What Is Yoga Really? Key Takeaways from Daniel Simpson
What actually counts as yoga?
Is modern postural yoga a continuation of an ancient tradition—or have we turned yoga into something completely different?
In Episode 20 of the Enlightened Anatomy Podcast, I spoke with Daniel C. Simpson, author of The Truth of Yoga, about yoga’s history, philosophy and how ancient teachings can still be relevant to the way we practise and teach today.
Here are a few of my biggest takeaways from our conversation.
1. There has never been one “true” yoga
One of Daniel’s central points is that yoga has never been one fixed tradition.
Different texts and traditions have proposed different practices, philosophies and goals.
Even two texts that are regularly taught side-by-side on yoga teacher trainings—the Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita—present very different ideas about how we should engage with the world.
Yoga has always evolved, borrowed and changed.
Perhaps the question isn’t “Is this the authentic yoga?” but “What are we taking from these traditions, and why?”
2. Modern postural yoga is modern—and that’s okay
The flowing, posture-focused yoga many of us practise today looks very different from yoga throughout much of its history.
That doesn’t make it wrong.
I love modern postural yoga. I love flowing from one posture to another, challenging myself physically and occasionally trying to balance upside down.
But Daniel reminded me that historically, meditation and breath awareness were far more central to yoga than performing sequences of postures.
We don’t need to abandon modern asana. Perhaps we simply need to remember those roots.
Can we bring attention back to the breath? Can we create moments of stillness? Can we give students opportunities for self-inquiry rather than filling every second with instruction?
3. Ancient doesn’t automatically mean true
This is something I think about a lot as an evidence-informed yoga educator.
We sometimes assume that because an idea is ancient, it must contain a truth that modern science simply hasn’t caught up with yet.
Chakras are a good example.
Daniel explained that chakras originally functioned as part of tantric visualization practices. The familiar rainbow-coloured chakra system—and attempts to map individual chakras onto endocrine glands or nerve plexuses—came much later.
That doesn't mean subjective experiences aren't meaningful. But we should be careful about turning metaphorical, philosophical or contemplative ideas into anatomical claims.
We can respect ancient traditions without needing to prove them scientifically.
4. Yoga philosophy isn't just something to talk about
One of my favourite parts of our conversation was discussing tapas—the willingness to encounter discomfort rather than constantly pursuing what feels good.
That might happen while holding a challenging posture, but it might also happen when setting a boundary, having a difficult conversation or noticing one of our habitual reactions without immediately acting on it.
That is where yoga philosophy becomes interesting to me.
Not simply: What did Patanjali say?
But: How might this actually change the way I live?
The bigger takeaway
We don't need to recreate the yoga of 2,000 years ago.
Nor do we need to dismiss modern yoga because much of what we practise is relatively new.
We can appreciate what modern yoga gives us while remaining curious about where it came from.
And perhaps that curiosity—questioning our assumptions, examining our beliefs and becoming a little more comfortable with uncertainty—is itself part of the practice.
Listen to Episode 20 of the Enlightened Anatomy Podcast: The Truth of Yoga with Daniel C. Simpson.
Enjoyed the conversation? Check out Daniel Simpson’s book, The Truth of Yoga, for a deeper dive into yoga’s history and philosophy.
Learn more about Daniel and his work at truthofyoga.com and follow him on Instagram @truthofyoga
TRANSCRIPT
20: Daniel C. Simpson on What We Get Wrong About Yoga
[00:00:00]
Matt: Hello, my friends, and welcome to episode 20 of the Enlightened Anatomy Podcast. I've got a good one for you today. I interview Daniel C. Simpson, author of The Truth of Yoga, and it was a great interview. We talked about the origins of yoga philosophy, how it's often misinterpreted today and how yoga teachers and just yoga practitioners can incorporate more philosophy into their lives.
It's a brilliant episode. I know you're gonna enjoy it.
Quickly before we jump into the episode, if you're interested in joining me for weekly office hours and doing my courses on pain, the physiology of yoga course, as well as my co-author Andrew McGonigle's anatomy course, that is what the Enlightened Yoga Collective is all about. It is the go-to community for yoga teachers.
I really encourage you to just check out the landing page, see what it's about, because it's kind of hard to explain in one go. But it's a chance to learn from me [00:01:00] directly and to go through all the courses that both Andrew and I have created, and there's a seven-day free trial. So go check it out at enlightenedyogacollective.com.
I'll drop the link below. And for now, let's cue the intro music
Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 20 of the Enlightened Anatomy Podcast, and I'm really happy, really honored to be joined by Daniel C. Simpson today author of The Truth of Yoga, and he also teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. He teaches on yogurt- yoga teach... Not yogurt, but yoga teacher trainings and online, just [00:02:00] like I do.
So I do the anatomy component. He comes in and does the philosophy component, although we haven't worked together yet, sadly, but I'd like to at some point.
Daniel: Hopefully soon
Matt: Also the host of the Ancient Futures podcast, exploring the modern application of timeless ideas. And then he has a master's degree in yoga studies from SOAS University.
I have a master's in physiology exercise physiology. I feel like we're co- counterparts i- in different realms of,
Daniel: Date
Matt: studies related to yoga. And then he has an online course, which we'll mention at the end. So with all that said welcome Daniel. It's great to have you here.
Daniel: Well, thank you, Matt. It's an honor to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Matt: Yeah, great. And can I just also say I really love your voice. You
Daniel: Oh,
Matt: a
Daniel: thank you.
Matt: nice voice.
Daniel: I've got a great face for radio to go with it. There you
Matt: You've got a face for radio.
Daniel: go.
Matt: I love it. Okay, cool. All right. I first found out about you online on the Gram, and yeah, I just really liked your posts.
I think I commented once, "Oh, can I... You wanna be [00:03:00] interviewed on my podcast?" You said yes, which is brilliant. And I read your book, The Truth of Yoga, which I absolutely loved,
Daniel: Thank you. Yeah
Matt: book. A, I guess modern take on history, on ancient texts, particularly looking at Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, and also a modern view of yoga.
It was brilliant. And the first question I'd like to ask you, I know saw on a post, I think it was on Instagram, that you said you were originally going to call it The Bullshit of Yoga.
Daniel: No, yoga without the bullshit, technically. So I've spun it round the other way to say, "If we take out the bullshit, what's left?" The truth. Because there's a lot of things that people associate, particularly with the philosophy of yoga, that have nothing to do with yoga. We might broadly classify it as whatever you find on the mind, body, spirit shelf of the bookstore, and a lot of those things are from the Western world.
They are nothing to do with Indian traditions, and they have, to a certain extent, colonized yoga philosophy. You can see that perhaps most clearly in the [00:04:00] representation of chakras, which are given rainbow colors that you will not find in any pre-modern Sanskrit source, but are now everywhere, including in India.
So there's this weird mixing and matching of influences that really defines the modern teaching of yoga whether it's in the techniques or the framing of them with ideas that I wanted to untangle. I wanted to comb out the extraneous stuff that seems to have acculturated around yoga, and try and say what is yoga actually about now?"
And also, what was it about throughout its history? 'Cause for most of its history, it was very different to what we now know. And so I was trying to go back to the source texts, and also to draw on the knowledge from academic research in the last generation or so, and then combine that with the traditional perspective of what yoga philosophy stands for that is timeless that one will hear whenever somebody in India in particular starts giving a talk on the topic, as if everything fits together into one seamless whole.
And the truth is, it doesn't. So the truth of yoga really is [00:05:00] that there is no one truth of yoga. There are many different things that have been called yoga, and, yeah, can authentically be identified as yoga. But trying to put them all together means that they start contradicting themselves, and that's why people get confused when they start trying to read about yoga philosophy, and my job is to try and unravel that confusion and make it a bit more accessible.
Matt: That's great. I love that. A great description there. You, you mention the chakras, and
I remember when I did my teacher training in India with the Sivananda Center, and they were describing the chakras as these smoke-colored or black-colored, and I thought, This is very different to anything that I'd heard before and what I'd told people before. So it was weird to hear something completely different. And then I looked into it later on, and I have an episode, previous episode, about do chakras, kundalini exist, that sort of thing. And there are actually many different approaches to chakras or many thoughts on how many exist,
Daniel: Of course.
Matt: Way I've thought of heard of them described is as meditation points.
Is
Daniel: [00:06:00] Yes. That's certainly how they began. Yeah, they come from tantric traditions where they really function as blueprints for visualization. So in a way, one is symbolically installing these symbols and everything that they represent in parts of the body as part of a process of transforming oneself.
The whole idea that tantric traditions really bequeath to yoga practice is that the body is something that can be not necessarily ignored or transcended or overcome as earlier, more ascetic schools of yoga like to look at it, but harnessed, embraced, included perhaps used as a tool to take us to some other way of seeing and understanding.
And part of that process for a tantric ritual practitioner is to symbolically destroy their mundane, impure corporeal shell and to replace it with the body of the divine. And so installing these energies, mantras [00:07:00] representations, elements associated with various divine beings in different places is part of the process of, becoming either fit for worshiping God or in some traditions, becoming the divine.
So that's where that all comes from. But yeah, go into the modern yoga world, and people will do all sorts of things with that including suggesting that these chakras are inherent to the body and that they need to be cleansed or unblocked or in some way worked with as if they had some existence independent of our imagination of them.
But to say imagination can sound pejorative as if they're not real. Anything that we think about becomes real in the, field of our experience. So to a certain extent, they are in this strange gap between the mind and the body, whereby thinking them into existence, they become an embodied entity.
And so in that way, you can imagine anything you want to be there. It doesn't have to be the classical list. But yeah, I don't know that there's much precedent for some of the things that are taught today. The only source text I know of that talks about unblocking [00:08:00] chakras or purifying or cleansing them says you stick your finger up your bum and twirl it around, and that will cleanse your chakras.
So probably not gonna sell so many workshops, or at least not the ones that
Matt: in the book though? D-
Daniel: I think that pops up. Yeah.
Matt: Yeah. And, just quickly on chakras also because sometimes as an anatomy and physiology teacher, people in a teacher training expect me to cover that, and I'm like I'm not gonna go over that," because it's not visible, it's not dissectable, it's not something we can examine or measure.
It's not something that, that exists in, in the realm of the concrete world. So
Daniel: Yeah
Matt: it is very much, as you say, something that's the mind and the body, and yeah. I think requires maybe further investigation before we fully understand the whole idea of the chakras. It's... But I agree that our modern understanding is probably not as it was originally intended.
Daniel: The other thing that people keep trying to do, is to make the modern and the pre-modern align. So now that scientific knowledge has advanced and we're aware of some of the invisible to us from the [00:09:00] outside structures of our inner world they're trying to say that plexuses of the nerve system or endocrine glands or whatever it might be correspond to these things.
And yeah, that started in the 19th century in India, but it's turbocharged in the last 30 years or so with yoga becoming so mainstream and people wanting to find ways of saying that what they're communicating is valid. And,
Matt: Yeah
Daniel: don't know that science is ever gonna be able to explain something that comes from a different way of seeing.
This is something that one can subjectively engage with, but it will never be objectively measurable in the same way as, your pulse or other things about your biomechanical anatomy
Matt: Absolutely. Yeah. And I interviewed also Bernie Clark on his book Prana.
With that book?
Daniel: I've not read that book. No. I know Bernie's work, but yeah. Tell me
Matt: check it out. And he talks about how basically science existed, this was the best way we had of describing something that people noticed was happening in themselves, [00:10:00] you
Like, I remember arriving at my teacher training in India I arrived a day late. People were sitting on the floor eating, and I remember my heart sang. I felt something in my heart
As I arrived there c- and I felt like I'm in the right place. Now, I could go... if I don't know what that is, then I could say it's a spinning wheel of light, or now we can look at it in terms of hormones released and different variations in heart rhythm, that sort of stuff, so I- it's... But all I know is that I felt something in my heart, something felt right, and so we gave our best guess at that time, and then science changes.
We learn more things, and that's okay. We, so we don't need to always keep was at the time the best description of what we didn't understand.
Daniel: Yeah, it's a very good way of putting it, and I think also the example illustrates quite neatly that something will always be, in my opinion at least somewhat out of reach of measurement. And that's the, the, the why of the whole story. You can demonstrate with all sorts of very fancy measuring tools these [00:11:00] days what lights up in what part of the brain or, what's going on in different body functions, as you were just alluding to.
But that doesn't quite say why you had that experience. And you can make subjective sense of that through storytelling, but again, that will never be measurable. That's, that, that's just your engagement with what happens. It, it's your direct experience. And so I don't know that science is necessarily going to be capable of-- unless it has some way of reconciling the subjective and the objective into some, grand paradigm that can also reconcile the quantum and the theories of relativity in s- in some way that I can't yet even picture to myself.
In which case I'm quite happy to leave it unreconciled and to leave space for that facet of experience to be real for us all to explore for ourselves, but to be careful about generalizing out of that subjective realm as if that was objectively true or how things are or the way that everybody else should experience it.
Matt: And I think there's this idea, there [00:12:00] should be some, some rule about this, like a you know, like Occam's razor.
Daniel: Yes.
Matt: There should be some, or a logical fallacy that it's like the ancient fallacy of truth, that if something is ancient, it therefore must be true. But maybe that's not necessarily the case, and th- there are things that we now know through science. You said maybe we can't explain everything through science. Definitely we won't be able to. Love, I think, is
Daniel: Yeah.
Matt: of it. We know what love is, can you explain it in a scientific way? I could talk about hormones, which we didn't know about before, oxytocin
Daniel: Hmm.
Matt: the attachment hormone, the love hormone, dopamine, serotonin, all these other things which we didn't know about hundreds of years ago.
But still, that won't fully encapsulate what the feeling of love is, right? That subjective experience. Yeah.
Daniel: It has to be felt, exactly. And,
Matt: yeah,
Daniel: That's the beauty of yoga in a way. It's a path of direct experience. A path of knowledge to a certain extent, but it's the kind of knowledge that isn't information of the sort that we're discussing. It's about almost dissolving the need to [00:13:00] conceptualize into the direct perception of what is.
And,
That's something that we can definitely engage in that uh, a machine, as far as I can tell, won't be able to do for us, or even necessarily, capture in the doing of it. It can only be engaged with.
Matt: Yeah. So how did you get into all of this? What interested you in it. I remember seeing a post recently on Instagram about how you used to smoke pot and get high.
Daniel: Yeah, yeah
Matt: And then you... I don't know, maybe that was actually the, the start of your interest in philosophy, right?
Anyway what is your background? What was your interest?
Daniel: You guess quite close to the mark there. Um, The the honest truth is I went to India in the late 1990s as a backpacker, and I had an interest in yoga and meditation that I was struggling to explore. I had issues with anxiety. I was dealing with my anxiety issues by getting high, and I discovered that some of the best hashish in the world was made in Northern India, and that there were people who smoked a lot of it who called themselves [00:14:00] holy men.
And I thought they were onto something, and the more I discovered about these people, I realized that they were regarded in some ways as yogis, and that they were quite similar to other characters going as far back as the Rigveda who are described, basically ingesting some kind of psychoactive substance and, having some kind of transcendent experience.
And so I thought, very misguidedly that if I just got as high as I possibly could, I might get enlightened. So that was my in to thinking about yoga. I went to the Kumbh Mela in 2001, hung out with some of these characters for a bit, and tried to make sense of, where they were and what they were doing.
I tried to make a radio documentary. In fact, at the time, I was working as a journalist as well as getting a bit too high a bit too often. And yeah, eventually, to cut a very long story short, I got quite radicalized. I worked for The New York Times when they were, inventing weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein didn't possess to justify invading Iraq.
And I quit my job. I organized a music festival in the former Yugoslavia. I went [00:15:00] off the rails and,
ended up...
Matt: born, just to
Daniel: Oh, really? Okay. Yeah
Matt: he goes like that .
Daniel: This was in Belgrade, yeah, and I had this sort of-- Okay, there we are, not far. Yeah. Had, had this delusional vision that we were somehow gonna heal the wounds of the previous generation unite the dis- perhaps disenchanted and certainly estranged former brethren of the, the, the original Yugoslav state, and it was gonna kick-start some youth culture revolution across Europe.
It didn't happen. I just took too many drugs, we lost lots of money, and basically got robbed by some gangsters. And I wound up back in the UK, having quit my career, with nothing much to show for it and a serious cannabis habit. And I lost my mind, and I ended up going regularly to a yoga asana class as a way of getting back on my feet, to be honest.
Quite literally, getting grounded, finding a way to become, more comfortable with being in my body and not running away from myself with deluded ideas about how I was gonna, become the great I am. So that was my way [00:16:00] in the early 2000s to a regular committed asana practice, and very quickly, I got interested in ideas and, also started going back to India to read more, learn more.
Eventually spent two or three years coming and going, spending six months at a time in India, and just wanted to give myself over to finding out more about why people did this practice. 'Cause, it feels good to make shapes with the body. It's all very nice, but what does that have to do with some of these older ideas about liberation, and what does that even mean?
And so I wanted answers, and every time I got an answer, it was slightly different, and in the end, I wound up back at university trying to make sense of how all the different answers may or may not, as we started the conversation, fit together into, the one true yoga. And I realized there wasn't one, and that actually a lot of what we do in the modern yoga world is relatively new and actually also therefore that, as you were alluding to, thinking that things have to be old to be authentic would be very [00:17:00] problematic 'cause it would confine us all to caves doing very little indeed ever again in a desperate attempt never to be reborn.
And obviously it's a good thing that yoga has changed in order to accommodate something that is presentable in a relative, re- relatively accessible format. People can drop in and take away some benefit to the rest of their lives. But Because of all that change, it's been very easy to throw away a lot of the ideas and just associate it all with the feeling good that comes from practicing postures or breathing techniques or even meditation, and just to assume that the aim of yoga practice is to feel good.
That was not the emphasis. In fact, the earlier traditions of yoga were trying to say, "You don't need anything to feel good. In fact, you should be able to feel good even when everything's terrible." And so I guess in a way, it's really pointing towards what we need more of in the modern world the ability to be okay with things when they're really not okay.
And all around us, there are things that are really not [00:18:00] okay, and yoga can give us the capacity to be with that, meet it, and not necessarily just accept it and tune out of it, but actually engage with it perhaps, and do something different with those tools than what the early yogis were originally trying to do.
But we need to think about what their tools were if we really want to get to the truth of yoga, so to speak, whereas otherwise we're just, enjoying our bodies, which is very nice. I don't want to tell anybody off for that. I like doing it too, but is that necessarily what the truth of yoga really is when we get to the core of it?
Matt: That's brilliant. Oh, I have so many thoughts after you said all that. Just on yoga I love how you said the idea might be to be okay with not being okay,
And there are stories in your book and you've... I think we've all seen those news articles of the, the man who's had
Daniel: Yes
Matt: for 50 years now or however long, and how yoga originally was an act of penance, right?
And it was, like, overcoming pain, not just rolling around and feeling good on the floor, and not just doing whatever feels good. And that makes me [00:19:00] think of an asana class also when you're holding a side plank, you're sweating, you've got hair in your face, sweat dripping out in- into your nose, yet can you just stay there?
And even if it doesn't feel good, can you just be there and do what is at that moment the right thing? Which is just to hold the side plank, or, to listen to your body and to come out of it as needed. But that's, that is in some ways different to just do what feels good. Because if we do that, then we'll all just lie down and all do restorative class, which is brilliant.
I'm not putting down restorative class. It's... There's so much value in it. There's also some value in, in challenging yourself, in, in putting yourself in an uncomfortable situation and seeing how you respond.
Daniel: Yeah, the Sanskrit term for this stuff is tapas, and it comes from a verbal root tap, which means to heat things up. And what heats things up? It's to have two forces pushing in an opposite direction, generating friction. So our desire to have things be very comfortable and enjoyable, rubbing up against the reality of this isn't comfortable at all generates that sort of [00:20:00] friction.
But that can happen in all sorts of ways. It doesn't have to necessarily be an intense physical thing. It certainly doesn't have to involve self-mutilation, like the guys who lift their arm up for so long they can't bring it down even if they wanted to. But we, need to think a little bit more about what that going against the grain resisting habitual conditioning is all about.
And I think it always, again, comes back to this question of why. So why were the ascetics doing that? That was because they saw the fundamental root of human suffering as being desire. And this is the foundation of the Buddha's teachings. It's what Patanjali says about, why we suffer in a way as well because we're trying to, Yeah, satisfy ourselves through the mind and the senses by getting more of what we like and avoiding the things that we don't like, and that machinery is set up to frustrate us because we never get everything we want, and we can never avoid all the things that we don't want.
And the number one example is we die and most of us would rather not and averse to the idea, but it happens. [00:21:00] And so yoga, in a way, is immediately fast-forwarding to let's stare that right in the face and try to make sure that we are unconcerned about that. And the easiest way to do that is to do something very painful and ignore the desire to stop doing it, and if you do that really intensely you deconstruct the machinery of desire, leading to inaction, leading to whatever mental response arises from whether or not, yeah, the action is delivering the goods and then also from that cycling into the next action because if we get what we want, we start to think, "I want more," and we start to strategize how to achieve it.
And
Get what we want, we feel frustrated, and we want to blame somebody or do it better next time or whatever it might be. So there's this endless cycle. That's karma, and the whole aim of yoga was to stop the spinning wheel of karma, make it all end, and get off the cycle. And so if you can do that by, destabilizing this momentum to the point that it just breaks and no longer spins then you've won, so to speak, the game of yoga.
Whereas what we're doing in the modern world might [00:22:00] be slightly different, it might still benefit from understanding some of that potential function that by going against what we habitually want we might actually learn something about how to let go a bit better, how to be less demanding of what reality gives us in order to be okay.
Doesn't mean we have to like terrible things or subject ourselves to abuse or anything terrible like that. It's more that we are um, increasing our capacity to tolerate really difficulty, 'cause difficulty is coming whether we like it or not. I look at my own relationships, I look at the way in which I get triggered, and I look at, the acting out of habitual patterns.
That's what yoga can help with if we actually want to engage with what's happening here, why am I behaving this way? What can I do to make a little bit more space between, the stimulus and my habitual response to let some of that energy dissipate or perhaps [00:23:00] somehow transmute it into a more skillful action, or at least have enough space to say, "I need to step away here before I say something really unhelpful or do something that causes all sorts of problems."
And then that is the real world of what yoga can do for us, but it requires tapas, it requires the, the, "No," and pushing back against, what's the normal way of being. So we have to think about, yeah, why I think, and then it really can be beneficial. We can take that off the mat. You don't have to be doing Vasishthasana and then holding it a long time.
It can be, how we are in relation to people who have expectations of us. So instead of giving in to the people-pleasing tendency, we're learning to be very skillful about saying, " I hear that you would like me to do that. Unfortunately, I'm not going to, and this is why." And ... so ... And that would be really painful for many of us, but there are ways to get better at that
Matt: Yeah. uh, Talking on tapas and relating it to what we know about physiology also. So within the muscle cell, ATP, adenosine triphosphate, allows the myosin head to [00:24:00] bind to actin, that's what creates all muscular contractions, whether it's a shortening or a lengthening phase against resistance. And the, a byproduct is force and also heat.
Daniel: Hmm,
Matt: So
Daniel: interesting
Matt: contraction, without you even realizing it, is also producing heat and is producing that tapas you could say also. I love tying physiology and what we know about the body into ancient texts about uh, about yoga and uh, even little things like that, I find that really beautiful.
Daniel: I think it really helps, yeah.
Matt: desire, and I've heard it said that desire is is at the heart of all suffering, which totally makes sense. I think that's in yogic texts and in Buddhist texts. And there have certainly been times, like at the end of a yoga practice in Shavasana or maybe in a seated meditation, I'm lying there and I think th- this moment is perfect just as it is.
I desire nothing. And that, to me, is the point of the yoga, [00:25:00] to have those moments when you think, "I don't need anything." This moment is beautiful as it is. And I think we can then maybe find moments like that in our own life, sitting watching the sky or being with friends or whatever. And to, to be able to let go of desire, Is, is something that we can experience through our yoga practice, so...
Daniel: it's available at any moment, honestly speaking. But to remember that and to have the, I guess background of practicing stepping into that to be able to at will, inhabit it is a challenge. And again, bringing some of the philosophical framework into the presentation of the physical practice can remind people that's the point of, all of this training, is to take it elsewhere and to have that capacity.
To be able to actually see some autonomy and agency in, our ability to, I guess, cultivate our inner world ourselves regardless of what's coming at us from outside, and to use that to be more skillful in our lives [00:26:00] in whatever way we choose. I don't think yoga has a prescription for how we should behave beyond a few basic tenets d- despite people's desire to go back to Patanjali and say, "His list of yamas and niyamas is the Ten Commandments of yoga."
I mean, You just have to get to number four and the requirement to be celibate to realize that he had a very specific agenda for world renouncers that doesn't necessarily tally with ours. And even when you get to the first two, non-harming and truth, they're in conflict. If we're really telling the truth all the time, we'll end up in a bloodbath 'cause people won't like hearing the truth that much.
So we have to be judicious with speaking the truth and offset it with the desire not to, hurt too much. "Speak the truth, but not to punish," as Thich Nhat Hanh put it. So this delicate balance of truth and non-harming. So absolutes are all, unhelpful, but Patanjali was fully into absolutes.
He's a kinda yoga fundamentalist. His aim is to try and convince you that the outside world holds nothing of value. The only satisfaction that's lasting is the one [00:27:00] where you don't need anything. That's santosha, the contentment that is sixteen times better than the best sex, the accompanying commentary effectively says.
The ability to just have the bare minimum for survival and to be completely okay with that, to not need anything else. And yeah, that's challenging. Most of us are not looking to do that. We're in a society that encourages us to want more. We're under great pressure because of, the economic reality to keep getting more 'cause prices keep rising, so unless we keep getting more we're going under.
So it's tricky to balance this yoga philosophy with the the modern world's requirements. And I think it's sometimes more helpful to have our own, set of criteria, values, principles that we're using to shape our engagement with the world and not necessarily to think it's all there in one text.
In fact, there is no text that gives us the blueprints for how to behave in twenty twenty-six or wherever it is into the future. We'll need to think sensibly for that about that for ourselves. And so a [00:28:00] bit of guidance from the past is helpful, but that's why I think it's valuable to take, modern knowledge and look backwards through those eyes not to try and say that the old information was saying the same thing But in fact, to say, this is what we now know, this is where we now are, this is what's important, but how might I draw out of the past a few key principles that will combine with that knowledge to do something useful, like with tapas or with precepts that will guide us skillfully in our behavior?
But the bottom line is yoga is value neutral. You could use yoga to get very effective at firing a gun. And so it's really up to us to give ourselves a framework that aligns with something a little bit more noble than that.
Matt: Yeah, good point. You could use yoga to abuse people, as has happened
Daniel: Many gurus
Matt: in various cults as early as what, Charles Manson. It all started with the peace, love, and understanding movement, and then it went very south from there. And while we're talking about Patanjali in my teacher training we looked at [00:29:00] the Bhagavad Gita, and so I've never read
Daniel: Hmm.
Matt: Patanjali's Yoga Sutras in depth,
and what I love about your book is you basically go into a great depth about both of those two seminal texts that, that are central to yoga philosophy. I particularly liked how you talked about how the last two chapters of the Yoga Sutras are rarely quoted. And it...
Daniel: Yes
Matt: examples of some of the things that it says.
So advanced yogis, siddhis, with their advanced practice they'll be able to read minds and predict the future. And, I... Up to that point I was like, "Yeah, okay, I can kinda get that." That can be read in a poetic way. The more that you know, the more advanced you are, I guess, or the more that you can see reality clearly and understand yourself and other people, you can maybe understand other people's thoughts a little bit better.
Not that you're, like, literally getting into their head, but, you know. so I was like, "Okay, I was with you." But then it gets really supernatural , so then Patanjali does say you can actually enter the bodies of other people, [00:30:00] you can pierce rocks, and you can even become invisible,
Daniel: You can fly as well, yeah.
Matt: So I guess we, just by focusing on the beginning of the sutras, we are actually picking and choosing, and we're not taking the whole text um, for what it is. Is that fair to say?
Daniel: It is, yeah.
Matt: thing
Daniel: Well, I,
I, both things are true there, Matt, yeah. I think, It would benefit us all a lot to acknowledge that what a lot of people have said about the Yoga Sutra honestly isn't true or at best is a very partial presentation of what it's actually saying, and therefore what Patanjali says is actually very different to what we might imagine he says.
So that's the first thing. And the second thing is perhaps that's, quite a good thing that he doesn't say what we want him to say, 'cause it doesn't oblige us to take the Yoga Sutra as the yoga Bible, as it's often presented, and imagine that somehow everything we're doing is aligned with that.
It's a text for world renouncers. It's got [00:31:00] some very helpful descriptions of, core principles of philosophy and practice that will be applicable to other modes of engagement with yoga. But it doesn't really describe the sort of thing that the Gita does. It's almost the polar opposite.
The Gita is by definition actually rejecting the worldview of the Yoga Sutra. The Yoga Sutra is probably written later, but it's compiling a thousand years of prior knowledge about how to turn away from the world. The Gita is saying to turn away from the world is, a delusion. First of all, you won't be able to escape the problem of suffering by doing that, and secondly, all you're gonna be doing is sitting in the corner saying I'm not causing any harm, while somebody else out there is causing a lot more harm."
So you need to step up, do your duty in terms of playing your role in society and seeing that as a yoga practice. Live life as an offering with no desire for personal reward and that is, the path of yoga. It can either be an atheist, in quote marks, approach, where you just see it as a [00:32:00] non-self-centered way of living or it can be a theist path, where you basically say, "Everything I do is an offering to God, and my job is to serve God."
And then, either way, you've removed the self-centered I need, I want, I get, mechanics from the way that the mind engages with action, and so the Gita says action is what yoga is all about. In fact, "Fixed in yoga, perform actions," it says. So it's the exact opposite of the renouncer worldview.
And so I was trying to highlight that there's massive difference between those two sources. But then the Gita itself is not the Bible for us either. It talks about a hierarchical structure of society that people are born into so the caste system. It's set on a battlefield. Krishna tells Arjuna to fight.
In fact, he tells him in the second person imperative, "Kill," and the yoga teachings are therefore used to engage in mass murder effectively. It's done for the greater good. It's got some sort of, at some point you have to stand up against the bullies otherwise they win type message, [00:33:00] but, violence is definitely there.
It's the opposite of non-harming. It's using yoga to be more effective on the battlefield. And then I suppose finally it brings God into it, and a lot of people are not looking to bring God into yoga. A text that is titled literally God's Song might not be the most appealing document. So all these texts have their advantages and disadvantages, and I think it's helpful to see all of that and then to go back and say okay what are they saying?
What of that still speaks to me?" And to think, yes we can be a bit selective, but we need to do that responsibly instead of just taking the bits that interest us and claiming that's what Patanjali said it to be saying, "Here are some ideas inspired by what Patanjali presents. Even though he takes them in another direction, we could do this with them."
That would be a lot more honest, but that would require people to have the confidence to say, "These are my ideas, and this is my take on yoga philosophy," and that's a scary place to be. It's much easier to hide behind Patanjali. But then as you say, if we do that [00:34:00] what of magic powers? What of the desire to basically let go of any interest in worldly engagement, to enter a state in which the material world holds no further purpose for us?
That's what the culmination of the Yoga Sutra says, the very final sutra. It doesn't say, "Get up out of your Shavasana and uh, get on with life." It effectively says, "Enter the Shavasana from which you never get up. Let go of this world. It's of no use." That's not a message that most people today are aligned with I think it would be helpful just to see all that, talk about it more in trainings, get clear this is not our document, but it's still got some good ideas.
And in fact, if we were to all read the first part of the second chapter rather than the second part, which talks about the eight limbs that everybody loves to latch onto 'cause one of them is postures, then we might learn a lot more about the way that the mind causes us problems and what we can do about it.
Matt: I think as humans we like to have a set of instructions. It would be
Daniel: Mm-hmm.
Matt: One book [00:35:00] that said, "Do this and you're guaranteed happiness." And the reality is it probably comes from a variety of sources, and it,
Daniel: Yes
Matt: comes from, yeah, like you said, we need to take something from this book, take something from that book, and think neither of them tell you exactly what to do. They give you some suggestions, some like precepts. And the Bhagav- Bhagavad Gita definitely doesn't tell you what to do. It says, " Do what you think is right in that moment, and don't ask for the fruit of your action. Don't be connected to the result of your action. Just do the right thing in that moment." So as difficult as it is to hear, I think really we just need to be constantly questioning ourselves as to what is the right thing for me
Daniel: to
Mm-hmm.
Matt: be doing in this moment, and there's no single text that can answer that for us, is there?
Daniel: No, and that's a great point, and the word obviously that the Gita is using in association with that is dharma, and that's a word that's missing from a lot of modern yoga vocabulary, but it's integral to Indian traditions, and it basically means right action, the right thing. It can have the flavor of, social [00:36:00] obligations, rules but it can also relate in a way to purpose or essential nature of something, and really it's to figure out the core of what is the essential nature of virtue?
What is it that we see is right? And that's context specific. There is no universal principle of that other than, as you say, to ask the question. If it's a question, then we're aligned with the, the spirit of yoga that's been there since the early Upanishads, inward-focused inquiry, trying to figure out, what's true and what isn't, and accepting that basically we've got a massive self-delusion machine behind our eyeballs that enables us to tell ourselves all sorts of stories that aren't true and we need to get better at seeing beyond that, and instead to have the capacity to get out of our own way and align ourselves actually with what we might call our felt sense, our gut instinct, or our, our heart's understanding of what's true rather than the ideas that our [00:37:00] brain can come up with to rationalize self-centeredness, which is usually what is going on when we start to moralize.
So I think it's, yeah, it's a challenge. The earliest descriptions of the goal of yoga, the aim of the yogi involve finding something that's hidden in the heart that needs to be revealed. That is the true self, the Atman or the Purusha, depending on the philosophical system. But the location is this cave of the heart that has to be opened, and the brightness and immortality effectively of this thing that isn't a thing is revealed.
It's a way of being, a way of relating that's more to do with this open-heartedness than narrow-mindedness. And so the narrow-mindedness is useful. You develop the capacity to concentrate in order to reveal this open-heartedness. But that's something again we don't talk about so much in the average asana class, or when people do, it's a little bit over the top, as they used to do in Anusara yoga about heart-opening poses and so on.
And yeah, it's not quite as simple [00:38:00] as that.
Matt: And I think you could do a lot of heart-opening poses and yet still be a bad person or still be a
Daniel: Some would argue that, some would argue that the guru of Anusara Yoga may have proved that point
Matt: Yes, exactly. Yeah. So y- you said a lot of classes don't mention that these days. In your book also, you talked about Satchitananda, the innermost
Or this, this blissful self which we're trying to, reach, get in t- touch with to, to realize we have this inner sense of bliss. And you say in your book also most yoga classes never mention this Satchitananda. And, said that today also. So is there a way we could bring more philosophy into our yoga classes, or should we even? Because, maybe we can let people arrive at their own spiritual experiences and just give them the space for it and just h- be quiet. What do you think?
Daniel: Absolutely. I quote my brother here, who made it into my book as a very pithy summary of what Patanjali was getting at, which is basically sit down and shut [00:39:00] up. And I think, there's a, a lot of good could come in the modern yoga teaching world from sit down and shut up. It would immediately trigger most students if you said we're not gonna do any asanas," in the sense of moving around, making shapes.
"You're just gonna sit still and be with yourself for the next hour." And they'd say, "But that's meditation, that's not yoga." Yoga was meditation until re- relatively recently. It was a seated practice until, the last millennium, and even then, the things that weren't seated were just warmups for sitting until very recently indeed.
And so yeah, I think the space that we can open up through skillful presentation of techniques might invite people to, explore it for themselves. But yeah, it's helpful to give a few pointers of orientation, and obviously the bar is quite high if we start talking about Sat-Chit-Ananda, which in any case is really an, an idea from Vedanta philosophy, which although it's used to explain yoga, is technically speaking a separate philosophical system.
The [00:40:00] yoga version of that is just simply not needing anything, to be okay with things as they are. And even just to remind people that that's what yoga texts say, almost with a, a shrug of the shoulders and, an uncomfortable giggle. Because, for most of us, that's just not true.
We're not okay with things just as they are. We want them to improve. We want more of this, less of that a better kind of something, otherwise we'll, not be happy. We'll stamp our foot until we get it, almost, in our minds. And so just to sow the seed of the idea that is a possible thing and that it is something we might slip into even just for a few moments,
To point to the gap between thoughts or some space between breaths and to see, what might happen if you just rest there for a little bit longer than you thought you might and just when it's uncomfortable, let go.
But to remind people that opening up space into which, something might flow, from which something might be revealed that's I think what the aim of the yoga teacher really should be, rather than giving a [00:41:00] lecture or trying to suggest,
Matt: Yeah
Daniel: know there's some guarantee you come to my class, you're gonna get awakened," 'cause that's quite a high aspiration.
Matt: And this doesn't mean we're doing something wrong with modern postural yoga. I wanna make that
Daniel: Not at all. No, no
Matt: the modern postural yoga. I love flowing from a wild thing to a high lunge and a half moon, going to a handstand. I love it. It feels so good to me, and it feels like a moving meditation. And you had an in- a recent Instagram post where you said, all of the modern postural yoga is new, and all that yoga originally was basically breath awareness and meditation, if I remember correctly. And so that's what I've been saying in my classes this week, like it's wonderful, the, the postural yoga that we're gonna be doing, and let's have fun trying to balance in handstands. But let's also remember that all that yoga is, that it, which it comes down to, is that breath awareness and that meditation, which we can also have in the movement and in the quieter moments also. So I think we can not get rid of modern postural yoga [00:42:00] as it is, but just also remember its roots, and I think that's why it's really useful to have people like you around to remind us of that.
Daniel: Oh, thank you, Matt. Yeah, and you highlight there two things that can be very easily brought into the presentation of postural yoga. Something to do with engagement with the flow of the breath, something to do with concentration that i-i-immediately anchor what is a relatively new practice, yeah, the sequences of shapes on mats in what was there for many centuries before that, and also provide that foundation that might lead into the spacious.
And there are lots of teachers who never talk about any of this, who just teach us in a practice to communicate that because of the way that they were taught and because of their own engagement with that in their practice. So absolutely, in no way am I wanting to, piss from a great height on the world of modern postural yoga.
It's given me a lot. It's helped me out of an addiction. It's, enabled me to become more skillful in all sorts of fields of my life. It led me into the study that leads me to teach what I do now. But at the same time, I think we have to actually just be honest about [00:43:00] the fact that it is modern postural yoga, and that's quite a triggering term for some teachers because they like to think it's always been thus.
Or if they've got a bit of awareness that things have changed, they're like why are you denigrating it as modern? Why can't it be seen as the same old yoga?" Especially if they're teaching it in a way that keeps alive some of those principles. And I think the main reason to emphasize that is because before we get to the modern era, there is no history of postures being the sort of main methodolo-methodology of teaching.
It-it's useful to see that's different and to start thinking about what might have got lost in translation as a result. ' Cause otherwise, it's very easy to get completely the wrong message, get fully obsessed with what the body can do, get very egotistical about the sense of achievement that comes from being good at bending, and,
Matt: Yes
Daniel: the cachet you can gain a bit less these days perhaps than ten years ago on social media.
But yoga teachers still get hired based on their follower numbers and their ability [00:44:00] to execute fancy shapes. And yeah there's all sorts of delusion that creeps in very easily that can lead in precisely the opposite direction. So just being aware that's a risk because we're doing something that doesn't quite have the same pedigree as sitting still gives us some food for thought, makes us inquire what might be missing?
Makes us want to study a little bit. We don't have to read all the books ever or, become a philosopher, but just to start with the question of why are we actually doing this, and how might we do it to be better aligned with that why? Yeah, that's yoga philosophy 101. We can all do that
Matt: That's brilliant. I like that. And I like how you said you're not here to piss from a great height on what is yoga and what isn't. And that reminds me of a story which I really liked from your book. It was the s- it was the letter from Kuvalayananda
Talking about Krishnamacharia. And Krishnamacharia is seen as the godfather of modern postural yoga.
So
Daniel: Yes
Matt: What Pattabhi Jois studied with him, [00:45:00] Iyengar
Other people, maybe even Sivananda.
Daniel: No, not Shivananda, but he was a contemporary, yeah
Matt: Oh, okay. So he was, Yeah, Krishnamacharia is you could say at least largely, in part largely responsible for modern postural yoga as it is, right?
Which we know, which I teach, which I love, and yet Kuvalayananda wrote this letter saying basically when he saw what Krishnamacharia was doing, he was like, "That ain't yoga."
Daniel: Yeah, effectively. He
Matt: yoga
Daniel: called him out,
Matt: know
Daniel: yes, yeah, called him out to his boss, basically, tried to get him canceled, so to speak. Yeah. Here's your employee. I've advised him to not jumble up his yoga with all this non-yogic gymnastics stuff." And, that was so hypocritical of Kuvalayananda 'cause like all of the early 20th century postural yoga innovators, he was mixing and matching.
He himself had been a martial artist. There were lots of ways in which yoga was borrowing from other Indian traditions, wrestling, martial arts, acrobatics, dance, and also [00:46:00] exercise systems that had come from the West, Krishnamacharya being one of those great innovators. We don't really know what he got from where because he didn't tell us, but he definitely got some things that were from outside the yoga canon.
He was called on it, and that made it into Kuvalayananda's biography photostat of this this letter that was sent to the Maharaja of Mysore. I just find it very funny that actually it was uncontroversial and self-evident in the 1930s that people were mixing and matching things that had come from outside yoga with things that were yogic whereas today people are still getting triggered by that online, saying, "How dare you suggest that my Ashtanga vinyasa practice isn't, extremely authentic, come from the Yoga Korunta, um, Korunta um, all sequenced many moons ago by some great rishi?"
Whereas it just doesn't seem it's true . So why don't we get more comfortable with that and just,
Matt: Yeah
Daniel: what we can get from the practice without needing to make it as old as it can possibly be in order to, A, have faith in the teacher, [00:47:00] B, have faith in the system and C, almost elevate it to some sort of infallible status when actually we ought to be questioning, is this sequence of postures all that helpful to do six days a week for 40 years?
I think if you ask many senior Ashtanga teachers about that, they will, if they're honest, start to question some of the dogma that is presented, and many of them actually teach a lot differently later in life than they started out doing for precisely that reason.
Matt: And I can't remember where it was in your book, but you mentioned about how even yoga philosophy has mixed and matched. So
Things from I, I'm not very good at remembering what, the names of texts, but some texts took, " Okay, I like that philosophy, so I'm gonna take that bit," and borrowing from Buddhism also, right?
So even in the philosophy, which seems like, okay, - no matter what modern postural things are happening, the philosophy is unchanging, right? Like you said at the beginning, what is timeless and all this stuff. But even that [00:48:00] has mixed and matched and taken things. So everything is an evolution.
Everything is mix and matching, and that's a beautiful thing because we're taking the things that work best at that time
Daniel: Hmm.
Matt: Best with people, and things that worked and resonated with people 1,000 years ago might not work these days. So I f- I found that really interesting to learn that even yoga philosophy has mixed and matched
Daniel: I think that's a very helpful message to share in the modern world because the whole history of yoga has effectively involved what is these days called cultural appropriation, taking things from another tradition unacknowledged and reframing them to suit your own purposes. That's the textbook definition of to appropriate.
In the modern world, people are talking about something that has a power imbalance, and that's particularly influenced by the history of Western colonialism. People of Indian descent seeing white Western yoga teachers cherry-picking stuff from their sacred tradition in order to make money, you know, annoys some people.
But it's not a new phenomenon, and it's also happening in India, and it's [00:49:00] been a consistent feature of how traditions evolve. So I think what we really need to do is perhaps lose interest in that term and to think more carefully about what the problem is. Yes, there can be problems with disrespect.
There can be problems with dishonesty. There can be problems with, you know- pretending, black is white. Also equality, yeah, and access to things and the ways in which something that isn't from our own culture is ransacked almost. We need to be careful about that, but at the same time, that is what cultures have done to each other consistently throughout the history of human civilization, not just in the field of yoga.
All culture is borrowed, it's exchanged it is cross-pollinating. That's how ideas develop, that's how they spread. And so what really that comes down to for me is the importance of two things, to be respectful, to acknowledge, this is not our tradition to do what the hell we like with. We have some degree an obligation to the tradition if we're gonna use the word yoga.[00:50:00]
That's come from the Sanskrit language, it's come from the ancient Indian subcontinent, and if we've got no interest in any of the source texts or ideas or transmission traditions that have brought it down to us, then why are we even using the word? Just call it spiritual stretching and go and do something else.
But if we are, gonna think about yoga, then also we don't need to take on board some of the messaging that sometimes comes from the yoga police, so to speak, which is we need to defer to Indian teachers and take it all in a particular way and, sign up for the one true yoga. Partly 'cause in the modern world that sometimes is coming with a very strong Hindi nationalist hidden agenda but also because, none of these texts are the blueprints for what we're doing here and now.
So we need to get more skillful at trying to preserve some of the principles of traditional yoga and keep alive some of the functions of the practice while giving ourselves a bit more freedom to let the form and the, the, the modality [00:51:00] change to suit our requirements. But not to turn it into something completely different so that it's actually strengthening the ego, rationalizing harming or any other of many different things we could say that would be leading in the opposite direction to most previous yoga traditions.
And so I think it's useful to study, it's useful to reflect, and above all, it's useful to be honest about the fact that we are changing things. By opening our mouths and talking about yoga, we are presenting it in a new way. By teaching it, by practicing it, we're adapting it to our circumstances. That's okay, but just be mindful of that being what we're doing and try to also be conscious about, " Am I trying to, in some way, keep a connection to what I inherited?
Otherwise, what am I handing on to the next generation?"
Matt: I think that's one of the best and most nuanced conversations or arguments I've heard in terms of the cultural appropriation discussion. That, yeah that, that really works for me. That really resonates. As opposed to if, if you are white and teaching yoga, you're inherently wrong.
That doesn't feel [00:52:00] right?
Daniel: No
Matt: and just because you're Doing yoga in leggings, that's inherently wrong. But there definitely has to be some respect to where it comes from, and appreciation from both sides that is a history of mixing, matching.
Daniel: And a history of colonialism, which really poisoned the well to a certain extent. Sorry
Matt: Yeah, yeah, Yeah. So that sucks about colonialism. Yeah.
Daniel: can we do? We, again, we should...
Matt: should not have done that, agreed. That's stupid.
Daniel: are where we are and,
Matt: Yeah,
Daniel: know, at some point we have to move on.
Matt: That. We need to honor, accept that was the history, and there are still
Daniel: Yes
Matt: that, of that to this day, absolutely. And as white people, we privileges that other people of color don't. Yeah, that's definitely an important aspect of the conversation too, completely.
Daniel: I'd just like to underline one last thing about it, which is that a lot of yoga teachers struggle with this because they are effectively, brought into an understanding of all of the problems and not necessarily presented with many solutions other than the sort of, unspoken idea that [00:53:00] if they just sign up for the right number of courses that will tell them how to not appropriate it, they'll be, okay, and they're walking on their tiptoes worried about getting carded by these very vigilant policers of what they're up to, and I don't think that helps.
I think as a yoga teacher it's much more important to just feel like it's okay to explore for yourself and to just be mindful of being careful about how you go about that and that there is no perfect way to engage with this tradition. But, there are obviously some things to avoid and that's fine, and they're no-brainers, but you won't get the, the magic blueprint to not be accused of cultural appropriation, and so better to just be clear in your own heart about what you're doing and why.
Matt: Oh, that's a great point. Yeah. Just thinking back on, on your past, your history, y- the pot smoking, the trying to save the world, maybe even in, a radicalized way. But all of those things contributed to what you're doing now. And so like any of us, all of our past [00:54:00] experiences helped us become who we are.
Whereas if you had just, become a CPA, an accountant from university, maybe we wouldn't be having this conversation, most likely not. So it's interesting to think that your history has brought you to, to be who you are today. And yeah, I think we in the yoga world are benefiting from your knowledge, so thank you.
Daniel: Oh, thank you. I sometimes joke I've taken so many wrong turns, I wound up in the right direction. But that almost then disparages those turns. I couldn't do anything else. That was to, put it in philosophical terms, my karma. That was the way I was made. I was conditioned.
That's what happened. I'd like to look back and think I could have done it differently and chosen a different course at these particular moments that I still sometimes look back on with a slight sense of shame. But but that's what happened and it was very hard to do it differently, otherwise I would have done it differently.
So here I am. But we can learn from that, and we can also, I think, use that as fuel for this inquiry. So for me, part of it's been actually there's a lot of ego that can manifest in trying to, beat yourself up and say, "I'm [00:55:00] through with all that. That was a terrible way to be." I used to almost, put myself on a pedestal as the bad guy and talk about all the terrible mistakes I'd made, and that was another way of self-cherishing.
And so I think we're always learning. We're always trying to process the past and try and move forwards. To ignore the past means we don't learn anything, but we can easily get lost in it as well.
Matt: Yeah. And that's applying the spiritual teachings to your own life, to the philosophy of yoga. Because it's one thing to think of it as this separate thing in these texts, but actually how can I apply it to my life? How can I be more humble? How can I be following my dharma, doing the right action in the right moment, and less attached to the results?
And it comes down to things, like you said, like saying, " No, I'm not going to do that," or being polite, or choosing your words in the right way. Yeah, that's a nice marriage, I think of these texts which seem quite foreign to our actual life. We actually apply this and put it in a daily practice? All right, Daniel that's been great. I really appreciate it. It's been a, a great conversation. [00:56:00] Um, I've learned a lot. Um, My podcast is called Enlightened Anatomy 'cause I focus on science and how it can be enlightening, and I think this is n- so this isn't exactly I guess it's not science exactly, but you have looked at the texts in a very rigorous and scholastic way, and so I think that's how it fits in with my podcast.
And at the end of the day it's just to help us become better people, be a little bit happier, and to learn. And I think that's definitely happened today. So if people do wanna learn more from you, what- how would they go about it? I know you've got a course coming up, which I think sounds really good.
Daniel: Hmm. Well, I mean, If I may uh, I'll, I'll attempt some sort of fancy etymological high wire act, 'cause the word science comes from the Latin to know scire. And so
Act of trying to know is what science is all about. And there is a word in Sanskrit as well, the verbal root vid is to know, and vidya is knowledge, which is also sometimes translated as science.
[00:57:00] Yoga is described as vidya, and the yoga vidya or the hatha vidya in medieval texts is the science of hatha yoga, is how it's sometimes translated. So there is a large crossover between knowledge and science, and the uh, the course I offer, this year-long immersion, is called The Path of Knowledge for a reason, really, because I think, yeah, there's something about knowledge that is the core of this tradition, and there's something about it that is it is scientific in a way.
It's it's using the mind skillfully, that's what yoga traditions have been pointing towards, in order to see beyond the mind. So there's often an anti-intellectualism, I think, in the yoga world which doesn't have so much time for either science or study and is much more into, gut feelings and what might be bracketed under the heading of woo woo.
Um, But I think there's something actually very precise and logical about what yoga teachings are asking us to engage in. It's, it's an inquiry, and so I offer over a year-long process an [00:58:00] inquiry into everything that yoga has been throughout its history, from the earliest evidence to today that will give us the tools to really go deep into the study of each tradition and also an awareness of what academics have discovered about those traditions in their attempt to make sense of history.
And then to bring the practical philosophy side of it to bear by meeting every couple weeks for a, a seminar live online, where we talk about how we make sense of these ideas, these practices, these theories, and how they relate to what we do as practitioners, teachers, or curious armchair enthusiasts, whatever it may be.
And so we've got a group of people who are coming from lots of different backgrounds, from all over the world, in fact. That's the beauty of meeting online. So there's lots of different perspectives. We all learn from each other. I learn from other participants. It's not really, me teaching as such.
I present information in some videos. I facilitate conversations, and I share information that I've gathered [00:59:00] from my reading and my studies, and effectively it presents what I used to teach on the master's degree at SOAS. But instead of doing that in a very, scholastic, a-a-academic way.
That you've got to learn it in this very objective, distanced format where we're not gonna talk about your personal engagement with it. We're going to just try and get to some analytical core of what's true about history. I'm trying to say we can do that at the same time as then immediately relating that back to us and what we actually do with this information and why even care about it in the first place.
So I think it's a, yeah, great opportunity for anybody who feels that, yeah, they learned a bit about philosophy in teacher training, they've tried to think a little bit about these topics, they read yoga texts, they perhaps listen to podcasts or talks, and they're often left with the feeling of, " I would really like some guidance on how all this stuff fits together."
This is an opportunity to get that, to not only hear it from somebody else in the person of me, but actually to be [01:00:00] offered the opportunity to find one's own language for talking about it. To get, to a point where one is confident and clear identifying, what makes sense from a teacher or practitioner perspective about what yoga is.
And also being able to say there's all these other things too, but they're less of interest to me." And if we look back into the past, we do find a lot of it isn't necessarily of interest, but it's still very helpful to know about it, and it gives us lots of food for thought
Matt: Right.
Daniel: So
Matt: yeah. Sounds like a great course. I'll be sure to drop it in the show notes, okay? A
Daniel: Oh, thank you. Yeah.
Matt: To your
Daniel: Truthofyoga.com, if I may say so.
Matt: truthofyoga.com. Great. All right. And if people wanted to follow you on social media?
Daniel: @ truthofyoga on the Instagram. Yes
Matt: Great. Okay. With that said, Daniel we'll close here. It's been a great interview and yeah, thanks very much for taking your time.
Daniel: Thank you so much for inviting me. Yeah, and thank you for your great questions, and I love the yeah, the scientific perspective that you bring. I think that's a very important thing to be sharing in the yoga [01:01:00] world, and to, to also hold it lightly in relation to a traditional understanding, having, trained as a teacher in Sivananda Ashram, that's already one foot squarely in the, Indian worldview as well.
So I like the fact that you can bridge those two in, in the way that you present it
Matt: Yeah. And for me I teach a lot of critical thinking too, and that's at the heart of all of this, of philosophy, of
Yourself, of understanding your biases. Critical thinking I think is such an important skill today. So
Daniel: 100%, 100%.
Matt: Great. Thank
Daniel: Thank you again.
Matt: a great rest of your day.
Thank you.
Daniel: You too. Cheers.
Speaker 5: What a great interview that was, my friends. What did you think? It was probably one of my favorites, and I just wanted to close with a few thoughts that really stood out for me. I really liked Daniel's thoughts on tapas, how yoga is not necessarily just about always doing what is easy, but about [01:02:00] being okay with things not being okay.
I also really enjoyed learning about how yoga philosophy involved a lot of mixing and matching, and he goes into more about that in the book, which I, of course, highly recommend. And lastly, I thought the discussion on cultural appropriation was very relevant and
one of the most nuanced and intelligent ones I'd heard.
And I fully appreciate the irony of two white men talking about cultural appropriation in terms of yoga. But I think his points were nonetheless very valid.
And as important as it is to acknowledge the source texts of yoga philosophy, it doesn't mean we necessarily need to accept every single thing that's stated in it [01:03:00] as truth. For example, also in his book, he talks about how the Hatha Yoga Pradipika says that you should practice yoga in a dung-covered hut in a prosperous country. So does that mean if you're not in a prosperous country and you're not in a dung-covered hut, then you're not doing the proper yoga? Obviously not.
So just because something was written a long time ago doesn't necessarily mean that it's true. But it's also important to acknowledge the roots.
I definitely, of course, recommend checking out Daniel's book and his course, and checking out my own courses through the Enlightened Yoga Collective, uh, with courses on pain science, physiology, anatomy, and also just helping you become a better yoga teacher, including office hours with myself and Andrew.
And if none of that applies, if you'd like to just support the podcast, you can do so for as little as $3 a [01:04:00] month. Check out the link in the show notes of Support the Podcast.
So until the next episode, stay curious, and I'll see you next time.
Speaker 3: Thank you for listening to the Enlightened Anatomy Podcast. We would be grateful if you would leave a review and a five-star rating. Be sure to tune in next time for more science-based knowledge to get enlightened and help others.
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