Episode 6: Re-Centering Yoga’s Philosophy With Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
While mainstream American culture limits yoga to a mere fitness class or a “woo-woo” spiritual endeavor that belongs at home, it began as a philosophical commitment toward ethical action and sovereignty. In this episode of the Liberating Yoga Podcast, host Harpinder Kaur Mann is in conversation with Scholar and Historian of Philosophy, Dr. Shyam Ranganathan. Together, they dive deep into the ways yoga’s current definitions have been shaped by Western colonization and how we can reclaim the practice today to fight racism and colonialism.
WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE:
Historical definitions of yoga as a practice and ethical theory of right action and good outcome
Why devotion to Isvara (sovereignty) makes yoga an inherently decolonial philosophy
How colonization transformed yoga from a communication of philosophical commitment to a religious, “mystical” practice separate from public life
White supremacy and capitalism’s influence on today’s asana-focused culture
Tokenization and the nuances of how colonialism has stripped away yogic knowledge from South Asian people and their descendants
The ways yoga calls us to fight racism and colonialism through Asmita (call to awareness), connections of solidarity, and opening ourselves up to learning
ABOUT Dr. Shyam Ranganathan:
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan (MA South Asian Studies, MA and PhD Philosophy) is a field-changing researcher, scholar, author, and teacher of philosophy, and an expert in the neglected traditions of Indian moral philosophy, which covers practical questions of how to live, what to aim for, and what we should value—including Yoga. Dr. Ranganathan is a trained scholar and researcher of philosophy and is author, editor and translator of over 50 peer reviewed, scholarly works (including Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy MLBD 2008 and 2017; the Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics 2017; and Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation, Routledge 2018).
A specialist in translation, having written his PhD dissertation on the topic of how we can understand texts without projecting our beliefs onto them, Dr. Ranganathan translated Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra (Penguin 2008). After over 20000 teaching hours and 3000 students, in 2019 , Dr. Ranganathan founded Yoga Philosophy (YACEP and CYA-RYSGOLD), a scholar practitioner initiative, to bring anti-colonial, anti-Eurocentric, research based knowledge about Yoga and Philosophy to practitioners. Shyam is a E-RYT-500 and CYA-RYT Gold. He is a member of the Department of Philosophy, and York Center for Asian Research, York University, Toronto.
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Website: yogaphilosophy.com
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Yoga teacher Harpinder Kaur Mann shows American yoga practitioners a path to reclaim yoga from appropriation and recenter the practice where it belongs.
In Liberating Yoga, yoga teacher Harpinder Kaur Mann draws from her own perspective as a Sikh-Punjabi woman who was alienated by the way yoga is practiced in the United States, but found her way toward reclaiming the spiritual practice for herself. Mann demonstrates that moving away from appropriated forms of yoga and back to yoga's roots is the only true path to healing--both for yoga practitioners who desire to engage responsibly in the practice with cultural appreciation and, especially, for marginalized yogis who wish to reconnect with ancestral spiritual practices and reclaim their full identity.