Welcome back to Honing In and to my interview with Harpinder Mann.

Harpinder Mann, RYT-500, SEP (she/her), is a trauma-informed yoga teacher, Bhakti student, and author based on Tongva land (Los Angeles). Rooted in her Sikh spiritual background and Panjabi ancestry, she shares yoga as a sacred path of remembrance and liberation. Practicing since 2013 and teaching since 2018, she guides students in weaving sādhana and the eight limbs of yoga into daily life to cultivate resilience, meaning, and connection. Her work bridges social justice and healing, honoring collective liberation. Her book, Liberating Yoga: From Appropriation to Healing, invites readers to reclaim yoga as a practice of integrity and wholeness.

Here are some of the things Harpinder and I discuss:

• Challenging the packaging of yoga and mindfulness as relentless self improvement
• Why working with students and clients doesn’t feel like a project to Harpinder
• Decolonizing yoga through honoring where practices have come from
• Harpinder’s book journey and the sense of responsibility she felt while writing Liberating Yoga
• Giving yourself space between projects to allow ideas to come to you
• The many ways we can deepen and practice yoga

Resources & Links:

• Harpinder’s website
• Events with Harpinder
• Harpinder’s book, Liberating Yoga: From Appropriation to Healing
• Harpinder’s Instagram
• Harpinder’s Podcast (we referenced Episode 3: Understanding Yoga Exclusion, Fatphobia + Racial Trauma with Leah Saliter)
• Books mentioned: Edward Said’s Orientalism and Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score.

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