Podcast Ep. 23 ~ Yoga Day Sydney 2025 Interview - Dr Swami Shankardev and Janie Larmour

Welcome to this episode of Big Shakti’s podcast, an interview with Dr Swami Shankardev by Janie Larmour, the organizer of Yoga Day Sydney, which will be held at Sydney Boys' High on Sunday, June 22nd, 2025.

https://www.yogaday.com.au/
Get 20% off your ticket price using the coupon code BIGSHAKTI20.
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/yogaday/1413531

Janie states - "Swami Shankardev is this year’s featured teacher and headline speaker. He is a medical doctor, yoga acharya, psychotherapist, and all-around wisdom ninja.

In his keynote, “The Principles of Yoga Therapy for Mental Wellness—Ancient Wisdom for Modern Minds,” he’ll unpack how Samkhya, Vedanta, Patanjali’s Yoga, and Tantra can team with modern psychology to develop mental strength and emotional resilience and illuminate the path to deeper Self-realisation."

Yoga Day—Sydney is a full-on, feel-good yoga festival created to “teach, inspire, and unite” the community in one jam-packed day. There will be 30+ yoga, meditation, and wellness sessions running four at a time from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., a buzzing marketplace for healthy goodies, and plenty of space to meet kindred spirits of every bendy (or not-so-bendy) level.

The doors swing open at 8:30 a.m. on Sunday, 22 June 2025, at Sydney Boys High School in Moore Park, giving you a whole winter-solstice weekend reason to roll out the mat and warm up body, mind, and humor muscles.

Yoga Day is a fantastic gateway for individuals to delve into various yoga styles and wellness practices that they might not typically encounter in their daily lives. By attending this immersive event, participants can learn new skills, broaden their perspectives, and embark on a journey of exploration and growth. Yoga Day 2024 was a huge success for all attendees, yoga teachers, and vendors.

The founder behind Yoga Day is Janie Larmour. With a career spanning 30 years in health and wellness, she has been sharing her passion nationally at large expos and festivals for 16 years and most intensely, internationally for the past 9 years in the USA and UK. Her extensive global experience has exposed her to the transformative power of yoga events, witnessing firsthand the excitement and wonder they create in both beginners and experienced yogis.
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Janie was inspired to create Yoga Day, recognizing the need for a dynamic platform in Australia. The vision is to provide a remarkable opportunity for yoga teachers, studios, and wellness brands to showcase their offerings to a large and diverse audience. ​

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Podcast transcript

Janie Lamour: Hi, everybody. We're going to speak to Dr. Swami Shankardev Saraswati today about what he'll be sharing with us at Yoga Day 2025 in Sydney. Yes, we have you. Hi. Swami Shankardev, with many years of experience in health, will discuss mental health at Yoga Day. Tell us more about yourself.

Swami Shankardev: I've been doing this work for about 50 years. I started in 1975 with my first consultation. It's been a while. As a young person, I was drawn to yoga from the age of 13. I read my first book on yoga, titled "The Third Eye" by Lobsang Rampa, which was very popular at the time. Later in the sixties, I had the good fortune to meet several gurus coming to Australia from India. Then I met my guru in the early seventies and went to India to study. I lived with him for 10 years there, then returned to the West and developed my medical practice, which incorporated yoga therapy.

All my work is yoga therapy. I offer one-hour consultations, focusing mainly on psychospiritual levels, because āsana is now so widely available. I can refer people to many great yoga teachers for āsana work.

In my practice, I work with a range of chronic physical and medical conditions, offering one-on-one sessions in combination with group classes. My primary focus has been yoga psychology, yoga psychotherapy, and spiritual evolution. How do we understand mental illness from a larger sacred framework? How can we view what we're going through from a soul perspective, rather than purely clinically?

Clinical work is important because suffering must be reduced. However, once we achieve balance through various methods, including cognitive behavioral work, medication, herbs, and lifestyle changes, we can move into deeper work with individuals who are open to that approach. The combination of Eastern and Western methods works amazingly well.

I call this the yoga of medicine, combining the best of these different worlds.

Janie Lamour: Amazing. I was looking through your website and encourage everyone to visit BigShakti.com. You've got podcasts, a blog, and lots more. There's a wealth of information on this website. The Core Strength and Calm Mind course interests me because my yoga practice is rooted in Chinese medicine, which focuses on developing the core and cultivating a calm mind. Tell me about your approach.

Swami Shankardev: I was fortunate to work with teachers from diverse traditions. I studied with a great chi gong master and became interested in understanding the differences and universal elements within Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan traditions. The Core Strength and Calm Mind approach involves grounding, alignment, and pulsation. From an Ayurvedic perspective, mental illness is often a disturbance of the air and space element, which isn't part of the Chinese system, which has different ways of describing the elements. In Ayurveda, we consider psychological and emotional issues as disturbances of the subtle elements, air and space, known as vāta in Sanskrit.

Grounding is crucial for bringing people out of their head or feeling states, back into their body and the earth. We develop the ability to feel the earth, working with breath in the lower Jao (the energy of the belly in Chinese systems) and bringing that into relationship with other chakras.

We work extensively with chakras, perhaps the heart chakra, to restore feeling capacity because many people with psychological issues suffer from anxiety, depression, or trauma, creating toxic feeling states. We purify those toxic feelings, reduce destructive emotions, and build capacity for positive feelings, restoring feeling function.

We can connect the earth element with the heart space or work with the third eye, bringing concentration that aligns various components of the mind around a central point. Grounding and centering are vital concepts in healing. We align different forces within the body, for example, the fire element in the belly. We want the power of the fire element to be present so people feel strong, vital, and courageous, and we might link that to the heart.

By aligning belly and heart, you have the best of both worlds. If you only have belly fire without heart, you have power and energy, but it's not very human because the quality of your heart is diminished. If you have the heart chakra, anāhata, active without power from the belly chakra, manipūra, the heart energy is weak and lacks direction. You may be oversensitive. Bringing power and love together, power and the empathy that accompanies the feeling function in the heart —that's what we aim for. Of course, it all depends on the person's needs.

Speaker: Interesting, because in Chinese medicine, the small intestine is your hara power, your gut, and its partner is the heart. The heart and small intestine are the fire element; they're partners.

Swami Shankardev: They cooperate. That's what we're trying to do. Yoga means connection, so we bring things back into alignment and harmony, and simply get out of the way, allowing the body's intelligence to operate. When you restore relationships between various parts of yourself, your innate intelligence in the deeper mind guides you to what feels right.

Part of my approach is to empower people to be autonomous. For example, they bring wisdom with them due to a soul wound or life challenges they've managed for years. They possess wisdom but often require additional elements to be added. The main element for healing is meditation. However, I also use Chinese medicine, referring to acupuncture and Chinese herbalism, to support purification and restore harmony between body parts.

Janie Lamour: How do you approach someone who is really in their head, cut off, and does not know how to drop into their body to feel?

Swami Shankardev: It depends on what's causing the blockage. We cut off several parts of the body: the head from the heart and the diaphragm from the belly. Many people struggle with the concept of power. Grounding alignment pulsation work is essential for individuals who tend to be overly analytical.

I also find another technique most helpful for this issue, which I'll demonstrate at Yoga Day. It is called Ajapa Japa. This technique uses the breath and a mantra to move between the navel and the throat.

You imagine a tube between the navel and the throat pit and feel, as you breathe in, that you're pulling chi or prana upward through it. You're charging the body. As you exhale, you move the prāna and the mantra back to the navel. The head chakra is always active, but the key is to bring the heart back into relationship with the head, as the heart is tender and often the most wounded. We bring energy, mantra, and visualizations to this frontal psychic passage. We use ujjayi breath in Sanskrit and a mantra in this psychic passage, which purifies the various chakras involved. It's like churning the mind, purifying blockages, and bringing attention back to the body in a grounded, somatic way. They no longer have to think about it; over time, depending on the individual and their wounds, this restores balance. It's part of an overall approach with many components.

Today, we often lose our sense of feeling, empathy, heart, and compassion. We shut down under trauma and life stresses, and the world today is a lot to hold.

How do we get through the day? We often shut down our feeling function, trying to think and rationalize: "What do I do? What happens next?" We often lose connection to our intuition, feelings, and inner wisdom. A significant part of healing is reconnecting with the psyche, the deep mind, and spirit—the essence. Ultimately, this revolves around consciousness. What is that power we have to know, see, perceive, and experience?

Consciousness is behind feeling. By placing consciousness into the body, feelings arise. Some feelings are toxic, while others are beneficial. You need support with toxic feelings. You need someone who can say, "That's OK, it is just purification, nothing to worry about," or "That is a problem, and we need to attend to that." That's all part of building trust in a therapeutic relationship.

Janie Lamour: What about developing the third eye, which is related to intuition? What's your quickest way to awaken it?

Swami Shankardev: The quickest way is to use mantra, chanting it while focusing on the eyebrow center to bring attention and consciousness there. All meditation that cultivates self-awareness activates the third eye. The third eye is the master chakra governing all others. It is the controller of the mind, the coordinator for the five elements, and controls the five chakras below it.

The quickest approach is mantra and visualization. You might place a flame here and chant AUM, or any mantra. Sound vibration is potent for penetrating blocked areas and creating resonance. Singing any vibration works because structures in our brain vibrate with sound, affecting cerebrospinal fluid. Sounds we make vibrate through the skull, stimulating the brain. It's a deep sensory experience—sound is very potent. However, the mantra, a psychic sound, is another level of potency that is 1,000 times more powerful than audible sound.

Janie Lamour: Wow. I can't wait. You have the longest session at Yoga Day, an hour. I'm not sure if you'll be able to fit everything in. I love it. You have about half an hour after your session when you are free. If you go beyond that, that's great. Thank you for your time today.

We look forward to seeing you on June 22nd.

Swami Shankardev: I look forward to it, too. Thanks so much, Janie. I appreciate everything you're doing to spread the word.

Janie Lamour: Thank you. Have a great day. Thanks. Bye.

To learn more about this approach, consider attending our Yoga of Mental Health workshops.

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