 And this episode of Skeptico, a show about what yoga is. Each and every single person is going to have their own way of experiencing the kind of deeper realm of yoga. And what I've realized is what we're exploring is not really yoga. It's our own inner world and consciousness. And it's just that there's this permission slip that yoga grants to explore that. Of what yoga isn't. And down into pigeon, pretend you're an animal, even though you're a vegan and you hate animals. Push this knuckle into the ground. That'll make these muscles feel much weaker. Keep your belly button drawn in and take nice deep breaths, even though you can't do that when your belly button's drawn in. I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just saying maybe you want to, very passive-aggressively. Just melt your ribcage into a melting motion, float the right leg up, no, no, you picked it up, go back down, and I want you to float it up, just a little bit of a creepy touch. Notice that we both have very tight pants on. By the way, that was Awaken With JP, who you can find on YouTube. Hilarious, hilarious stuff. But of course, the first clip was from today's guest, Zorananda, who we're going to hear all about in his show, The Yoga Connection. Here goes. Welcome to Skeptico, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host Alex Sekaris, and today we welcome my new Dharma brother, my fellow yogi, the creator and host of the Yoga Connection podcast. Zorananda is here. Welcome, man. Thanks for joining me. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a year in the making, and it's nice to now have the opportunity to sit down with you and chat, so this is going to be good. Fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. You know, let's start. Tell us a little bit about yourself, the whole yogi experience, yoga experience, something I'm really into, but also I kind of, I just think so many, I've listened to so many of your shows. There's some very interesting stuff all over the place we could go. So start just giving us a little bit of background on who you're. I just learned that you're a Canadian. Yeah. So I live in Edmonton, Alberta in Western Canada. And I'm Serbian. I'm a first generation Canadian Serbian. So my parents came to Canada in the 70s. Yoga came into my life when I was around 18, 18, 19, 20, first in the first iteration of meditation and getting into kind of the new age wave of energy and chakras and, you know, John Valom, Alkeza Deck and the whole flower of life meditation that he was teaching at that time. And what I began to notice in diving into spiritual content, spiritual information is I had this knack for first starting with meditation. And it all stems from a lifelong skill of dream work. And it's stuff that I learned through my parents because they are regular dreamers and my parents, for whatever reason, out of my siblings, my parents would always sit down with me and ask me about my dreams and really help me analyze what was going on. And so when I started getting into meditation, were you a lucid dreamer? Yeah, to an extent, I wouldn't say to the level of like fully controlling the dream itself, but where my participation in the dream was based on decisions that I was making. So I found that I would have these different levels of dreams where the first level is you really have no participation. It's just kind of like a movie that you're watching. And then the next level would be you're kind of participating, but you're still at the whim of what the dream does. You know, it starts and stops. And then the third would be like full participation where I have like superpowers and I know the realm of the dream and I'm very familiar with it. And how that transferred into meditation is that my meditation started taking on that same quality where the first stage of the meditation would be seemingly chaotic in my mind, right? There's a lot of stuff happening. There's a lot of thinking. There's a lot of flash images. But then as I practice and sat more and more in like the flower of life meditations and just on my own is that there is a development occurring of being able to noticeably go deeper into my meditations and noticeably have profound what I call phenomenal experiences that started to shape this kind of like path of synchronicity into yoga later in my life. Yeah, that's interesting. The reason I bring up the dream thing is, you know, I don't even know, but it's interesting to the father's son thing or the parent son thing. My oldest son was just kind of spontaneously lucid dreaming from the earliest age, you know, and he would report these things. And when they're little kids, you don't pay much attention when they get a little bit older. And he had all these kind of very shamanistic kind of encounters in his dreams and stuff like that. And then I was doing skeptical and then I started researching it. And it's funny how like it's so true. It's interesting with the relationship with your parents because what I found and this is like confirmed by lucid dream researchers is that someone telling you about the whole experience wakes you up to the possibility of it. And once you're awakened to the possibility that, yes, you can be aware in your dreaming and you can take more and more control of it, then you're able to do it just by the kind of suggestion or even the knowledge of it. So that's cool that your parents were involved with you in that way. Are they kind of on a spiritual journey and explicit spiritual journey as well or what was their deal? So they both grew up as farmers in Serbia. And so their connection to spirituality was through the Docs Christianity, where the the religion in Serbia is similar to Russian, where Christianity was adopted at a certain time. And our focus on anything religious is more tied to God than it is Jesus and then also household saints. So like we celebrate three different saints in our house, Sveti Nikola, Sveti Sava and Sveti Petka. And so their upbringing was more so believing in God and praying to God and receiving the teachings of Jesus, but not being so fundamental and being so like God fearing even around Jesus, like we find in Christianity where there's like this obsession of everything about Jesus. And so what I found just throughout my life, the more and more I look back on my childhood and my teens and communications that I've had with my parents about spirituality is that there is this seemingly kind of natural sense in our family that there is something spiritual going on. And though my parents don't really have the best way to articulate it, they don't know how to really like scientifically or academically approach it. They just instilled at least in me that the best thing that I can do in understanding this is being kind and loving and compassionate. And from doing that, I found it's opened up many more opportunities to kind of take further steps into what spirituality is and maybe they have, right? Because of just the difference in generation, the difference of intention and upbringing and tradition, where, you know, being a first generation Canadian, my life is starkly different than what their life was. And so their focus on what spirituality is and religion is was very streamlined to being Serbian, right? So for me, I'm in a whole new country and a whole new world and many more opportunities. So my parents were like, it doesn't matter if you don't believe in this stuff. This is what we know and this is what and how it benefits us. So we just want to see that you live a good life. And then those are like the kind of sparks that then allow me to be like, oh, I'm free to investigate, right? I can investigate Buddhism. I can investigate Christianity and Hinduism and yoga and see just what fits for me the best. Yeah, it's funny. You know, I'm was raised Greek Orthodox and second generation. And there's a lot of parallels. So you were an Orthodox Christian. I was raised Orthodox Christian. I don't know if I characterize it exactly the way that you would. I think it's very Christian. It's Christian. There's no kind of ways around that. And it's certainly Jesus centric. I mean, there's big old wooden statue of Jesus up there bleeding and all sorts of incense. I don't think it's any different in the Serbian Church. But I do think, you know, the experience of having I was connected to my grandparents. And especially my grandmother, my Yaya, and she was devoutly Greek Orthodox, and it was a practice that worked for her. Just she was completely she couldn't separate anything spiritual from her religious tradition. So I think it is kind of interesting. And then my dad dropped us off and then went and played cards, you know, so he would go and play poker, you know, the drops off a shirt. So we got this whole thing. But the other thing that you kind of just mentioned is and I tell people this all the time and I tell my kids, it's like when I was brought up, we understood that we were not white. We were Greek, right? So here I am growing up outside of Chicago. One, my ancestry is I'm only half. Greek, if you want to call it that. But that was my world because the world was centered around this church and this church was an ethnic identity of being Greek. And intertwined with that was Greek Orthodox. And I thought, you know, as I've done all this, the spiritual journeying that I've done, it's so interesting for me to have that background, but I see it kind of differently. I see it as a as a mind control background and not always in a bad way, but in a pretty inauthentic way and a pretty much of a way to kind of control people or shepherd people. It wasn't really the primary focus really wasn't on any kind of true spirituality that could come along as part of the ride. But the real thing was about being in this group, kind of protect each other, kind of be in your clan, be in your cult in kind of a good way. So good way and bad way. So I don't know any parallels there with what you saw and what you experienced. Yeah, my what I noticed is there was no pressure on whether or not we went to church or we kind of followed in line and step by step and step with the Serbian church in the city. My parents really didn't care about that. And because of their upbringing and what their families taught them in understanding one important kind of saying from Jesus is that your home can be your church as well, that there's no how you believe in God and how you worship God can be done in the private of your home. And the celebration of God in a church is something that doesn't have to be like forced upon. At least that's what my parents have taught me. And, you know, we would go to the Serbian church here in Edmonton periodically for like Christmas and Easter. But I just really for my mom saying like your belief in God and your connection to God is in your heart. And and that's her approach was with it. And even though she still regularly regularly reads her Bible, she'll go through it and find passages that, you know, she that will help her in the day, that cult like mentality just wasn't there. And that's where I feel grateful to have been able to have that kind of upbringing where there's it's really much more relaxed. And I had this balance between my mother being religious and really deep believer in God and then my dad being much more scientific and much more logical. And and so they both instilled these kind of beliefs in me of like, yes, there's God and yes, the Big Bang happened and the universe is this old. And, you know, we're on a planet circulating a sun. And so it really helped me develop this understanding that we can appreciate the world that we're in in a scientific way. And we can use the advancements that we have to measure where we are and what everything looks like. And we can have mysterious events that happen where that scientific side has almost no method of measuring and understanding. And then that's what really makes this whole place beautiful and strange, right, being a human. Yeah, that's great and and well said on your part. I guess, you know, I pinged you in this kind of email exchange we did beforehand. And, you know, I was trying to the skeptical thing, so I'm kind of trying to knock you off your center a little bit. And I really liked the way that you kind of came back to it because I think there's a lot to kind of process here. The whole yoga thing, as I see it, is susceptible to the same cultish co-opting that goes on in all these other different traditions and all these other different cults, you know, and I see it as something that has to be actively resisted and first understood and then resisted. And I really like the way that you you didn't push back. You did a very kind of, you know, I thought you were extremely open, but you're also just exploring how we can move forward in kind of this gentle way towards the deeper truths that are a part of this tradition because that's really what yoga is. Yoga is just a tradition. It's following some people that have done some things in the past and picking out bits and pieces of that. So you have a tremendous amount of background in terms of yoga training. You've gone and you've done hundreds of hours of training under different masters. You've lived in other countries where they're immersed themselves completely in this. And at the same time, I think you're also still very much somebody who's on a journey and maybe not married to any of those traditions completely, which I think is is really essential to all this. So tell us a little bit about what yoga means to you, what it has meant to you and how you understand it, how you even understand what it is. So when I look back at I'd say the beginning of my journey in exploring meditation and getting into yoga is I've always had this kind of inquisitive sense of wanting to know something more about where I am and who I am. And I started looking at Buddhism and yoga kind of at the same time because I was in university studying Asian philosophies and I was studying Buddhism. And what I found for myself is I was at a point in my life where I was nearly anorexic and I had very bad skin issues. And though I had somewhat of a grasp in the beginning of the kind of mentality around what it takes to meditate, I just felt that the physical part was missing in kind of understanding and exploring spirituality and the spirit in the mind. And between yoga and Buddhism, yoga shined more in my mind because of the physical practice and just knowing what my upbringing was of being really athletic, being a skateboarder and a snowboarder and getting out of all those sports. I still wanted to maintain some kind of athleticism and that's where yoga kind of fit into that piece at the beginning. And what I started to notice is there's this unraveling of opportunities to travel and to explore what yoga can be in my life as more than just a physical practice. And because I was still very much researching a lot of new age stuff like outer body experiences and channeling and entities and so forth, that the synchronicities of these opportunities coming up to travel were then pairing my intention to go somewhere for yoga. So say, for example, to Thailand, to Copenhagen, where that was my first significant international travel and it was to attend the Agama Yoga School on the island. And with my intention of going specifically for yoga, then there were these other kind of phenomenal experiences that happened as well. So I just I found that yoga was this bridge or this kind of connecting piece to continuously bring about these spiritual learning lessons that opened my mind to allow me to understand that living this life, even though we have to participate in the mundane world of like having a job, paying bills, blah, blah, blah, that there is an internal, deeper levels of experience that doesn't really involve other people. Like it's it's kind of a paradox in in trying to understand it because obviously it does involve other people because you're meeting and having conversations with people. But the decisions that, for example, I was making to go to Thailand and go to this yoga school, there were these experiences that I was having that only I knew I was having. And it's similar to having a profound lucid dream that you're asleep in the middle of night and you're having this profound experience of this dream of being on another planet or being in another world or whatever that that is solely happening to you. And there's a kind of development that's taking place, whether you want to be aware of it or not. So I just found that yoga was really helping bridge into the spiritual development that other kind of religions or methodologies or philosophies really couldn't at that time. Yeah, I mean, I still think we're kind of I don't know if we're adding more to the confusion about what yoga is. And we probably have different understandings of what yoga is. You know, when I started doing yoga, it was, I don't know, over 30 years ago, I'll just start that. And I had a fantastic first yoga teacher, which everyone must have, if you're going to really get it. It's like a gambling addict who, you know, has a great experience that first time and they can't get rid of it. So if you have a really good teacher at the beginning, they can kind of hook into this experience. But I remember fortunately for me, this is back like back. This is back in Dallas, Texas. And my teacher, like all the teachers back then had gone to India, you know. So this guy, BKS Iyengar, he was his kind of guy. So and people don't know BKS Iyengar, along with Patabi Joyce are two of the most influential yoga teachers in the West period. In terms of the asana, the physical practice of yoga. I mean, if you want to go back to Yogananda, who lives right up his ashram, his spiritual energy is still right up the road for me here. You know, that goes back. But in terms of this tradition of this physical tradition, it doesn't go back that far, really. It really only goes back 150 years or so. And a lot of us influenced by these guys were Indian. We're influenced by British gymnastics, you know. So they kind of incorporated that. And when people try and go back and say these asanas are ancient, they're just they're just not. We just don't have any real record of that. We have a couple of people sitting in lotus poses that are 1,000 years old. But we don't have that long tradition of stringing these things together and all the rest that. But I don't think that matters. That doesn't matter to me. But anyways, back to my thing. So one, when I first started, all the teachers were grounded in this experience, this very kind of rigid, fundamentalist kind of Hindu. You have to do it this way. You have to go in India. You have to go through these long, you know, arduous kind of trainings with your master and all the rest that. And then the other thing is awesome women yoga teachers. So many awesome women yoga teachers. But back then it was all men. And like the classes were almost all men. And then women started coming in more and more. But like the first class, I think we're all Dallas Cowboy football players, these old jocks who are, you know, just didn't. They had a sense that their physical nature was somehow connected to that chatter that was going on in their head because anyone who's physically involved, your skateboarder, snowboarder, I mean, you know that like completely. It's all about the mind-body connection. So you're trying to reconnect with that. And these guys were trying to reconnect with that. And in the process of reconnecting with that, they're really connecting with consciousness. And when you're connecting with consciousness, then you're starting to open up the door to kind of this greater spirituality. So I guess what I want to make sure we are, I get my two cents in, which I just did, is that we've continued, I think, in some ways to kind of confuse people about what yoga is, you know. And people who are kind of into really into yoga, they get one upset that all the Instagram yogies and the YouTube yogies and, you know, the girl in tight suits, you know, has a really hot body and guys and girls, if you want to tune in, you can get a hot body like that, too. And you can, you know, really work, get a good workout. And in some ways, there's nothing wrong with that. And in other ways, like my yoga teachers told me all along is like, like way back in the day, they were like, great, great. They're on the path. They've just entered the stream and that all the streams lead to the rivers and all the rivers lead to the ocean. There's only one ocean. So if you jump on the path, if you jump on a YouTube, if you jump on the Instagram, you're on the path. So it doesn't really matter that what is what is the big step is either to continue with the other metaphor, either being in the river or being out, being out of the river. So I just kind of rambled in there. But what are your thoughts on on any of that and how we're interfacing with what yoga is in our modern culture? My yoga teacher likes to say, all yoga is good yoga. And I am fortunate to have to have him as a teacher because of the combination of authentic teaching of being from the Himalayas and growing up as a yogi from the age of like six years old. Until now, being authentic in the sense of really being consistent in his messaging and really maintaining this lighthearted attitude. And what I've, you know, realized and witnessed in my journey of yoga is that the first step in that first opportunity and for me, it was, you know, a yoga class in my university and seeing just like how I felt afterward. I think from there, depending on just who you are as a person and fundamentally what your belief system is like, whether or not you choose to go deeper into wanting to explore the world of yoga is really going to be dependent on your own effort, right? So, you know, just like jumping into the stream or the creek or the river, you might just stay there and that just might be your yoga journey and experience for the rest of your life and that's fine. Or you might take a look at the river and look at where it's going and where the stream of that river is going and say, you know what, I'm going to let go of the edge and I'm going to see where this river takes me and so on and so forth where your journey into really uncovering what yoga is, is personalized and it's subjective, right? So I can perfectly articulate exactly what that is to me, but that won't really matter because each and every single person is going to have their own way of experiencing the kind of deeper realm of yoga and what I've realized is what we're exploring is not really yoga, it's our own inner world and consciousness and it's just that there's this permission slip that yoga grants to explore that. It's like a program that we're putting in, you know, it's like this new software and, you know, that program, that software is geared towards uncovering something within ourselves, it seems. I love that permission slip. I think that's great. I wrote that down. You know, one of the things I sent you is this, you know, my favorite yogis, Wim Hof and Mickey Singer. Mickey Singer, because he's rich, he's a billionaire and he made it all himself while he was a yogi and Wim Hof because he flies under, both these guys fly under the radar as being yogis and one of the things like I love about Wim Hof's rich too, which is good, but and got rich from kind of doing yoga, really. But the thing about Wim Hof and the permission slip is that Wim Hof is about creating experiences for people. So if you go and watch, if you go, go to YouTube and you Google Wim Hof, all you see are these kind of very Western kind of doer stuff, world record, hold your breath, I'm hooked up to the science labs and isn't this great and all the benefits that and I'm going to have a beer with Joe Rogan and all the rest that stuff. But go look back, go talk, type in Wim Hof yogi and he says, yeah, I was 16 years old. I was in the Netherlands. I was like cutting out pictures of these Indian yogis to make my own yoga book because I didn't have a yoga book and I was all about yoga, yoga, yoga as a way of a path into any way to get into this thing that we're talking about is this conscious experience that I'm having because we have to contrast that with what you are being told, what your dad is being told in all his scientific training is that there is no conscious experience. That chatter is it's an illusion. It's just your brain firing. So the reprogramming for that I think is the dramatic shift that yoga allows us. So what I think is so fantastic about what Wim Hof has done is Wim Hof has distilled it down to I'm going to give you experience. Come here and breathe with me for 15 minutes in this way and hold your breath in this way, which probably isn't the best way to breathe and to hold your breath if you really consult with people who know that, but you will have an experience and that will experience will put you at a decision point at which you will have to say, did I have an experience? Was there a me in there? And if there is a me in there, who am I and why am I here? And then the next thing he's going to do is going to put you in that cold water and then say, you're you got all that chattering going on in your head saying you can't do it or you shouldn't do it or you're not comfortable. I'm going to put you in and you will have that experience and that experience will generate that decision point. And to me, that's what yoga is always about. It's always about that decision point. It's always about if I bend this way, will I break? If I bend this way, will I fall? If I bend this way, will I experience something different? I think part of letting go is that we're actually all personally responsible for our own evolution. And I think when we think of evolution, there's this grand scale of inexperience of like millions of years, right? And it's really from the scientific community and investigating the evolution of humanity. But I think the scale of evolution is both micro and macro. And I think what yoga does is it provides a solution regarding how we're evolving on a day to day basis, even though we're not seeing our bodies change and how our body changed over a gradual period of time is within our lifetime. And that's still, I think, an evolution. It's a personalized evolution. And when we look at the trifecta between our body and our mind and our spirit, is that when yoga is plugged into those three, we can see that there's an evolution taking place on those three parts of ourselves. So over, you know, five years of doing a 10 years of doing a physical practice, we see how our body changes. We see how we become more flexible and more limber, more fit. And with that and complimentary to that is the evolution that takes place in our mind from then going into meditation and seeing that our reaction to things are different because we've learned to not react to all the sensation in our body from sitting in postures for so long. At least that's what I've noticed for myself. And then when it comes to spirit, we're starting to then get into what the nature of our own experience of our spirit is and how that within that there's an evolutionary component to it. And so when I look at someone like Wim Hof, which I have over the last like several years, is it's almost like he's showing that the rate of that evolution can be manipulated and that with all these really powerful breathing techniques is that you can enter into a state where seems scientifically impossible, right? Where in order for you to be just a normal human being at the whim of your autonomic nervous system, that suddenly you can do this 15 minute breathing technique and you're almost impervious to cold and extreme temperature. And that almost seems like that would be an evolutionary trait that's built over a long period of time where you as a human through generations build up that tolerance and maybe your great, great, great, great, great grandchildren have that. But he's showing that there is a system that you can utilize where you can rapidly go into that new state of being. Yeah, except that he's kind of doing the old yoga trick. The breathing don't mean shit. You can jump in that water whether you breathe or not. And I love I love some of his videos that he has where, you know, he'll suddenly pull the rug out from under people and go, OK, we're going in the water and they go, wait a minute, what about the magical breathing technique that will prevent me from hypothermia? You know, you don't need it. You just jump in. That is fucking yoga, right? That is yoga and that is the trickster because there is this trickster element to yoga, too. You know, it's like I love what you're saying about micro and macro evolution. I think it's it's really true and I think it's a very deep insight. You have many really great insights about this practice because you're obviously very, very developed in your practice. And it comes through when you talk about it in a very deep way. But there are so many jumping off points to this life lesson that can be wrapped around these experiences associated with yoga. Yeah. And I think that's personal conditioning, right? Why it is that we believe that we're so limited and that's something like ice cold water is going to have such a strong negative effect. But, you know, I know I think that, I'm sorry. That misses the point. It misses the point because the breathing does help and it does dramatically shift your mind and put you in a better state in all the ways that you were talking about. What I think he's pointing out is the leap, you know, the quantum leap, which is essentially what we're talking about is all mental stuff. There isn't any physical stuff. So at any point we can jump out of the physical and say, I don't need any of that. And if you have what I think it is, if you're with Wim Hof, he has enough physical presence and energy to pull you along. I wouldn't recommend that someone go and jump in that 35 degree water without going through his exact protocol and without training. But there are some people that, again, kind of shatter all the rules because they have that energy associated with them. Well, there's obviously a level of preparation that's needed, say with Wim Hof, in doing what he's done, right? So and this was obviously something that was lifelong in his pursuit of like you're saying being 16 years old and like obsessing about yoga is that for him to get to the point where he's breaking world records and he's doing like marathons in the winter in his shorts and climbing Everest and swimming under in like frozen lakes is everything that led up to those moments and every day he chose to condition himself to prepare for that. It's like I'm starting to think as well. It's really no different than any athlete that's preparing for a long distance run or like whatever it takes to condition yourself so that when you're right in the moment of performing that task, you are not going to be influenced by the chatter within your mind that's going to prevent you from succeeding, right? So, of course, you couldn't expect someone who's never done any of that stuff to then try to emulate right in the moment what Wim Hof does because it would be like telling a toddler who just learned how to walk to suddenly ride a bike, right? that then that toddler is going to need to go under do or undergo some kind of training in order to actually successfully get onto the bike and start riding it as soon as it's set in, then that toddler can go off and that toddler can ride the bike freely. And so I think that there's this threshold where there's like anomalies where there are people for whatever reason can jump in without that training. And, you know, in the world of yoga, it can be explained as like karma, you know, that it was just in their karma. It's like they were this yogi in a past life, whatever, regardless if that's true or not, that there are these anomalous people that for whatever reason they're already settled in a state of mind that allows them to do those things without having to do the arduous training that Wim Hof did. And I think that has to go to show what Wim Hof's presence is doing. And I think this is where it goes into the influence of consciousness of someone like Wim Hof, who is engaging with millions of people through his social media and his videos, is that there's I'm going to use this word again. There's this permission slip to then allow yourself to absorb everything that he's done without having to do all of it and to fast track into something that for him has taken, you know, a couple of decades to do. And that's not to say that, you know, these people are breaking world records, is that they're given this permission slip to not have to do all of that work to just like get right into it. I don't know. I think there's a lot. There's a lot to hash out here that, you know, which is what is beautiful about yoga. There's so many, so many things to explore and, you know, kind of set up your tent wherever you want. So I'm going to shift gears a little bit because I think it brings this back to focus in a different way and it really isn't a shift of gears. But so I started yoga in Dallas and I was very fortunate, had a very good teacher who was very connected to BKS Angar and brought BKS Angar over to Dallas and, you know, we did some sessions with him and it was interesting to be in his presence. Guys, kind of a jerk, you know, it's known for kind of slapping people around and stuff like that, which immediately raises questions. You know, if this guy is the ultimate master, why is he still kind of control anger issues? You know, it ain't worked out for you yet at 80. So anyways, I come out, move out to San Diego, North County, San Diego. Love it out here. More yoga studios, especially when I came out here, you know, the yoga wasn't as popular. Just more yoga studios per mile, per, on 101 and any place in the world. And Patabi Joyce had had a very big influence here because he had come in his, one of his first trips to the, to the West was here, North County, and again, found another, I found another great teacher who was a direct disciple of Patabi Joyce. And I started getting into what they call a Yengar yoga to very set sequence of, of breathing and, and asanas. And so anyways, great experience, loved it, learned a lot. And a few years ago, so that skeptical has been my other yoga experience. So a few years ago, I had the chance to interview this wonderful yogi woman, Annika Lucas, who, by the way, you guys have heard me mention Annika before, and she just published a memoir, which is incredibly brave for her to do because she was the woman who was a victim of being sold and as a sex slave at like six, seven years old by her mother, she was in Belgium. And you know, the whole to Tro kind of elitist world leader kind of things, but real stuff, just real satanic sexual abuse. Anyway, and yoga, her practice now is she goes into prisons, the prison system in New York and helps women through yoga because a lot of women, especially ones who have been sexually abused, assaulted, you know, have all these issues with space and physical and kind of stuff like that. So she's doing all this tremendous work. Anyways, Annika tells me, just kind of in passing, because when I brought up the yoga thing, she goes, yeah, but Tabi Joyce, what a creep, he sexually molested me, you know, sexually assaulted, let's say, because she was a grown woman when it happened. And I'm like, whoa, could this possibly be true? I mean, I've had, I've been in the room with Tabi Joyce and I've been in a ton of Iyengar classes. Could all these people be following this kind of very rigid, stand up tall, proud Indian yogi and the guys really, you know, that? So go, anyone can go Google this. The guy's a creep. Annika Lucas isn't the first one to said this. There's literally 100 women that have come forward and said, this guy's a creep, and we know that so many of these yogis, particularly ones that come over from, but also ones from any place else that want to kind of put all the trappings of yoga on, are doing all this stuff. Well, that's not a very spiritually developed kind of thing to do. So I think the whole thing about, you know, understanding what we're getting into here, understanding the spiritual process, understanding discernment and understanding that, again, fuck this yoga bullshit. You know what? I mean, we're all in this stream and it's nice to put up this tent and say there's a certain tradition of what thought and a certain tradition that's been followed. But if you think you're going to just get in there and it's all going to be good. No, it just it doesn't work like that. It works like the rest of the world works, which is. You better be aware of what's going on around you and you better be responsible for your own experience, because no one else is people will try and take advantage of you. Did you ever hear that about Patabi Joyce? Yeah, I'm quite familiar with them. That was the one thing that I made sure to study just regarding like the history of yoga and who came out to the West and when. You know, we're I was mentioning this, I think in the emails of just my belief that there are these waves of yoga that have come into the West starting with Vivekananda and Yoga Nanda. And then secondly, with Patabi Joyce and BKS Angar and Bikram. And I can't help but think that there's this underlining connection, all being some of these like federal agencies in America, where you have to think that the, let's say, starting with like Vivekananda and Yoga Nanda coming to the West, they were actually quite highly successful in their pursuit. So they each were presenting to thousands of people in universities where Vivekananda had the shortest amount of span of time in the United States. I think it was like just a few years where Yoga Nanda was in the United States. Initially, I think from like the 20s all the way up into the 40s, right? Like so he didn't die in the 50s. So I think, yeah, I think it was, yeah, in the 50s, that's right. But what I what I considered is that if you are the government and you're seeing these two mystics come to the United States and have such an influence on philosophy and way of thinking and way of being, and you just see the Americans flooding to these like mystics, that when the second iteration of this comes in that you would want to do something about that. You'd want to ensure that how Yoga is starting to develop and spread, that you'd have some control over it. And that's why I think with specifically with these three, Patava Joyce, Iyengar and Bikram is that out of, you know, all the people who are starting to teach Yoga, they are the three primary teachers. And they are just they just become multimillionaires. And and I think just I don't think Patavi Joyce, he never became a multimillionaire. I mean, maybe his grandkids have, but none of those guys ever had any money. Well, and that could be just something missing in my perception of how they were going around teaching the way that they were teaching and and charging, because definitely with Bikram, you know, he's out of the three who reap the benefits for sure of doing $10,000 a person trainings and in one, but Bikram was a different case because that's what I'll say. I mean, one of my things is we're all leading rich spiritual lives. So, you know, that doesn't mean we're all leading good, good spiritual lives. We're already leading rich and the chatter goes on. You know, so like you can have your Kundalini experience five years ago. Great. That doesn't mean shit in terms of right now at 1151 a.m. You are in your body. You are in your space. You are now, you know, that's all there is. And that is more or less meaningless. We all know that. And yet sometimes we kind of forget that and want to again elevate these. Extended experiences into something more than getting you out of your the situation that you're in. But anyways. Well, he was he was a Mercedes. He was a Mercedes Benz mechanic in Hollywood. So Bikram was. So he knew all these rich people. He knew they had all sorts of money just to fly around and they were stupid and these women would come in and just do whatever. So he knew the routine and he just applied some basic techniques from a business standpoint, can't fault them from that. But he's the only guy really kind of cashed in on it. I mean, I think Patabi Joyce and Iyengar. I mean, their kids and the other people in their family said, hey, we got to start put the name on it and brand it and stuff like that. But even then, they didn't cash in it as much as all the money that's been made in yoga. I mean, a ton more money has been made than than those guys. I mean, to a certain extent, you got to feel sorry for him and that they didn't cash in at all, but you can't feel sorry for Patabi Joyce because he was a creep. Yeah. And so that's what tells me is that there was really nothing special about them and that's the glamour of maybe Patabi Joyce teaching to 150 people in a gym, you know, and being talented in his flexibility and his strength that we are all at the whim of the confusion and the chaos of our mind of whether or not we decide to do good deeds or not. And I think there's also this fallacy around the sanctity and the privacy of our mind, right, that within our mind, we can be an absolutely shithead of a person. And and then suddenly that starts to translate when we start manipulating people and coercing them into things. And then we think that because, you know, it's a private setting that it's not ever going to go out, you know, and, you know, the one thing that always sticks with me and what my father has always showed me is that integrity means that when you're alone and your actions, when you're alone, reflect the character of who you are, right? So as long as you can stay in integrity with your morality and your ethics that you are developing for yourself, you know, you put on a front that you're an honest person in life and around people, but then behind closed doors, you're, you know, you're a thief and you're a liar and whatnot is I think that's really what is at play with someone like Patabi Joyce or Iyengar, where behind closed doors and in private, that their true nature kind of comes out of still being a human still having desires still being at the whim of their sexuality and their want of pleasure and and whatnot. And some of the things that I looked into with Patabi Joyce and in how he would kind of justify his actions towards women is that everyone was so tight in their anus or something, you know, like everyone was so tight in their hips and so tight and there is this, you know, there's this practice called a phoenix mudra, right, where you clench your butthole and you hold it and that he would go around and like use his fingers to like press on on people's like a phoenix mudra and I think there's this disconnect between what is appropriate or not with whatever state of mind he's in and whatever is okay in the Western world, which is ironic, I think for me, because when you go to India, and I don't know if you've been to India, but generally, there's this like very like strict protocol of how men and women even like interact with each other. Right. So it just seems kind of weird to be in a culture where you live in a family in one room with 10 people. And like, there's no, there's like, no I don't want to say it. There's really no privacy around your sexual life. But then to come to the West, I think that's really just what has, you know, and it's all kind of hearsay because, you know, you're, you have way more experience with this person than I do. I can only go based on what I'm reading on the internet or in a book, right? But from just what I've observed is to be from a country where there's so much poverty, everything is so restrictive, the traditions are very strong in how you interact with women to then come to the West in the 70s and this and suddenly seeing just beautiful women everywhere. And they're in bikinis, you're on the beach, you're just like, holy shit, I'm in paradise. And to then have that sense of freedom of not only is Patabi Joyce very sought after as like this Indian like master that then he can live out his wildest dreams that he never could, right? 100%. And you know, just to be clear, just because we've thrown out some names and this is all inside baseball wouldn't have in any other way, not going to apologize for it. But to be clear, because Angar was never, I haven't heard anything sexual involved in anything that he did. So just to make it clear, his thing was more, you know, slapping students being kind of domineering and kind of stuff like that. And the way there's always apologetics that go around with it. And it's really somewhat racist, the apologetics, you know, like, oh, I anger when he was young, you know, he was had to walk five miles and he was picked on because he was the British and he was brown dark skinned and all I'm sure 1000% true, you know, I mean, trying to break into that. But at the end of the day, it doesn't make him a bad, like we're all struggling in this journey and we're all making mistakes. I'm making more mistakes and have made more mistakes. It's just, I just think it's, it's part of this process, I think is stripping away the bullshit associated with yoga, in order to really let it come forth, you know, and I, I want to circle back because I've heard some great interviews that you've done on your show and you're going deep and you're talking about all the struggles that people are having with their practice and how to help other people and, you know, the psychological barriers, because there's all this, the one thing I appreciate about what you're doing is you're holding on to yoga loosely. And you're holding on to, but what you're holding on to firmly is the metaphor. Yoga as a metaphor for spiritual transition, spiritual growth, spiritual development. Talk about, talk about the metaphor, if you will. So what I've come to understand in my relationship, say, with my teacher, Visigy, and my practice is that it points to self mastery. And I think where commonly people get caught up in adopting yoga as a kind of principle to life is that they associate their deeper experiences with the teacher that they have. And so they hold tight onto that. And they, and they take their experience of yoga as literally only coming from their master. And if they weren't able, if they didn't have their master, they didn't have their teacher that they'd be lost. And so for me personally, what's being able to understand is that self mastery is a choice in leveling up your relationship with yoga. And that's as a metaphor, it can pave the way to living your life day to day, where your joy and your happiness isn't based on anyone outside of yourself. And so when you do your practice, and you have your experience of your practice, and you do your meditation, that you fully realize that you are responsible for that. And that though your teacher, at some point could have been a helping hand to point towards that experience, that you fully realize that your path of mastery of whatever yoga is is an ongoing experience for the rest of your life. And I think that's the trouble not troubling, but that's the difficult part of yoga is when you go through initiations, and you have deeper experiences, that once you can settle into that this is something that's going to be here for the rest of my life, then it kind of lifts the burden off. At least it did for me that I don't need to try to prove anything. I don't need to try to force myself in into anything. I don't need to have this teacher to fast track me into some kind of enlightenment that I do have the rest of my life for it. And I can enjoy day by day the process of showing me what yoga can be because I actually don't fully know. And I like being honest about that. I don't like presenting myself as someone that's like, so knowledgeable and so perfect in everything that I know. Hey, man, I'm just a human too. And I'm figuring this out day by day. And I just choose to have a wonderful time doing it. And so then that's how I can kind of hold it loosely, where it's not such a like a strict thing. You know, you said some cool things there. And I also want to kind of remind you of something that you said that I really liked in one of your shows. But you're talking about the chakras, right? And people get all worked up about chakras and chakra energy, healing and energy work and going to not putting it down. And I'm sure there's there's practitioners who are energy workers who do things and make things happen. And I've met some of them stuff like that. But I really like where you took it. You said, What if we think about the chakras as metaphorical? Yeah, I, I personally found that that is kind of missing from the kind of literature around chakras, you know, you can go into any bookstore and find a plethora of chakra books that kind of all say the same thing about where they're located, what gland is a part of it, what color the chakra is and how to visualize these things and the kind of like cleansing of these chakras and seeing that there are these psychological aspects of it when you look at where they're located and just some of the trigger words that are associated of it. So like say with the root chakra and you look at survival and sexuality and yeah, so say even like the second chakra was sexuality and pleasure that rather than focusing on this color and the shape, you can actually go into your own psychology around all of that. So what is my sexuality? What are my pleasures? Who am I as the creative sexual person in the world? Why am I attracted to this person and not this person? Why is it that when I am attracted to this person? These are the thoughts that I have and this is the way that I go about trying to make something happen. That I think is going to tell you so much more about who you are than sitting and listening to some chakra meditation and having this like internal kind of fantastic dreamlike meditation where that goes really besides the point of what I think the chakras are actually there for it's more of like you're saying a metaphor and understand it is the psychology of yourself and pretty much everything that I like to talk about when it comes to chakras and yogas, I go based on what my experience is, right? So I've seen for myself when I explore the chakras this way, and I looked at my psychology around it, it allowed me in the moment to shift how I communicate to people. And that's where I've witnessed the benefit of understanding the system. And so then it makes sense to me that when you look at the chakras from the past, that there wasn't anything about the rainbows, there wasn't anything about like focusing on the colors and and all this stuff that's all really new within our within our upbringing within the yoga system, right? So I just think personally, it's important to look at it that way. And that's there's going to be a much more benefit to it than otherwise. That makes sense. So how do you process deal with the doing part of yoga? You know, because obviously, we're as we connect to this spirituality, one of the things we're connecting with is the the non dual aspect of it, no matter how you get there, because there is some ultimate reality to that logical reality to it, rational reality to it. You know, you are not in in some in some way, you are not who you think you are, and you are not individualized in some way. So yoga is all about doing and it's very physical. And a lot of us who are drawn to it, we understand that that was a hook for us. But ultimately, don't we get confronted with the doing part of that? Like, in this is another level of the metaphorical kind of part of it, you know, like, one of the metaphors that I remember way back from one of my teachers is don't anticipate the pose, right? Simple, like an instruction, don't anticipate the pose. You're in one pose, especially if you're doing a stung yoga, you know, there's a sequence and it's always the same sequence. I think it's really great. Because it like, what we want to do is Westerners and you see this all the yoga videos on YouTube, they're always how we change them up and you can change it. Not just do the same fucking thing every fucking day, and realize that every breath is unique. Every breath is new. There can be no repeating, because everything changes all the time. But anyways, there is still this doing part of it. And then at this deeper level, we're always confronted with the part of who is the doer and is there really a doer and is there really anything to do? And as I stretch and I try and stretch further, where am I stretching? You get my point. How are you processing the action, the doing thing? I view it through my relationship with control and really examining whether or not I'm in control in the moment. And because we are so intimately tied to this body, we think that every action that we do is based on our own control. And it seems like what a strong yoga practice is indicating is that through connecting to your breath and not anticipating the postures and moving through it, that you release control and that you can go from the start to the end of the whole experience, totally taking a step back and witnessing everything that's happening. And even though you still feel that you are making the movements and that you are the one providing all the energy that taking that step back, you start to see that everything is just happening. And I think that is the scary thing to most people is because we just have it really well anchored in our mind that we're in control of everything that we're doing. And to have this experience where possibly something greater than ourselves is really in control of everything can really be illuminating sense that this realm that we're in and this world that we're in is really so fleeting. And it's okay to not be in control. And it's okay to take a step back. And so then when we have that experience in our yoga practice, where we get good at that, we get good at maintaining our connection to our breath, we get good at taking a step back and watching. And everything is still there. All the feelings are still there. All even the thoughts are still there. But there's this witnessing that shines the light on why all those thoughts are there, why all those sensations are there. And it's not a verbal thing. It's really as if we are walking in the dark, and we stub our toe, and we have a flashlight and we go, why did I what did I stub my toe on? Why did I stub my toe? But if you're not ever going to shine the light on it to see what's there, you're just going to be stuck in this confusion of why, why, why, why. And so to have a practice that allows you to take a step back and shine a light on everything that's happening. It starts to make sense why, right? So say if you were to take a beginner in the practice, right? And they tell you, Oh, it's it's hard for me to do yoga because I'm not flexible, right? It's like, well, why are you not flexible? And the answer could be just simples because they've never done any stretching in their life. And from the day that they're born to the day that they're about to do the yoga practice. Every single day they've moved in a particular way. And it's a very basic movement of just getting up, walking to and fro and just that simple pattern of doing the same thing every day without ever stretching at all. You come to the yoga practice and you start doing movements that you've never done before, you start opening up your hips, you've never opened before, you start doing lunges you've never done before. And what I found is with through teaching yoga over the last like 12 years, is that there's this strong resistance to take a step back to begin with because the sensations are so strong. And it triggers everything within to reject the experience and to not even want to participate at all. But what happens is that the more and more you start to show up, the more and more you start to participate on whatever level if it's a daily or weekly or whatever, that over a period of time, things start to open. And it's through that opening that allows you to take a step back. And each time there's this unraveling where in the beginning of the yoga of the yoga experience, your very first class, there was no opening at all, everything is super tight, everything is super rigid. It's super hard to do everything to a year ahead, where suddenly those postures are no longer super tight, your body is no longer super rigid. And you're able to sit in a posture and breathe and experience. And that opening takes place and you're able to take a step back. And you go, holy shit, I know exactly why my body was rigid now, I know exactly why. And the intelligence of your entire being will show you, it'll bring up those memories, it'll bring up an injury or an accident that you had when you were eight years old or when you were 16 or whatever, that suddenly there's a communication that's going on that you never really had. And that's what I think is really important to understand in the yoga process and in the experience is that your body will start communicating to you in a way that you never thought it could before. And it's through the release and the openness of all that tension and all that energy. So you got to think that every day we use our muscles and especially when things tighten and tense up is that there's so much stored in that. And I always try to be careful in explaining this stuff, because I don't want to be just like that typical yoga teacher that just says like, Oh, you have stored emotions in your body that you need to release. How I like to go about explaining this is that the energy that you are taking in and the energy that you are putting out physiologically through your nervous system and through your connective tissues is that your nervous system is going to store energy into the tissues themselves. And the more your tissues get bound up and the more your connective tissues and your muscles get bound up, the more more difficult it is to release that energy. And so essentially what yoga is doing is it's allowing you to make little micro tears into the connective tissues and the muscles themselves to release through the nervous system at those points. And I think that's what is associated to emotional release, because you're having these like pockets of energy release. And because your brain is processing all of this all the time, that energy will go throughout your body and even go into your brain and your brain will show you what that was. And so you just got to think about then if you were to do that every single day, your body is going to communicate to you exactly all that is held within yourself. Kind of maybe sort of possibly can you do yoga if you're in a wheelchair? I think yeah, yeah. So I mean, doesn't that that's always the thing that that like, I get everything you're saying and I don't disagree that I've experienced it personally. And I've seen hundreds of other people experience it. I just got to pull up on that a little bit. I got to go skeptical on that a little bit. And it's like, it is all that but it's something more than that. It's something different than that. And you can get there through a bunch of different paths. Yeah, and that's why there are the different kinds of yoga, right? There's bhakti yoga and karma yoga and those are just names. Those are just names too. I mean, these are all consciousness exercises. The basic idea is simple. Who are we? Why are we here? And we're asking that question through the body, just like we can sit and ask it through the breath and ask it through. I mean, that's what you're saying, you know, bhakti or you can ask it through service, you can ask it through love, you can ask. But it's just consciousness exercises. But it's beautiful. And what you do is beautiful. And then you're a musician too. So how was that kind of informing your awesome work as a yoga teacher? Yeah, music started to show up with yoga. When I started playing guitar for yoga classes. So the funny thing is that I tried my hardest to get into like rock bands and metal bands, and nothing would work out. And when I started teaching yoga, and I started getting into the kind of yoga community in Edmonton here, is that I started to develop my just guitar playing in a way where I could just improvise on the spot. And that is what opened me up to then play a guitar for yoga classes. And that time in my life, so that was like several years ago, was one of the most beautiful experiences for yoga that I have had of being able to sit with, you know, 20 to 30 students, and completely improvise for an hour and a half. And when I think about meditation, and I think about the kind of rigidness and what people should experience in meditation of like, you need to sit down, you need to be in lotus position, or, you know, you have to have your eyes closed, you need to be chanting a mantra is those experiences brought me into meditative states that I have never had just kind of seated trying to meditate, where I'm pushing boundaries of what I think I can do. And every time I came into the class, and I was about to play, I would sit down, and I would just tell myself, Okay, I have no idea what I'm going to do. And I'm kind of scared right now. But I think I just need to work through what I'm feeling, and just trust that it's all going to work itself out. And sometimes it wouldn't work. And my playing wouldn't be as substantial as other times, but the opportunity to provide this like musical soundscape for people, and to have a teacher totally integrate into what I was playing, allowed for just this beautiful experience of connecting to people in a whole new way that I really never could imagine. And so I would say for just for myself personally, even my journey with music and guitar has been spiritual. And there's this self development that occurs just learning music in general. And, you know, I realized for myself that I'm not going to be in a rock band, I'm not going to be this like famous musician. And I started to look at, Okay, so then why am I even doing this? You know, like, why does it matter that I can, you know, play these crazy songs? And it just came down to personal development, and what I'm learning about myself, and how music itself is this powerful tool in self expression, because there'd be times where I'd be feeling all kinds of emotions, I'd be pissed off about something and I'd play my pick up my guitar and start playing and I'd start playing or making up just like beautiful song in this beautiful tune, even though I'm feeling terrible. And so that just showed me that there's this power involved in this in having the skill to play an instrument where the instrument itself is static, and it was on its own, it does nothing. But then you and having all these feelings can channel all of that right through the instrument and bring life to something that is seemingly lifeless. Very cool. Yeah, people need to check it out. Zornanda has been our guest host of the yoga connection podcast. What else do you want to leave people with? So my work largely now is understanding the power of the heart and what it means to live from the heart. And it's something that I think is glossed over typically because there's this attachment of a feminine quality to it where what I like to tell people is that your ability to be a loving person and to be compassionate and empathetic is a superpower in the sense that the heart is such an intelligent place and it's such an intelligent being an operating tool that when you can give yourself the permission to go into your heart and live from your heart, you'll see for yourself that your life can be so beautiful and it can be so abundant. Even if that means you don't become a millionaire or you live in an apartment and you just have your cat and sometimes you feel alone in this whole weird fucked up world that we're in. But to give yourself the opportunity to go into the center and this organ and this place within yourself that's providing you life and it's providing you the circulation is providing you the wherewithal in even wanting to be a loving person that you don't have to change anything. You don't even have to do yoga. You don't even have to play music. You don't have to do anything. You don't you don't have to try to prove anything that your heart itself is in you and it's giving you right now everything you need to be alive and that you are a special person. Even though we're all not special people, you know, right. Right. Very good. Very good. Awesome. Having you on my brother and keep doing it and keep you still do classes regular training. If people get up to Edmonton, do you have a studio and stuff like that? Do you do classes? Currently, I do not. I've just taken a step away from the yoga studio world. And right now I do privates. And I'm largely focusing on music. I'm working on a new album and my podcast and my life here in the work that I do. So the one small thing I just want to correct is I changed the name of my podcast from the renegade yogi to the yoga connection. Oh, you're right. Right. Yeah. You know what? I've seen the old ones. I'm sorry. So go ahead. I'm sorry. Go ahead, please. Yeah. No, what? No, no worries. So yeah, the yoga connection was Zornanda. I my most recent episode is with my teacher, yoga Rishi Vishwiketu. And yeah, but you can check out my website, Zornanda.com. It has my music on it has my book Future Life Progression has the meditations that go along with it. So yeah, most of the work that I'm doing right now is privates with I'm doing the Future Life progression, heart based meditation and private yoga sessions as well. So feel free to reach out on my website, you can email me there or you can find me on Instagram at yogi.zornanda. I'm kind of all over the place because I'm the type of person that fucking loves everything. So not only do I do yoga, I'm like training in CrossFit. I play, you know, guitar and I love music and yeah, just makes life fun. I yeah, so life ought to be fun. Yeah. Okay, Zornanda. Awesome having you on thanks buddy. You're very, very welcome. Thanks again to Zornanda for joining me today on skeptical. The one question I tee up from this interview is what do you think about yoga? What it was what it is what it's going to be? Any yogis out there? Let me know your thoughts love to hear from you. So I have some just really cool stuff coming up. I hope you stick with me for all of that. Until next time, take care and bye for now.