Dr. Shyam Ranganathan holds an MA in South Asian Studies and an MA and PhD in Philosophy. He’s a strong voice on social media, and his is one of the few yoga handles that actually stops my scroll. That's for the same reason he kept me pretty rapt in our conversation. Here we talked about his research on understanding how Non-Western traditions such as yoga are marginalized in a Western world and how BIPOC traditions of philosophy can help understand colonialism and inform our way forward and away from it.

We discussed how he approaches the practice of yoga, which he basically equates with the word 'Bhakti' since both words point to devotional practices; he describes yoga as being about devotion to individual and personal autonomy or sovereignty. Since so many of us don’t speak or study Sanskrit as a language or study yoga the way Dr. Ranganathan has–it strikes me that there is a lot to learn here. He offers a fresh perspective on pre-colonial yoga and how we can reclaim threads of it into our modern understanding of what we’re doing and how we’re practicing. I absolutely loved this conversation and hope you do too.