A conversation about the roots of yoga, the technology of the mind, and what it takes to truly change.
Tara Mitra grew up between two worlds. A Catholic school in Canada and a Hindu father who told stories of Krishna and the Mahabharata on weekends. That split sent her first into management, then into every healing modality she could find, and eventually into the depths of the yoga tradition itself.
Now a yoga teacher and yoga therapist, she brings rare clarity to what this path is actually for, and what it costs to follow it properly.
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Scott and Tara have wanted to record this conversation for a while. They finally found the time with Tara calling in from Karnataka at the start of monsoon season. What follows is one of the most grounded conversations Stillpoints has produced. Tara speaks without performance. She’s been doing this work for thirty-seven years, first through Western psychology and management, then through the body, then through the textual tradition. She knows the difference between contemplating your patterns and reinforcing them. She’s lived both.
In this conversation with Tara Mitra
- How a full prostration in a temple at eighteen, something she didn’t plan or understand, began everything.
- Why the contemplative space, if it isn’t trained, can become a place to hide rather than to grow.
- What Sankhya philosophy and the Yoga Sutras actually offer – a technology of the mind, not a religion.
- Why chanting works, even if you find it strange.
- Her father spending twelve years insisting she was still in management, and the moment his jaw dropped when she chanted. the Narayan Upanishad in his living room.
- What yoga can offer people with serious mental health conditions, and where its limits are.
- Her belief that real success is quietude.
Tara is one of those teachers who makes you feel the tradition has weight and direction. That it points somewhere real.
This conversation will stay with you…
“Real success is quietude. Joy and peace within your heart, within your being – not a commercial idea of peace, but genuine.”
About Tara Mitra
Tara Mitra has been practising yoga for twenty-two years and studying the human mind since 1989. With East Indian and Canadian heritage, she carries a rare dual fluency – she understands both the roots of the tradition and the world her Western students are coming from, and she refuses to water one down for the other.
She trained in Ashtanga Yoga under Tim Miller, R. Sharath, and R. Saraswathi Jois, and spent four years assisting at Saraswathi’s busy shala in Mysore, India. For almost a decade she has been a student of Dr. Vigneshwar Bhat, studying the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Yoga Sutras, and Vedic Chanting in depth. She is a Certified Yoga Therapist (C-IYAT, Krishnamacharya lineage), specialising in trauma, stress, and anxiety.
Her teaching is traditional, rigorous and, by all accounts, quietly joyful.
You can find more about Tara here:
“Tara is one of those people who makes the tradition feel alive and urgent. She carries the lineage with real care and asks questions that made me look at my own practice more honestly. I’m grateful this conversation finally happened.”
Scott J – Stillpoints Podcast
If you enjoyed this podcast then you might also enjoy Scott’s conversations with Kia Naddermier and Josefin Wikstrom.
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