The Gods as Inner Forces: Yoga Through the Puranas

Hosted by Vinay

Saturday, January 17th

3-5PM

Daya Ridgewood

$22

The three month series is called 

Myth as Practice: Yoga Through Epic Story:

How yoga's ancient stories shape practice, ethics, and attention

January's Purana workshop is called: The Gods as Inner Forces: Yoga Through the Puranas

For thousands of years, the Puranas have elaborated yoga's key philosophies including the nature of the universe, the soul, gender, and the churning work of practice. This two-hour workshop uses these sacred stories to ground our understanding of yoga, and brings the ideas into the body through asana and pranayama.

The Puranas introduce the gods not as distant beings, but as forces that shape inner life—creation and dissolution, devotion and discipline, attachment and release.

Through stories like Ardhanarishvara, the dual-gendered form of Shiva and Shakti, this workshop offers both a grounding in foundational yoga philosophy and a language for understanding cycles of change and the dynamics of attention within practice. We’ll approach myth as a practical tool for deepening bhakti, presence, and relationship to the sacred in everyday life.

BIO:

Vinay Kumar Mysore (they) has been teaching and telling the stories of ancient India for thirty years. They are a student of Srivatsa Ramaswamy and Ryan Leier in the Krishnamacarya tradition, a path shaped by 17 years of dedicated study across yoga and meditation. Vinay invites students to engage with yoga as a South Asian system of liberation; one that resists colonized interpretations and reclaims its roots through breath, myth, movement, and ethical practice.