Loading...

PODCAST

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish

Nishanth Selvalingam

The world of Yoga is wide and varied. In this podcast, yogi Nish the Fish shares the deeper dimensions of Yoga, Vedanta and Tantra, asking the big questions: why do we practice? What is meditation? What is the purpose of a human life? What is Beauty? What is Death? Nishanth Selvalingam studied various South Asian philosophies with his Shaivite grandfather in an ashram in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and moved to Los Angeles to study philosophy, teach yoga and play guitar in a rock band. Join him and

health & fitness alternative health

All Episodes

242:04

How Did Yoga, Vedanta, Tantra & Kali Come To America?...

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/07/05

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 o...

en-us

178:31

Spirituality for Nihilists, Hedonists, Materialists &...

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/07/05

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!&nb...

en-us

201:52

Mantra For Kālī As Void

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/07/05

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...

en-us

241:12

Ecstatic Songs to Krishna | Mira As South Asian Baddie

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/07/03

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! 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 an...

en-us

121:31

Why Do We Offer Flowers To God? | Mahārtha Mañjarī

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/06/27

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... Hit Me Up x Support the show Lectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Frida...

en-us

174:07

Why Are People So Mad on The Internet About Tantra?

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/06/27

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 som...

en-us

180:32

How To Turn Every Word Into A Mantra

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/06/27

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 ...

en-us

140:15

Should We Share Tāntrik Secrets On The Internet?

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/06/27

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...

en-us

106:52

How To Not Be A Cult | Protecting Your Autonomy in...

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/06/07

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 ...

en-us

96:37

Is Kālī Lying To You? | & Why I Love Women Who Lie

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/06/07

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 i...

en-us

120:11

Everyone Is Allowed To Learn Tantra | Punk Rock Tantra

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/06/07

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.&nbs...

en-us

165:47

Tāntrik Marxism | The Revolution of Redistributing...

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/05/19

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. B...

en-us

133:13

Chinnamastakā & How To Actually Make Love

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/05/14

Over the years, we've done quite a few lectures on Mā Chinnamastakā, one of the most mysterious and often among the most feared from of Mā with a very complex rasa-profile, at least as far as Her iconography is concerned. In 2024, in Goddess Worship in Tantrik Buddhism | The Buddhist Chinnamastā we looked at a Tibetan Buddhist tantra for Vajrayoginī & compared it to a "Hindu" tantra for Chinnamastakā to demonstrate that the Goddess tradition is the same across sectarian lines! Then, in ...

en-us

188:15

Mātangī & The Poetry of Impurity | Sattva Maxxing in...

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/05/07

We start with a little review of rasa vada, the theory of aesthetic "flavors of Consciousness" that are very much emphasized in our Tāntrik iconography & poetics before presenting Mātangī Devī as a a radical invitation to reclaim those rasas, or "flavors" which are commonly rejected as impure or unspiritual or unwholesome in the name of a deeper, more inclusive & capacious non-dual understanding. And to discuss the ucchistā approach (the spirituality of impurity/trangression), we ne...

en-us

173:46

What is a Woman? | & Why God Is A Woman

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/05/05

Isn't interesting that around the same time that the narrative of the quintessential serpentine representation of the divine, dark feminine, chaos embodied, Tiamat's evisceration by Marduk, the male storm God par excellence gained mythological dominance, Hammurabi hammers the "law" into his stone, thus enshrining the role of the conscious, analytic, externally-oriented & physicalist mind as more important or "holier" than the feminine, subconscious, interiorized, symbolic & archetypic...

en-us

187:06

Partying As Spiritual Practice | Sukhopaya, The Path...

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/04/24

In this bold little talk, I wanted to discuss the ānanda-mīmāmsa section in taittirīyopanishad: are the three different types of bliss different in kind?/ is spiritual bliss different from "worldly" bliss so that I can articulate the poetical, aesthetically oriented practice of Śaiva non-duality called the "sukhopāya, path of pleasure" as in Vijñāna-Bhairava, verses 68-75! I also wanted to discuss the root "bhaj-" in "Bhakti", to discuss congregational spirituality and make some ...

en-us

165:01

Two Transmission of Tantra | Jñānā vs. Kriyā,...

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/04/20

In Tantra, you find two separate transmissions that seem to be in tension with one another: one one hand, there are the Jñāna or contemplation oriented traditions (for example, the Vijñāna-Bhairava Tantra or Somānanda's śiva-drshti) that privilege subtle, interior practices involving the intellect and spacious, sky-like awareness (think: Dzogchen) and on the other hand, in the vast majority of instances, there is the kriyā approach which centers formal, external, often deity-oriented ritualis...

en-us

62:42

Kali, Christ & Sticking It To The Man | Who Can Teach...

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/04/19

After some ecstatic & triumphant kirtan (which you can watch in the last video here) at our second session at our second Denver retreat in April 2026, we take up our evening's lecture, an Easter special featuring some of my most inspired reflections on Tantra, gnostic Christianity and the politics of spirituality to answer the question: Who has the right to teach & practice Tantra? We reference some of Cynthia Bourgeault's and Elaine Pagel's academic work on the early history of...

en-us

154:52

How Meditation Works | Classical Yoga vs Tāntrik Yoga

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/04/15

There are many ways to understand the word "meditation." Given that this is one of the central modalities of spiritual life and given the ever increasing interest in meditation, I felt a definition and discussion around meditation to clarify what it is and isn't in the Patañjali Yoga tradition would be helpful. More importantly, after we sketched out the basics of classical yogic meditation (i.e concentration practice), we then compared it to Tāntrik meditation to show how the Tāntrik traditi...

en-us

146:24

Śaiva Teachings in the Devī Māhātmyam

For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish ·

2026/03/30

Since it was Chaitra Navarātri last week, as part of our last Friday morning Abhinava Gupta Paramārthasāra class, we explored some key śaiva ideas that appear in the opening teaching of the Devī Māhātmyam. In this talk, we first explain the mythic context in the Bhagavad Gītā, the Upanishads and of course, the Devī Māhātmyam and explain from a śaiva perspective, why all these aesthetic and poetic features of the teacher are central to our metaphysical and soteriological framework! Also, we...

en-us

419 results

Similar Podcasts

Доктор Тройняшкин

Доктор Тройняшкин

Healthy Chat

DR ALI BANIHAMOUR

Dingue ‐ RTS

RTS - Radio Télévision Suisse

Words of Wellness with Shelly

Shelly Jefferis

Linchpin Conversations

Pat Sherwood