Sundari Johansen & Anjali Rao: On Tantra, Yoga, and Embodied Resistance

Our transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human editors. We do our best to achieve accuracy, but they may contain errors. If it is an option for you, we strongly encourage you to listen to the podcast audio, which includes additional emotion and emphasis not conveyed through transcription.

Anna Corwin: Okay. Hi, everyone. It's wonderful to see the beautiful faces of those of you who are here in person and I know there’s folks who are here online with us. I’m Anna Corwin. This is Sundari Johansen. This is Anjali Rao, and we are, I'm so excited to be in conversation with all of you and with these incredible people. So as you maybe noticed from the introductions, we're all representing the Women's Spirituality Department here at CIIS in different ways. I'm the chair. Sundari and I are both faculty. And we are so incredibly blessed to have Anjali, who you could hear, is incredibly talented, multi-talented, and accomplished as a, earning her doctorate with us. And women's spirituality, this is, it covers a lot. We are an interdisciplinary program and a transdisciplinary program, and we explore many things, including gender and spirituality. And all of what we do is really rooted in justice and resistance movements. And I think we're going to touch on some of these things in this conversation today. And today is really a moment for us to celebrate some incredible scholarship that these two have been doing and to explore some, both to celebrate the book launch of Anjali's book, which is a huge accomplishment and was absolutely just such a tremendous joy to read. It's really, really fun. I loved reading it. I couldn't put it down.

Sundari Johansen: Same.

Anna Corwin: And she's starting her PhD. Just, I can't even wait till what comes out next. I have seen some of your papers and it just gets more incredible. So this is a really, really special day for celebration. And we're also celebrating Sundari's work. You heard a little bit about the grant work that she's doing, the archival work, and also she co-founded, I'm going to cheat and look at what it's called, the International Center for Tantric Research. So we'll get to hear about yoga and Tantra and Hinduism and feminism and resistance movements. And I am so excited to be just a little part of this conversation. So I will start by asking you both to speak. So you're both situated within this world of women's spirituality. You're both situated as scholars and as feminists. And I'm interested, and I will have each of you answer this question, but I'm interested, within this field of women's spirituality and this larger field, if you can define Hinduism for us, which I know is a big task, but just how, and you'll each get a chance at it. So it's not the definition, but how are you approaching Hinduism? How do you understand it? And I'll start with you, Anjali.

Anjali Rao: Well, thank you. Thank you, Dr. Corwin, and thank you, Dr. Johansen. It's just such an honor to share space with two of my professors who I continue to learn and study from and deepen my own understanding of spirituality and the intersections with justice and feminism. So I'm just really deeply grateful for each and every one of you for coming here. To answer Dr. Corwin’s question about what is Hinduism, it's like really trying to define the entire ocean based on one palmful of something. So it's easier to define Hinduism, or rather understand what is Hinduism by what it is not, rather than what is. So I'll start with what it is not. What it is not is it is not a monolith. It is not homogenous. It is not based on a central canon of teachings. It does not have a single founder or even one central teacher or teachers. So it's a very complex religion, I hesitate to say religion because now I know religion is very problematic and it has a colonial framework to what we call as a religion. But it is a system you can say of belief systems, traditions, spiritualities with a lot of paradoxes. It has believers, it has theism, it has polytheism, it has atheism, it has agnosticism. So it's a lot of that and it is what we, one of the things that I mention in the book which is sort of undergirding of all of that is the caste system and that's why we have to mention caste when we're talking about Hinduism and also that caste is throughout a lot of the traditions in South Asia. So Hinduism is first of all not an ism. It is a multidimensional, heterogeneous group of people who have multiple ways of being and living and thinking and feeling and experiencing.

Anna Corwin: Thank you Anjali and now Sundari.

Sundari Johansen: How do I follow this? Well you know this, I like this approach of talking about what it isn't because that is part of Hindu philosophy of trying to, how do you explain what the ultimate reality is. It's not this, not that, right? Neti, neti. And so when we're talking about Hinduism, again it’s, you know this thing, it’s not really an ism, Hinduism is sort of a constructed category, right? Hinduism arose because, the term Hinduism arose because when people were coming to India from outside they saw people who were living within a geographical area and Anjali talks about this in the book and they referred to them as the people of the river, right? The Sindhu and then it became Hindu over time and that was related to the Indus River as well. That's the Greek word for the Indus River that we call in English today. So there is this association with the philosophy and practices of the people who are living by the river, right? But then, the sort of the category becomes expanded because over time there's all of these beliefs and practices and philosophies, incredibly, incredibly rich and incredibly diverse philosophies. It's amazing how pluralistic and diverse this thing we call Hinduism is, right? And that diversity is geographical even from village to village or within a, within a particular tradition, people can have different ideas and they're connected with some certain, usually there are some connections, but as you know Sri Aurobindo who was the spiritual teacher of the founder of the California Institute of Integral Studies Haridas Chaudhuri, as Aurobindo said and as his spiritual partner Mirra Alfassa said, there is nothing you can find, within Hinduism, that the opposite is not also true.

Anjali Rao: Exactly, yeah.

Sundari Johansen: Right? So anything that we say about Hinduism, something, the opposite will be true of that. So if you, so I want people to understand also how philosophically rich these traditions are, because when we, in the Western, Western, it's also a constructed category, the quote unquote Western Academy, there has long been an attention to the great philosophers of ancient Greece and the French philosophers, German philosophers, European philosophers, sort of in that tradition. But if we look at Hinduism, we see an incredibly rich philosophical system, every culture…

Anjali: Or systems,

Sundari: Or systems, right, multiple systems, yeah, and every culture is actually rich in philosophical systems but it's been excluded as religion, right? And so, I think it's important as we enter this conversation to understand that for example yoga, there are many yogas and Tantra, there are many Tantras and everything in between and beyond each having its own very rich philosophical system, ritual practices, understanding of the nature of reality, understanding of how to reach and connect with that reality, and as we enter into this conversation we're not going to be able to hold all of it, right? We're just going to be talking about a tiny little itty bitty sliver. So I think, that's, I don't know that I've actually defined anything but…

Anna: That's wonderful, that's wonderful.

Sundari: Just some framing.

Anna: I want to make sure, I want to ask a clarifying, just quick, I think you said it's been excluded as religion and I want to, just to make sure we're clear, I think that what I'm understanding you saying is that there is this rich philosophy of philosophical history that's incredibly dynamic and rich and complex and that in the history of coloniality and the global history it has been categorized as religion and therefore excluded from a sort of larger canon of philosophy.

Sundari: Right, right. So for example in the European philosophical system you have Christians who are doing philosophy that equates Christian beliefs with sort of the nature of reality and all of this stuff and that is categorized as philosophy in the Western Academy and in India for example we have, well my field is Hindu Tantra so I'll think about Abhinavagupta, who was an incredibly amazing polymath and mystic and tantric philosopher in the 10th, 11th century CE who wrote incredibly, incredibly complex philosophy but you won't find that talked about in most philosophy programs because it's categorized as religion and religion is seen as less than, philosophy in terms of intellectual merit. So I just want to point that out, yeah.

Anjali: I think one more thing I think we need to kind of talk about is how porous, the porosity of Hindu traditions, how it kind of absorbed so many different influences throughout history and throughout historical periods, that it was dynamic and it is continuously like most religions are, a dynamic, I don't even want to say system, a dynamic thing.

Sundari: Organism, maybe, like an organism.

Anjali: Organism, exactly, that kind of takes in and shapeshifts and then kind of changes and moves forward, kind of things.

Sundari: And I think, well we're going to get onto a roll, I think that's really really important too. Because one of the things that we talk about in religion is this idea of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Those are big words. Most people have heard maybe of orthodoxy but then a lot of people are like, heterodoxy, what is that? It's the opposite of orthodoxy, right? So in orthodoxy you have to believe a certain thing or practice a certain thing in order to be considered part of that religious group, right? And with heterodoxy, it is often pushing back against that orthodoxy. And what orthodoxy often does is it says, this, we have teachings that are eternal and unchanging and this is the way that things must be done. And that exists in Hinduism today, right? But we also have to acknowledge that Hinduism is varied and changing and has gone through so much evolution and shifts over time. Including in the heterodox traditions which includes Tantra. And we'll talk a little bit about that later.

Anna: Yes, perfect segue. So now that I've asked you one enormous question I'm going to ask you another enormous question, which is within this larger field of Hinduism. Your book is called Yoga as Embodied Resistance and I wonder, many of us of course growing up in the US maybe think of yoga as asanas and I wonder if you could define yoga for us. What are we talking about here?

Anjali: Again, yoga is, I like to say a multi-valent, a polyvalent word which refers to so many different things including traditions, practices, teachings that evolved or developed rather. I don't know whether I would say evolved, developed. As it went through different time periods it kind of took on the shape of whatever was existing and responded to it. So it started off as sort of a psycho spiritual practice which is mostly about meditation and transcendence for example, right? Transcendence from what? Transcendence, questions regarding the nature of, as Sundari was saying, consciousness about perennial reality. What does this mean to live? So sort of those deep existential questions were answered in the first part you can say of the development of yoga. And then next was, like, the development of figures for these kind of questions. For example, the Puranas which kind of took on like storytelling of these, what were considered as gods and goddesses. And so yoga kind of shape shifted to accommodate that and sort of respond to that in the larger Indic tradition. And then we have responses to the caste system where people fought back, especially people from the marginalized groups, the oppressed groups, women, different castes. They pushed back against, what Sundari was referring to, in terms of orthodoxy, the Brahminical orthodoxy. And we have this spontaneous sort of development of what we call as the Bhakti renaissance where people took on or wanted to participate in a direct participation to the sacred, right? So yoga emerged from all these different movements and moments in time, took on all this, again, has a very porosity and also syncretic in many ways because it took on different aspects of history as it encountered it. So I also like to use a lot of metaphors in my book because I feel it's more accessible because otherwise you're all like, what is she even saying. So I say for example yoga is like an ocean and it goes through the waves crush, crash, touch different parts of the land for example and the landscape and then it takes on whatever comes from that land and then it kind of continues to move on. So it is that kind of dynamic development of yoga that I refer to in the book also and that's what I always have whenever I share about yoga in a teacher training or whatever. I always kind of start with that question because it's an assumption that yoga is typically asana or hatha yoga, which is a very body centric practice, which also happened because of many reasons but mostly influenced by the Tantra traditions that hatha yoga developed where asana and anything to do with the body was seen as a possibility for using that, for transmuting that, into something more. So that to me is yoga. Yoga is a multivalent, polyvalent word that has changed, that has absorbed, that has evolved, developed, whatever, that consists of different kinds of teachings but it has to do with liberation, transcendence, transformation of both the individual and because the individual is situated in the collective, the collective.

Anna: Thank you. And now you get another enormous question my friend. What is Tantra?

Sundari: Well I'm teaching a whole class on that right now and one of the first things we say is who knows what Tantra is. So hard to define. All these things are so, you know, we like to name things. We want to know sort of what's the shape of it. How can we stick a flag in this and understand what it is and these things sort of evade categorization sometimes, right. But there's a few ways that we know what Tantra is and I think that, I think this will be useful to our discussion to just give a very brief little background, which is that there are these texts called the Upanishads that some of you may be familiar with, early, early quote unquote Hindu texts and one of the things that, one of the major innovations that happened in the Upanishads is this idea that the true self, the Atman, is not separate from infinite being, the Brahman, right? So this is a fundamental idea that moves throughout lots of different philosophical systems that grapple with this idea, that the self, the true self, which is different from our ego self, right, is not separate from the ultimate infinite being. Everything makes up everything in the universe. And so how we imagine that thing to be, is different based on the philosophical system and what our relationship is with that ultimate is different based on the philosophical system and there's many different systems, right. So in Tantra, there are also lots of different ways of categorizing that. But what sort of evolved over time was this idea that the self, that Atman, that individual self, was not separate from ultimate being and that you could realize that while you are living your life through certain kinds of practices called sadhanas. Sadhanas just means a kind of practice, a kind of striving towards something. And so Tantra then is an embodied sort of practice oriented tradition, a mystical tradition, that is aiming to achieve a kind of liberated state while you're alive but without doing what a lot of the other sort of more orthodox schools of Hinduism did, which was to say, well, this world is illusory and so we have to deny the body. And instead Tantra says, actually, if we engage the body, if we engage not just our sense of pleasure but also our sense of sometimes of disgust, if we engage all of these different emotions that we have through different practices and find this place of like equanimity, right? That that will help us reach a liberated state more quickly. And then we can, when we become the master of our bodies or mistress of our bodies or mx of our bodies, then we can, because the body is also the cosmos, right, so the body is a model for the cosmos, the microcosm is the macrocosm. When we are able to master that body or mx that body, that we also can achieve this kind of, you know, attain things that we want in the world, right, so there's a kind of magical dimension to it as well, that you don't have to deny the world in order to reach liberation. And so that's a very oversimplified way of putting it, but I would always orient Tantra toward this embodied practice that takes a lot of different forms, it has a lot of different attitudes to a lot of different kinds of practices, but it's that embodied sense of embodied mysticism and embodied practice, embodied yoga, right? I always talk about how the lowercase yoga versus the capital Y Yoga, that yoga as a sort of general term of that disciplined practice to achieve well-being, bhoga, and then you get liberated, mukti, right? So…

Anna: You make it sound so easy. Then you get liberated.

Sundari: Liberated with these three weird steps.

Anna: Wonderful. So I'm just having this experience that, or reflecting on this experience that I think a lot of our students when they start their masters or PhD with us in women's spirituality come in and then find out pretty quickly, it feels like they know less and less and less. And that feels like with this incredible illumination you're doing, you're sort of showing us how much there is to know that is enormous that we will just sort of gently touch with our fingertips in this conversation. But thank you. But moving now from these sort of very large definitions to your projects that we're celebrating today. And so we're celebrating the launch of this incredible book, and I wanted to ask you, Anjali, about the motivation for this book. You are a teacher. You've been doing this work for a long time. What motivated you to write this incredible history and this exploration in this book?

Anjali: Well thank you for asking that. I started the idea of the book actually, well not the book, but the study. I never thought that I could write a book. Maybe around eight to ten years ago, and it started with an Instagram post, so it was really not that deeply existential. But it started with a white yoga teacher proclaiming that it was the West that liberated women to practice yoga. And that actually got me very curious. I had just started studying and teaching yoga, so I was like, really, is that really true? Because I know that there were women practitioners, but when you look at the bookshelf, all the books that we are referring are people, men, basically. And I'm not even talking about the modern texts. I'm talking about texts like Patanjali's Yoga Sutras and the Upanishads and Hatha Yoga, Swatmarama wrote Hatha Yoga Pratipika. So all these really big texts that we consider as quintessential yoga texts were written by men. So I was like, where are the women in yoga history? So that was my key, sort of core, sort of question. And then of course, like Dr. Corwin said, the more you dig, you realize more you don't know, and the more you haven't considered as what are important questions. So that kind of broadened my inquiry into how is gender navigated, right? Because what are some of the considerations in terms of patriarchy and how has that changed or has that really changed? And of course, whenever you have to talk about patriarchy, you have to talk about caste. And as a Savarna, as a person who has caste privilege, I have to listen and study from people who are impacted by caste hierarchies, especially the Dalit folks and Bahujan folks. So the more I learned, I realized that what I thought of as yoga or what I thought of as Hinduism and everything sort of shifted and changed and sort of the ground kind of went away. And then I had to kind of figure out stuff. And it is only now that I'm figuring out, okay, what's my relationship to Sanskrit? What is my relationship to the texts that I've studied, which I've considered to be sacred? And how is that political or how has that always been political, right? So I realized that I have to kind of disrupt this or rather at least challenge, if not disrupt or at least question and surface out these questions of where is Brahminical orthodoxy and how it has sort of taken over yoga and since when it has taken over yoga. And I knew that the only way I, at least the way I could do it, because I'm not a Sanskrit scholar or I don't have access to many primary texts, was through storytelling. So because I'm a Kathak dancer, I'm a Kathak dance student, so my ways of getting into these sort of very big questions were through stories. And that's how I kind of have offered in the book, which is I talk about these different big periods of yoga history from a feminist lens and the feminist lens is offered by storytelling because feminist histories were preserved by stories. It was oral traditions because women typically and marginalized folks do not have access to writing resources or even for example, stone inscriptions, right, which is the big part of history, historical evidence. I mean, I'm just talking to my professors like it's kind of strange for me, but you know, so history has always been through all these evidence and those evidence are typically by men. So where are the stories, feminist stories are through song, are through poetry, are through art. And I knew that I had to kind of bring that element into yoga studies because that is where the world I come from. And I don't see this being discussed much. And so this is my little offering. And I have done this only because I could be in dialogue with people like Thenmozhi Soundararajan who has written the foreword, who is also the author of Trauma of Caste. I referred to all the caste abolition leaders like Dr. Ambedkar, Gail Omvedt, Prachi Patankar, people who I have kind of worked with in a small way as well as studied from, because my perspective was from a Savarna as a caste-privileged person. And I know that that is not obviously the only way. And I had to kind of listen to and learn from all those. And I've sort of gotten those threads of critique into the book. And offering, I'm very practical. I'm like what do people do with it? So I hope I've offered pathways for folks to reflect and say, How can we shift this culture in yoga spaces? So that's the project.

Sundari: And I just want to add that as I was reading your book, one of the things that struck me was, you know, with Tantra, I give a very slim definition. But one of the important things about Tantra is that it began as a way to sort of rebel against orthodoxy, right? It began in cremation grounds with people living in cremation grounds and smearing themselves with human ashes and saying, this is also the ultimate reality, right? Even the ashes of a dead body is Shiva, is the ultimate reality, right? And so that has continued as a thread through a lot of tantric traditions. Even as we have, you know, and women are referred to as gurus, the texts are all written by men, that have been found anyway. There are many thousands of texts that have been lost, destroyed. There are many thousands of texts left to be translated and encountered and worked with and that sort of thing. But, which is why study Sanskrit, please. But I think that the important thing is that women are, you know, in these texts, we see that women are gurus. Women are knowledgeable. Women are practitioners. And in the texts, we also see, because they are texts, a movement toward privileging Brahmins, privileging caste, bringing caste in. And in the texts, we see, some texts say you should not take any consideration towards caste. And other texts say, oh, well, women and Shudras, the non-dominant castes and dalits, I'll use the term dalit, which is a more respectful term than is used in the texts. But people who are outside of the caste system who have been oppressed, dalit means oppressed. And we have some texts saying, you know, they should be included. And we have other texts saying, well, these mantras aren't for them. They have to do this other practice. So we have a tradition that in some streams is radically egalitarian, radically so. And we have other streams in which it's reinforcing these systems. And so as I was reading your book, I was thinking about how there is this growing movement of, you know, the history of Indian feminism is rich and important. And I'm not going to cover it in its entirety. But…

Anna: You're not? [laughter]

Sundari: But in one stream of Indian feminism, there was a sort of rejection of religion because of these oppressive systems. But there is, more recently, a movement of women who are scholars who grew up in these traditions, who are reaching to the more liberatory aspects of Tantra, of Bhakti, the devotional tradition. And I think your book fits really well into that stream of tradition. You know, we have Rita Sherma and we have Madhu Khanna and we have Neela Bhattacharya Saxena and all these women doing amazing theological work. And there is so, you know, this is really a powerful work of theology, of feminist theology, really. And I think that's incredibly juicy and powerful. And I want people to read it.

Anjali: Oh, my God. I'm a little speechless because I look up to Dr. Corwin and Dr. Johansen's work. And when I met with Dr. Johansen over coffee the other day and I said, you know, when she said, I liked your book, I said, I'm done.

[laughter]

Anjali: But yeah, no, this is a, I think, I don't, if you were to ask me, you know, why you chose the stories I did, I can only say it came through in some sort of a realm of inspiration which I cannot articulate. And now I know that it is probably a sort of quote unquote of women's spiritual way of embodying knowledge or feeling the knowledge or whatever. I don't know what to call it yet. I don't have the words for it. But as soon as I read, for example, my first story, which is Sulabha, I knew that I needed to have. And this was, I've sat with that article from Ruth Vanita and her scholarship for years. It was not like I read it and then I went and wrote it. I sat with it for at least four or five years. And then, you know, then that got to me, that got me thinking, where are some of these brilliant debates? And I think one of the things that we were talking about is feminism and how it intersects with Hinduism. And you mentioned like how Tantra has been a way of challenging orthodoxy and patriarchy. And even within yoga, what we consider as yoga texts, feminist narratives. And feminism is a very Western, I mean, it's obviously an English word. The movement is birthed in the Western world. But that does not mean that there are not people who have challenged or resisted patriarchy. So though it's very rooted in that specific cultural context in the historical period, each of these periods have had people who have resisted in their own ways, either through debate or through dissent or through practicing radical sort of agency over their own bodies and rejecting marriages, walking out of marriages, getting married to the goddess, getting married to the god, like every single shade of gender. People were genderbending before genderbending became like known in the English way. So that's some of that rebellious sort of voices I wanted to highlight. And I think we all in this particular political moment need to kind of highlight that we are going through these horrendous times. And I hope that we can look at these not only my book, but in general, feminist resistance through different cultural and philosophical and spiritual traditions as nourishment and an anchor. Because I think we are sort of going around thinking, can I say the word? What the fuck? Like what, you know, so that is happening. And I hope that it kind of... I hope it roots us into our own heart and spirit space.

Sundari: And well, I just, I want to say that there is, yes. Yes, like everything you've just said, but also something to keep in mind is that, you know, in the sort of philosophical systems, you know, we all live with philosophy, whether we know it or not. Right? We all have philosophy impacting our lives, whether we know it or not. For example, do you think your mind and your body are separate things? Do you think your mind, your body and your spirit are separate things or the same? That's philosophy. That's the nature of being, right? It's called ontology. If we think about some of these traditions, the mind, you know, we think about like, oh, I'm so in my head about things. But actually, in these systems, the mind, the intellect and the body are part of the same material existence. And that can be kind of wild to wrap your head around, to think of the mind and our thoughts as material, right? But when we think about it that way, we can think about the intellectual work that we do as embodied work. And that is a powerful shift, I think, right? If we think about the work that we're doing in scholarship, in writing wonderful books that, I mean, like the way that you synthesize the entire history of yoga and India in the first couple of chapters is…

Anna: Brilliant, is brilliant.

Sundari: Really very accessible and really great and worth the price of the book alone. But there's also this thing of, you know, there's this way that we think about, oh, I need to be in my body. And that somehow means getting out of your head.

Anjali: Right.

Sundari: And I think that actually we need to find a way to bring our, to bring that way of thinking and bring how we think and how we intellectualize and how we dig into these juicy topics into our bodies, right? To bring them together so that we can go from this grounded place and do some really important work that really needs to be done, pushing back against oppressive systems.

Anjali: Yeah. Absolutely.

Anna: Whoo. Yes. Oh, this, there's so much going through my head I'm having, I'm having a couple, one is the question that I wanted to ask next which I will get to but before I do that there's a, there's a image that I'm having this coming to me. I used to live in L.A. and there's all these like culverts. It's like, that shape the water so that they don't control the water like these cement culverts so that streams that used to have all their rivulets and all their messiness and used to, you know, create banks, you know, are controlled. There's something about this conversation and what you two are both getting at and that is, I think, really sort of illuminating, I'm thinking of this this metaphor of the culvert and of oppressive systems and systems of patriarchy, the systems of the neoliberal capitalism, these systems of colonialism, both historically and contemporarily, and all of them as controlling the stories that we tell and that so often when we're, and that they also divide in certain ways and there's so much that we're, that you two are doing, that we I think in our education and women's and in our sexuality are trying to do, that you're sort of illuminating here, you used, that is illuminating that it is, it's, there's nothing new about feminism, there's something that you're showing us here maybe the words are different or the ways it's showing up and you know all of that, but there's not, it's not some new liberation that's coming outside, that actually looking at the history allows us to see actually that the contemporary or the single story is itself that culvert, that control. And then there's something also I think about, there's something really really important here about the fact that the seed of your story started on an internet post an Instagram post and that there's something actually about the way that we're consuming information these days. That also can function in that way so that it sort of limits us and limits the complexity and there's something really beautiful about, and actually quite simple in some ways about your book, you do a really beautiful job laying this out, out the history simply but you are also saying this is not a single story and, and then also you're doing this, also for us, where you're, you're resisting and I think we, I also, we are resisting, the idea that religion is some separated thing that is outside of the body or that is is, you know, this mind, the body this, the Cartesian models but also there can be this idea that spirituality is a, is a coming out of the, is somehow separated from the political or somehow separated from anything else and that also being something that is, is just a foolish kind of single story. That it comes from colonial histories, comes from histories of oppression but of course resist at what you both illuminate in your work is that spirituality has always been in many many different spaces around the globe also entangled with resistance and the political. So, with, with some awkward transition here, I'm going to, I'm noticing, you know we, we got so, this is easy for us to just go, whoo, strong but we, I asked Anjali this question of the motivation for her work and I want to ask you also you do this and you have the International Center for the Study of Tantra, Tantra research I forget the title of sorry…

Sundari: National Center for Tantra research.

Anna: Thank you. And you're also beginning a large research project in India and archival project with, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the motivations for your work.

Sundari: How long do you have?

[laughter]

Sundari: Well, so I want to point everybody to the website tantricresearch.org. If you are interested in learning more about the work that we're doing. We are going to be setting up a series of public talks that will be broadcast online with some of the top scholars in tantric studies hopefully trying to make some of that very amazing research that's going on, like accessible to the public. And our, our, our sort of research focus is on Assam which is in northeast India, it's very important center of, historically important center of Tantra, also fairly under-researched. As well as traditions in other regions that are connected to that, to that region. And the motivation for that was that, is that, I in 2005 went on my first pilgrimage to India and I went to a place called Kamakhya and Kamakhya is one of the most important centers of what we call Shakta Tantra, so the goddess focused form of Tantra that sees the goddess as the sort of ultimate reality in in the world, right? And so, the way that the goddess is worshiped, there is that, she is the cosmic Yoni, she's the cosmic vulva, the cosmic womb, the source, Yoni also means source, so the source of the universe. And there's a big long story that I won't tell right now. But I went there for a festival called Ambubasi Mela, which is, or Ambubachi Mela, which is the festival of the menstruation of the goddess. It means the flowing of the waters. And I went into the, so the temple’s closed for three days, so those of you who are familiar with Hindu sort of orthodox restrictions around menstruation. Typically when a woman menstruates, she has to be separated…

Anjali: Sequestered.

Sundari: Yeah. In various ways for several days. And then after bathing she can sort of re-enter society and so she can't go to the kitchen, she can't wear her normal clothes, she can't sleep on her bed, she can't go to the temple, all these things. And so there is, so this, in this festival when the goddess menstruates, the temple shuts down. Nobody can read any sacred text because the earth is menstruating. Nobody can plow the fields because the earth is menstruating. Nobody can do any planting, because the earth is menstruating, right? And then on the, so it closes down for three days and then on the fourth day the temple reopens and this is considered the most auspicious day of the entire year. And that was the time, the first time that I had Darshan, Darshan means to see. And with Darshan, you see the deity, but, and you look into the deity's eyes and then the deity also looks back at you, right? So it's a relationship. But at Kamakhya it's not actually Darshan. It's Sparsha. It's touch. Because there's no image of the deity there. It's a stone. It's a natural stone that a spring flows over. And so that is considered literally the stone vulva of the goddess. And so you go there and you touch the stone to receive her blessings. And so that was the first time that I went to Kamakhya. That was my first first experience and I had a very powerful experience. And I'll leave, leave that description for another time. But I went back a year later and I was only going to stay for a few days and I kept trying to leave and things kept happening. The car broke down. People canceled on me. Flights were canceled and I ended up having to stay there for three weeks and just at the temple. Like I couldn't even go on any excursions into town. And I finally said, OK, fine. Fine. OK. And I developed a very close relationship with my friend Rajeev Sharma and his wife Bandana Sharma, who run the Foundation for History and Heritage Studies in Guwahati, which is dedicated to preserving the history and heritage of Kamakhya and Assam. And we developed a very close friendship. I was eventually initiated into the Tantra tradition at Kamakhya and learned the rituals I spent, I lived there for a year doing fieldwork, spending many hours in ritual and doing, doing research. And one of the things that I did there was, was to help my friends to preserve manuscripts and to digitize other kinds of documentation, like copper plate grants from kings that were granting land to different families and, as well as, recording the music of women there, the devotional music that women had composed and would sing to the goddess. That was an important part of the ritual life there. And so over time, you know, as I, as I was doing my research and developing close relationships with this community, it just became clear that this was a lifelong reciprocal sort of relationship, right? That this is part of my larger family. And so you do things to help your family. And so one of those things is that many manuscripts had been stolen or sold in times of very difficult economic times. People would come and buy loads of manuscripts. And so a lot had been lost. And so repatriating copies of those manuscripts through digital copies and, you know, trying to find things and connecting my friends with other scholars around the world was part of that. But it's also, we are aware that manuscripts are fragile, right? And these traditions involved copying, hand copying manuscripts every so often when they would start to break down. Well, when you, that tradition is lost, then you're left with these hundreds of years old manuscripts that are crumbling. So what do you do? So what I did was I wrote a grant for the British Library's Endangered Archives program. I won that grant. It's a, it's a pilot grant. So we are going to digitize the library of my friend's archive at Kamakhya of these wonderful tantric and magical and devotional manuscripts. And then we're also going to do some traveling around Assam to talk to other families that he knows, who have manuscripts, to preserve them because some of the younger generations, they're not interested in, you know, preserving and working with these traditions. So the older generations want them to be preserved. And so by doing this work with the British Library, you know, the British Library is very aware of its history of, its problematic history of colonization. And this is one of the ways that they're trying to help preserve knowledge for the world and help right some, in some way, some of the very serious harms that have been done. And so I think we, in the Academy, we all have responsibility to do some part of that, as part of our work. Yeah.

Anna: Incredible. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that story. I think I'll ask one last closing question. They're not getting easier, these questions. But we've talked, you know, today about, we've mentioned the world being a bit, a bit insane in this moment, a bit challenging and your work, both of you, brings the spiritual and the political we've, the embodied and power and resistance altogether. I wonder if you could speak to what you hope folks will take away from, from this conversation and from your book and the significance for this moment. And I'll ask each of you that, maybe start with you, Anjali.

Anjali: I think one of the big things that we have to kind of consider is that, A, religion and politics are not separate. Healing traditions are also political in terms of access, in terms of who gets to shape them, who gets left out, you know, those kind of things. And so for me, equity is something which has been a big part of my work and we need to kind of consider that. So what what what what what what would I invite people into considering is that everything we do and I quote black feminist actors, everything we do is political. And so our choices are political, our choices of participation in the systems or not are political. So I would say that and, and this is how we, one of the ways we resist is to keep our own stories alive. Stories of how we are not only surviving, but thriving. You know, fear is the biggest way in which authoritarian systems, authoritarian governments kind of feel that they can assert control. So I say, of course, we have to be safe and each of our positionalities depends, you know, depending on that, we have to navigate safety. But keeping our stories alive and keeping our own ancestral traditions alive, thriving, building community, of communities of resistance, I think that would be the key takeaway for me.

Anna: Thank you, Anjali.

Sundari: Yeah, I would say, you know, my work right now is really looking at the nature of materiality, right, the physical stuff and the power that's in that, right? Something that's called material agency. What is the, what is the power of that thing to impact the world around it? Right? And that, and how is that understood? And I'm looking at how women's bodies have a kind of material agency in Tantra. Right? And I think that one of the things I said earlier is, is really connected to that. That, you know, we're a university. We were founded in this idea of integral education and what is integral, well, ask 100 people you'll get 100 answers, right? But it's that integration of the whole self, right? That integration of the spiritual, the intellectual, the physical, like all of it. And that resistance takes so many forms and embodiment isn't just getting out of your head. It's integrating the intellect with the body. It's integrating our experience. It's integrating our spirituality, because all of those things when we bring those things together, we're, we're moving from a place of power. And we all have inherent power. Every one of us, the small things that we do, have impact. We don't, you know, what I think one of the biggest problems with American culture is this hyper individualism. I don't think anyone would disagree with that. Well, maybe some people would. But it's this idea that, in order to make a difference, you have to be a superhero and you have to be making big changes and leading these big movements. Actually, the kindness that you show to someone who's having a hard time on the street, can have impacts that you won't ever know about, but can be profound to that person and then can be passed on and on and on. These small things can make a huge difference. And also being part of a larger group of people, whatever those actions are, that can also have a huge impact. It's together, not just sitting online and making comments, but actually organizing with people, going and having lunch, having coffee with people, figuring out, what are we going to do? Where are we going to show up? How are we going to embody this resistance? How are we going to be in the world together? Because it's not just about changing our individual selves or liberating our individual selves. It's about how we move in the world and how that ripples out beyond ourselves. Because that is, I think, what we have lost in our culture and that's what we need to rebuild in this current sort of political and historical moment, is those connections, those embodied connections. So, yeah.

Anna: We have a tiny bit more time, so I'm going to ask you to say a little bit more if that's okay. So you're speaking about, I love that you're talking about material agency and you're talking about embodiment. And there are some ways in which I think, both materiality and embodiment and the power in embodiment, can be often in the US, sort of a separation from the world. I wonder if you could say, like, connect what you were just saying, this beautiful, beautiful thing, to the things you were saying earlier about…

Sundari: Yeah.

Anna: Okay, you know where I'm going.

Sundari: Yeah, totally. Yeah. And what we're talking about is tantric philosophy, right? So this idea of tantric philosophy, if I was in class, I'd be [...] There's these different ideas about how we engage with the world, right? So if we're talking about, quote unquote, Hinduism, there's, you know, sort of prevailing philosophy that sort of, in sort of one of the orthodox schools called Advaita Vedanta, sort of like a non… it’s that non-dual. So when we say non-dual, we mean that non-separation between the Atman and the Brahman, the self, the true self and the ultimate. There's this, you know, I was talking about how there's this idea that the world is illusory. And so we sort of...there's a lot of valuing of asceticism, of rejecting the world, of rejecting sexuality, of rejecting just, you know, basic everyday pleasures and all of that stuff. And in Tantra, I mean, I think that Tantra is, you know, most people, when they think about Tantra, they think, you know, in America, they think about, you know, tantric sex and orgasmic pleasure and orgasmic breathing and sexual freedom. And that's really not what we're talking about when we're talking about these traditions. And that's a whole other conversation. But Tantra is really about engaging the whole self in the process of liberation and engaging in the world. And, you know, I don't think that a lot of, you know, the earlier texts were too concerned with political movements, like we are today. But another thing that I was talking about is how modern, a lot of modern Indian feminists are bringing these ideas to be grounded and sort of how actually, how, like, yeah, we actually do want to bring these, these ideas into our current political movement. And I think Rita Sherma talks about ecological healing in her work and how, you know, the importance of, of, of considering sort of ecology in our spiritual, in our spiritual world. And so, I'm rambling a little bit, but I just, I just want to say that there's, there's a way in which people can, you know, whether it's in yoga communities or quote unquote new age communities or other sorts of spiritual communities, there's often a kind of thing that we call spiritual bypassing, right, where you engage in spirituality and say, well, we're going to just engage in our spiritual practice and, you know, something, something, the world will be healed. Right? And, and I think that, that there's a way that we can use tantric philosophy to say, actually, we need to engage in the hard stuff, actually we need to do the things that feel comfortable. That actually part of Tantra is, is getting at those places where you have reactions where you feel uncomfortable, where you are like, oh, did I step in it like, and, and I think we can extend Tantra to those spaces, right? Because if we're doing, if we're doing something that is meant to be transformative and is meant to shift our relationship with the world and to expand our consciousness to realize everything as Shakti or as Shiva, whoever or as Vishnu, whatever you're, because Krishna, whatever you're as Radha, whatever your orientation is, then that means also recognizing in the moment that everyone in this room is Shakti. That the ground is Shakti, the walls are Shakti, the traffic outside is Shakti. That the person struggling with addiction on the corner is Shakti. That the person in the White House is Shakti. Right?

Anjali: I think that's a stretch for me right now.

Sundari: Right, but it forces you to think like, we talk about not dehumanizing other people. Right? That that counts for those of us who are engaging in resistance to, to avoid dehumanizing other people because there will be a point at which we are asking people in positions of power, who are holding guns, that we're going to say, we know that you are better than this. We see that you're human beings, and you can choose differently. And that there may be a point when they're asked to do something, that is illegal and immoral, and we have to appeal to their better nature. And if we can remember that, then we have to constantly remind ourselves, oh, these people that are doing things that we really don't like and that are really dangerous and really harmful, they are also human beings. And I think that's a profoundly tantric way to approach the world, because it makes us look at ourselves. That doesn't mean that we have to accept everything or that we have to say, oh yeah, you're great, you can, you know, we can still have boundaries, very firm boundaries. Right? But it means recognizing the other as worth engaging with.

Anna: Thank you. So that is the end, we are out of time. I want to say just a huge, huge, huge enormous thank you to both of you Sundari and Anjali. You two are incredible. I have the best job in the world, getting to be in your presence and learn from you. And thank you so much for this incredible conversation. Anjali, thank you for writing this book. All of you, please get her book? It is, it's wonderful. I, Yoga as Embodied Resistance.

Sundari: If you're here, you want to read it.

Anna: Yes, you do. Yes. And I want to thank all of the public programs, the CIIS, Pele, Emlyn, everyone. Thank you so, so, so much for hosting this, making this so easy. Thank you to all of you for being here. Such gratitude to all of you. Thank you.

Anjali: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Johansen. And thank you, Dr. Corwin. You've made me less nervous and intimidated by...

Sundari: And I want to thank both of you for just the richness that you bring to, I mean my daily life. Like I am, I can't believe I get to do this for a living. It's amazing. And that I get to work with incredible people like you. Thank you. And yeah, if you, if you like the conversations we're having, women's spirituality program, man.

Anna: We've got a master's and a PhD. Come join us. Come, come learn that you know nothing as we...

Sundari: Absolutely.

Anna: How much there is to learn.

Sundari: What did I call it? Sacred nerdy mischief.

Anna: Sacred nerdy mischief. Thank you everyone so, so much.

Anjali: Thank you all.

Sundari: Thank you.

 

Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live.

Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef and hosted by Alex Elliott at CIIS. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. CIIS Public Programs are produced by the Office of Events at California Institute of Integral Studies. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.