For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish

The title says it all I think. So often Kaula Tantra gets conflated with Cārvaka, materialism/hedonism as a way to delegitimize and I personally get so many detractors on the internet saying to the same that I'm just using spirituality to justify spiritual backsliding and my reckless partying so I thought I'd just drop this response to prove that while they look alike on the surface, they are worlds apart in inner experience

Here are all our talks on Vāmācāra, the Left Hand Path path:
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We gave this lecture on Navami, the 9th and culminating day of the Autumn Goddess Festival (navarātri) which is poetic, poignant and fitting because what we discuss here feels to me like a culmination of everything I've experienced and learned at least in the last year if not over the course of my life in Kali so far! This most radical idea is an overture of sorts in my modest understanding of our Mad Mother Divine...

In fact, over the years, we've given some rather radical and non-traditional lectures highlighting some of the subtler nuances in t...

You guys, I’m excited to see you for our Navaratri conversation on "does Kali tell the truth?", going off the opening teaching from Medhasmuni in the Candi on the relativity of perception. This is somewhat of a sequel to one my favorite lectures of all time Is Kālī Lying To You? | & Why I Love Women Who Lie

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Lectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST 
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A fun and zany lecture, something a little lighter than the past two weeks of intense, subtle Tantrik non-dual discussion. We'll talk about tantra, rock & roll and How To Avoid Being In A Cult. We'll reference Baudelaire and his "be drunk poem", read an excerpt from a torn piece of paper that I found (or one that found me) and reflect a little on the sangha drama and internet cancellation episode 2 from the past years

Here are all our talks on the left hand path over the years: https://www.patreon.com/collection/1862374

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The title says it all I think.

Here's all our lectures on Kali and her unique theology:
https://www.patreon.com/collection/266524

Hit Me Up x

Support the show

Lectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST 
Use this link and I will see you there:
https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815

For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:
https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnish

To get in on t...

I want to discuss whether or not there are any real dangers to studying and practicing tantra. And if so, what are the risks?

This seems like a somewhat preliminary conversation and we’ve approached the topic before from a few different angles over the years but tonight I want to go in with some much finer brush strokes regarding Abhinava Gupta’s analysis on “Mala” in chapter 4 of Tantrasāra/tantraloka with reference to the non dual Shakta reframe from the opening verses of the Mahartha Manjari that prove to you in the immediacy of your experienc...

Sometime back we released Mania, Feminism & Tantra in American Culture | My Statement Re: Allegations a sort of statement re: the first wave of internet cancellation controversy to just candidly offer our thoughts on some of the things that we are being accused of. Now in the second iteration of internet witch hunt, things have developed in some pretty amusing ways warranting another press release, as it were. I had fun, indulging in some whimsy, and chaos in my response.

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Somewhat of a sequel to our discussions Where do Kāpālikas Come From? | Tantra as a Dravidian Tradition & Are We Aghoris? | Kapālikās & Tāntrikas of the Deccan & South India, in this talk we explore the often antagonistic and comedic characterization of Kāpālikas or early Śaiva Tantriks in Sanskrit literature and drama, to supplement the historical descriptions we encountered last time. 
Jai Mahākāla!

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Lectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST 
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Last week we did something very exciting in out Left Hand Path Rituals & Worship of the Consort class where we shared mantras and instructions for rituals that are typically hard to find because of the censure around vāmācāra (the so-called "left hand path") but to properly explain the theology, soteriology and purpose of these rituals we plunged into this fascinating discussion about the Kāpālika Vrāta, and the spiritual benefit of societal disdain/misunderstanding which is as current today as it was in the time of our ancestors. But more import...

Every Gaṇeśa Chathurthi (the fourth day of the waxing moon in the month of bhadrapada) we celebrate Gaṇeśa by giving a special talk. In the past few years we've discussed The Tāntrik Gaṇeśa (2024), Who is Gaṇeśa? (2025) and also How To Worship Gaṇeśa (2025) approaching the topic from a few different angles. But this year I wanted to do something more ambitious and direct, something we've never done before. And as such, we gave one of my favorite talks of all tim...

On Kali Jayanti/Krishna Janmāshtamī last week, we were especially inspired and we gave a talk called What Form of Kali Do I Worship? | Ādyā Kālī vs. Kṛṣṇa and still buzzing from that, we plunged right into Are We Aghoris? | Kapālikās & Tāntrikas of the Deccan & South India where we looked at some historical Sanskrit literature to contextualize just what tradition we're part a of and just what it is we're doing here, especially given all the ambiguity around the internet's conception of "aghoris". 

In this talk, al...

On Kali Jayanti, we gave one of my favorite talks ever called What Form of Kali Do I Worship? | Ādyā Kālī vs. Kṛṣṇaand buzzing from the inspiration of that one, we rolled into into our Friday morning satsangh with this wonderful introduction to literary depictions of early śaivas (i.e Kāpālikas) in some classical Sanskrit and non Sanskrit historical sources to establish ourselves in a historical context that is often missed when discussing Tantra & Aghoris & whatnot. I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did!
Here's a playlist of all our material on śaivism in...

Every time Krishna Janmāshtamī/ Kali Jayanti (the 8th day waning moon of the holy month of Shiva, śrāvana) I find that I am especially inspired. It is no insignificant thing that Kālī & Krishna share the same "birthday"! Last year, we gave a talk on the subject called Krishna = Kali and I still think it's one of the best talks we've given, like, ever. Last night, similarly inspired, we went even further into the issue by asking: what is my Ishta, chosen ideal actually? What does our lineage understand Kālĩ to be in our h...

By now it's probably quite obvious that our spiritual community is like the Protestant church you grew up in. Although all of our content on the internet is listed as "adult-content", often I have overestimated the maturity of our audience because I am only just now starting to understand how deep seated our preconceptions can be regarding hierarchies of power and institutions of authority, what to say about these things in the spiritual world. The thing is: we tend to always look outside ourselves for answers and more often, we tend to hold everyone and everything responsible for choices...

Because it was the close of the eclipse portal with the lunar eclipse on śrāvana pūrnimā (pisces full moon) tonight, we were all in a reflective and contemplative mood and so in this talk, we discuss some of the tensions, paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the transmission of Tantra throughout the ages with the early sadhus in the Vedic era to the Śaiva Siddhantins to Ramakrishna to Vivekananda and to us in the modern context, before plunging into some practices from the Kāmakalā-Vilāsa & the japa krama from our vāmācāra paddhathi. Here is a playli...

On the auspicious occasion of Nāga Pañcamī, the sacred day for worshipping dragons, I was inspired to give a slightly more dynamic and comparative talk this time compared to our talk last year (Snakes, Dragons & Nāgas in Tantra) which focused more on the āvatāras of the nāgas (Patañjalī, Abhinavagupta etc.).
In this second talk on the subject, we explored the concept of the Dragon (a more literal reading of Nāga) as a personification of wildness and primordial chaos, tracking the idea in the Campbellian Hero's Journey (to make an exciting claim about merg...

We gave this talk in the lobby of a hotel in Seattle, discussing a few traditional safe guards around approaching Tantra and finding teachers/lineages/institutions that suit your predispositions. These three-fold safeguard (sat tarka, guru, āgama) becomes especially important when approach Kaula or Vama (i.e "left hand") type traditions and so in many ways, these ideas are foundational not only to spirituality as a whole but certainly to interacting with our community. Inadvertently, this talk ended up becoming guide of like a sort of "community guidelines" for us!

Jai Mā!

Here's a playlist of...

A nuanced and radical question in then singularity that is the modern experience of Tantrik transmission and education on the internet in post-modernist late-state capitalism! This lecture is part of a series on not only how to interact with spirituality as a whole but particularly with regards to how to interface with our community. 

PS: Here's a playlist of all our community guidelines+ safety

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Lectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST 
Use this link and I wi...

A lot of the recent controversy had to do with an event that happened in Seattle where one of our friends left the retreat and many felt that I was wrong for letting her walk off into the night as she did. Anyway, since then, many actors with various motives have used said friend and spoken for her as part of their virtue signaling, misguided activism & gofundme grifts. All is fair in love and war so no love lost but I thought it was rather special to be able to finally hear from said friend and see what she...

Gang, let’s get back to work. 

Last night, I started lecturing again, and in light of recent events, I thought it would be good to address: 

1. White knights and neocolonialism

2. The projection of disempowering narratives into marginalized groups especially women in the name of “protecting them from themselves” 

3. The weaponizing of those narratives of disempowerment for a consumer capitalism obsession with internet controversy at the expense of truth for the currency of attention and acclaim 

4. The Reagan-esque virtue signaling and explicit hypocrisy 

5. Ineffectual fear based anger driven acti...

Okay wow. What a week. There’s so much value in our coming together to discuss grievances, clear up misunderstandings, ask questions & clarify our roles and relationships to one another, especially in the wake of the out of control narratives on the internet that has me guilty of everything and anything including human sacrifice. For this, the public forum/open discussion style satsangh we did last week is ideal. So we did another one tonight, as we had planned last week.

Although we’ve decided Jvalamukhī (albeit coming from an ultimately good, if not a tad misaligned, place...

We gave this talk on a special occasion: the amāvasyā (the new moon) that opens the gupta navarātrī period (the 9 nights of the summer goddess festival) and so to celebrate, we reflect upon dīkshā, spiritual initiation & the systems of accountability to ensure the credibility of Tāntrik lineages so that we can better contextualize our place as a community in the midst of all of that. 

Mainly, I want to revisit the validity of intrapersonal mystical experiences like dreams and intuitions as reliable metric for religious authenticity even beyond texts and institutions and to s...

To celebrate the Gupta Navarātrī (Summer Goddess Festival) this year, we got together in Portland and decided to take up a new text, the Saundarya Laharī, an exceedingly beautiful Śrī Vidyā primary source & primer attributed to Ādi Śankarācarya to study alongside the Yoginī Hṛdāya which we started studying together last week. 

In this first of many talks on the Saundarya Laharī (follow along with this lecture series here), after a little introduction & discussion featuring Mahadevaji (which you can watch here), I jump in to introduce some foundational & preliminary ideas about Tāntrik Goddess wo...

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 you can learn more about here: A Simple Way To Worship The Srī Yantra | Khaḍgamālā Stotram if this text is new to you. It is perhaps the best introduction to the practice of Śrī Vidyā because until we understand the names of all the deities (emanations of the one deity, Tripurā), we will likely not be able to map them on to the cakra, which is just the sort of thing visual...

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 Thursday evening text study, I thought I'd share this little voice recording from the other night after our Kālāshtamī pūjā where we offer a brief run through of the first of three chapters of this text with some loose commentary. I'll drop the videos for this class moving forward in this playlist.

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 philosophical presentation of the Absolute nature of reality), mantra (a sacred sound formula which is synonymous with the Deity/Absolute Reality as a vibrational pattern) and pūjā (ritual procedures detailing the employment of mantras to contact and assimilate the energies of the maṇḍala)  have been given most often in the strictest secrecy and most reverent ritual settings. <...

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 equally valid) ideas about “Tantra”, “Guru” & most importantly “Dīkshā”, spiritual initiation.

In Indic spiritual traditions, we tend to value texts (śāstra) to substantiate our claims and this is especially true of Tantra which is in a large part a textual transmission (without dispensing with the importance of human to human spiritual transmission, through living lineages, of cou...

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 strange and exciting new ideas talk for hours on end. This is an especially exciting story if you are participating in yoga in any capacity and even more exciting and inspiring if you are, or are aspiring to be, a teacher of yoga, vedanta, tantra or any other Eastern spiritual tradition that emerged in America since...

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 talks! May this be an offering to Swamiji and to this manifest universe, to all animate and inanimate beings, to the sum total of all souls, the one God Swamiji taught us to worship! May we live up to his ideal. 

Jai Mā! Jai Guru! Jai Swamiji! 

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S...

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 word in every language can be empowered (i.e "mantricized) to create change in the world within and without. In this talk, we take some of those ideas to their logical extreme to articulate a mantra for Mother Kālī in her pure void aspect, before whom even Śrī Arjuna trembled in fear in Chapter XI of the Bhagavad Gītā! In this talk, we see how Mā in this a...

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 birthday it happened to be that day!

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Lectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST 
Use this link and I will see you there:
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For more videos, guided meditations and instruction a...

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 the Sanskrit word for "flower", the central offering in pūjā) and how we see spiritual life as a whole. This talk slaps, you guys, if I may say so myself... 

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Use this...

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 usually kept quite secret in institutional hierarchies that carefully curate distribution and access.

(not to mention of course that I'm young and cute and spiritual teachers are apparently supposed to be old and grumpy and serious and virtuous or something...)

Now, when some of my friends started posting their own content...

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 Gupta and others. In How Mantra Works & My Favorite Śakti Mantra we explained mantra-sādhanā in a properly śaktādvaita (non-dual) context and then extended from there in Kālī Gāyatrī Mantra | & How To Use Mantras to consider how the mantra can then be applied in a more traditional ritualistic, contemplative and meditative context (which Abhinavācharya might call "ānavopaya" or what we migh...

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 to one and all along the highest standards of accessibility while remaining sensitive to the subtle nuances that make secrecy important and unavoidable to some extent in the Tāntrik world, we were all crashing out together at Bhairavī Tārā Ma's and I gave this little spiel about how there is a clear precedent both classical and contemporary for sharing secret teachings like we are doing. Also, we talked a litt...

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 "traditions". 

People, often internet strangers, will almost always have something to say about your practice and as if they were the highest authorities on the subject, offer their opinions (whether asked or unasked) about what you can or cannot do. 

What human being is allowed to have power over any human being, though? When did we ac...

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 trickster out to get you and rob you of your true inheritance: joy, bliss, peace, blessedness etc. Even in Eastern traditions that don't have room for the Devil, we tend to make a devil out the world; we demonize its dynamism because we haven't understood it or how to worship it & we cherish (often times escapist an...

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 a circus gathering of weirdo outcasts that we call "sangha". 

And after all, what is a spiritual community but a gathering of weirdo outcastes for whom community and sense of belonging have been withheld by mainstream society?

Its this very need to belong, this very human craving for connection that is often leveraged against you to stay i...

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-European world and also, interestingly, Marxism to see how this Ramakrishnan approach is the necessary response to a post-modern, post-truth increasingly relativist world in which many are lapsing into nihilism, atheism or conversely, religious fanaticism. 

Because May 1st is the day the Ramakrishna Math & Mission was founded, we spend some time reflecting on what institutionalization means fo...