of defining colonised traditions as religion and then the western tradition going back to the Greeks, everything they say is philosophy. And so this has two different, this has a couple different impacts. Colonised peoples start to buy it and believe it and so they lose an Indigenous connection with their philosophical, their deeply philosophical history. And their Indigenous traditions were always philosophical because they weren't colonial traditions, right? They were just freer traditions where people were so colonised, people start to believe that then academics kind of repeat that, they then study religions. And so, you know, it was the British that used a Persian word, Hindu, which basically means like India, to say that everything Indigenously South Asian is Hindu. And you know, this is just the power of colonialism. Now there are a billion people in the world who believe they're Hindus. That was something invented by unfriendly outsiders. But through this process of colonisation, wherever you're tricked into thinking that's my safe space, my safe space is within this bubble of this religious identity. People start to kind of mimic these things, but one of the outcomes is nobody's actually looking at the philosophy or they say they are, but what they're doing is they're interpreting it through the western lands and they're using the west as a standard. And if it says what we find in Aristotle, then it's fine. If it's not, it's mystical or, and no one's actually looking, but if you actually look, you can see the same position, you know, we should minimise suffering. That was the Buddha's idea and that's a religion. And Jeremy Bentham, you know, British parliamentarian, famous utilitarian, said the same thing and he's, you know, he's a utilitarian philosopher. There are all sorts of examples like, you know, sankahya, which is closely associated with yoga, it says that the universe is the evolution of matter, nature, and then as it gets more complex, mind and intellect are emergent properties. This is actually contemporary terminology, but mind and intellect are just very complicated states of matter. And so then everything can be explained, everything we see and experience can be explained by prior states of the material universe, right? So if a white dude in Europe said that they would think is very progressive and secular, but that 2000 years ago said in Sanskrit, by Ishvakrishna, that's an orthodox philosophy in Hinduism, right? Now, the political implications then is that, well, if we are supposed to buy secularism, then we can have the white people stuff, but then anything that's from a BIPOC tradition is treated as a threat to the secular order. It goes back to the Romans, we're living the same political system. But what that also means is that decolonial philosophy that doesn't come from the western tradition is also treated as spiritual, mystical and a threat to the public order. So this creates an apartheid where we just don't bother to look, we don't bother bother to learn, and then we confuse white supremacy. This is basically white supremacy with good political order. We should be secular and let's keep the religion. Now, the problem is because people buy it, if you ask them about the religion, they will play the stereotype that the colonising tradition wanted for them. So you have to do a lot. The weird kind of work I'm doing to kind of go back and yoga has really made that possible for me. I don't think I could have done it without this willingness to not kind of buy my samskaras. And, and I'm always finding that I made assumptions about what was said in some famous text and that it was a complete projection I heard from somewhere else. And the words are actually far more interesting and secular by our standards, less spiritual, mystical. But you have to be committed to this work, otherwise you just will never bother to look.

Jo: Hey, it's Jo here. Just popping in to let you know that my teacher, Renee Stevens, has an upcoming aerial yoga teacher training at total fusion studio, Morningside, Queensland, Australia, with level one aerial yoga essentials. Starting on September 26, 2024, Renee is offering 25% off. If you book in for the aerial essentials advanced and aerial yoga therapeutics modules, please use our affiliate code, Garden of Yoga to help support the podcast. Like me, Renee is passionate about about using the aerial hammock as a way to make the benefits of yoga more accessible to more people. And she's joined by a team of experts, including past podcast guest Kristin Mathieson, who'll be teaching the unit on aerial yoga for intellectual disabilities. You might have caught our conversation with Renee and Kristen back in April. Renee also offers online options and recognition of prior learning. If you're already teaching aerial yoga and looking to deepen your knowledge, I'll include the link for more information in our show notes. And I encourage you to reach out to Renee if you'd like to learn more.

And you're a Sanskrit scholar as well, right? Because I feel like I say that. But didn't you do your own translation of the yoga sutras?

Shyam: I did. So I would not call myself a Sanskrit scholar. I did an MA in south asian studies, and I did, like, I did Sanskrit. If you're going to be an actual scholar of Indian philosophy, you need to know enough Sanskrit to at least check a translation with the grammar book. That's a pretty low level Sanskrit skill. It's more than most people, but I wouldn't call that Sanskrit. Now, the yoga sutra is just a really weird book because it's not written in ordinary prose. So just being great at Sanskrit won't help you because it's a text of professional philosophy. It's just like when I teach something written by Bertrand Russell. More these British philosophers, early 20th century, to my students, who are all like, if they're not native English speakers, they're proficient in English. They don't understand it because they haven't learned to think philosophically, to understand arguments, to be able to follow that way of thinking. So there are lots of Sanskrit scholars out there, yoga studies, but they confess they don't understand what the yoga sutra is. But it's surprising they think they should because they haven't trained in this. It's like me trying to read chemistry and going, oh, this doesn't make any sense. I'm not a chemist. I don't know why I would expect it to make sense to me. But that's more of the racism, right? That you have all these people who think, oh, how hard can this be? I'll just learn some Sanskrit. And then they can't understand it because they never took the philosophy seriously of brown people to be knowledgeable enough about the topic, to be responsible as scholars, right? It's just stuff written by brown spiritualists or something, right? Like, the racism is remarkable. So I would not call myself a scholar. But I also think, with respect to the yoga sutra, it wouldn't help. The last thing I'll say about the yoga sutra is that it's a sutra text, which is like a zip file. So each word was chosen because it has many meanings. And the idea is that you could pack a lot into a short sentence. So then understanding the yoga sutra, you have to understand it as, like, you have to decompress it as a text of philosophy. So that kind of skill. I pulled out a dictionary, I looked at all the meanings of each word. I would sit back and I knew enough about philosophy to say, well, what's the argument? What's the theory that's being explored? And the more I got rid of my samskaras, the easier it was to just see all out on the surface. It's very clear. So sorry, I didn't mean to completely cut off your thought, but I want to make clear, I do not count myself. I'm competent to cheque translations and that kind of thing.

Jo: And the translation was the element that I had in my mind, because if you're looking at someone else's translation, they've done all of that mental groundwork that you were just talking about and they have picked the English word that they think is closest to the idea being expressed. So it's like another layer of someone else's bias or perception that you're working with.

Shyam: Right. So the only reason I translated the Yoga Sutra was that, well, there was two things going on. My PhD in philosophy was on translation. How do you translate moral philosophy? So I was thinking a lot about methodology and then I was asked to teach the Yoga Sutra in Ayurveda school. And every translation, it was so obvious to me that the author did. The translator just kind of made the Yoga Sutra say whatever they already believe. And what they would do is that they would choose one meaning out of several meanings, that a word has to be the translatable meaning. So they made themselves the criterion. Right? There's a kind of narcissism involved in Samskara. It's all about you and the way you see things. So every other translation I found was just so obviously. And I also knew enough about Indian philosophy to know that, like, I knew where these ideas were coming from. So I'd read one translation, I'd be like, oh, that sounds like this famous South Asian philosopher, you know, read another. And I'd be able to. I'd just be able to say, these people are just deriving, they've got a favourite and they just want the Yoga Sutra to say that. So. And I think people are still like that. They like to shop for translations, which I feel really weird, like, how would you know what the. Like, what would be the criterion according to which you're assessing it? And often they're like, you know, the one I feel best with. I'm like, well, you know, just join the party. That's what everybody's doing. They're making it about themselves. Right. Which is very un yogic. But anyways, it's kind of ironic. All the things that aren't supposed to be happening when you're practising yoga, it's there. Especially when people want to get into yoga.

Rane: Yes.

Jo: Like, it's a little microcosm and it seems to be very aligned with everything else you've said about being unconservative and questioning everything, that you're not just going to pick up a little book that's going to tell you exactly how things are, it's going to make you work for it and unpack it and figure it out for yourself.

Shyam: Yeah. So there is this extra, so you have to do the work. But the interesting thing is you start to realise it was done for you, but your work was peeling away all of your baggage. Right. So that's pretty neat. Now I look at it and I have a lot of students who are like, yeah, like, when you can do this kind of work, the sutras connect. They're just not weird, kind of isolated, mystical claims and there's a theme and a story and there's also an argument. And, you know, what's said here makes sense, given what was said earlier. It stops being a mysterious exercise. But I think a lot of people want the mystery. There's a bit of that, too. People want it because I think it's a way to avoid doing the work, I think.

Jo: So one line that you wrote in your book that really rang true, and I definitely include myself in this. Most yoga spaces are dominated by people who use them as an opportunity to say whatever comes into their mind, as though that's yoga. And I've definitely been in some classes where there's been some questionable nuggets of wisdom shared. It's obviously just that teacher's stream of consciousness. They've got a room full of people who've showed up to listen to them and I'm sure that some stuff has come out of my mouth as well, unfiltered. So I'd really like to unpack this idea of, I guess it's probably more likely to be a white person standing up the front of the room spouting wisdom and everyone else just kind of swallowing that as though that's yoga.

Shyam: Yeah, South Asians do that too. Like, people love to go to India and you're going to get the same thing about, like, the south of the Indian brown version of it, right? Colonisation. So this is just such a total historical process, right? It's not like. It's not like your ethnicity is going to, like my ethnicity saves me. Like, if I. I had all sorts of baggage, my understanding of all of this, that if I just started talking about yoga at a younger age, I would have said all sorts of nonsense that just came to my mind. I think that what saves us from this is this devotional practise to Ishvara, because that makes it not about us. And so then when you teach, you're sharing your practise with people and a practise is a work in progress. I don't, you know, every year I'm like, oh, I was wrong about that, or I was wrong about that. So I don't. You know, I think that's just what. It's just part of the practise. You grow and learn, but what you're not going to do is stand up and make it about you, or, you know, how you feel about something. And you're also going to be in a position to share knowledge, right. Because you're not making it all about you. So if, you know, if you yourself haven't. Didn't come up with the way you have, like, you can point to, like, what we're talking about, my book or something, right. It's. There's a way to kind of decenter. And then if you come ask me, I will tell you about the procedures and the work. It's not about me. There are these choices. You could do things differently. And so, you know, that really saves us from, you know, just. Yeah, the stream of consciousness and then this kind of narcissistic need to be the centre, the one spouting the wisdom. Right. I also think being a philosopher, like taking philosophy seriously really protects against that, because philosophy is the love of wisdom. It's not the same as claiming you're wise. So there's a kind of modesty that comes with seeing it as a practise of research, something that you have to learn. And the more advanced you are, the more advanced you are as a student, you become more of a researcher, more of a learner. So those are very protective. But, you know, I think the fact that it's so unusual for people to have that kind of reserve and that. And that, you know, deference to the practise just speaks to what goes on in yoga land. Right. Is a lot of funny. I don't know how else to put it.

Jo: And I've seen you make the parallels, say, in like, a yoga teacher training. It's pretty normal to bring in someone who maybe has an anatomy background, teach the anatomy unit, but it's very unusual to bring in someone who has a philosophy background to teach the philosophy unit.

Shyam: Yeah, absolutely. I feel, you know, but, you know, unfortunately, there's just less. There's just less qualified people. You know, it's just not because of colonialism. We're just not so, like, the weird things that I had to go through to get here, I. There was no one to learn Indian philosophy from. Even now, I look at people who are technically professors of Indian philosophy. I have all sorts of critical things to say because they do this interpretation thing. They use their beliefs. I had to learn philosophy about the European tradition largely from people of European descent, but I learned philosophy. I learned that discipline from them. And then I learned about South Asia and I put it together. I had to do a lot of really weird things to get to because we're not set up to learn this. But I do think the fact that people don't appreciate that this is a problem. Right. And don't try and at least find someone. There are not many people, but there are some. Right. It is interesting. It does speak to priorities, I think.

Jo: And I saw on your website, do you kind of offer, like, your book as a text to trainings and then people get like a question and answer session with you? Are you kind of trying to do a way that people can access this information and kind of have this kind of a debate in a more accessible way? Like, if they can't hire you to come to their city to teach in their course?

Shyam: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I. So, so I offer just, I've offered lots of online courses where there's video content and there's weekly meetings, but I also do offer to come in and, like, I can, like, set you up. I can provide one of these courses for your yoga teacher. Like, everything at Yoga Philosophy is Yoga Alliance accredited. So. And, like, it's parallel with other accreditation expectations and so, yeah, for sure. The idea is that, like, this is a module you could fit into whatever you're doing. Those are options that I. That I offer. Yeah, for sure.

Jo: And I'd also like to dig in a little bit more to the topic of your doctorate research, which, like, tell me if I'm wrong about this, but it's about the nature of, like, Yoga and Bhakti ethics versus the idea of virtue ethics.

Shyam: So my doctoral dissertation was on translation, so I. So my, I have a, I have a kind of. I got interested in South Asia, because I got interested in this story that was being told that South Asians, Indians were interested in every topic of philosophy except for ethics and politics. It's just the story you would tell about a colonising tradition. If you wanted to pick them as, like, in need of someone else to come in and take over. They've never thought about these issues. And that was the orthodox view. When I did Miami and South Asian studies in the late nineties. And so my first book, Ethics in the Indian philosophy, was the first book on ethics and Indian philosophy in decades. No one had written anything like on the topic in decades. It wasn't very good, the book, like, I'll say I was just starting. And then I went and did a PhD on translation and then I started. Then I translated the Yoga Sutra. Then my brain and my mind got kind of blown by this very careful attention to procedure in detail, that there's a way to be. This is where discipline comes in, disciplined about your thinking about options. So it's not just like whatever you feel like, and then it's a practise, it goes on and then you work on yourself, you get rid of your cobwebs, you have some scars. And then one day I realised that what the yoga teacher was teaching at the start is a distinction between what I call explication. I write about this in the book where you use, basically you're taking responsibility for ordering thoughts into conclusions and then understanding options. And that provides space for you. And that's just basically what you do when you use logic to understand the options. And then the opposite is when you interpret, you explain everything in terms of what you believe, which is. And a belief is an attitude that a thought is true. So what I. I wish this was like an easy story to tell, but when I came to that appreciation that that's what the yoga sutra is teaching us, then that's. That's the method that explains how things go badly. What goes on in the scholarship is everybody explaining things in terms of their beliefs. But if you adopt this explicatory method, you then see it all happened like, I swear. Within an hour, everything became clear to me that what the South Asians were disagreeing about were competing theories of Dharma, which I knew already, but I didn't have a very clear way of putting it. And the disagreement between these competing theories of dharma is a disagreement about right choice and good outcome. And there are three basic ethical theories that we have in the west and also in South Asia. So the first is virtue ethics, the idea that you have to be good in order to know what to do. And then there's consequentialism. There are these good ends that justify what you should do. So maybe if it's happiness, what you should do will bring about happiness. Then there's deontology, the idea that, well, there are lots of good things to do, but some you have special reason to do. Karma yoga. The Bhagavad Gita is an example of deontology. Krishna says, better Yoga, poorly done than someone else's. Dharma. Dharma, lots of good things to do. But something is on your plate that you have to do, and that's your. And you do it not because of the outcome, but because that's your responsibility. And then there's a fourth theory we don't have in the western tradition, which is yoga, Bhakti, and it is the opposite of virtue ethics. So whereas virtue Ethics claims that you have to be good in order to know what to do, Yoga says you have to be devoted to the right. And then as you practise that, you bring about the good, which is just the perfection of that practise. So you don't have to be good at yoga to do it right. You don't have to be even a good person to be doing the right thing. And the goodness is not anything except for your autonomy that you start to generate as a result of your practise. So that was something that came to me much later, after a lot of work. But once I realised that, it all of a sudden, the colonial history of the world we live in became really clear. Because why is it in a colonising tradition, we don't learn about Yoga Bhakti, because it's decolonial. You can't colonise people who are working on being sovereign and independent. You have to convince them to give up that practise and do something else. So there is an important difference between virtue ethics and I yoga. But it took me a while to get to that.

Jo: I think it really ties back into what you were saying earlier about, say, really big global issues like climate change, how you want to live in a world that's good for everyone, because that's ultimately good for you as well. You don't want to make this choice because, oh, this is what a good person does. And I'm in my own little separate reality doing the things that I think are good for me. It's like you're connected to everyone else and that informs the choices that you make. Because ultimately, if it's only good for you, it's not really as good as you think.

Shyam: Yeah, I think thinking about devotion to sovereignty means that you need a space to be sovereign. So then whatever is good for you is going to also be good for other people who also have an interest in their own independence also. So you stop worrying about yourself and others, you stop worrying about you. Just your devotional practise gets rid of that opposition. But at the same time, I think you start to see that people waste their time trying to be good, because often that's based on some conception of the way the world is and we could radically change it. And that idea of what it is to be good would be kind of not all that we would see. It was like a poor approximation for what we should really be doing. You know, I think we spend a lot of time, you know, we think about the world as something that has to die and expire, everything perishes. And so that creates a kind of limitation in the way we think about possibilities. And so then we try and be good or aim for good things or do good things within the context of the world that we experienced, but then that limits our imagination for what's possible. Right? So I. You know, I found that, like, when I started practising yoga, I saw the ways in which this worry about goodness was really a prison. It made me more interested in conforming to what seemed like was good, or seemed would be a good outcome. But if things really change radically, things could be way better, right? Like, we. It's hard to even imagine how much better things can. Can be until we've changed. And so worrying about the good is really limiting, because whatever we say about the good is something we imagine as good, but the right is just completely open ended. You're always working on doing the right thing, and what that looks like will change. The same practise, what it looks and feels like will change all the time. So I find it less limiting and I find myself kind of more open to radical change and less worried about, you know, like, recycling and doing these things that, like, we know, like, all the plastics going to the oceans anyway. Like, you know, like, there are all these things that we're told would be a good thing to do, and then you actually do the research about, like, where this stuff is going. You realise it's just a bet, it's just like a show that we're putting on. We're not actually solving climate crisis, we're just trying to fit into a world that we think is doomed anyways. So, anyways, I think that the yogic way of thinking is just, you start to think, well, maybe we could just do things very differently.

Jo: And that brings us to another line that I love from your book, which is yoga is about being the solution to one's own life.

Shyam: Yeah, yeah. I used to want a user manual. I remember being very upset about having no user manual for me because I always would try and do what other people said would work, or is the way things are supposed to be done, and it would work out horribly for me, just horribly. And I thought, well, I don't, you know, I wish I just knew how I worked because then I could. But then, you know, when I started practising yoga, I realised, well, I'm a variable thing and how I work can change. And so I'm kind of solving the problem of me, which is what I'm supposed to do with myself as I practise.

Rane: Interesting. So I wanted to sort of circle back to a bit about that discussion on BIPOC traditions being considered, you know, religion. I'm Maori, I'm from New Zealand originally. And in New Zealand there is this kind of tradition or a concept called Matauranga Maori, which is essentially a knowledge framework, frameworks around knowledge, and it incorporates, you know, what we might consider mythology. It also incorporates, you know, astronomical observations, observations around nature, you know, that they use in their everyday life. And there's been somewhat of a resurgence of this framework in academia in New Zealand recently. I might not be explaining it the best, but I'm following. Cool, cool. But also people like Richard Dawkins have been railing against it on Twitter because. Yeah, I guess you can imagine. And I guess this. Another part of me thinking about is this idea of sovereignty. Also, within Maoridom, they signed a treaty with the colonial settlers, the Treaty of Waitangi. And one of the articles of that treaty is essentially, there were two translations, one in English and one in Maori. And it's the article about sovereignty. So it's kind of interesting to me that this is sort of sovereignty on a political, I guess, government level. But there's been a lot of conversation around individual sovereignty in Maori, in Maori culture, and also even affecting things like digital sovereignty. So this is more of a rant than a ramble, I guess, than anything. I just. I guess. Yeah, all these ideas seem quite related to me. I'd like to get your thoughts on that.

Shyam: Sure. Yeah. So I think, you know, our appreciation of Indigenous traditions is very impoverished because we often just like, even colonised people. You know, we. We kind of. We're what's passed down is what manages to survive the colonial experience, right? So even what you think you might know about your Indigenous tradition is probably only like a small, even what's remembered by the elders, all of that, a small amount of what was actually there. And so I do think that one of the things that happens within colonial relations, I see this in Canada, it's the same. I mean, it's the same people or the British showing up. But the European tradition starts with this idea that what it is to be an agent is to be a language speaker, logos. And so then. But you only have that within a community. And so what happens in the western tradition is that it treats. And then logos also is their word for reason. So you conflate the reasonable with what your community will allow. That's the way the west grows. And then that's why it's colonial. It's always trying to impose its community expectations. And then one of the things that happens in colonial interactions is that indigenous people who didn't have that way of understanding, the Indigenous people often thought of themselves as agents within a universe of agents. Not just humans in their community, but like different animals. The earth, right? And South Asia was exactly like that. Like, you know, the wind was a God. It's an agent, it's doing something. So is the earth. Humans aren't really a special kind of thing. We're just a different kind of critter, right? That was like they knew that. But the western tradition makes being part of a language group really important and then its language group the most important. So the colonial interaction then forces Indigenous people, especially when they're entering into treaties and that kind of thing, to like formulate their self understanding in ways that could fit in with the colonising. And so I think a lot of times, like, we don't, we don't. We barely appreciate how rich and sophisticated Indigenous people were even with what we are remembering. Because in a way it's filtered through these colonial expectations of it being about language, culture and even a framework. Because I think one of the things that happens is we're forced into thinking about this as a frame and not. And it might have been more like a dynamic research project, right, where they were willing to kind of learn and change based on new information. So I think when we go decline yogic, we free ourselves from thinking that, first of all, what's apparent is everything, right? And then we allow ourselves to appreciate that, you know, violence erases things. And so the decolonial project, I think a lot of times then, is about enabling everyone now to be decolonized. Right. Each one of us. And then I think that's the way we start to regain what was lost, which is like a more openness to being part of a universe of diverse agents. That's exactly what the colonial tradition erases. Right. It's about its community, and then yours fits in and nothing else matters. So, I don't know, I feel like maybe that was my rant and response.

Rane: No, that was great. That was great.

Jo: I have another layer to add that I just noticed when you were speaking about this, and we were speaking earlier about how philosophy got filed under religion, but it sounds like, as well, science got filed under religion.

Shyam: Yeah, yeah. BIPOC science is religion. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Because they. What they do is like, the western tradition forces us to treat Indigenous people as having a worldview, not they. You know, a worldview is a very limiting kind of thing. Maybe they were open ended in their inquiry. Maybe they didn't have a theory of everything. They just had different hypotheses and they were working on things that's very kind of ordinary. But then once we get to the, oh, this was their worldview, then where do we file that worldview? We file that under religion in this kind of white supremacist world. Right. And so no one. It's hard to go back and then say, hey, what were they learning? Or what were they doing? Yeah, for sure.

Rane: All right, well, I guess we've got one more question. We ask everyone this question, and you might not like it, because I'm going to ask if you could distil everything that you've learned and teach down to one core essence, what do you think that one thing would be?

Shyam: Well, I think it's that we're always making choices, so stop pretending like you're not making a choice. That's just the way it is. And then once you get to that, start making responsible choices.

Rane: Beautiful.

Jo: Great summary.

Shyam: Thank you.

Rane: Yeah, thank you so much for speaking with us today. I've learned so much during this conversation. I was very quietly absorbing a lot of information. So, yeah, thank you for your time and it's been great speaking with you.

Shyam: Thank you very much for having me.

Jo: Thanks as well, for how generously you share your knowledge and these questions with the world. Like, I've got so much from your book, but also just from your website and everything that you generously and publicly share. Like, it's a huge resource.

Shyam: I'm glad. Thank you very much.

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