BOOK TALK | Paul Bramadat – Yogalands

DETAILS AND REGISTRATION

Join Paul Bramadat, scholar of religion, yoga teacher, and author of Yogalands: In Search of Practice on the Mat and in the World (MQUP 2025), for a free yoga class. This class will be a light-hearted introduction to some of the main asanas and issues found in postural yoga traditions in North America.

The event is free to attend and beginners are welcome. Copies of Yogalands will be available to purchase for $15 (50% off).

Come stretch your mind and body at 51 Dockside Drive, Toronto, ON M5A 1B6. The event takes place at George Brown College - Waterfront Campus.

Learn more: Eventbrite tickets

Paul Bramadat is director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria.

about the book

Millions of people practise yoga, attracted to the mat by its promise of physical and mental benefits, social connection, and spiritual nourishment. Promoted as a way of healing the body and mind from wounds inflicted by the world, modern yoga may be a critique of the social order – an “anti-world” to which practitioners escape. Yet yoga can never free itself entirely from the compromises and contradictions of reality.

In Yogalands Paul Bramadat wrestles with his position as a skeptical scholar who is also a devoted yoga practitioner. Drawing from his own experience, and from conversations with hundreds of yoga teachers and students in the United States and Canada, he seeks to understand what yoga means for people in the modern West. In doing so, he addresses issues that often sit beneath the surface in yogaland: why yoga’s religious dimensions are rarely mentioned in classes; how the relationship between yoga and trauma might be reconsidered; and how yoga seems to have survived debates around nationalism, cultural appropriation, and sexual misconduct.

Yogalands encourages practitioners and critics to be more curious about yoga. For insiders, this can deepen their practice, and for observers, this approach is an inspiring and unsettling model for engaging with other passionate commitments.