Heart Yoga Radio

TAOIST DIALECTICS

In this podcast we playfully and seriously outline our eccentric take on 'Taoist Dialectics'. This entails brief encounters with Plato's The Sophist and Hegel's Logic as well as an engagement with a parable told by Taoist master, Chuang Tzu. We relate all this to personal resilience in these apocalyptic times. [Free. 32 minutes.]

LAO TZU 40

This podcast deals with Chapter 40 of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. We concentrate on the amazing relevance this chapter has to our current political, economic and spiritual emergencies. In a few short lines, Lao Tzu diagnoses the condition of the working people of his time as subjection to violent and militarily oriented 'robber barons' whilst they themselves are the creators of value and the necessary goods to sustain life. This is exactly our condition too. Lao Tzu offers a meditation to counter the fragmental [non-holistic, non-systemic thinking] which is the ideological counterpart to a kleptocratic economy. [Free. 29 minutes.]

AFGHANISTAN, GEO-POLITICS, HISTORY - INTERESTING TIMES 42

This podcast gives our initial take on the recent take over of Afghanistan by the Taliban as US and NATO military withdraw after 20 years of occupation. We place the events in the systemic contexts of geo-politics and history and expose the hypocrisy of UK and US media and politicians who would cease to ally with Saudi Arabia if they really did care and women's emancipation from oppressive regimes. NB don't miss the short in-door addendum at the end. [Free.  34 minutes.]

GB NEWS & TOXIC 'FREEDOM' - INTERESTING TIMES 40

In this podcast, we discuss two recent events on GB News TV station which reveal the employment of a toxic and incoherent notion of freedom which is regularly employed by neo-liberal propaganda. These are Nigel Farage's take on the RNLI rescuing migrant in the English channel and Neil Oliver's claim that his freedom may rightly entail others' exposure to COVID infection. We contrast this with a notion of freedom which is grounded in the psychological, cultural, economic and social systems any desirable good is embedded in. [Free.  46 minutes.]

DAWN BUTLER & THE POST-TRUTH PARLIAMENT - INTERESTING TIMES 39

In this podcast, we jump off from Dawn Butler's expulsion from the House of Commons for the offense of mentioning the Prime Minister's predilection for lying. This event, in combination with incompetent handling of increasing COVID infection, the breakdown in supply chains to supermarkets as a consequence of Brexit, and the steady turning of the right wing press on the Tory government add fuel to a dangerous and chaotic public mood which the far right will attempt to capture. [Free. 31 minutes.]

SAVAGE JAVID'S RANDIAN FANTASY - INTERESTING TIMES 38

In this podcast we comment on the state of the Tory Cabinet as members are 'pinged' as  a result of the Secretary of Sate for Health testing positive for COVID19 on the eve of 'free-dumb day'. We focus on contradictions within the right as authoritarian social conservatism vies with libertarian-libertinism for dominance and powerful opportunists attempt to face both ways. In this context we examine Javid's espousal of Randianism. [Free. 35 minutes.]

COVID19 & MENTAL HEALTH

In this podcast, I examine the mental health consequences of the COVID19 pandemic and their embeddedness in entwined economic, cultural/ideological and ecological systems. [Free. 26 minutes.] 

EYES - COMMENTARY ON A VERSE

This podcast is a commentary on Eyes which is a verse from Songs of No and Yes explicating a meditation on the human face. [Free. 15 minutes.]

LAO TZU 39

This episode in our Lao Tzu series deals with Chapter 52 of the Tao Te Ching in which Lao Tzu discusses the benefit of contemplative alignment with the Tao and the modest comportment it induces. [Free. 15 minutes.]

REMARKS ON FREUD PART 1 - THE UNCONSCIOUS

This podcast is the first in an ongoing series on Freud and psychoanalysis which is meant to be useful to our series on fascism and reason, as well as to our many considerations of the workings of propaganda and ideology. Here, give some background to Freud's intellectual journey and elucidate the notion of 'the unconscious' and its significance for humanity's self-image. [Free. 34 minutes.]