Welcome to this online yoga philosophy course.

In this part, we will go to the very core of yoga philosophy and examine the yogic model of why suffering arises in our lives, and why we should keep striving towards a peace of mind that never seems to come. 

This analysis can be liberating in itself, because it can make it possible to navigate more gracefully in the impulses of your mind, but it is also the stepping stone to understand the underlying strategies of yoga.

In yoga, the traditional goal of the practice is to create a fundamental change of perspective towards yourself and your relationship with the world. In these three lectures, we shall investigate what kind of perspective the yogīns are looking for, why it is structurally impossible and mystical, how we can strive for it anyway, and why we do not need to be alienated by the idea of liberation.

In this part we shall look at the concept of change from two different perspectives. First, we look at change through the eyes of the early, ascetic schools of yoga, and examine why it is such a major challenge to the human mind. Secondly, we look at change through the eyes of the later haṭha yoga, where they engage in change to perfect the feeling of flow.

In this segment we take a closer look at tantra. Tantra brought new layers to the yoga tradition, and the modern yoga that is mostly practiced in the West is fundamentally influenced by tantra. We shall look at how the relation towards life is fundamentally different from the earlier schools and how liberation should be sought IN the world rather than by turning the back on the world.