Why "Truth of Yoga"?

Reflecting on what comes from where with Stuart Sarbacker

In the spirit of Ancient Futures, here’s a flashback to an old conversation with next week’s podcast guest, Stuart Sarbacker. It was hosted four years ago by Grass Roots Books in Corvallis, Oregon, and we discussed my recently published book, The Truth of Yoga. Stuart started by asking why I’d chosen that title. Here’s part of my reply:

“I spent a lot of time being frustrated by the way the modern yoga world is saturated with, you know, New Age candy floss, and swimming around in it can get quite sticky and quite sickly. And I really wanted to – given my own immersion in India, effectively, but also in serious consideration of the lineages from which modern yoga has evolved – to do some justice to that and say, well, this is actually what is the yoga tradition, as opposed to the Theosophical Society or whatever else, or ‘The Secret’ or any number of New Age spirituality books. And so my working title was actually ‘Yoga Without the Bullshit’…”

You can watch the rest below – or stream the audio. We talk about everything from yoga history to guru abuses, gender imbalances and ways to relate to tradition today. Stay tuned for another chat with Stuart, out next Wednesday, in which we talk about, among many other things, links between yoga and psychedelics.