To wake in the forest, on this full moon in July. Heart full of moon full of heart. Drops of sunrise find the floor of the oak-hickory understory. Birds I cannot name have much to say. A dapple-bottomed deer, who’s been growing up in this hidden green hollow of a summer, oscillates the serving dishes of his ears here, next to the creek bed with his mama. In an hour, teachers visiting from out of town will arrive to help me remove the invasive stiltgrass destroying patches of biodiversity on the ground—stiltgrass is a monocropper who who cannot play well with others and offers neither shelter nor sustenance to the Beings who live in the meadow I steward. Enshittification is everywhere, and easily reversible with a little work.

But first, this morning I’m reading three different pieces of writing from ashtanga people – about yoga in Cairo, and Vienna, and a long (unpublished) interview Sharathji did before he died.

What is this, when tears come directly from the center of the chest? It is like touch. You can touch with your body, yes. And also, you can touch any person or so-called object with an organ. The heart is an organ. An instrument. You can plink on it, or crash into it with ham-hands, or –you know—learn to play.

Last night around the Guru Purnima fire with many teachers, I hamstrung my heart and my words. It is not for me, now, to be the one who summons spirit, who draws out the heart into a devotional container to warm us all. Fifteen years ago, yes. But now, that is their remit. They are the teachers. And to teach: it is first to learn to make worlds. Nothing less. Transformation begins with one specific magical skill: the ability to build a container with your own huge heart of devotion.

I did nothing. Let them come forth with their feeling to make a world. They piled into a pontoon with a couple of big yellow Labradors – I stayed ashore – watching the evening reflected on (yes) Strawberry Lake. Then they made their fire, and were together, and chanted to Sun himself. Speaking to Sun where he lives, in all actually educated practitioners of Surya Namaskara: in the heart.

As they looked down at their sheets and I added my voice, watching the sky, the fireflies lit up their airy bodies. Their entire insectly thoraces: made sunlight so they can play in the night.

Emotion is arbitrary. Which ones do you want to live in? Which emotions bring life?

I have a fantasy that Richie Davidson is made mind-czar of the apocalyptic American white house. He is given 5 minutes at the beginning of every meeting. Every one. He teaches the materialist version of Love, in which you train your left prefrontal cortex to override the ruminations of the right one, habituating the whole “brain” into increasingly universal warmth and goodwill. Materialists say the Cluster B brain won’t change—and that is also human (and most of the people atop any hierarchy are Cluster B.) But still, Richie seeds Treason of the Ego into the Cabinet. Next, he brings in one of the few remaining Gazan children. He brings an Iranian grandfather. He later brings a cow. (You do know the Go, right? That their big bodies are filled with heart? The myth that a cow has 4 hearts is an emotional truth, not a material one. We have all agreed to farm/torture their heart-bodies.) He introduces a chicken. (Kukkus being hilarious and trickster-smart, not sandwiches.) And in these ways, the mind-czar touches the dessicated hearts of those who have something to cultivate.

This is the year that people started talking to me in prompts. It’s the year actual humans started sending messages that weren’t written, but hazarded, out of a meaning-void prediction system. There is an Epic Psychosis in the offing. Still out there distant, with these early warning waves landing in the in-boxes and the apps.

I say this because Devotional Health is preventative. Sharath’s death taught me this. We are now firmly in the effects-phase of his passing, where it has been revealed who we are individually, and as a group. Turns out a whole lot of you have astonishing emotional depth, cultivated over years of valuing love, feeling thanks, deciding to have faith.

Devotional health is like core strength, friendships, and personal psychology. It comes on gradually, and with practice. This “gratitude practice” and “warmth and goodwill” that the materialist brain people teach: bio-hacker culture interprets this as some sort of experience. Some sort of optimization. Fine if it gets you interested. But this is long term character development: deliberate sculpting of the personality over time. Making the inside beautiful.

The future is materialist and soulless, somehow even more than the present. We will convince ourselves that algos are people too. We already behave as if this is the case for corporations.

What if Being is something more. Always was. Is right now.

This would be the only reason to fill your life with devotion.

I submit that the yoga is increasingly subversive, because it conjures inchoate notions that Being is beyond material. Souls… are substrate. This is troublesome, because it implies Beings are not objects. As Kant put it, a person is an end in themself, not a means to pursuing one’s own agenda.

We are always choosing our spirit. This moment, now, is not a momentary choice but an accumulated effect of the last days and years and decades of the feelings we have lived.

The people here who chose devotion, over decades, are the ones who have also created a future. Ashtanga was never a system to rig or a hierarchy to scale (though also it always totally was). It’s a bunch of different practices that bring the heart to the fore of the life, and make you extremely strong in body and mind so you can withstand the heartbreaking world every day without becoming bitter.

Bitterness may take you eventually: when the body fails, your family suffers, the War won’t stop. It gets most people these days. But bitterness can be pre-empted. We are absolutely free to decide to love.

More than ever before, I am learning this through the people I admire most. Through hundreds of you, who have accumulated a certain kind of wealth over time. Richness in generosity, warmth, goodwill and gratitude. You’re not faking that shit. It’s the interest on life choices made for beauty and substance, not for advancement and accumulation. It’s just a practice of a certain, currently rare, kind of intelligence. Something especially concentrated in particular lifeworlds, perhaps.

Today, 20 months since the entire hierarchial structure of this community evaporated (because most of us simply allow the truth of this now, rather than scrambling for control in a power vacuum), certain underlying realities and individual characters have been revealed. Everything is exactly what it looks like. And most clearly, I see that the devotional health that this practice taught all along is now an extremely powerful resource. It is stored sunlight. I have never believed in you all, and all this, so fully as I do now, on this Full Moon in July.

_{*The two really good photos here are by Kristen of the Field of Visions substack. The others are taken by me.}

((Photo by me. It is my teacher MA Narasimhan with a palm leaf script. Circa 2011, after the publication of a sexily incorrect ashtanga history by Mark Singleton. In fact, old words heard from the stars, and transmitted through oral tradition, were and are archived in this manner.))


Here between the eclipses, eclipses the mystics have been hand-waving about for a century, the nonsense slop prophecies are set aflame on the innocent Earth. Slop started as holy book remixes about Gog and Magog. Maggedo. Apocalypse improv. This is the IP American Christian Nationalists + murderbot bros use now to video-game their hallucination-interpretation of the prophets, with missiles they call Tomohawk. There is no actual eschaton in this war - no set future drawing us towards itself. It’s just that the people with the artillery (Open AI + a firm named for a Tolkien weapon) see Earth Life as Fortnite, and most of us aren’t privy to their twitch streams.

Elno, a minor Ep. who does not provide for the many children he has with many mothers, because in his game money beats life, tells us that in the “simulation” he’s living, the “most entertaining” pathways will always prevail. Ok then :) His is a tribe that has not grokked (Douglas Adams’ word; let’s appropriate it back) life or death, plant or animal, stardust or moon. Their action consoles offer only buy, sell, borrow, tweet and boom. Reality is bleeding, crying, calling for better authors.

Language and Epic matter so much right now. Communication from a richer, realer place—one that centers an actor-speaker in spacetime. Using language that comes from an animal body. Using self-aware analog action—the only action worthy of an Epic. Using unpredictable language.

This morning I learned the reality of this war from the corners of the internet where real humans speak. This draws me back to Mysore this past November, watching language rebirth my own tradition from the ashes of a different and far lesser trauma— the sudden unscripted death of my teacher.

In Mysore, on the morning after Sharathj’s Vaikunta Samaradhane, something novel happened. A suddenly sacred text flooded forth to hold us—and from a digital archive no less! Extremely powerful. Constituitive. An excellent re-write. I thought I’d keep my memories of this to myself because this is so personal. But nevermind that. This is just an example of word coming to life to weave a comforting and shock-resistant togetherness, after horror and loss.

So… here’s from my journal from four months ago.

____________________________________

I didn’t want to go to Mysore for the one-year memorial. Not that it was an option. I understood that being there beside the family was my duty. One does not negotiate with these things. It was a relief that this is also what my students wanted – that I be there to represent them, and also take my own time for closure on the year of grief. Amor fati.

But secretly, after the terrible reports of what happened in Mysore last February, I was devastated to be re-entering the professional scene there. It would mean missing the most beautiful month of the year in Michigan, and cancelling my birthday because it would fall the day after my guru’s final funeral. It might be the worst possible goodbye to my second home. If the scene was as messy as I predicted, I would not return. February 2025 had been that cringe. This wasn’t ashtanga.

These were my selfish small thoughts. It’s shameful to lose sight like this, but there I was.

In that mindset, what especially saddened me was the prospect of practicing led classes in Sharathji’s shala to audio recordings of past classes. Have mercy. It would be morbid. It would be too much, emotionally, stirring up a collective sadness just in the moment we were instructed to move forward.

Somehow, the reality is proving stronger than the predictive beliefs of my mistrusting mind. In part because I’m here in a group, and I suspect because the blessing-asking rituals of the Vaikunta actually worked.

On what would have been my birthday, we return to his shala. We were one or two hundred. We knew what to do; it felt a little bit rote. The speakers crackled, bouncing feedback off the corrugated zinc, quonset-style roof. The fluorescent tube lights attacked my pineal gland, flattened out contrast in the room, turned pinks to orange and blues to seasick green.

And Sharathji sang.

His greatest mastery was always in his timing. Bizarrely better now than ever. I came in with each of my senses committed to suffering, and was able to sustain this for at most ten breaths once he (we) got rolling. The group’s openness to the moment got right in to me.

Maybe any arbitrary recorded led primary would be so artful. Maybe the one we cued up that morning was the best one that ever was. A few suryas in, he demanded: “why you hurry?” To some anxious person, present in the past, on the day it was recorded. And to all of us: exactly one year by the stars after his death.

Why you hurry?

Why should this be funny? It killed. I died.

A few minutes on we got an “It’s ok it’s ok,” in sotto voce. Whispering to a single past person; whispering to us all.

In Marichi C, I saw Mariachis. How strange. A quarter-century practicing this pose - and before that day I’d not realized the Mariachi aspect of Marichi. Please don’t strike me down, Sage; are you familiar with the world-historical brilliance of Mexican trumpet polka?

The fifth navasana might have never come. He said “ffffffff”….. from the stars, faking us out before enunciating “five!” Tempting us to come down before he called five. We did good. We were happy.

In garba pindasana, the practical joke at the midpoint of the series, he said, “It’s possible.”

After practice, I hopped right on my trusty scooter and sped even further into the countryside. Driving aimlessly, fast, on a motorbike in the country: this can be everything. Karnataka is the greenest I’ve ever seen (though I’ve been here in every month except October-November all these years). Jacarandas in bloom, heavy Jackfruits in the trees, teeming nets of Morning Glory on every climbable thing, big wavy elephant-eared Fig trees even more ecstatic than Mexico’s happy specimens, and what I know as Yarrow exploding along roadsides like endless happy flowered fuses. I got a little lost out there; correct method for any lesson in gut reckoning.

It’s ok it’s ok.

And now, we are off on a new path forward. I’ll stay for the rest of the month. Practice is light. It’s low stakes. It’s hilarious.

In the fall, a sleeping dream morphed into a waking one. An eye in the sky, but make it good. Sharathji always joked, “I see you! I am watching you.”

But it wasn’t a joke. He ate, slept and dreamt his Mysore room. His students were his world. He studied us, and told me to know my own student-world and study it well. Study your students always.

In the dream, the Eye in the Sky isn’t a Tolkien evil, or the Surveillance Bros’ “joke” rendition of the same (Palantir) as they make their global police state. No. The dream Eye is an insideout beacon of Satya Yuga, the Sun of a good and future Epic/Epoch, floating aloft atop a beanstock.

The crux is that the beanstock Eye in the Sky, in the dream, is looking inward. The universe is perceptible not from looking out. The benevolent Eye over the landscape is blind to the outer world. It is occult. All-seeing: of an inner and subjective, participatory, shareable, truth. It doesn’t make sense. That’s why it’s exciting.

I told a few friends about the dream Eye in the Sky. One called it Good Sauron. Yes.

Now that I’m back here in Mysore, I realize it may bear some connection to the Nimitta, the light that showed up on the horizon in sitting practice, a couple years before I arrived here for the first time in 2009. That light, which I only saw when meditating on a cushion, burned through to outer reality one morning while I was drinking a post-practice coconut and watching someone totter around on the balcony over the shala. Since then, if I take shambhavi mudra, there’s a white-gold hole out there, a tear where my brain’s persistence-of-vision function doesn’t bother to paper over my perceptual field. It’s a little bit normal. What’s weird, it teaches, is the whole persistence-of-vision thing.

I watched the tear on the horizon obsessively for a bit. (It is one of the markers the rationalists who can’t stop substacking about their jhana realizations are seeking. Oof. You can stop now guys. Remember, you’re materialists. It’s probably just a physiological floater.)

This makes no sense, but now I see how Sharathji’s slapstick-from-the-stars is apiece with Good Sauron. There is a tear on the horizon, where the fabric of physical reality doesn’t quite come together.

The library of Sharathji’s led classes will be sacred for us insofar as they sound everywhere inside, see everywhere inside. They’re a guide to a rich inner world where you’re weirdly not alone. At all. That’s somehow the goodness of it. In there, those of us who find this sacred are going to learn to find each other.

This morning in the shala, we hit a patch of dhyana. Eye of the hurricaine, baby. What happened was that Sharath and the assistants seemed to disappear, and for five minutes we shut up and practiced.

I’m serious. Every now and then, the psychic churn of the KPJ practice room bubbles under. No more subject, object, seeking, critiquing, emoting, needing, performing, wishing—the activities by which an ego-wracked mind avoids getting absorbed. Just chop wood, carry water, put your foot behind your head, look at the tip of your nose. The absorption state in which being = doing.

Where there is fear, there is other. Take it from Ramana Maharshi. If you want to avoid merging into that storm – if you want to stay in singular droplet form, then cultivate fear and otherness. But be warned. Come February it gets harder to stay separate because the humidity in that room edges up and the all-night heat melts down knots that have been hiding out in the body. Selfhood gets slipperier.

I pretend to be naïve of the KPJAYI samskara circus. But the truth is that once your driste is on track and your awareness has opened up a little, it’s easy to read the collective mind of that room. I love this big student body and would be lost without it, but OMG its moments of stillness are rare.

Today, a “one more!” from the office door signaled our collective movement out of dhyana. Back to the shitstorm. Whenever that happens, it’s like the mothership’s dropping out of warp speed right into a meteor shower. Mayday Hanuman! Vrittis thicker than mung bean dal at Sixth Main! Throw us a line!

It doesn’t take eyes or ears to perceive the shitstorm. In fact, you have to do actual pratyhara for your natural-given sixth sense to operate properly. Get a drishti, duh. Your psychic detection device is a tiny pine cone in the center of the brain, often so fossilized in food additives that it’ll show up as a white, calcified orb on an MRI.

Yes, I got my pineal gland checked. In Mysore, it takes 200USD and thirty minutes to get a magnetic resonance image of any body part you choose. You can just walk in off the street. So MRIs are the new henna tattoos. There are more casual MRIs in this scene, I assure you, than casual sex….

In my brain, turns out all that fluoride in the Montana water has been flaked off the little glandular structure Descartes called the seat of the soul. Maybe premature pranayama has its benefits? Somewhat less encouraging is observing that about one-fourth of my skull contains empty space. Hmm….

Anyway. Back to the benefits and limitations of Elvis leaving the building. On Sunday, Sharath joked that he’ll just install a video camera in the shala and watch us practice from his bedroom. That way, he can lounge around in bed and finally get more than 4.5 hours of daily rest.

I laughed so much, imagining this.

Then he said it doesn’t work like that. He said you can’t really learn this stuff from a video—though he noted that watching his DVD is better than absolutely nothing. But really, he said, you have to be in the room with your teacher for a long time. He used the word relationship, and the phrase in person, over and over. He laughed lovingly about a student who once showed up for his first visit and instructed: “Just consider me as an old student.” How funny and cute, he said. I don’t even know you.

Here I am trying to write about conference, but all I can even offer is a distant impression. To be honest, my experience of conference is mainly kinesthetic, energetic and emotional. Not verbal, really.

After a couple of months, you start to get it that the main theme of conference this season is how to be a good yoga student in India. The underlying message is: Hey guys, I know you come from lots of different cultures and are drawn here for many different reasons. That’s cool. Here’s a set of motives, inner practices and outer disciplines that will help you engage the asana practice as a limb of actual, like, yoga. It’s a 101 on being a quick study, with an implicit recognition that the scriptures warn that many students will never really get it… or will only get a small part of it and then limit their own growth with the very belief that they already know what it’s all about it.

***************************

That’s all. Been here since December this time, and that’s really all I’ve got. I mean, come on. You can’t learn about Mysore, or even about conference, from the internet. There will be no Mysore TMZ. There will be no Sharath TV. There will be no Coconut Stand Cam. Masala Dosa (hello, Rosebud) is not a cover Facebook profile for the Boss.

It takes three months to get properly disenchanted with Mysore life – to process the hype. So come for that short amount of time. Realize that yogis’ lives here, outside of practice, are not really that cool. Find out that authorization is not a pat on the back, but just another posture that now you have to integrate without turning it into a neurotic ego trip, or a another decoration for your cute little spiritual-ego charm bracelet. Authorization is just a pose like any other. For some people, completing the posture means leaving your day job, making the terrible transition from sadhana to seva, and getting up at 4 in the morning for the rest of your life (hint: YOU PROBABLY DON’T WANT THAT). And finally see that the social scene is—in the words of the finest ever Mysore junkie—deeply shallow.

In other words: listen. Stay focused. This is all about practice. Take the ineffable, and see through the hype.

If, having pushed through the hype, the hurricane force of practice in this room still pulls you—if it polarizes every cell in your body from the other side of the planetand you can’t even help but screw up your life and get back on a plane—ok.

Then yes. Come back to know this room. And to be known by it in a more or less Biblical sense.

Some people—thousands of us around the world—do live in, and by, the energy of this shala. We merge with it and separate ourselves out again. We’re pulled apart by it, and then reconstituted as more efficient, transparent humans. For a few practitioners, the room’s weather system has spun the small self’s discursive mind to bits, redistributing it in equal portions throughout the entire body. Body being an, ahem, loose term.

In any case, this experience defies words. And it doesn’t fit on a screen.

Ashtanga has never felt so innocent to me, as it does now. In mostly sweet ways.

Do I spoil that innocence, just by existing for you with my whole mind? I’m a holder of Ashtanga’s institutional memory going back 25 years. I’ve carved out a standpoint that sees practice from the vibrant grassroots, even though it’s impossible not to know the things the community’s forgot.

The grassroots is where to stay, in any lineage. It gets increasingly dark, lonely, dessicated and instrumental as you ascend any hierarchy; the juice is all at the grassroots. Historically, what I’ve witnessed is that the people who crave power and money will find their way up the spire. Those who crave to serve and love will remain in community. Watch, for example, how Hamish keeps himself and lives his life: integrated, unpretentious, in the classroom every day. That’s why he is happy, and why the insight he offers actually works. And look way up there, by contrast, at those who have converted themselves into icons. Actually, let’s not. Yawn.

Each time the winners rewrite history, when the new top dogs predictably memory-hole what really happened and how they got there, I truly do not care. I watched it happen in ashtanga in 2007, ’09-10, ‘16-17 and again last year. I have learned the ways it happened in 1950, 1980, and 1995. (Memory-hole. v., to erase the events that created the current power structure, and gaslight those who remember the before-times. See also: primitive accumulation.)

This erasure is least important thing that happens in a tradition, though it also has to be held somewhere so we don’t go insane. Power is boring! Those who seek it are not those who know wisdom. What’s important is each individual practitioner—that they get the tools they seek to heal their own selves. The tools and real relationships speak for themselves, drowning out the acquired narcissism of those on the path to stardom.

Except, this too is an innocent and simple idea, I suppose. We do look to the luminaries. We do crave a history. We understand our own future by reference to the stories we are told.

So, because power is boring, because spiritual potency decreases as power increases, this is going to be a boring post. No need to continue. You can stop here. I’m just going to document some obvious things—things everyone who was there at the time still knows somewhere in their minds. I do this for a few, now and in the future, who may want facts over sob story.

This is the thing about the acquired narcissism of notoreity. It’s hard to imagine, but when you turn in to a celebrity, you receive significantly more attention than accountability. The imbalance corrupts the mind of anyone. Truly, anyone.

Power and empathy are inversely proportional. No one is immune. Here’s how you see the effects.

The more corrupted the luminary, the more it’ll come out in (1) victim stories and (2) narratives of “seeing the light.” All the details, individuals and slow grind are washed away by epiphany. Watch for this: the victim-heroes of the internet. Those stories are manhole covers on their memory holes. True history lies beneath.

Does the crystalline river curse the well when it flows on? No, it thanks the well. It is the weak, undrinkable steam who blames the Earth from which it flows.

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Last month, people came to me distraught about a new memory hole that opened up in the ashtangaverse. A celebrity teacher claiming he wishes he’d never done the practice, that it did not benefit him, that it won’t benefit you either.

Uh huh. Saw that comin’. Blows on fingernails.

Remember, this is normal. The poor-me turn. It’s the black hole that forms when the fully effete star loses its place in the galaxy.

To my knowledge, this is the deepest the shadows ever got in the century of ashtanga in view. Remember, you stopped reading several minutes ago. So you won’t click on that—not unless you’re grounded in your personal knowing, and after a really long time on the path you have taken on the responsibility for holding some of the institutional memory. You’re stable enough to look after the dharma a little bit.

What this is, is two North American celebrity yoga men using women’s stories, and the stories of women’s bodies –without their consent or even with their explicit forbidding –to undertake a cock fight. The two white hot stars in question continued their fight in the parking lot (at the time, this was Facebook comments), where they both postured as the victimized party. The students, the spectators, the women’s bodies: collateral damage.

And yet, there is truth here to see here. An almost fully erased memory-hole in the ashtangaverse. First, vulnerable students silenced. Then, lies to the community. Next and later, more lies to the Newspaper of Record. An episode that comes back now unspoken, as one of the stars digests his resentments and misattributes them to Yoga itself. For the sweet few whose faith was harmed last month, this morsel unbearable truth may help help as your discernment builds.

That is the goal of the method, you know. Not nothingness. Not cessation. Discernment. Between what is illusion, and what is truly the case. Krishnamacharya taught this clearly. And whooooosh it went, down the memory hole too.

Let’s bring that one back.

**************************************

Anyway. Cults. They are a property of groups and how we interact. They come and go. It’s no shame or big problem, most of the time. It’s just a funny little side-trip in the process of consciousness knowing itself.

I wrote that November 2025 was the best trip I’ve ever had to Mysore. It’s because of the sense of growth, okayness, and (straight up) love that pervaded that time. People connected much easier with each other than ever before, in my experience.

This had nothing to do with Sharath’s absence. He is my teacher and I actively love him, whatever he is now. And also, in his presence, the mean girls (not a gender specific term) tended to exert control over the social dynamics. The were terrified of others being included in Sharath’s attention and care. The sociologists call it boundary maintenance, or social closure. Elitism. It’s weakness, expressed as cruelty.

As a sociologist, I’ve tended to be overly aware of culty behavior in spiritual groups. For me, this discomfort it got more intense with each passing year, because my seniority conferred status. So, sometimes people who were exclusionary and cruel to others would be way too kind to me. I’d have to discern one’s true character by watching how they treated the perceived dorks (speaking as a proud forever-dork in truth), animals, and would-be invisible people. That’s how I learned (over many years) that some of the new generation senior teachers are real no-nonsense beautiful human beings. Seriously: Susanna, for example. I watch this one with students, and it is so beautiful. Arne. Megan. Lu. Beautiful. I saw the love of all beings pour freely in its time from Rolf, Swenson, my Dominic, and Nancy too. There so much good everywhere, in all of us, in all of the times.

And at the same time, the culture of a cult is a diffuse thing. It takes dispassionate ethnography to track. It lives in the way a group makes people feel, in the creation of degrees of insiderness. Strategic non-acknowledgement is the way to create standing in cults. As is strategic praise. (Think Hegseth, bowing to his maker.)

What was hard for me in the Mysore as the first quarter of the 2000s wore on was not just the culture of celebrity and exclusion that came and went at times. It was the existence of an explicit Hagiography of Patthabi Jois, the book called Guruji: A Portrait. One of the two authors of that book has tried to remove his name from it, as part of the memory-holing process. But it was our sacred text, every bit a Bible. The Apostles of the Patriarchy each had their chapter; the key tales of the Maker known to all. They were wonderful Apostles, most of them. I met them all, and delighted in most of them both in their time, and to this day.

More even than the Bible of Guruji, what put us our places in those decades when things got culty was the way that the most elite white men opted in to the caste hierarchy, taking on the affect and the thread of Brahmins. There was one priest who would do it for western men, proffer the status most Indians would never have in a lifetime of rebirths. He’s still initiating white guys, but now Ashtanga culture has changed. We understand this is weird elitism, and this is to our credit. Sharath told us in conference in the aughts: “that is not real.” It is a family thing, he said, not to be sought for status. But the existence of an elite, white, Vedic boy club set the entire vibe.

In our time, people who wanted that, who helped us all create it, have opted out. Why? I think because, ultimately, we are a subculture without a guru. We always will be, now.

For some, this means the magic is gone. Without the mega-transference of a super-pedestal, what’s the point? We saw the chelation of the authority-bound minds last spring and summer, in the wave of “I quit ashtanga” media posts, designed to capitalize on the grief and perceived collapse of our lineage. Yes. Right on schedule. Insensitive, and unkind to the recently heartbroken. But natural. That’s exactly how it should work.

Cultiness is a transient property of action, not a permanent characteristic of any so-called group. (Rogers Brubaker and Max Weber taught me to understand human behavior this way.) It is a style of mind, inside of all minds. Cultiness will always be coming and going. But, never again quite like it did in the brief era that began in the 1990s. That, I see now, was the anomaly in the broader arch of a tradition focused on technique, discipline, and relationship. Krishnamacharya’s own son refused to be called anything but Mister. Mister Desikachar. He refused to receive gifts, to be a guru of any sort. The path is for walking. For walking together, in relationship. And not—especially— for illuminating from far up high, fueled by fans and followers, far far out of reach.

We are a quarter way through this century; and I am a quarter-century into my path of this yoga. It is the beginning of everything. And I have never yet felt this path to be so crystalline, so fresh, clear, nourishing, and good. So, deeply, good. We can look downstream and see a watering-down. That is there, along a certain track. Maybe it’s stagnant, or even toxic, at times, in that little direction. But there is another deep channel, crystalline and crisp and true. Stronger and clearer, and ever more bracing, for the rocks it has run past in its journey.

OM.


*All photos by Angela, from 2009 - 2025

The Imaginal is not for The Naive.

No. It’s a world that requires you to lose your innocence and your religion FIRST, before gaining entry at all. The Imaginal is post-rational, and post-materialist. Post-intellectual.

Imagination is brain-bound. The Imaginal is jail-broken: thought-forms rambling around the social and cosmic orders with minds of their own.

Enter the Egregore. The self-aware thought-form. Alive to itself, thanks to human evocation. We know symbolic power when it shows up as brand, celebrity, and currency. But the odd God, too, can gather clusters of consciousness around him, learning to see and to speak. Stealing back the power of the symbol.

Gods want to be fed. Greece knew this, and later Rome, while India knew it first and never forgot. Access to The Imaginal begins with a breadcrumb, and proceeds very slowly, over years, to a feast.

The shala’s first elephant God was 2.5 inches in sandalwood. Peti(t)Ganapati. Brought home to Michigan in 2009. He’s gone wandering now in the Pacific Northwest (perhaps pilfered from a storage unit), along with my long-lost intentions to open a shala in Seattle. Hmm…

Next, Laghu Ganapati came into the shala’s life circa 2011, when I gave up the ghost of academia, and the path of teaching took me fully, and for this whole lifetime.

For the first 15 years of our shala, I could fit the kit of it on my back. Laghu Ganapati wrapped in ceremonial Mysore cotton, a candle, a cash bag, a little incense. The shala itself was the practice, the people. We were, emphatically, NOT a physical thing. Fifteen years like that! When a dank 70s ceiling tile fell right down in the middle of practice in 2018, I shrugged. Our leaky front windows (original install: 1865) poured freezing cold winter right into the finishing room half the year. Shrug. People couldn’t find us because there was no sign: well obviously. What mystery school has a shingle on the street? We were on an enlightenment path, not one of name recognition.

We fed our one material asset, Laghu Ganapati, faithfully for 15 years. We never closed during that time. Not once. Snowstorms; my trips to India and elsewhere; covid, Christmas, Easter, Ramadan, Hanukkah, all if it: one of us ensured that our shala was open every, single, day. Students took to intoning the mantra Herodotus wrote about the Persian postal carriers of 450 B.C.: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Daily, Laghu Ganapati’s sandalwood trunk and his crescent headpiece shed a few fragrant grains into our reverent fingertips. His sandalwood acquired its own kind of patina from the mixed oils of loving fingertips.

Only now is the little guy energetically enormous enough to move from the navel of the shala, right in the very center of the space. To the crown. So on Thanksgiving morning, a spontaneous installation ceremony unfolded. After practice (we were open on Thanksgiving), we chanted as we cradled the elephant from one room to the next, leaving our front desk totally empty. For a week. Creating space for the big guy.

And yesterday, finally, Maha G. came to reside. To play. To preside. I strapped him into the passenger seat of my car, and we drove over the river and through the woods, in snow, to the shala.

Later the group chanted him into place, fed him pomegranates and oranges and rice and incense and peanut butter cookies and laddoos and chocolate and pecans, and much later ate of his prasad when he’d had his fill. I felt so normal about it all.

It was August 2024, 14 months ago now, when the iceberg of AYA2 began to ask me about emerging more into the physical world. I have business meetings with our shala. This shala, who is now a self-sufficient, sensitive, quiet and deeply caring teenager of an Egregore. We sit down, in the Imaginal, where the shala talks to me about its needs and wants while I listen. I, the middle-manager between the Shala Thought Form and consensual reality, then basically just give her-him what she-he wants.

The shala, after 15 years, needed a sign. Meh. Ok. So we made a sign. And it turned out perfect. Then after Sharath died, the shala wanted a photo of him. Again, meh. Something I’ve avoided carefully - the path is not a person, even if Sharath is my person. But it was time, and so a portrait of his perfect feet, with relaxed smile in the distance, came to be installed. This 8x10 black and white, it was huge for me. Massive.

It didn’t stop there. Next, a bulletin board for Summer Camp 2024—the event I invented to express the community’s deep emotional resources, and bright sweet networks, in the midst of all the changes. Two by four feet of chaos! Polaroids of bonfires and art parties, thank-you letters from practitioners who came from around the country and the world. And later: drawings, sutras, talismans. A place for ephemera and memory. I also accepted an interview at the local paper, which I’d avoided for a decade and a half. It felt important to put Sharath’s name into print, in our little town. So there would be a trace of him on the record, and in minds who had never heard of him before.

All these little manifestations have been bringing the shala into the physical world for the past year. Big white cedar Ganapati feels like a culmination.

He comes from the same family shop where I initially found PetitG and LaghuG, Sri Satya Mohan Handicrafts. Maria chose him from a high shelf on sight, for his eyes. But he wasn’t correct - he had two full tusks and his rice ball was rather lumpy, and the hue of his wood wasn’t as warm as will be needed for Michigan winters. So Shiva Kumar made the Big Guy bespoke, and also took the to the dentist, rendering him properly ekadanta. He made me a list of all the ritual tools needed for the next day’s puja - designed to put the elephant’s roots on ice for a bit while he took to the skies, then reminding him how to ground himself and bless people on the other side of the world.

From the artisans’ shop, I transported him on my back like training-montage Yoda. Heavy. A treasure hunt for camphor, flowers, incense, kumkum, fruit and coconuts.

Dhawi and I took him to the Gokulam Ganapati Temple, the first temple I really ever knew, for the whole retinue of proper blessings. When I first drew him from the backpack, the Temple Manager and Temple Manager Assistant both made their eyes huge in approval: “MahaaaaaAAAAh…. Ganapati” and “Eyes, eyes!”

Getting him home from there was not easy. Is carrying Yoda through the swamps supposed to be easy? No: it is path-clearing. It is faith-giving. It is energy-gathering.

I thought about a sermon my Dad gives sometimes. On the Koine greek word skandalon, which it seems Jesus liked to use. The word refers to people who who cause you to lose your faith in the path. Or, those who make you place faith in something stupid. (This evokes for me the trend of “I quit ashtanga” posts I saw when I logged back into IG last May - right on time, six months after Sharath’s death. Introducing a New And Improved Truth for those whose faith was cratering. Skandalon, one way or another.)

But sometimes Jesus referred to himself as the skandalon—one who would disrupt you if you were on a stupid path. Notably, the path of materialism, ego, identification with the body, identification with the thoughts. I feel like he got that idea from his foregod, Ganapati. Neither the Elephant nor the Prophet are trite about matters of The Path.

Ganapati is the greatest charismatic megafauna the world has ever known. And also, he’s a funny guy, a tricky guy. Now he’s emerging from the navel of our shala in response to kind of a lot of sustained discipline, and a collective post-materialist willingness to come into relationship with super-charged symbols. Our shala, itself, is become post-metaphysical, post-rational, post-intellectual, post-materialist. Into this growth edge, an entity so weird and audacious: an elephant riding a rat, holding a conch and a lasso, with a snake for a belt. All of him far too large to ignore. An extremely serious icon. How does this fit in Michigan?

Because we built a path to, and around, this thought form. By choosing to live by different values. By becoming a mystery school and sticking around longer than can be reasonably expected—long enough to start all over again now.

I prefer silence to voice, and emptiness to objects, and not-knowing to mastery. Sometimes to a fault. Our shala is at the beginning of something new, where Ganapati seems to indicate I can have my emptiness and eat it too.

Split me open, I’m a tender coconut. We all are. The time since Sharath died, it was a YEAR. Opened with the machete of death; closed out with a sweet mineral recovery cocktail mixed and decanted by none other than nature and time.

Sharathji is a tree. A VERY different species from his grandfather. Sharathji is my favorite Sacred Fig, specifically the one which anchors the Saturn (yes, Lord of Hard Lessons) temple in Gokulam. This specific, beloved Fig is pictured with a butterfly (date). And again later with its vibrant snakes (date).

The Sacred Fig got a machete haircut this year. Extraordinary. Its great arms destroyed, and its shade temporarily shorn off, so that the trunk can grow even more dense and high. Look at the new shoots sprouting from him, tender and straight, rooted into something extremely deep and powerful, bunched together sweetly.

This is November 2025. I experienced 11 seasons with Sharath (2-3 months), a month with him last year, and now the absolute game-changer that is SYC November 2025. This trip is tender, wildly alive, a hivemind that’s growing unaccountably fast. The love factor is irrepressible, almost awkward. There is so much evolutionary force inside us that goodwill leaks out despite anyone’s best efforts to be cool.

Practice feels incredible, even though I’m 25 years older than when I started, because the pranic field we are generating isn’t one where we care about the elasticity of the psoas or the quick mobility of the joints. This is an interpersonal, intangible effervescence we’re generating – across generations and languages and grudges and grief. And of course: this right now, it is my best trip to Mysore.

*

There’s no hiding that we had an excruciating year after 11/11. In nearly 26 years in this scene, I have not witnessed such poor judgment. We’ll be recovering from our bad calls for a generation.

That work started in November, and is already a thousand times more rich than last year was cringe. I know the plans I have for you, says the Fig Tree, with apologies to the prophet: plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope, and a future.

One year. Past tense now. A certification scandal, and the distrust, and painful-angry harassment it of course created. Chaotic, conflictual energy in Sharathji’s room in February, when it was all briefly confused with a television event (who will win at Survivor this season?) and scared away the very soul of grief and gratitude. We lost some of our best practitioners for that, rightfully.

And that is the reason to be transparent about it: because I perceive it is safe for spiritual practitioners to come back. For people on a life-path to come back. We didn’t kill the magic; we just tried to turn it into a transaction. And failed. As Shraddha said on the day of the one-year: I hope you can accept the changes.

Then this fall, the worst teacher scandal the practice has ever seen. (I say this having seen it from the horrifying perspective of aggrieved students who reached out to me). All of this, churning up out of the cauldron of trauma, grief, uncertainty and loss of faith. It’s to be expected. We we reeling. But now, we know we have to make it stop.

Ok: HOW. A magical spell. Vaikunta Samaradahane. A dozen Brahmin big guns, chanting for hours to close out the year of grief for Sharath’s passing. Their ancient in-group spells more potent, I think, than any of us realized at the time. Now, we are inside a month of something truly new in ashtanga method. A handful of senior teachers hive-minding with a couple hundred self-selected faithful practitioners on the dance floor. This group is not only faithful to a guru and to his family; we are faithful to a community, to a shala, to our own spiritual growth.

It’s crepuscular.

This month has been four weeks in Sharath’s increasing, radiant field. Most humans fade away. Some leave a hole. And then there are the icons, who increase in power by dying.

I am witnessing the transformation of my utterly human teacher into a legend. Human Sharath got angry, missed stuff, and was especially perfect in his goofy awkward Sharathness—a quality which increased after he got through his first 4 or 5 very hard years as a leader. Sharath the icon retains all of this – a rare power – but also leaves us with so much methodology.

When Sharath’s complicated grandfather died, there were many words. I only remember this perfect image from David Swenson: “Patthabi Jois was like a tree.” Yes. Those who took nourishment from him found shelter, fathering, and karmic growth challenge beneath his energetic canopy.

Yes, and Sharathji is this but in a different and new way. Cut down half a lifetime early, poured into all of us now, at the beginning of something.

It’s the completement of an apocalypse. A future is there, drawing us forward. The next Buddha will be a Sangha, the Dalai Lama said. The consciousness around it froths in generative dark silence (distinctively away from screens), cells of intelligence dividing, irreducible to the parts of its sum.

Let’s see who self-selects, splices in, and softens.

Nov 3

HOW TO KEEP TIME IN PUPPIES*

You might not have heard…. but it is the case that an important time-keeping method, for each and every day, is its Puppy Count. This is an arcane and mostly secret form of time, one which requires so much vigilance and mindfulness that one might in fact lose track of Gregorian time constructions, such as “months,” and “years.”

The Puppy Count is, of course, grounded in the empirical realities of both puppies and cycles of the actual Planet Earth. But there’s much more to it than that, since the puppy count must account also for space and cultural setting. Time is relative to space (and puppies), as Quantum Theory has shown.For example, in India, a “puppy,” is generally agreed to be--among dedicated Timekeepers / Puppycounters--any actual canine who is in the care of its mother, or some other surrogate parent such as a human, cow, goat, or water buffalo (one never knows) who has adopted said puppy for care, milk-feeding and general socialization.

There are House Puppies, Country Puppies, Chai Stand Puppies, the very occasional (extremely esoteric) Temple Puppies, and finally Street Puppies (the most heart-trembling of all categories). Any instance of any of these constitutes one (1) Puppy in the daily count.

In other settings, such as the United States of America, where the prevalence of all Puppies is reduced (along with, and accordingly, the general happiness of the humans), one may need to designate other counting conventions. So for example, a full-grown Golden Retriever, depending on her countenance and bearing, may count as “one (1) Puppy.” An aged Pug: also entirely possible to enumerate in each day’s puppy count. Rare exceptions may even be made for extremely affectionate bunnies, mice or hamsters: the indisputable criteria being that they must be extremely happy to see you, climb on your person rather unhygenically at times, and be frequently so overcome with their own Ardor towards “their” human that they pant with their tongues hanging out.

“Puppies” also poop rather at random. Hence: a cat has never been a puppy. At least not according to official Puppykeeper Knowledge. Not yet.

Each Puppy instance renews at midnight in every Earth Revolution on its axis. So the same Puppy who counted as One (1) at 11:59 counts AGAIN as One (1) at 12:00 midnight if, and only if, they demonstrate Countable Puppy Comportment, as outlined above.

The method of Puppykeeping (tracking what time it is, on the Clock of Puppies) is an art to be practiced, and a theology to be debated. By my count, yesterday was a Seven (7) Puppy Day, including Ruby and Max (their parents Angela and Ladoo do not qualify as “puppies” in India) as well as a handful of street puppies of Gokulam. NOW, however, the time is NINE (9). This is because I have clocked Two (2) House Puppies, Four (4) Street Puppies, and Three (3) Country Puppies, all since the earth began the current turn, at what is consensually called “midnight”--and for our purposes, naturally, Zero Dark Puppy.

The present Puppycount is extremely auspicious, auguring that this day (referred to some as November the 4th) may yet reach double digits in Puppy Time. Here is today’s Third (3rd) Puppy, a Country Puppy who ran up to my scooter in rural Karnataka, possibly attracted by the smell of the kitty kibble in my pocket, but also possibly just because of the general trusting-insane-curious-ebullience of his absolute Puppyhood. I gave the kibble to his mama, who was exceedingly happy to see me cuddle her baby, and chased my scooter for at least 30 yards (ahem, 27.4 metres) when I finally tore myself away from them - both because even Country Puppies can cause traffic jams, and because I needed to visit the Idly Man. But that’s another matter.I know this is extremely complex, but if you’re following, you’ll note that today’s official time is 9, with a high likelihood of it Raining Puppies before the Revolution of Earth is renewed

*(This might actually be a post about what my cognition does when it gets a break from executive functioning.)

Nov 9

ADDENDUM. I have learned that Every Moon is a Puppy, or possibly it is better said, Every Puppy is a Moon. My dear friend Arne (certified teacher from Mexico) explained this to me.

It’s like this: There are always Puppies in Mysuru. It’s the Law. There Must Needs Be Puppies. Time passes, apparently. Yet always, there is a Puppy. This suggests that the specific Puppy(ies) is (are) changing, while the universal Puppy(ies) is (are) constant.

We know already, of course, that this is true for Moon. Every Moon is exactly Itself. It can not be a different moon. It is a Moo(n) of 1. Tonight’s moon is its own single instance, never to be repeated. Tomorrow’s moon, absolutely different Moon. Moo(n) of 1. Yet ALSO! It is the same Moon as yesterday and tomorrow!

Therefore: A Puppy is a Moon.
Furthermore: Every Puppy is the Moon.
Finally: The Moon is Puppies.

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Nov 19

GO means

You know this. Secretly, go also means knowledge. Maybe (extra secretly) it sometimes also means ray of light / wisdom? Anyway, today I visited a Go Shala.

(top right photo by Patrick Santos, bottom middle by Green Hotel staff, others by AJ)

Nov 3, in response to many individual birthday cards delivered from home

Dearest Everyone: This was a shamanic level surprise. My God. All of you, your fingerprints and your sweet words are physically and spiritually here in Mysuru now. I do not understand how you could go to such a huge effort for this project; and at the same time I confirm to you that the healing and joy you have created in me is as big as the universe.There are two things that stand out to me now, as I hurry to write to you in the dark, smelling the petrichor of last night’s rain and listening to the one very early rooster calling from the north on High Tension Road.

FIRST, my single mindbody is not enough to keep track of the epic nature of this past year. How uncanny - a death anniversary followed by a birth anniversary. All of it the same. A recognition that Sharathji will not have more birthdays, and an affirmation that to be born - to take birth - is something of greatest significance. What actions will we choose? What thoughts will we choose? What habits will we follow? The answer to these questions is simply the substance of who we are! Your words, written physically, help me see how big this year - and all of life and death, which are not separate - truly are when we can hold them in our awareness. To belong to others, to have a path and a lineage backwards and forwards in “time” — my God, it’s so good. Without these guideposts for a life, who would we be? Thank you for helping me see so much in just this one simple afternoon. I cried huge happy shamanic tears of recognition and love with each new envelope of connection. I cannot imagine a more potent ritual, EVER, in my life. Thankful to you, thankful to time, thankful to Ann Arbor and Mysuru for the constellation of connections that bring this all together.

SECOND, I see a new theme making itself known in our shala. It started with our Bullet Journal workshop two years ago. It matured last year, when I changed the “don’t take notes” policy in the Foundations course and instead encouraged people to write things down in class AND we added the formal role of the SCRIBE in the course - which now has a lineage from A. to E. and beyond. There is an effort in this time of delusion to destroy the word. To destroy the neural connections, which enable name recognition and relational stability, that are anchored in our knowledge and care of language. Ardor (the book, by Roberto Calasso) helps us see this too - the sacred nature of “listening lineage” - shruthi parampara - which passes the word from one human to the next as a form of connection. And it was in O.’s insight, about how we as a community are effectively digesting the sacred texts into our present lives little by little. There is something in our practice about care for the word.

Words are magic spells. Languages are history and future and relationship. Let us write to each other, put love in our language, put language into form. This, in these times, is already part of our community practice. And now because of you I can see the sheer healing power of honoring the word. And so we begin… I will take this learning onto my motorbike and out to Sharathji’s shala and into this day. So much love, recognition, care, appreciation, and joy connecting you to this moment and my heart to our shala….

________________________________________________________________

Nov 4 - Following our rememberances of 11/11/24 at the Ann Arbor Shala

K., S. and C. mentioned in their beautiful comments that they learned of Sharath’s death from my “podcast.” We have a whatsapp group, now with D. also, where I send them private voicenotes when I’m at ashtanga events that are relevant for teachers. I want them to have an inside sense of “being there” and also to share a subjective view of my own path with them. Whenever I speak of anything involving another person, we refer to this as the “cone of silence.” This is the strict “medical grade confidentiality” that surrounds our shala in quietude and is the basis of what I consider to be safe space.One time only, I want to include you here in the vulnerability and tone of the podcasts. Because what happened this morning was a culmination and a commencement. The peace and gratitude I mention here are for you! Each one of you!! They are, quite simply, the result of how you have held me.

You can ONLY listen to this if you consent to keep it in the cone of silence. We are talking medical grade professionalism. Each and every one of you. If you listen, you are hereby obliged to hold this in that level of honesty and reverence. How do we establish this “word is bond” level understandig? With an emoji. If you are even thinking of clicking, first you put a

to indicate that you will hold this with medical grade professionalism.If you know yourself to have a history of leaky words or overshare, then have the discernment to wait. I’ll keep the file and you can ask me for it later. When you know yourself to have the proven ability to be a VAULT.

The names mentioned here are all casually shared. It’s not actually anything normal people would consider confidential. But our standards at the shala for such things are NOT the world’s standards, my friends. Please understand, this is not a space where we simply pass on hearsay--because Patanjali says this is likely to be wrong knowledge! It’s not a morality thing; it’s a discernment thing.

Ashtanga involves--VERY clearly--the purification of the speech. Body, speech, and mind, in fact.This includes some mention of my colleagues, friends, and also Sharath’s family in very tender contexts. Any time we share of another’s experience, or even intone another’s name, in the context of Patanjali Yoga, that has real weight. For teachers it should be a sacred act. So I’m offering this as a way to include you in this beautiful morning. But ONLY if you can show up with the gravitas I expect, and require, from any teacher.

(Podcast not included.)

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Nov 19, after my last sit with Jayashree for this trip

Have been able to finish at the shala in time to get to Jayashrees 11:30 - 1:30 chanting session several days a week this trip. Today, there were only three people in the class - two complete beginners (I know them from the shala) and me. It was incredible. It was also my last class with her for this trip.We chanted the entire first pada twice with Jayashree guiding and me providing a sort of back-up for their baby steps. Then at my request we chanted the Guru Ashtakam, gorgeous verses by Shankaracharya (composer of the Vande Gurunam, as you all know). The Ashtakam is about about devoting oneself to the lived experience and wisdom represented by a teacher’s feet. This is the chant I recite mentally in my relationship with the photo of Sharath’s feet at our home shala.Then there was time for discussing her life, and my life. She advised me to teach teachers, to study my Sanskrit. I touched her feet. Then she said a blessing that means roughly “you are on the path of yoga, I bless you to realize this path fully.” She has never said that before. it was ***amazing.***

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Nov 20

Considering a major investment in and for the shala.The artisan ShivaKumar (third generation carver at Sri Satya Mohan Handicrafts) would do the following, according to my request:

• take a day to finish all the carving to add much more softness ad detail

• do some dentistry on Ganesha to remove half of his right tusk, so that he is the “Ekadanta” version of the deity (do you know the story of how Ganesha lost his right tusk…..?)

• reshape the rice ball in Ganesha’s left hand so it is a proper Ojas Ball

• make a larger Rosewood base for him, and make it removable so Ganesha could fit in my carryon (I’d need to give away some stuff to make room! seems fitting)

• darken the stain, so that he has a slightly ruddy complexion that matches better with the shala

Then, I’d need to find time before departing to take Ganesha to the Gokulam Ganapati temple with the proper items (flowers, fruits, etc) to receive blessings for him and his journey.

Still feeling through this. Help me out. How do you feel when you see him?

Do you like the specifications I have in mind for the artist?

How would we house him at the shala - maybe just bolt him down to the front desk?

Photo by AJ before Led Intermediate in Feb 2011


In a world where the news of the week = new precision on mula bandha (“anus only, anus always!”) and a menu change at Sixth Main (the beautiful waiter will cross “Tandoori Vegetables” right off the menu in your hand if you won’t stop ordering them), well… in this context, Sunday’s Led Intermediate is an event. Sorry, Mubarak. For Led Intermediate, there are spectators. Youtube films. There are practitioners who start talking about it a full day in advance; and the post-game commentary stretches to afternoon in some quarters.

The history we keep is one of “energy.” We tell stories about the aggressive days of the institution –when the old lions were in the room to show the new generations what shakti’s all about. Or the brutal days when SKPJ would stretch catvari to eternity. Or even older days in Encinitas, when you had to hold still in the hard postures while he went around to adjust the other six people in the room and the Super 8 was rolling.

When I became a bit too excited about the old stories one morning back in Santa Monica, Dominic abruptly changed the subject. These are the good old days, he said.

In other words, now is yoga. Or: Come on. Wake up to this. Or: forget about the way we never were and give yourself to the way it is.

Good call for one who aestheticizes the past. While the boatloads of newer students suffer from culture shock, energy mis-management and supta kurmasana (but rarely forget to embrace the present moment), the Intermediate crowd’s suffering lodges in another kosha. When we get weary, we empty our cups on nostalgia for different vibes, if not for younger bodies. (As if we weren’t all stiff and awkward back in our twenties.)

Suffering aside, I submit that we’re deep in salad days down here. A time of peace and soft yellow light. On Sundays, It’s practically afternoon (7:30) by the time Led Intermediate starts, so after a lie-in and a leisurely coffee hour, we mingle out front, chit-chatting up a storm while Saraswathi finishes her Led Primary.

We love each other. We love being here. We love to practice.

Spectators gather in the vestibule: word is it’s a full house out there, though I wouldn’t know since I go way in to soft eyes in order to shorten my focal distance from the mat. But trust me on this: the laughs for people who flub technique are just rumor. The watchers feel inspired, focused and ever so civilized. Very day at the races. I want to give them pince-nez, fitted gloves, and mint juleps.

Speaking of which, Sharath and Saraswati serve cocktails around the room together during karandava. By mayurasana’s ekam, we’ve all had a good long rest in bellyflop asana. But even rested, the peacock is the hardest pose to hold.

Sunday’s pre-practice mood contrasts hilariously with our previous meeting—Friday’s 4:15 led primary. By Friday mornings, to my eyes, we’re ground down to less loving and loveable selves. The crowd is largest for that class – the usual 4:15 crew plus another 30-60 (?) others whose start time is before 6:15. Thus the line-up outside the gates begins not at the usual 3:45 but—god knows—maybe closer to 3:00 in the morning.

Four a.m. may be brahma muhurta, but getting up in the 2:00 hour is just ludicrous. There’s no way to make sense of this without drinking the Kool-conuts, if you know what I mean. For most, coffee’s sufficient to get it going. But a 2:30 am dance party with a refugee Indian cat also works to pre-func for the insane Friday ritual.

Anyway… come Sunday, the edge is buffed out. The intermediate kids are rested, fed, recreated and caffeinated. Last week, our newest initiate, in searching for a word to describe her first experience, selected: “Fun.” Exclamation point.

For sure. If we work an edge, it’s the slow finishing sequence, not kapo or croc or ut pluthihi. The karandava cocktail hour means everybody who needs one gets a flip up. And there are acres of mat space – an observer said there were 30 of us last week, a sliver more women than men. Maybe half of that number finished, while the others are gradually learning—or re-learning—the sequence.

Last week, it was only at the end that things got instructional—and the didactic bit wasn’t to do with technique or strength. We were subverted by other means.

Incidentally… my read is that practicing here is supposed to mess with stuff you take for granted about reality: notions of time, progress and entitlement are systematically scrambled. I say systematically because the practice works by being relentless. If there’s insight after the asanas have done their first layer of work (i.e., the chikitsa, or therapeudic opening, of primary; and the intermediate kundalini stuff we call nadi shodana), I’d suggest it happens because of the action of practice just keeps on rolling. The repetition churns on in to the emotional body, the relational self, the astral body, and I have no idea what else. But I suspect we only find out if we really do the internal practice… once the asanas become part of dailiness, like the coffee and the cat, and maybe the kids.

No wonder SKPJ would say don’t think about teaching until you’ve practiced a decade. No wonder Patanjali wrote that practice is only practice if it proceeds without breaks. Some commentaries on the Sutras note that ceasing practice is like setting yourself back to the beginning. You avoid whatever subtle challenge it took you all that relentless showing-up-for-it to uncover in the first place.

Anyway. Practicing in the shala is subversive, one way or another. For one thing, I swear the big clock on the wall changes by a few minutes every week. “Shala time” constantly throws me off. And within that framework, I lose my sense of duration. The best I can do is moor to 5-8 breaths in any given posture, like that commitment is a rope to pull me through a a stormy (or calm) sea.

Here’s a good fluctuation. Last Sunday, Sambhav ambled in to the room during finishing. At 3 or 4, he no longer totters (and yesterday during savasana he ran around whiffing a cricket bat, waiting for his dad to come out of the office), but his voice is still the high, round-voweled warble of last year. I remember feeling impatient for my own Dad when he spent Sunday mornings at church, tending to other people, so by default I interpret Sambhav’s interruptions as an assertion of his claim on Sharath’s time.

In any case, in the 15-count headstand that lasts forever, Sambhav decided to set his own rhythm. After Sharath’s tired tenor “Wuuuunnnn….,” the son piped up from the stage with “TooooooOOO?,” and long before we could turn around the current exhalation, he followed with a triumphant “TreeEEE!”

Cuteness.

Filled with happiness, I made an upside-down smile and stayed in drste. Then, a few moments later, “Twuuun-teee!”: a holler that sounded as much like a safari bird call as it did a twenty or a fourty.

All this, and we’re still exhaling… and then there’s Sharath’s definitive tenor of “Twoooooo,” dropping low. The first time we’ve heard that voice since it intoned “One” back ages ago, way before Sambhav jumped in and changed this class from second series to seventh.

Sambhav begins the variation again, his efforts to push the cadence forward now settling in to play between the bars. Another “Treeee….?” Then, venturing a “Fouuuuuuurh?! ForTEEN!! FIF-TEEN!” And then there’s a sound of jumping-boy excitement on the stage… and I’m lost for a breath… or a year… in the weightlessness of my sacrum drifting in to the anti-gravity column above the atlas bone.

And then Sharath, steadily cueing inhalation and a sense of slow water-falling movement from the floating sacrum down the back of my spine, again toward the atlas: “Treeeeee…”. Ok, tree it is, Teacher. Growing some roots from the crown in to the “soft marble” of the floor and Prakash’s cave below.

It went on like that for a year or two, through a full 15 and then 10 (if I remember right?) in half-bend, and a final rise up for a breath before exhale down, don’t lift your head (i.e., roll straight from crown to forehead to protect your neck, and in the meantime refrain from peering around the room).

Afterwards over coconuts, a few of us mused that the new posture—Sambhav Sirsasana—was the seventh series version of headstand. In Sambhav Sirsasana, the teacher as father-character expresses as dispassionate discipline and clarity. This teacher-voice is not affected by annoyance, excessive discipline, or a need to criticize. It is not interested in labeling behaviors as “good” or “bad,” “intelligent,” “funny,” “cute,” “too loud,” or whatever. In its steadiness, the root-count of Sambhav Sirsanasa just allows the child’s wild energies to arise, giving those vrittis space and time to play out.

Giving space. Giving time.

And within that: allowing the fluctuations to have their own is-ness…

what Nisagardatta would call suchness…

…what seventh series (toddlers or not) gives us back—after all that healing and purification—as specific, arbitrary beauty in the world.

The Vaikunta Samaradhane—one year death anniversary ceremony—of R. Sharath Jois took place in Mysuru, Karnataka, on November 2nd. I attended, and will remain here to practice and teach at his shala for most of the month. These first days here have been full of renewal, recognition, and belonging. The trees are full of flowers; the streets are full of puppies; and the air is pressed with just the perfect percentage of humidity—and with it a sense of the sweet swift vapor that is any single life.

The shala I direct in Michigan has a lo-fi private platform on slack where a couple hundred of us share all sorts of yoga things, and I create new classes on whatever ashtanga topics emerge from the ferment. This “shadowshala” began as a third place for connection during Covid, and has continued as a dark forest community that enables us to stay off of the socials (which most of our crew consider a bit cringe, if not crazy-making).

Yesterday morning, Sharath’s daughter Shraddha said I hope we all can accept the changes… And she said it from a place of inner example, of having accepted the changes. In a soft, radiant way. This landed for me, as teaching, and as the meaning of this moment. This time here is already full of such clarity. Of serenity and beauty I sense a few others would treasure if you could be here. So I thought that this month I’d share publicly, here, some of the bits I’m writing for our shadowshala, in addition to other writing I hope to have time for because life is simpler here than back home. I hope you like it.

***********************************

Sharath’s death anniversary on the 2nd was followed by my birth anniversary on the 3rd. I decided to mute the latter out of respect, but the students from home made moves that demonstrated the nonduality of taking birth and taking death. They sent with a student who also made this journey a great many individual birthday cards, which were individual letters, really, reflecting back to me what this year has been and what each student relationship has been, in each single writer’s accounting. As Maria Di Masso (Ashtanga Yoga Rosario, Argentina) said over idly this morning, our students have a little distance from what we’ve gone through this year, since the moment we directly experienced Sharath’s death in Virginia—so in a way they can see the whole of it better than we can. Here’s the thank-you I offered yesterday in the shadowshala…

Dearest Everyone:

This was an extremely powerful surprise. My God. All of you, your fingerprints and your sweet words are physically and spiritually here in Mysuru now. I do not understand how you could go to such a huge effort for this project; and at the same time I confirm to you that the healing and joy you have created in me is as big as the universe.There are two things that stand out to me now, as I hurry to write to you in the dark, smelling the petrichor of last night’s rain and listening to the one very early rooster calling from the north on High Tension Road.

FIRST, my single mindbody is not enough to keep track of the epic nature of this past year. How uncanny - a death anniversary followed by a birth anniversary. All of it the same. A recognition that Sharathji will not have more birthdays, and an affirmation that to be born - to take birth - is something of greatest significance. What actions will we choose? What thoughts will we choose? What habits will we follow? The answer to these questions is simply the substance of who we are! Your words, written physically, help me see how big this year - and all of life and death, which are not separate - truly are when we can hold them in our awareness.

To belong to others, to have a path and a lineage backwards and forwards in “time” — my God, it’s so good. Without these guideposts for a life, who would we be? Thank you for helping me see so much in just this one simple afternoon. I cried huge happy transformative tears of recognition and love with each new envelope of connection. I cannot imagine a more potent ritual, EVER, in my life. Thankful to you, thankful to time, thankful to Ann Arbor and Mysuru for the constellation of connections that bring this all together.

SECOND, I see a new theme making itself known in our shala. It started with our Bullet Journal workshop two years ago. It matured last year, when I changed the “don’t take notes” policy in the Foundations course and instead encouraged people to write things down in class AND we added the formal role of the SCRIBE in the course - which now has a lineage from Amy to Eva and beyond. There is an effort in this time of delusion to destroy the word. To destroy the neural connections, which enable name recognition and relational stability, that are anchored in our knowledge and care of language. Ardor [by Roberto Calasso; last summer’s reading for teachers and anyone else who wanted to try svadhyaya on hard mode] helps us see this too - the sacred nature of “listening lineage” - shruthi parampara - which passes the word from one human to the next as a form of connection. And it was in Alana’s insight, about how we as a community are effectively digesting the sacred texts into our present lives little by little.

There is something in our practice about care for the word. Words are magic spells. Languages are history and future and relationship. Let us write to each other, put love in our language, put language into form. This, in these times, is already part of our community practice. And now because of you I can see the sheer healing power of honoring the word.

And so we begin… I will take this learning onto my motorbike and out to Sharathji’s shala and into this day. So much love, recognition, care, appreciation, and joy connecting you to this moment and my heart to our shala….

- To those of you who have contacted me about learning ashtanga: welcome to our monthly newsletter. There are two factors which govern the timing of new Saturday cohorts: the assemblage of a good group of people, and my emotional capacity. Right now we have 3 waiting; and I’ve learned from experience that the list can go up to 20. Meantime, as explained below, my emotional capacity will need some time to replenish.

It’s important I have capacity to build a real connection with each person— that is, emphatically, the method— so in order for this to happen I must simplify my schedule for a couple of months in order to run a Foundations Cohort. It now looks like this will happen in spring or early summer. It is fine to start sharing this with those you think would really appreciate joining a cohort. Based on nothing at all except my intuition for what will be salient, it feels that in 2026 two organizing themes of my work will be establishing positive rituals, and the emergence from there of a somewhat effortless discipline and clarity. For those of you already interested, I would suggest to look for ways that these themes are already present in your lives, and can be nourished in anticipation of a deep dive together next year.

- It is joyous and chaotically peaceful here in Mysuru, India. My teacher Sharath’s memorial service - for the one year anniversary of his death - takes place tomorrow. It will be large. He is a beloved son of this town, and the treasure of his students around the world. Hundreds will come in for it, and remain to practice ashtanga together for the month. Sharath’s widow, Shruthi, told me today that she wants me to help teach those classes. I would do anything for Shruthi, and this will be a natural expression of loving memory of Sharathji. A small group of us teachers will hold the space, and offer assistance, for everyone else. The teachers all know each other well, and given the way things are unfolding, I expect this month together will be a time of sweet, caring, respectful cooperation. And service. We are all suckers for service, in the best way. I’ll share more with you as the chaos settles into something like an agreed-upon daily ritual.

Of course, this means that my plan for quiet time this month is shifting. So I’d like to pump the brakes a little bit, and try to restrain my enthusiasm for all things shala and teaching in the months ahead. You’re all welcome to (try to) hold me to this when you see my fundamental sin - the teaching error of wanting to share too much too soon - inevitably re-emerge. It is my favorite problem and a good one to have, so please do not read in any apology to this paragraph. Everything is unfolding beautifully.

- I’m off to meet again with Shruthi, and fellow teachers for the month. But first, a whisp of the last little thing that transpired before I sat down to write to you. An underlining of the shala adage: be a quick study. Yoga is training in reading our environment, being adaptable and - very importantly - learning to be good in a crisis. It is training about how to experience real interest in, and learn from, mistakes.

I’m not sure how well I expressed any of these just now, but I did at least have a marvelous time running out of gas in the Mysuru hinterlands. First time for everything. When the motorbike whose gas gage I misread (ok, because it doesn’t work) sputtered to a stop on the drive back from Sharath’s shala outside of town, it came to rest opposite a rural manufacturing plant with a security guard posted out front. A year of Duolingo Hindi has either left me useless with it, or many people actually don’t care about this somewhat fictitious national language. (In Mysuru people speak Kannada, which I’ve failed to learn much of at all, and which has nothing to do with any other language I recognize.) In any case, the guard - and the rickshaw driver who earnestly putted by - and I all shared exactly one word in common: petrol. That and a lot of swallowed smirks, demi head wobbles, and tiny affirmative nods (nods being perpendicular in anatomical direction to head wobbles, of course).

The whole disaster was worth every inconvenience and delay for (1) the way the guard pulled an empty water bottle out of a tree like he’d been storing it there for exactly this purpose and (2) the extreme restraint with which the man at the gas station received Rickshaw Guy and me when we officiously presented him with said bottle.

Every character played it cool, failing to keep the corners of our mouths the least bit relaxed, enjoying the stupid episode together. No damsel in distress stuff; no stranded foreign woman drama. Just a in-joke of me and three reserved and watchful dudes playing our exact roles for each other on the stage of the world. It ended in my being the last one who tried, and the only one to succeed, opening the bike’s tricky trunk. A treat. That’s when we discovered one more shared gesture, as I held up the water bottle full of petrol to an air-toast, and both Rickshaw Guy and Security Guy held up imaginary bottles of their own.

Down the hatch, and back on the road...

OM
AJ

*All photos in this letter are by me, unless otherwise credited

Woke up in the leaf globe today. Soft, sweet tears pooling under my eye mask. Zelda Spoonbender, all 12 pounds of her, melting over my thorax. Her right paw wrapped around two of my left fingers. Sad; happy; reverie.

Coming up on a year.

The penultimate Saturday of October last year, I taught the last class of a 7-week beginners’ series, left the group resting in the shala and cruised straight to the airport in Detroit. The following morning at Miami Led Intermediate –my last with Sharath—he stepped onto the top of my mat. Where had I been, mm? He’d never before offered his feet to me—just offered them like that. The splayed wingspan of his absolutely unique life experience of 53 years.

“Want me to help this week?” An idiotic impulse, since I hadn’t had a day off work in a while and would prefer (selfishly) to just thrill to my own practice for the week. The energy in the room would be (and so very much was) electric joy.

“Yes! You help me!” And that was it. My treasured Dhawi and I laughed. And then led intermediate was heaven. Not the fluffy buoyant powder days of my 30s, but a comic-awkward holiday prayer service. A string of dad jokes beaded on a familiar vinyasa thread, held in place by the synchrony of 40 or 50 or 100 old friends.

A couple weeks later, the same net of pearls, spread over the globe. Walking down the Shenandoah mountain with those who had held him in the end, into the arms of the other 80 or 90 more who had waited on the mountain top while he died, then filed past the EMTs to the parking lot to wait for his soft feathered bird body to float back down on a stretcher.

We fell into those many many arms in the parking lot. Unreality. Disbelief. Pure love and beauty. Still inside the leaf-globe of the crystalline moment, his spirit soaring over the surface of the earth. One heart. His broken open, and into each of ours too.

We were, at Shenandoah, 100 long-term practitioners and teachers—a group who was willing to show up for this strange new thing he was offering, just because it was him. Every one of us on some sort of a life path of deliberate ahimsa and satya and so on, in some sort of karmic relationship with a teacher who had encircled us in his particular lineage. A small lineage, really, in the scope of things. Small enough, despite its late explosion in numbers, to experience as fictive kin.

Psychological safety. In the vestibule there. The leaf globe and the eternal moment it holds.

In childhood, I witnessed a lot of trauma from a little distance. A consequence of an intentional, hopeful upbringing, during which I lived with my nuclear family on a vast utopian ranch with 100 orphaned kids who were trying to heal. So strange. So full of care and devotion. A vestibule unintentionally designed to train a sensitive small person to attune to the emotions of the 100 little ones around her. (That number: a container of knowability. An Indra’s net of pearls, all interconnected. 100 factorial dyads. Robin Dunbar said after a point a human web will fragment because our nervous systems can only hold so much. But 100. Yes. Easy. 100 is an ideal inter-relational container.)

So, the instinctive feel of trauma. Unevenly distributed across the 100, and beyond that across the whole net of living souls knit into this lineage somehow. Anyone, everyone, is entitled to the deepest shock and sadness that Sharathji sat down, and softly died. In fact, it seems that—in some cases—it landed especially hard the further a person was from the place his soul flew into and out of the sky. It is so, deeply normal to grieve a person you’ve never met.

And for me, I would not characterize Nov 11, and my year since then as being about trauma. Not at all. It is about love. It is, so far, the most beautiful and most alive year. The abrupt unwanted change held, and increased, and integrated.

When in happened, Sharath’s family asked us immediately to keep it off the socials. Delay as long as we can. Have some decency. Some respect. People need to find out some other way if possible. The 100 of us made a Whatsapp compact, so much as we could, while the chat itself was just the hundred of us.

As I detached from the group to walk to the Westphalia in which we’d brought Sharathji up the mountain, to decend without him, someone whispered something like: “X knows. The vultures will be circling.”

The desire to be first on Instagram. To claim an association. To cover oneself in the ashes of his recent fame. Yes, of course. Normal. How you process when it’s raw, if you don’t have a softer more intimate container. And also, potentially super traumatizing to one’s followers.

My mind diffused out into the net. That was how it felt the whole evening and night of Nov 11. Now I see that the sleep ring recorded a couple hours in bed, and Whatsapp logged so many dozens of calls.

The way it felt was: who am I called to include in this love before Instagram puts an ice pick in their brain? My beloved mentor Dominic of course. First of fictive kin. Friends. Students. Students of friends, friends of students. It’s all the same. Fingering the beads one by one through the night until the first vulture landed a little before dawn. Exhale. Ok. Now we make the altar. Now we light the candles. Now we serve the chai to all the others who have been up tending to the net through the night.

Ratcheting up the ritual. Keeping ahead of the fragmentation and alienation. The pure, good instinct of psychological safety.

Continuing to hold the horrible experience. Holding each other in order to do that. The purity of care in this. The ancient depth of animal intelligence.

________

Since I learned the extent of Taylor’s psychic violence, my central reflection has been on this topic of psychological safety. How can the instincts around safety in yoga be so totally missed, lost, stripped from the fictive relational beams and floorboards of a shala itself?

How is it possible: for a teacher to mine for vulnerabilities, then weaponize them against a person in his care? How is it possible, to not understand the nature of a trauma container—the instinctive holding and privacy a being requires to transform their hurt? To find ease—maybe even peace—silently within themself?

How is it possible, to burden people who are not teachers with your words against your own students? To speak in public about the perceived “issues” of a person in your care? Unreal.

To use the internet as a place to desecrate a relationship that at least one member considers to be sacred? Unreal.

In a professional sense, of course there are protocols to prevent such psychological violence. Around our shala, we call it medical grade confidentiality. We also call it the cone of silence. Teachers and assistants never discuss students’ process outside of a professional, clinical, confidential container.

The shala is itself a container designed to be private and psychologically safe to the degree possible for any individual, at any given time. The work for a teacher is to leave the practice there. To let it be.

Part of that holy privacy is not using students for promotional purposes. Their practice is their own. The life in it, the physicality of it. Their experience is not mine; it does not belong to me as a business woman. They are not followers, not testimonials. Because: it’s not a transactional relationship. It’s something else. Whatever they make of it. But at least I can insist that I’m not doing money for postures. I’m not doing attention in exchange for social media features.

If we’re designing for psychological safety, practitioners do not sign away their rights to the image of their own practice. Taylor advised this, so that your image can be used for promotional purposes. Sonima also owns me like that. For the times I practiced under the banner, I did sign my spirit away. It was worth it for Sharath. And, I will not do so again. My guru is gone. Far gone. He can’t help me hold the safe container of my own practice anymore.

Basic professional reverence something I learned from a Dad who is a hospital chaplain, and a Mom who is a therapist. So many people in this world understand this! To be a caregiver, in its million forms, is to be reverent. That instinct of care and safety is in the lineage from Sharath too. Around him, there was no clinical training, nor formal rules. People got it, or not. (Increasingly not, perhaps.)

Sharath created containers. Vestibules. Contexts to hold transformation. Those containers broke down a lot, especially as the numbers exploded and the definition of what we were doing seemed to change.

And also, whenever there was a mutual tending over the years, those relational containers were profoundly radiant within. There are so many people still practicing, and growing, within them. I am only one.

Sharath’s ability to navigate consent was something. Consent is uneven and always in flux. With some, he held his feedback in reserve. He’d give an instruction; a person would ignore it or think it was not for them; and he’d let it pass. No confrontation. Vestibule intact. Relationship attuned to the moment and the person. Beautiful.

With me, he did confront me twice. Twice in 22 years. Both times changed my path, and were very hard. But like a few other practitioners I imitated, I made it clear to him in show-up, and in words, that our inter-personal vestibule was stable. I would remain there within it, even if I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror he held up to me. He was, upon reflection years later, 1.75 for 2. Astonishingly good odds against my ego. I am grateful. I remain psychologically safe.

The story remains the same old epic that it ever was. The path remains the same discipline and surrender, as it ever was. And held inside them, inside the leaf globe also— and inside the jeweled net of so many people I love so much— the mind-heart that started softening 11 ½ months ago knows ever more… that it is safe.

There’s healing in this moment. Strong teachings from an extreme situation. Cult abuse is not normal in the yoga world—it’s so insane that I find clarity in it. Here are some lessons I’m taking forward from an unlikely teacher.

1

A society is as good as how it treats its most vulnerable. A person who has been caught hurting others and held accountable is a kind of vulnerable. If we feel degraded, to treat him with dignity is ennobling.

He is a being, not a symbol. It’s possible to discuss what he teaches factually, and in a way that does not generate spite or anger—but rather inspiration. Love, even.

2

The aesthetics of domination speak for themselves. Someone who creates an image of themself standing over small women in catching. This is exactly what it looks like. It was all right there, with perfect clarity. All along.

3

There’s an inverse relationship of celebrity and accountability in these times.

If you want to do whatever you want, first build influence. Internet notoriety is insurance.

Celebs once complained about the microscope. But that changed. In fascistic times, infamy = fame. Same same.

If you want to be an exception to the standards in your profession, just goose the follower count.

For example: Huberman is a minor misogynist with a minor following; Rogan is medium/medium; and then there is the Orange One who rules them all. The internet has this unique mathematics of immunity.

4

When a teacher shares their opinions about their own students with other students, I tend to worry. Doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. It’s just uncool.
The topic of psychological safety comes to mind…

5

Taylor taught about advanced yoga. Colleagues spoke of him as a senior teacher. What do these words accomplish, and why? I suppose we conflated his follower count with meaningful knowledge. See item 3

6

Students who receive the strongest adjustments of their lives in a workshop setting, without expecting them, without rapport and consent, can receive lasting trauma in the body. Not to mention, very, very, very many injuries.

Trauma being, specifically, kinds of unresolved experience that the body holds.

Maybe touch like this is, indeed, designed to leave an impression? I could call this a red flag (obviously) but more obviously: how cringefully uncool. Tasteless.

(Forgive me, but why let loose such a person among students in our care?)

7

There’s a drama triangle in all of us. Abuser-Victim-Savior. Someone who identifies as a victim may instinctively seek a savoir. Reaffirming the victim identity delays the taking of responsibility for one’s own choices. And, stepping into savior mode is what locks down this dynamic for everyone.

8

It’s great to hae students observe a class before they start Mysore Style. This way, they can evaluate the practice with their eyes and sober mind. The first impression is an experience of autonomy and distance. Setting the groundwork for psychological safety. Pre-empting enmeshment.

9

Someone sounding like Taylor claims there was no power dynamic in his classroom.

There is usually a power dynamic. That’s not bad at all. As a student, for example, I prefer to learn from people who have more know-how and wisdom. That’s a power dynamic. There’s absolutely nothing dirty about a hierarchy of knowledge. (Do you disagree?) What’s sketchy is denying it’s a part of life.

10

Parasocial projection. This is where the power is now. Being in people’s eyes and ears, in their minds and heads, through ubiquitous sensory overload on screens. The connection the watcher experiences is one of transference. The creator is the broadcaster—they receive a higher volume of reciprocal stimulation as audience size increases. For the creator, the nature of the data is mainly quantitative – not the emotionally and spiritually intense qualitative experience of the watcher.

No wonder we call them influencers. The influencer, a curated distant image, is the mirror of whatever fantasies and needs we watchers transfer onto them. The power, the raw energy, the influencer receives is immense.

Let’s say an influencer knows the craft of sexual grooming. This attention economy enables them to groom literally all of the time, and at scale.

Potentially: IG can be a transference machine. IG can be an enabler. IG can be the best grooming device in history. When, and how, can the tool become a domination toy? I’d really like to think this through.

I don’t know, but my first take is that IG supercharges transference when it presents pictures of interpersonal domination, of sweaty bodies, of skin. When it shows tribal gatherings of a who’s-who.

When it tells you what to do, how to be—with the teacher’s knowing voice into your head. When it offers promises of inner peace or self improvement – the escapist gradiosity of dream fulfilmment, of self mastery, of inclusion. Follow me, and I will make you into someone new.

11

Shunning is primal, tribal behavior. The possibility of losing your clique or community can terrify people. Someone who has the power to affect your standing among your friends—for example a teacher who talks to students about other students—is one many will want to please. This is our most primitive aspect, even as it’s also the archetypical mean-girl high school stuff.

12

It’s complicated to not name one who has done harm. It’s complicated to call for change without naming oneself. Anonymity feels like safety, in a practice where tribal shunning has been turned against women who come forth after being victimized. But credibility suffers, so does trust within the group.

I wrote this blog anonymously from 2007-11. This subpersonality was a risk to my academic credibility. Uncloaking was awkward, but as I grow up a bit, and grow the many pieces of me together within a whole, de-anonymizing is what’s right for me.

A cat is half siddhi; the remainder a mix of furred electrical wires and verve.

Zelda never forgave me for Mysore – I was nowhere for 1/6 of her life, and would return smelling of cow. She’s aloof. But starting May 11, she put me on a struct cuddle program. Gazing into my eyes, wrapping her suede spiked beans around my fingers. When the water flowed from my eyes, she’d drool. Twenty minutes, three times per day.

Yesterday she only demanded one cycle, and this morning she just curled up in my armpit to hold hands/beans and kiss my face. Seems like she’s ramping down the treatment.

Last week was sweet, sharp pain. The six-month anniversary of Sharathji’s death crept up on us. I’d been around Europe – Paris, Amsterdam, Italy. While my country slides into itself. Like watching Mt. St. Helens erupt: a slow-mo geothermal demolition, down into hot sludge, covering the country in opaque toxic smoke.

At DTW, there were private security at customs, selectively harassing Asian women over 70. Infusing animal fear into us. Caught one in the eye and mouthed “what are you doing?” His face was a Lynchian rubber sheet over bloodshot blue eye beads. No bones; just a half-emulsified human melting down off his cranium. He answered in a bark: “you don’t want to tell us you have meat snacks, people are afraid; come give me your meat snacks.” I locked eyes and stared with love until he looked away. So creepy, both of us.

This is where we are. Grad school training, and lots of dinner parties with historians, help me see it in historical time. But I wish the professors also had some prophecy to lean on. A theory of Cosmic Time. It helps.

I won’t tell them, but will tell you: Kali Yuga is a refuge. This has all been foretold: Industrialization. Commodification. Colonization. Ethnic cleansing. Addiction machines that project a self and massify the ego: opium of the masses. FOMO and mimesis as ways of being. Obsession with the physical, with power, with saṃsāra. Distraction and manipulation by those who hold the power. The powerful themselves: deluded by messiah complexes and strategic long games. The mass death of discernment. People—souls—valued according to how much they have. And how adroitly they comply. It all goes together; it’s just the spirit of an age.

The Kali Yuga prophecy has solace – the practices of truth and love. The little flame that gets us through is heart-feeling. Bhakti is a serious thing, until it’s not. Choosing the loving thought. Saying the loving word. Studying the inner system for the energetic blocks to grounding the love down from thoughts, down to words, down into the body itself.

The prophecy says Truth is the one leg we have to stand on now. Discernment. I’m doing terribly with this. I hold the poison in my throat. Watching factual distortions travel. Letting people have their story. Playing incredibly dumb. Being a vault. As always.

A confidant said: notice the people who have a strong need to be right. They will force situations, and re-narrate facts, as far they must to get the dopamine hit of I’M RIGHT. Yes. Maybe observation is enough. The cards have begun to fall. The cards are in midair. In the anti-democratic nation states. In the war zones. In ashtanga. We do not know what the score will be when the cards land. Does it matter?

Last week, I cried over Sharathji. For the person he was. For those early conferences where he talked about cricket games and begged us not to destroy our minds by posting our asanas on the internet. Before he just gave up. Before there was an army of the faithful.

(All three images with thanks to Elizabeth Carmody von Genderen)

And also, after all of that. The mutuality of seeing between two extremely awkward people. The trust he had that no matter what he said, I would take the instruction. I would not reject him, play him, or try to punish him. Even in response to HARD instructions, made to change my personality and the future of my soul. To circumstances I really disliked. Even for someone who turns everything into a light-hearted game, Sharath’s was a HARD initiation that taught me tapas like I never could have understood through life itself. I cried about the times he was his whole self in the rare, dead-serious moments when we sat alone. Merciless; funny; confusingly committed a plan I couldn’t see.

I cried because initiation like this, blessing like this, is dead. We will never have an ashtanga guru with this intensity and discernment, with the capacity to say no forever. With the real knowledge of what it means to take on students’ karmas to transform their personalities and fates.

After all this, I cried for the way that I started to feel him trust me in the classroom. Selfish tears; personal and intimate tears. My nerdy nervous system learned to be what he needed, where he wanted, at any moment—after those first couple years when he yelled at me constantly. “Sharath is trying to kill Angela,” was the joke then. But Harini told me no – when you are in his mind like this it is only because he is making you be perfect. It Indian teacher method. It is pure love.

Later, there were three years together in the Mysore room when I felt (this is weird and may be wrong) that he’d tell me subliminally where to be, and felt him watch me work. The micro-nod. With the same eyes I felt he watched me at conference. It took years to make my movements harmonize exactly to his actions, to become exactly on time with his rhythms and humor. A kapha process - slowly, awkwardly, painfully gained. And never to be forgotten.

Mirroring was the central relationship for weeks and months at a time, first in conference and later in the classroom. Being seen. Clocking the nod and letting that be everything. Him observing me reaching out to the lonely people. I’d feel him watching, watch back for the micro-nod. That was an underlying spiral – me migrating to the margins, as I have my entire life, putting attention where it wasn’t expected, figuring out who didn’t have connections or status—who felt scared or less than—and including especially them. Avoiding and the insiders. Because more interested in everyone else.

We never talked about it. We never talked about ANYTHING. Conversations were when he told me to do a hard thing and I said yes. Or later, when it took the form where he told me You know what to do, and I said ok. But the intimacy from the very start was in feeling seen, and accepted, in the dorky caregiver part of my personality. He studied us all so closely, wanting desperately for everyone to get along.

We were his world, his scripture, and his svādhyāya. The little sociologist in me thrived in the Cosmos he created.

These were the crying thoughts towards the end. For the very personal, selfish loss of the intimacy with him.

And finally: for the way that, over the years, he talked more and more about THE NATURE. At first, when his Grandfather controlled everything, Sharathji just had a little apartment in Coorg, where he would escape to The Nature. I wish I knew when he saw his first tiger, when the big cat became the elusive center of his Nature mystique.

Being in The Nature now will never not be for him, as much as it is for my Dad.

It’s my fifth spring in the forest, where the two acres I steward are—for the first time—showing signs of biodiversity. I cannot talk about permaculture without also talking about authoritarianism and ashtanga. Clearing the monocropping invasives, who lock up the forest floor in woody root systems, block light to the understory, and snake murderous tree-choking vines up to the tops of the oaks and hickory. Three strong bullies (honeysuckle, buckthorn, riverbank grape) working together to wipe out everyone else.

Clearing them out naturally – without herbicide spray—took five years of heavy labor. That’s what I lifted instead of students during lockdown, and then just kept at it. I never realized it might…. end. The plants who don’t play well with others are still lurking a bit, but the soil is no longer just a mass of spiky root balls covered in prickly bark stems neath an overstory dying—collapsing—under the weight of heavy vines.

This spring, for the first time, there are native sedges. Wildflowers I’ve never known. There is a grove of tiny baby Ash; and poplar, walnut, silver maple, oak. By this time last year, the deer had eaten all the baby trees; but now it seems their fuzzy bellies are full on the mayapple and clover that couldn’t survive here before. What is going on?

We lost 3 Elms to beetles, and I’m worried about oak wilt, but both diseases are species-specific. A forest is for many kinds of independent trees; it has to be, if it is to thrive. And meantime I’m meeting all these new beings, latent in the soil, kissing each other up from deep in the ground in the soft understory light. Furls of real genetic information that went dormant for 40 years while Honeysuckle was Pretender King, but their diverse sequencing and their seed was never lost.

That’s what you’ll hear at the fertile margins of ashtanga too. You’ll know you’re there when you hear them say this. True knowledge is never lost.

I didn’t hear the first whisper of Krishna until the age of 22. A field was created by the way we said his name. I am only realizing now, 25 years later, that this field has held dear friends to me all this time, and very slowly showed me how to be a friend in return.

Here is how it happened. Halfway into my bachelor’s in philosophy, my mentor Dr. Fost started talking to us about divine play. Lila. It was I tiny liberal arts school near Portland, Oregon. Philosophy class would have 2-5 people in it and we were only allowed to read original texts (20-80 pages per day), no commentary. We met most days in a heavy high-ceilinged Greek Revival hall built in 1928. Over the course of that year, my little mind started to move towards the teachings of Advaita Vedanta. By senior year, when the philosophy club got a tranche of cash for a special event, I convinced them to bring an Advaita scholar to campus. Eliot Deutsch. A translator of the Indian sages for western mind, founder of the discipline of Comparative Philosophy. He would teach us about nonduality.

So he came, all the way from Hawai’i. I was his little host, walking him across dewy lawns to his lunches and lectures, watching the way he greeted our humble college. On Wednesday night, he Delivered. It was the intellectual event of the year, and none of us understood more than half of what he said in the third-floor conference hall overlooking our grove of mossy 200-year-old oaks. It got contentious! A hot fight about play, between my mentor and his colleague from English. Sigh. I was geared up for a full serving of enlightenment the next night, but what we got was something entirely different.

Eliot made us forget the intellectual knots of metaphysical debate; let us think deeply about friendship. His talk on “creative friendship” was nothing less than a peak experience, an epic high in the realm of ideas. He used that lecture to enclose us in the same field of intellectual love that contained his entire scholarly life.

What I think I remember is the idea of the super-best-friend. Krshna as the one who loves Arjuna into the best version of himself, mischievously and fiercely; who makes his own hard sacrifices and takes no bullshit on the way. One who creates whole realities like this, with the tool of friendship, has known one thing: how to be One who Loves. Eliot’s term, if I remember? All action, it is the expression of a love that cannot merely stay still – undifferentiated – nondual. We are not—he submitted—enslaved to our karma. Friendship is a holy vehicle of human choice wherein we create whole worlds. If we have love.

The bitterness from the night before transformed into a field of eyes sparkling for each other.

What matters now about that night 25 years ago is that Eliot created a field of creativity—invoked it explicitly and filled it with goodwill. The highest form of philosophy, he was saying, is shared novelty. Some of the most cherished people in my life today were in that room.

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The same is true of all the Mysore rooms I’ve been in where the spirit was strong. My teachers’ rooms, specifically. If Sharathji was holding them, they were fields of consciousness and play, fields of internal battle, and for those who were ready they were also fields of creative friendship. THIS is the change angent: the consciousness field itself. Not the things (postures) in it.

This topic is too vast to discuss. But it’s coming to the fore, awkwardly, in words because I’m seeing now that my work going forward is to try to constitute fields of shared consciousness. To the degree that I am able. That’s the transmission I received, more than anything in particular. How to hold a space.

A Mysore room is so many things, and around all of them, necessary for the radiance to happen, there needs to be a container. An electrificed charge of deep silence that drives the senses inward, so deep and so much that the heart sends out its web to hold us together with our people.

Technically, there are things that increase the chances of a field springing forth to hold a group. Think about the way our teachers did it: to join the field, you commit for a month of shared time and space; you become cohort of spiritual friends; the group follows a clear discipline together with a lot of shared silence; each person should infuse wisdom teachings into each day. And within all this, with luck, the durable matrix of connection becomes extra bouncy and resilient through the crucial practice of just hanging out.

For the first ten years of teaching our local Mysore program in Ann Arbor, I’d also take an away-workshop every so often for a teacher who I mentored. Instead of going many places, I just went back to the same handful of small shalas every year.

This is because Sharath was extremely skeptical of workshops – they increase teacher ego tremendously, because we get treated as special on the road. What he wanted for us was the mundane nature of Mysore style – that we constitute a home program and build the field. Workshops were ruining the practice, it was often said.

The best students still say this. I got to hear Hamish give this warning to us kids over dinner again in November. Oh yeah. Thanks man. Let’s not forget.

For those first ten years I broke this excellent rule, and badly. My concession was to keep the spirit of it through a commitment to only visiting a few of the same places repeatedly. Until they grew bored of me. Meantime, with each visit, I would be even more delighted by them. It was tremendous. My shy, loyal heart loves a long duration. I worked so hard following that rubric, and loved it all so, so much. Thank you, all of you who joined me there.

Each visit, the host teacher would have them write me a letter, to a no-reply account called AJPhoneHome. Say anything, free associate, tell me what you want to study this weekend; it is all confidential. I’d read the whole sheaf of emails twice on the plane, using my ethnographic data analysis training to pull out common themes. That is how I could guess what to put into the container of our talks together.

On Friday evening, our first meeting would just be the ethnographic report. I’d simmer it all down to the main 2-4 key themes in the letters. It was never not beautiful, for me the reader of the leaves and for the students who made them. A big, comforting, hilarious mirror. I loved looking into it and seeing all of them.

The field of practice within a single shala ways always TIGHTLY coherent. People practicing silently together, but stitching the 8-limbed method into their own life path in a way uncannily on theme for another person in the opposite corner whose name they didn’t even know yet.

The whole point of sitting together was to throw light on the web of connection that was already there, glinting that radiance off of a few particular jewels, and then shut up again about these things for a year.

To work, this all had to be unscripted. An agenda from the facilitator (me) would kill the organic revelations within the field. The point of these meetings was not to impart knowledge – I had none. It was to see the field they already had created through their shared consciousness, rejoice in our awareness, and allow new positive intentions coalesce at the intersections of each web.

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At our home shala in Michigan, I do none of this. I just show up. We all do. That’s it. Yesterday over chai and transportive cardamom Madelines, after Led Primary, we were talking about how the world is so hard now. Ukraine and Gaza. And the uncertainty. Untold future wars. The deluding of the mind, the aggression in the zeitgeist, the unbearable suffering of Beings.

I feel a physical ache in my heart now, often. To feel the world now in a realistic way, without pretending it’s something else. This is the feeling of staying connected, and staying real.

Something that digested yesterday with the chai, as we shared how we feel this ache in the heart, is a specific way that it helps to have a shala.

Ours is both local and virtual, so the lives that intersect in our meetings circle the whole globe. Many aspects of this world-moment are knit into our ashtanga container. Within this shala, we were thinking about how each of us knows the single life line of individual friends. People we know to be alive to their lives; spiritual friends who are on an 8-limbed path that breathes us all together and apart.

What helps me, above all, is to sink my awareness into the knowledge of just one or two of these beautiful, intentional lives. To do “find my friends” on the spiritual plane, sensing the truth, goodness and beauty that this One traces onto the planet with their life. Just today. How do they move through this world today?

Here we are. The crisis roars; the wars are real. And friendship by friendship, creativity holds its own field. There are Ones finding a measure of liberation by taking action from love. We suspect, in our shala, that meditating on, cherishing, just a single friend for who they are can be enough to hold the aching heart in balance. And a whole shala of spiritual friends, over long time, it is a bright universe.

Relationship is protective. Ritual is protective. Radical acceptance is protective.

Ashtanga yoga, it’s only made up of relationships. They can be of any sort. And it does seem each individual tends to have just a few versions of the same relationship over and over. May as well make them good, but also open them up to creativity as much as possible.

Jayashree and Narasimhan made me understand this explictly. It was in 2009 that they gave me the first protection incantations. Invocations. Summonings.

May he protect us both. May he nourish us both, with knowledge. May our study together have brilliance and no misunderstanding. May the cows and the scholars be protected. May there be peace in the three kinds of forces acting upon us: cosmic forces out of our control, the forces of the world around us, and the forces within us. Peace.

Their mantras lightning-redesigned reality for me. Sitting on the floor of their little library, bare lightbulb flickering off in the afternoon power cut. Our motorbike-shaken bodies quivering, then going slack and dewy in the heat. A vinyasa to soften western mind. Then the protection spells, billowing around us and sealing us en caul.

A membrane than does not decay, but only if it is constructed correctly from the start.

These teachers’ transmission, like Sharath’s, is not other than magic. And we all know, I hope, that 80% of magical practice is for protection. Or maybe it is 99%.

Like Sharathji, they received the confused little sprite that I was, accepted her, and filled her with what knowledge she was able to take in. They all shook out the shabby fabric of my reality and then swaddled up my wandering soul with theirs. The spiritual generosity of this oct. And in many cases it doesn’t last.

But what does it mean when the magic actually takes, to remain in the membrane of a student-teacher relationship when reality changes again?

What if your teacher is dead?

What does it mean for a student, specifically? Here is what I can see. It shows up as naming our teachers always, as citing our sources, as elder care if we had been so lucky, as reverence for their legacy. Those whose relationship is blessed like that, mutually: I see they are full of life now, and are never not grieving. This is not time to discard the past or remake the world. It is time to intuitively hold our teacher’s memory in the blessings of protection.

I look out and see those who glide along their path inside the air-chariot of unconditional love + human acceptance that the protection mantras create. And those who do not, who leave a trail of tears of broken relationships behind them—either because they chose unwisely from the start, or because they did not have the strength to accept the human parts of their teacher when they inevitably came to the fore.

That bit has been the strangest experience of my life – watching my teacher, this epic person, be transformed into either a super-human or a scapegoat in so many minds.

The adharmic relationships may be karmic, but they are NOT fate. Not at all. Not when we have transformative technologies at hand. A person can stitch real love together from shreds, re-narrate their path out of truths that really will hold, really will bless the path.

In fact, I find it is common, to get several years down your path and regret the way that it started. Something in our intention, or our protection, was not correct. Our first teacher did not have a transmission. We were without blessing. Yes! That is what real magic is for. Wholeness minus wholeness equals wholeness.

Dominic says this in fewer words, speaking of relationships. This is someone who combines his wild mind with Saturnine moral discipline. He is the one who had the generous charisma to make us all cry 3 ½ years ago at Sharathji’s 50th birthday party, recounting stories of his childhood and the true nature of his personality. A whole-life recognition of his treasured oddities, and his treasured gifts.

This same teacher, Dominic, is one who has always held the poison of gossip or his own reactivity to ashtanga drama in his throat. He could do so for lifetimes, if that is what it takes. And from that place, when there is an interruption in real actual love, he just says: Fix it. Go, fix it.

It is either in us, or on us to stitch together a relational path full of acceptance, respect, blessing, realness and love.

Or not. Many people try to make a go of it without protection. The theory of a blessing is not the same as the action it requires.

Rocket said to me last summer, regarding a particular practice often deemed risky, wild and esoteric: it feels protective. Yes. This too is a teaching. From the place of real intelligence, and real discernment, to magnetize with the protective nature of our own methods. To then trust them, give ourselves to them, and allow them to protect us.

Sharath was about that sort of faith. He named his firstborn for it. The quality of shraddha is not mind-numb. It’s heart-alight. So much so, that our animal bodies know they can trust the path. They are protected.

OM

*Photography by the brilliant Kitty Schulz

Again at 4 am on Monday, with the candlelight and the cat. The full moon glows the snow like it’s radiating from within. Crystalline snow this time, spiky LED particles for a desolate rave where there’s no food left and the deer and foxes and bunnies huddle together for warmth. We’re miles from any streetlight or snowplow out here.

Saturday was two months since Sharathji died in the forest. I taught our radiant group of beginners (the shala does a two-month series of classes to share basic breathwork, meditation and movement principles with the townspeople, with no agenda that they become ashtangis). Then a text from Dhawi reminded me of the anniversary, and that landed heavy. No time has passed since he died, but my world is inside out.

Ashtanga is deep down in an in-between time now. An inter-regnum, or time between regimes. Same as the entire nation-state system, here at the horriffic halftime of this morbid decade.

My lens on Gaza, Ukraine, the Gulf States, Sudan, North Korea and America in 2025 is the old Gramsci line about regime change: “The old world is dying an the new one struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Zizek translated this as now is the time of “morbid symptoms.”

Yeah. Monsters are real they are flooding the breaches in the nation-state system. But ashtanga, also in regime change, is giving awe and wonderment, moral excellence, reconciliation and repair, compassion and kinship, and the thrilling aspect discipline that frees the mind. Instead of matching the energy of the moment, ashtanga as I’m living it is generating a radiant moral opposite to 2025.

I’m between the worlds of the one my teacher created, and the one I’ll inhabit for the rest of my life. I want this liminality to remain unresolved. May it continue filling me with creativity, gentle perception of the good, and childlike verve.

Yoga resolves apparent opposites, teaching our cells the truth of the principle that like increases like. However! Yoga can also generate duality where we need possibility and freedom. Pratipaksha bhavanam. Cultivate the opposite.

For weeks I’ve been remorseful about the comedy emerging from my heart. Every time I’m asked for words on who Sharathji was, what emerges is mischief and dad jokes. It’s trite. It feels disrespectful, as a senior student charged to carry his legacy, to fail to convey the depth and enormity he also kept hidden.

But I’m finally understanding that there was duality he cultivated in me as a deliberate teaching. I arrived in Mysore with a decade of practice in my cells, on the foundation of a rural farm kid’s instinctive lone-wolf discipline. My primary emotion, was reverence for Yoga. My primary thought, was that I could never adequately pay respects for this sacred methodology. What these looked like, though, was SELF-seriousness. Humorlessness. Refusal to bring my whole playful carefree self to the mat.

Now I see that Sharath summoned the dork in me. The dork in him recognized it. Saw it under my seriousness, silence and restraint. Physical humor, mischief and dad jokes were a step toward our true nature. Tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam.

The first conference I gave at the shala, on the 7^th day after his death, was unbearably light hearted. Listening back to the recording, I speak of toe socks, of the Jedi mischief in the way he chose to die. Next I recorded with Scott Johnson, and what came forth was the memory of him putting his new tiger-telephoto lens in my face in Durvasana, a physical joke on the grip of my driste. Same energy with Harmony too. The silly morsels. Leaving a record absent the ache of human suffering and the horror of loss.

I want to examine my time with him and see the answers to the universe, and heart of devotion that serious student-teacher relationships express so beautifully. That’s not absent, but mostly my grief is a comic strip. That was how he worked with me –serious to the point of absurdity. That is what it took to make me know the part I was missing.

So I go forward with a chronicle of slapstick ashtanga. This is the transmission he gave to the hyper-serious student. A little workaholic, tasked with something that isn’t work at all.

The first book I loved as a teen was My Antonia by Willa Cather. In 2020 I drove to Red Cloud, Nebraska, and stayed in her childhood home with the ghosts. So many ghosts out there alone in the covid cornfields. Cather’s book is about a kid from Virginia who’s haunted by nostalgia, who encounters Virgil’s insight about how “the best days are the first to flee.” How we idealize the past, turn it into set pieces, and vacate the present of sweetness.

The best days are the first to flee has been a mantra for me ever since. A check on the way my mind idealizes the past and makes the present unspecial.

But that’s not how the situation of Sharath’s death works at all! What’s present to me is the hilarity. His death has moved into me as lightness and ease. A death certificate that acts, in my cells, like the biggest possible permission slip for the secret dork to take form. For the cosmic joke to glimmer through even in this era of monsters, moral horror, morbid symptoms.

He gave me a lot. A LOT of funny stuff, painfully funny, against a background of discipline and devotion. It took me SUCH a long time to get it. Years. God, it was all so much.

And it’s not like I don’t recoil now from this comic book phase of my grief. I do recoil. It’s not like I don’t judge the way that I’m being changed by seeing him die. Judgement is there. But I do see that this is what he asked of me, to hold and share the transformative intensity of this yoga while also expressing the truth of the light heart. If I am understanding him correctly, what appears as dad jokes is no less than the comedy of the cosmos.

Ashtanga is art and science. Art in the way of esoteric masonry, bookbinding, permaculture, and secret societies. Science in the way of weird science: not equations but lab chemistry and freaky particle accelerator physics. If you see the film, I think you’ll agree that Rublev the icon painter (like the bell caster Boriska) is the soul of his place in time. He’s a practitioner of ultra-technical science whose art can only evoke spirit and unify his world if done in soulful, technically precise relationship with the mentor who he adores, and with the squirrely insolent mentee who is the breaker and yet keeper of his heart.

A bell can only be cast in one way. Only the way Boris—no, not Boris—Boriska does it in Andrei Rublev.

For bell casting, you need a special kind of material. To find such material, you must be prepared to travel to the ends of the earth, to search for it with tremendous patience, all the while forbidding yourself from thinking about how you might lose your head if it’s not ready in time.

Because bell casting must not be rushed. There are critical moments in bell casting. Those who doubt and stop at such times should not be argued with; they must be compelled to continue working.

But a good bell caster suffers from this forced coercion.If someone catches fire during bell casting, they should calmly, casually, and almost off-handedly tell the person next to them to extinguish the flames.

Bell casting can only be led by someone who knows how to do it—it doesn’t matter if they’re young.

Bells must be cast with seriousness, as they are not for ordinary use but are meant to call people to shared practice.

A bell cannot be cast without the experience of our forebears, but inherited knowledge alone is not enough.

If the bell rings and everyone rejoices, the one who cast it should, if possible, cry far from the eyes of others because its sound is not perfect—for there is no perfect bell.

If someone is dissatisfied with the bell they cast, they may, in a moment of despair, blame their ancestors for not passing down their secrets. But curses won’t help.

Instead, it is better to set out on a journey to find even better materials and cast a perfect bell.

And a bell must still be cast in the same way even if the commission is so grand—or calls for such a new type of casting—that one lifetime is not enough to complete it.

A bell, therefore, must always be cast the way Boris does—with patient passion—even if the caster knows they will never hear its chime.

After all, they are not casting it for their own use.

This is the end of my 24th year of ashtanga practice. It’s the beginning of my 48th year of living. Feels the weirdest possible halftime show. Halfway into this no-going-back decade, and into this life. Half of that life in the yoga.

Does daily ashtanga practice even make sense for multiple decades? Suddenly people are asking me this, like there’s a surge of doubt in the method, or just a mis-definition of ashtanga itself.

Yes, the yesest yes. Continuity is the course, for me personally. Yoga methodology is the reliable source of clarity and truth that I know. And this is just getting started, for me. I don’t always even know what Yoga is, but do sense that it knows me. It is in a process of knowing me, now more than ever. And giving that clear knowing back to me, a glimmer at a time.

I experience the same doubt about ashtanga and teeth brushing. C’mon. Worth interrogating. Teeth brushing takes time; it’s repetitive; we’ve already done so much of it. It’s kind of a kids’ thing really. Why not try something else?

For me personally, some physical intensity is important. Genetically. Not just asana, but in work and daily life. Asana itself is slow and careful for me now, unlike in my 20s. Of course. It’s 25 degrees below freezing. I do glorious working class labor in the Mysore room, run around the forest on frozen ground most afternoons, and have been lifting weights since 2021. Not the life you choose if the goal is an easy Natarajasana. But this life, strangely, is what my heart chose. The asanas serve this particular life.

I’ve contacted the parallel Angela who doesn’t know Yoga. She seeks intensity and truth through ultra high stakes work, as a journalist in Gaza or Ukraine, her freedom to intimately connect with others limited by sensory overwhelm and social anxiety. (I was a political beat journalist for the main newspaper in Oregon by the age of 20.) I admire that person, but the difficult thing yoga s-l-o-w-l-y made me know is that my soul path is quiet service. Service to our animal selves, nerd intimacy, life relationships, digging one deep knowledge well and translating the findings down there into a different kind of “news.”

A day without formal practice does feel similar to skipping the toothbrush. Moss grows on neglected teeth, in the folds of the untrained mind, as well as the kapotasanaless psoas.

So, yes. I will be rising early to practice on my family’s bathroom linoleum this week. After cleaning the teeth.

Sure there’s a hygiene thing here – conditioning my discernment, expression and embodiment. Mind, speech and body. But what interests me now is how my experience in yoga is fueled by a mystery. Why does the method hold such mystique, still?

Yoga philosophy is practical; analytical mind should be able to put it a box with and tie it just-so with a bow. But no. The generator for practice lies very far from my rational mind, somewhere in the outer dark unconscious – whispered through from future selves, or past ones, or other beings entirely. This unknown where the drives reside, it is source of extreme creativity. The more I turn into it, the more energy there is to connect with others, share the practice itself, create weird stuff, make weird choices, and just keep letting go and letting go of the concepts and identities that got me this far. Practice isn’t so much a discipline now. It’s a mystery, and an entrancing sweet smell that draws me because it’s making me more alive to living itself.

Back to the weird question - whether ashtanga sadhana makes sense decade upon decade.

This is urgent. The existence of the question is urgent. It suggests to me that we’re teaching wrong somehow. That Patanjali’s Sutra 1.14 isn’t the immediate take on someone like me: of course she is just getting started. Do people not know 1.14?

Is there a fallacy of misplaced concreteness? An idea that “ashtanga” means a concrete set of moves and vinyasa counts? That it’s one single man’s idea? Again so strange. Ashtanga is a path in eight limbs. Five can be taught; three can be caught. (I’d submit that the 6th one can be taught too.)

The asana practice is the entry level. It’s there to train the senses, to make us know how to move our energy, and yes to get us super clear – and super freaking skillful- with the physical body that supports the mind on the spine. Sometimes it’s just easier to stay razor’s edge present for 120 minutes of flowing movement than 120 minutes of raw flowing mind; but it’s all ashtanga if you’re on this path.

The body piece is thrilling. Being excellent technicians, of a physical art. Pursuing the (self-) knowledge to inhabit the forms brilliantly.

How to bear load on the arms with the exact joint rotations and muscle movements that are right for your shoulder girdle. How to jump while also exhaling or inhaling. How to feel the three arches of the foot with such clarity that energy rises through the knee joint, flows over the adductors and dives into the center of the cervix or prostate. How to draw the subclavius lightly down around the collarbone so the humeral head rests at home in the joint and the breath blooms right into the intercostals. How to gaze on the nose in a backbend in a way that feels like you’re looking right at the tip of the tail, releasing the meat-hooks of the sub-occipitals in gravity as the piriformis spreads like a hammock and the spine fills with liquid light.

THIS is the entry level practice. I’m doing it every day and rarely not delighted by the dance party in the cells of self and other. No more or less special than brushing the teeth devotionally. My god, the way of continuity – and the value of doing the thing for a long time without a break. It was set up like this from the start.

This post ran 4 pages, with ideas we could teach in the first 100 hours of the practice, to set up others in stable way from the start. To correct for the wrong knowledge that ashtanga is for kids. So that each one knows how to make the practice their own, how to cast a line out into the mystery and begin a continuous relationship (only if they are so inspired) with whatever it has to offer them. Individually. But this plane’s boarding so I'll trim that off for some other time.

Happy New Year, everyone. 2025 may not be less weird, but we do have resources to meet it.