Relationship has an extraordinary way of showing us ourselves.

We can spend years meditating, practising yoga, studying philosophy and cultivating beautiful states of consciousness.

And then another human being walks into the room.

Suddenly there is nowhere to hide.

Our expectations. Our wounds. Our defensiveness. Our need to be right. Ou…

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Spend enough time in the spiritual corners of Instagram and you’ll see what I mean. Dramatic breathing. Shaking bodies. Spontaneous movements. Cathartic releases. Ecstatic faces. Tears. Energy moving. Breakthroughs. All with theatrical camera work set to an absolute banger of a tune, making for an epic instagram reel.

It can make Kuṇḍalinī awakening look incredibly seductive. And perhaps that’s worth questioning.

Not because Kuṇḍalinī isn’t profound. I’ve spent a significant part of my life practising and exploring Yoga, Kriyā, prāṇāyāma and meditation, and my own experience has given me enormous respect for this territory. Yes, it can be beautiful, blissful, mysterious and genuinely transformative.

But that isn’t the whole story.

What we don’t tend to see squeezed into a thirty-second reel is the person who hasn’t slept properly for three weeks. The person who can’t settle in their own body. The person who feels shaky and electrically charged months later, whose sensitivity has become so heightened that ordinary life suddenly feels overwhelming. The person genuinely wondering whether they’re having a spiritual awakening or losing their mind.

I’ve known people over the years who have spent not days or weeks, but months and sometimes years trying to integrate experiences they understood as Kuṇḍalinī awakening. That’s worth talking about too.

Because if we’re going to celebrate the extraordinary possibilities of these practices, we should also be mature enough to talk about their intensity.

This isn’t an argument against Kuṇḍalinī. It’s an argument against rushing it. Against mistaking intensity for depth. And perhaps against our contemporary obsession with the breakthrough itself.

What are we actually talking about?

It’s probably worth establishing that Kuṇḍalinī isn’t simply a Sanskrit word for shaking during breathwork.

Historically, Kuṇḍalinī belongs to a much richer Indian Yogic and Tantric understanding of the human being. These traditions describe not only the physical body but a subtle anatomy involving prāṇa, nāḍīs, cakras, bindu and Śakti. Kuṇḍalinī is generally understood as a latent or coiled form of Śakti — the dynamic power of consciousness — that can become awakened through Yogic practice, initiation, devotion, grace or some combination of these.

Even that explanation deserves some humility. There isn’t one universal Kuṇḍalinī map that has existed unchanged for thousands of years. Different yogic and Tantric traditions describe different numbers of cakras, different subtle-body systems and different methods of practice. The familiar modern image of a serpent rising neatly through seven rainbow-coloured chakras is only one simplified presentation of a much more diverse body of teachings.

That matters because these days we can be remarkably quick to interpret intense experiences as “activation.”

Trembling, crying, heat, spontaneous movements, altered states — perhaps these experiences can occur within Kuṇḍalinī practice. But their presence alone doesn’t necessarily tell us what is happening. Hyperventilation itself can produce tingling, dizziness, cramping, altered perception and feelings of unreality. Anxiety can create extraordinary bodily sensations. Trauma can show up through the body. Sometimes a strange sensation is simply a strange sensation.

And sometimes something may indeed be occurring that the old yogic maps give us a beautiful language for exploring.

We don’t need to know too quickly.

There is something healthy about leaving a little space around the mystery.

The old yogis weren’t in such a hurry

One of the stranger things we’ve done in modern spirituality is extract some of the most powerful techniques from traditions that once existed within an entire way of life.

We want the breath retention, the bandhas, the kriyās, the mudrās, the transmissions, the awakening. But perhaps not always the preparation that traditionally surrounded them.

Deeper Yogic practice existed within a larger container: ethics, āsana, purification, diet, mantra, devotion, study, relationship with a teacher, community, rest and gradual progression. Not every practitioner followed some perfectly ordered curriculum, and we shouldn’t romanticise the past, but there was an understanding that powerful practice required preparation.

The Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā offers a wonderfully unsexy image for this. It compares the gradual training of prāṇa to taming powerful animals such as lions, elephants and tigers. The point is simple: something powerful should be approached skillfully and progressively.

This is almost the opposite of our contemporary breakthrough culture.

My own training in this territory isn’t in the modern Kundalini Yoga system associated with Yogi Bhajan. I’ve been taught Kriyā Yoga and Kuṇḍalinī-related techniques through Haṭha and the Akhanda tradition, particularly through Vishvaji and teachers within that lineage, alongside many years exploring the teachings of non-dual Tantra through teachers including Sally Kempton and Tara Judelle.

Across these different streams, one of the things I’ve come to appreciate is that the stronger energetic practices rarely stand alone. They belong inside a much larger practice — one that includes preparation, meditation, ethics, devotion, self-inquiry, relationship, embodiment and, importantly, integration.

The aim isn’t simply to generate more energy or manufacture extraordinary states. It is to become increasingly capable of meeting what practice reveals.

Historically, many Haṭha and Tantric practices were also embedded within teacher-student relationships and oral transmission. That doesn’t mean every yogi had a guru hovering over every breath, but it does mean we should be cautious about imagining these practices were designed to be picked up casually and intensified without guidance.

A good teacher can watch. They can notice. They can give you more when you’re ready and, just as importantly, tell you when enough is enough.

Sometimes the most intelligent instruction isn’t go deeper.

It’s stay here for a while.

The problem with intensity

This is where the explosion of modern breathwork becomes interesting.

I love that people are rediscovering the breath. Something as intimate and accessible as breathing can profoundly affect our state. But when powerful practices become popular, there is an inevitable tendency to emphasise the spectacular.

More intensity. More release. More catharsis. More breakthrough.

And I think there can be a subtle pressure here, particularly for newer or less experienced breathwork facilitators, to feel that they need to give people an experience. To blow their minds. To make something happen.

If everybody leaves the room shaking, crying, euphoric and saying, “What the fuck just happened?”, it can feel like the session worked.

But did it?

Maybe.

Maybe something profound happened.

Maybe somebody touched something deeply healing.

Or maybe their physiology was simply pushed into an extremely altered state.

This is where I think we need discernment.

The intensity of an experience isn’t necessarily evidence of its depth.

An enormous experience can be transformative. It can also just be an enormous experience.

And I think the more experienced we become as teachers, the less interested we need to be in manufacturing fireworks. Sometimes the most skilful session is the one where very little appears to happen. Someone breathes. They soften. They become quiet. They leave feeling a little more at home in themselves.

That doesn’t look particularly impressive on Instagram.

But perhaps that’s part of the problem.

Modern contemplative research supports at least some of the caution the older traditions expressed. Research into difficult meditation-related experiences has documented changes across emotional, cognitive, perceptual, somatic and sense-of-self domains. For some people these experiences are meaningful and transformative; for others they can become genuinely distressing and interfere with ordinary functioning.

The question, then, isn’t simply:

How powerful an experience can I create?

It’s also:

Do I have the skill to recognise when enough is enough — and the capacity to support someone if what I’ve helped open doesn’t neatly close again when the session ends?

I find one aspect of this research particularly interesting: the interpretation we place around an experience matters.

Someone begins trembling in a workshop and is immediately told, “Your Kuṇḍalinī is awakening.” Perhaps it is. But an enormous interpretive framework has now been placed around an experience that may not yet be understood.

Why the rush to name it?

Sometimes a more intelligent inquiry might simply be: What are you actually experiencing? Can you sleep? Can you eat? Can you work? Do you feel grounded? Are you frightened? Does more practice settle things or amplify them?

I’ve heard many experienced spiritual teachers speak about the fine line that can sometimes exist between illumination and madness. I don’t take that to mean illumination is psychosis, or that mystical experiences should be pathologised. But the opposite mistake is equally dangerous. Not every episode of mania is enlightenment. Not every hallucination is clairvoyance. Not every panic attack is purification.

We need enough spiritual openness to respect mystery and enough discernment not to explain everything away with spiritual language.

When the practice becomes too much

If I could offer one piece of advice to somebody genuinely interested in Kuṇḍalinī, Kriyā or deeper prāṇāyāma, it would be very simple: go slowly.

There is nowhere you need to get to.

Learn to breathe well before becoming obsessed with manipulating the breath. Develop steadiness in the body. Learn which practices genuinely settle you and which stimulate you. Let kumbhaka and more intense techniques develop gradually. Don’t stack increasingly powerful practices simply because you can tolerate them, and find teachers who aren’t overly impressed by dramatic experiences.

If things are already becoming shaky, sleepless or overwhelming, I wouldn’t automatically reach for another energetic technique to “move the energy through.” Sometimes adding another practice is simply adding more fuel.

Simplify.

Reduce or temporarily stop the practices that are clearly intensifying things. Eat properly. Hydrate. Sleep. Walk. Garden. Swim. Do physical work. Spend time in nature. Spend time with people who don’t particularly care about your spiritual awakening. Do wonderfully ordinary things.

If the inner world is becoming extraordinary, let the outer world become extraordinarily ordinary.

Traditional Ayurveda might describe some of this through settling disturbed prāṇa or grounding excess vāta. Contemporary language might talk about reducing stimulation and supporting nervous-system regulation. Different maps, perhaps pointing toward some similar practical wisdom.

And there is an important line here. Persistent insomnia, paranoia, mania, hallucinations, suicidal thoughts, seizures, extreme panic or an inability to function normally shouldn’t automatically be dismissed as “just Kuṇḍalinī.” Seek appropriate medical or psychological support. A profound experience can have spiritual meaning and still require clinical care. Those possibilities aren’t mutually exclusive.

Creating the conditions

Something else I appreciate about traditional practice environments is their attention to the conditions surrounding practice.

Food, clothing, cleanliness, sound, company, environment, rhythm and sleep all matter.

In some of the ashrams and traditions I’ve practised within, white clothing is common. Elsewhere you’ll see saffron, ochre, mustard yellow or simple undyed cloth. There isn’t a universal Kuṇḍalinī uniform, and I’m not interested in creating another spiritual rulebook around what colour someone should wear.

What interests me is sensitivity.

What happens when you practise in loose cotton or linen rather than tight synthetic clothing? What happens when you’ve showered, the room is clean, the lighting is soft and your phone isn’t beside you? What happens when you sit outside? When you eat simply? When you remove some of the noise?

Maybe something changes. Maybe it doesn’t.

Feel it for yourself.

This is something I appreciate about the yogic idea of sattva. It doesn’t need to become superstition. Sattva points toward qualities of clarity, balance and harmony, and traditional practice environments have often attempted to cultivate those qualities through food, clothing, cleanliness, ritual, sound and surroundings.

Wear white if you like. Sit on a sheepskin if you enjoy it. Practise beneath a tree. Wear natural fibres and see how they feel. Not because somebody told you these things magically amplify your aura, but because becoming more sensitive to what supports clarity is itself part of practice.

Kuṇḍalinī practice should make us more sensitive, not more gullible.

And eventually, of course, yoga has to survive airports, traffic jams, fluorescent lights, screaming children and shitty days. The point isn’t to create such perfect conditions that we become incapable of functioning without them.

But when working deliberately with subtler practices, there is wisdom in creating a supportive container.

Maybe we don’t need another breakthrough

Perhaps underneath all of this is a more interesting question.

Why are we in such a hurry to awaken Kuṇḍalinī anyway?

Why the fascination with the huge experience, the opening, the activation, the breakthrough?

Spiritual practice can quietly become another form of acquisition. Another experience to collect. Another identity to wear. The ego discovers spirituality and suddenly it has a whole new shopping list.

I’ve had the awakening. My Kuṇḍalinī is active. My third eye is open.

Maybe.

But has it made you kinder?

More honest?

More available?

Can you listen? Can you apologise? Can you tolerate discomfort? Can you love another person without turning them into a character in your spiritual story? Can you sit quietly without needing something extraordinary to happen?

Extraordinary states are seductive.

Ordinary embodiment is harder.

Perhaps the real measure of these practices isn’t how dramatically energy moves through us during meditation, but how we move through the world afterwards.

Does practice make us more intimate with life? More embodied? More compassionate? More capable of relationship? More at home in the ordinary?

If it does, beautiful. Something is integrating.

If it doesn’t, perhaps another breakthrough isn’t what we need.

I’m not writing any of this to frighten people away from Kuṇḍalinī. Quite the opposite. I think these traditions deserve enough respect that we don’t reduce them to another peak experience.

Prepare the body. Steady the breath. Clarify the mind. Develop discernment. Find good teachers. Eat well. Sleep deeply. Spend time in nature. Love people. Practise consistently.

And go slowly.

There is no prize for awakening quickly.

Perhaps the question isn’t How do I awaken my Kuṇḍalinī?

Perhaps it’s:

Am I becoming steady enough to meet what awakens?

Get comfortable. Rug up. Find somewhere you can really settle in.

This was a particularly beautiful practice, held in the stillness of the winter forest, with a live soundscape woven throughout by Matthew Hatch.

Nothing to achieve. Nowhere to get to.

Just give yourself over…

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More, more, more.

Same basic game as collecting basketball cards when we were ten.

Except now instead of trying to get the rare Michael Jordan, we’re collecting peak experiences and altered states.

And somehow calling it non-attachment.

Less anxiety. Less boredom. Less grief. Less irritation. Less of anything that doesn’t fit our picture of freedom.

Without noticing it, practice can become another way of negotiating with life.

I’ll take the high.
Please remove the low.

But life doesn’t seem particularly interested in that arrangement.

It keeps giving us both.

Beauty and mesiness.
Connection and loneliness.
Pleasure and pain.
Clarity and confusion.
The sublime and the completely mundane.

Sometimes before breakfast.

And perhaps Yoga was never meant to make us permanently high.

Perhaps it teaches us how to become intimate with the whole experience.

To enjoy the beautiful moment without immediately trying to hold onto it.
To meet the difficult one without immediately needing it to disappear.
To discover a steadiness that doesn’t depend quite so much on getting the experience we prefer. An awareness that is kind of like the blue sky.

This is where The Yoga of Ordinary Life really interests me.

And it’s personal.

Through my teens and much of my twenties, I rebelled pretty hard against anything that looked like traditional family life.

The routine of it. The responsibilities. The repetition. The domesticity.

It all looked a little too mundane to me.

I wanted freedom.

Travel. Adventure. Practice. Big and new experiences. Interesting people. Different ways of living. Anything that felt like it might break me out of the ordinary.

And some of that rebellion was important.

It took me places. It opened doors. I’m grateful for it.

But looking back, I can also see that some of what I called freedom was another form of pushing and running away.

I was searching for freedom from life rather than freedom within it.

There’s a difference.

Because intimacy asks something of us.

To be honest.
To listen.
To be inconvenienced.
To wash the dishes again.
To love the same people through their beauty and their bullshit.
To let ourselves be known.
To sacrifice something of our own comfort for someone we love — and discover there can be beauty in that too.
To discover that repetition doesn’t necessarily mean imprisonment.

I know how that can sound — like an invitation to become a doormat, to let people walk all over you. That’s not what I mean at all. It’s an invitation to receptivity. To reciprocity. To being a little less selfish, and a little more connected to the one in front of you.

Sometimes repetition is where intimacy deepens.

I thought the mundane was something I needed to escape.

In many ways, I was pushing away the very intimacy with life I was searching for.

And perhaps that’s one of the strange turns of the path.

We can travel halfway around the world looking for freedom, only to discover it quietly waiting for us at the kitchen table.

There’s a beautiful embodied functionality within the Tantric traditions: practice isn’t reserved for the mat, the cushion or the sacred moment. It’s brought right back into the most unremarkable moments of the day.

You step into the shower.
Warm water across the shoulders.
Steam rising.
The sound of water filling the room.
For a few moments, nothing to solve.
Nowhere else to be.

You make tea.
The kettle begins to sing.
Leaves unfurl in hot water.
Warmth gathers in your hands around the cup.
The first sip.
Just this.

You step outside.
Cool air meets the face.
Feet find the ground.
Morning light moving through the trees.

The mind may already be halfway through the day.

But the body is here.

This is practice too.

Not making the ordinary more sacred.
Not pretending a cup of tea is enlightenment.

Simply becoming available enough to notice that life is already happening — quietly, exquisitely — before the mind rushes off to find something better.

And that doesn’t only apply to the beautiful moments.

Sometimes practice looks like noticing you’re irritated before you send the message.
Sometimes it’s listening when you’d rather defend yourself.
Sometimes it’s letting sadness be sadness without immediately turning it into a problem.
Sometimes it’s noticing your child laughing in the next room and realising you nearly missed it because you were thinking about tomorrow.

Nothing added.
Nothing pushed away.

Not because every moment needs to become some precious spiritual experience.

But because this is our life.

And an extraordinary amount of it can be spent waiting for our life to become something else.

Maybe that’s the cosmic joke.

We spend years trying to get there — wherever there happens to be — only to discover that every time we arrive, we’re still here.

And here is remarkably easy to miss.

This Sunday, I want to spend three hours exploring another possibility.

Through Tantric Hatha Yoga, pranayama, meditation and some of the subtler teachings of Yoga and Tantra, we’ll explore what happens when practice stops being something we visit and begins to enter the rest of our lives.

The beautiful bits.
The difficult bits.
The ecstatic bits.
The boring bits.
The whole strange dance.

Not how to transcend ordinary life.
How to become intimate with it.

EVENT DETAILS:
The Yoga of Ordinary Life
Sunday 23 August
10:30am – 1:30pm
Beacon Yoga Centre / Sivananda Ashram, Beaconsfield

With love,

Stu

Retreats. Ceremonies. Pilgrimages. Workshops. Long sits. Time in nature. Those rare moments when the usual noise drops away and something becomes very clear.

But eventually, we come home.

Back to responsibilities. The inbox. Work. Traffic. Dishes. Family. Our phones. The same relationships and habits. The same old trigger…

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It talks like calm, or even profound wisdom. It uses the right spiritual words. Acceptance. Non-attachment. Surrender. Love and light. It can even look wise and calm from the outside, sitting cross-legged with a soft face and slow breath.

But underneath it, something is being avoided rather than met.

That’s spiritual bypassing. Using practice, or the language of practice, to step around something difficult instead of walking through it.

The great traditions have always pointed at this same distinction. Thich Nhat Hanh built an entire teaching around it — no mud, no lotus, the flower only able to grow because it’s rooted in the mess, not despite it. Other lineages talk about feeding your demons rather than banishing them, or welcoming even the guest you didn’t ask for. Different words, same instruction underneath all of them. Stay. Sit with it. Don’t rush the mud into becoming a flower before it’s actually done its work.

Grief that gets relabelled as impermanence before it’s been properly grieved. Anger that gets smiled through, pretending everything is okay, while the jaw, and often the whole body, stays clenched the entire time it’s happening. A hard conversation that gets replaced with a boundary, a retreat, a longer meditation sit, anything except the conversation itself.

I don’t think anyone does this on purpose. That’s exactly what makes it so slippery.

—

Here’s the part that makes it genuinely hard to catch in yourself.

Bypassing doesn’t feel like avoidance from the inside. It feels like progress. It uses the same vocabulary as real growth, sometimes the exact same sentences, and it can produce a very convincing sense of relief. The nervous system settles. The story gets tidy. Something that was messy and open-ended suddenly has a bow on it.

Real peace and bypassed peace can sound identical out loud. The difference isn’t in the words at all. It’s underneath them, somewhere words don’t reach very well.

Real peace has room in it. It can hold grief and stillness at the same time, without needing the grief to hurry up and leave. Bypassed peace is more like a lid. It’s smooth on top because everything underneath has been quietly asked to stay quiet.

One is spacious. The other is just well managed.

—

If I’m honest, I know this territory from the inside, not just as an idea.

There have been stretches of my own practice where I mistook composure for depth. Where staying calm became more important to me than staying honest. Where I reached for a teaching, a mantra, a breath practice, in the exact moment what the situation actually needed was for me to feel something uncomfortable all the way through, in front of another person, without an exit.

It’s a strange thing to notice in hindsight. At the time, it didn’t feel like hiding. It felt like maturity. It felt like exactly what all the books said I was supposed to be doing.

That’s the trap. Bypassing borrows the outfit of the very growth it’s preventing.

—

A few things I’ve come to notice, less as a checklist and more as a felt sense, that seem to separate the two.

Real presence can be interrupted without flinching. Bypassed peace snaps the second someone gets too close to the truth of it, then insists it wasn’t snapping.

Real acceptance doesn’t need validation. Bypassed acceptance needs a caption, a celebration, someone standing by to confirm how far you’ve come.

Real non-attachment still falls apart at the funeral. Bypassed non-attachment shows up composed, says everything happens for a reason, and quietly files the grief under the category of “low vibration.”

Real growth gets its hands dirty in one specific, ordinary relationship, the one you’d rather avoid. Bypassed growth just learns better vocabulary and calls the vocabulary a transformation.

None of these are tests to run on other people, tempting as that is. I’ve failed every single one of them at some point, usually while quietly congratulating myself on how enlightened I was being about it.

—

Here’s what I’ve come to believe about this.

The trap was never really about how we come across. Of course we want to try our best. None of us is out here trying to be an arrogant ass about it, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be calm, or kind, or actually changed for the better by our own practice. The trap is narrower than that, and sneakier. It’s using spiritual truth to build a facade instead of a foundation. A spiritual ego that has learned to look calm, lovely, positive, sweet, and has quietly mistaken the look for the substance. Toxic positivity, in very good posture.

Which is also why this was never going to be solved by someone telling us to stop doing it. It isn’t an achievement model, something to be graded on, corrected on, praised for getting right. It isn’t really about anyone else’s eyes on us at all.

It’s about integrity. Morality, in the truest sense of that word. Authenticity underneath both. An inner compass, not an outer report card.

Witnessing is part of tending that compass. Learning to notice a feeling rather than immediately become it. There’s a classical practice for this, neti neti, not this, not this, which trains exactly that separation. It has a real shadow side. Done without maturity, it becomes a sophisticated way to leave a feeling rather than stay with it. Done with discernment, it does the opposite. It gives you enough ground to actually stay with what’s arising, instead of floating above it.

Honesty is part of it too. The willingness to stay past the first answer that arrives. The first answer is almost always the convenient one. I’m fine. I’ve dealt with that. It doesn’t bother me anymore. It arrives quickly, because convenience is fast. The true answer usually takes another moment, and it often shows up as sensation before it shows up as words — a tightness somewhere, a breath held slightly too long.

This is where the eight limbs of yoga have always quietly done more work than they get credit for. The yamas and niyamas were never really ethics as rule-following. They’re scaffolding, a structure for building actual integrity rather than performing it. Truthfulness. Non-harming. Contentment. Discipline. Self-study. Practiced honestly, none of them ask you to look a certain way. They ask you to actually be a certain way, whether or not anyone’s watching, whether or not it photographs well.

We don’t need to be told when we’ve drifted from that. We need an inner compass sensitive enough to feel it happening. And when it catches us, because it will, the tone matters enormously. Not harsh. Not a courtroom. Loving, but fierce. The kind of honesty that doesn’t let us off the hook, and doesn’t put us on trial either. It just names what’s true, and asks us to come back.

None of it works if it turns into self-judgment. Watching yourself clearly isn’t the same as attacking yourself for what you find. The aim isn’t to catch yourself doing something wrong. It’s simply to see clearly, the way you’d notice weather, without needing it to be anything other than what it is.

Left entirely to ourselves, the nervous system tends to take the path of least resistance, settling on whichever version of the story asks the least of us. That’s not a character flaw. It’s just what happens when nothing is there to shape the ground, the way water always finds the easiest way down. Which is exactly why the compass has to be tended on purpose. Not because we’re broken. Because that’s simply what any compass needs.

—

So maybe the practice isn’t learning to recognise bypassing in the moment. Maybe it’s simpler and less flattering than that.

Staying loyal to the inner compass, even on the days the story it’s pointing away from would be far more comfortable to believe.

Letting integrity matter more than how any of it looks from the outside.

And every so often, asking ourselves the one question that actually cuts through it, lovingly, but without letting ourselves off easy.

Does this sound like peace to you, or does it sound like me hiding.

—

P.S. If any of this landed somewhere in you, we’ll be working with this same territory in the body soon — a Tantric Hatha immersion called The Yoga of Ordinary Life, where we’ll explore all of this, and more, in real depth. Click here to check it out.

With love,

Stuart

But rest was never the reward. It’s the ground everything else grows from.

Without real sleep and deep rest, nothing settles. We wake up still holding yesterday, and stack today on top of it.

Jo and Stuart sit down to talk…

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That door was Anodea Judith’s work.

Wheels of Life and Eastern Body, Western Mind were the first books that made the subtle body feel like something I could actually work with. Not just seven pretty colours on a poster, but a map that helped me understand my own fear, my own voice, my own capacity to love.

Let me say this clearly, before anything else: I hold enormous gratitude for that work. She took something that could have stayed obscure and academic and made it usable. She gave a generation of us a vocabulary for our inner lives. Nothing that follows takes any of that back.

I found those teachings around 2010. Before long I was teaching them myself, guiding people through the familiar journey from root to crown.

And I want to be completely honest about something.

It worked.

People had real, embodied experiences in those rooms. They softened. They found words for things they’d carried silently for decades. There were genuine breakthroughs, and I remain deeply grateful for that chapter.

It helped a lot of people.

It helped me.

⸻

The inconvenient truth

Which is why it was mildly inconvenient when I started hearing that model being questioned.

And significantly more inconvenient when the person questioning it was my wife.

To be fair to her, she wasn’t dismantling anything. She was the messenger. She’d been listening to tantric teachers, scholars and historians who work directly with the primary sources, and she’d come home lit up by what she was finding—the sheer variety of the systems, how recent much of our familiar model actually is, what those texts were really asking practitioners to do.

My first response, if I’m honest, was not curiosity.

It was disinterest. Then something closer to defensiveness.

I’d nod along, find a reason it didn’t really change anything, and go back to teaching exactly as I had been. I could explain that the scholars were being too literal, too academic, missing the lived experience of the practice—which is a very sophisticated-sounding way of saying I didn’t want to hear it.

Because what she was relaying was fascinating in the abstract and deeply inconvenient in practice.

And I could feel which of those was going to win if I ever sat down and looked properly.

It’s one thing to scroll past a stranger challenging your worldview. It’s another when the conversation keeps arriving at the kitchen table, from someone who knows exactly what you’ve been teaching, and who is not going to drop it.

Eventually I looked.

⸻

Where did “the” chakra system actually come from?

Most of us have inherited the same picture.

Seven chakras.

One above the next.

Root to crown.

Each linked to a colour, an emotion, a developmental stage, perhaps even an endocrine gland.

It’s presented as though this has always been the chakra system.

It hasn’t.

The version most of us know today comes largely from a sixteenth-century tantric text called the Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa. It was an important work within its own tradition, but it was never offered as the universal blueprint for all yoga or all Tantra.

And here’s what genuinely surprised me: there has never been just one chakra system.

Some tantric texts describe four chakras.

Others six.

Others nine, eleven, more.

The familiar seven-centre model isn’t the only ancient chakra system. It’s one expression among many.

I want to be careful here, because this is the point where it’s easiest to overreach.

I’m not saying the chakras themselves were invented in the twentieth century. They weren’t. A system of six chakras crowned by the sahasrāra is genuinely old, well attested in the tantric sources, and carried faithfully within real lineages to this day. That skeleton is ancient. The Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa didn’t invent it—it described something already alive in its tradition.

What came later, and elsewhere, was the flavouring—the rainbow colours, the glands, the psychology. But the structure underneath is old.

And this isn’t only in the texts. The centres-along-the-spine model, six rising to the crown, is carried by many old living lineages—the Śaiva and Śākta tantric traditions, the Nāth yogis, the kundalini and hatha lineages, and Kriya Yoga among them. It’s genuinely ancient, and genuinely still alive.

What you won’t find in any of them is the rainbow. Or the endocrine glands. Or the ladder of psychological stages. Those you’ll only find downstream, in the last hundred years, in the West. The old lineages kept the structure. The colours and the meanings came later, and from somewhere else entirely.

In the early twentieth century, our particular version reached the English-speaking world through Sir John Woodroffe, writing under the name Arthur Avalon. Over the decades that followed it was elaborated on by Theosophical writers, absorbed into Western esoteric thinking, and eventually taken up by the human potential movement.

The Sanskrit tradition remained. But it was woven together with modern psychology, Western esotericism and ideas about personal development until the strands were almost impossible to separate.

That’s the version many of us inherited.

Not false.

Not fraudulent.

Simply… modern.

And that’s worth sitting with, because the problem was never that the modern version is worthless. The problem is that most of us—myself very much included—were handed it as the chakra system. Ancient. Singular. Unchanged. Received wisdom passed down intact from the rishis to your Tuesday evening class.

Nobody set out to mislead us. The people who taught me believed it too. That’s how these things travel.

And it’s worth being precise about who added what, because it’s easy to pin all of this on whoever happened to be your particular door.

The rainbow spectrum—red at the base rising to violet at the crown—was assembled in the West across the twentieth century, with the specific rainbow scheme most of us picture often traced to a book from the 1970s. The gland correspondences, the auras: laid down by Theosophical writers decades before most of us were born. By the time the model reached the teachers I learned from, that layer had already hardened into fact.

What Anodea Judith brought was something different: the psychological and developmental mapping, the marriage of the chakras to Maslow and to attachment and to the arc of a human life. And she was fairly clear that this was her synthesis rather than ancient doctrine. She inherited the rest exactly as I inherited it from her.

Which is rather the point. Almost nobody in this chain was inventing. We were all passing along something we’d been handed, in good faith, without much thought about where it had been.

Somewhere in the transmission, the seams simply disappeared.

So when I stood at the front of a room while teaching this, with total conviction, linking each chakra to a gland, an emotion, a stage of human development—I wasn’t lying.

I believed it. And it isn’t nothing. Those associations do something: they give people a way in, a language for what they’re feeling, a felt sense of the body as meaningful rather than mechanical. That’s relatively real.

To be clear, the ancient yogis absolutely did map the subtle body—and with extraordinary precision. Locations, petal counts, seed syllables, presiding deities, elements. Nothing vague about it.

They just weren’t mapping our psychology.

We inherited the map and quietly changed what it was a map of.

I was repeating something I’d never thought to question.

Which, it turns out, is much easier to do than any of us would like to believe.

⸻

We’ve done this before

And the chakras are not a special case. We’ve done this repeatedly.

Look at mindfulness. Vipassanā was a liberation practice—embedded in ethics, in community, in an entire cosmology about the nature of suffering and the end of it. The West extracted the attentional technique, set the cosmology aside, and offered it back as stress reduction. It genuinely helps millions of people. It is also not the thing itself. A generation has grown up assuming mindfulness was always a wellbeing tool, rather than a method for dismantling the illusion of a separate self.

Or look closer to home. A good deal of what we present as ancient āsana owes as much to nineteenth-century European gymnastics as it does to anything in the classical texts. We’re standing in this one. Literally.

The pattern is worth naming.

We meet a mystical practice.

We find it beautiful, and slightly too strange.

So we translate it into the languages we trust—psychology, physiology, self-improvement.

And in that translation, something reliably goes missing. Not the technique. The potency. The sense that these practices were built by people trying to come apart, to dissolve, to be undone by something vast—not to feel more balanced by Thursday.

I’m not arguing for purism. Traditions that refuse to move die in glass cases, and the psychological chakra model reached people the sixteenth-century version never could have.

But there’s a difference between building something new on old foundations and quietly forgetting the foundations were ever there.

One is evolution.

The other is amnesia dressed as reverence.

Honouring a lineage doesn’t mean freezing it. It means knowing whose shoulders you’re standing on, saying so out loud, and staying curious about the parts that don’t translate neatly into the language you’re most comfortable in.

Those are usually the parts that still have the voltage in them.

⸻

A different purpose altogether

The biggest shift for me hasn’t been the number of chakras.

It’s what they were understood to be for.

In the modern Western approach, the chakras function as a map of psychological growth. We heal the root. Open the heart. Strengthen the voice. Balance the third eye.

It’s a beautiful framework, and I still think it holds real value.

But it’s not quite what the classical texts were describing.

Those texts were concerned with liberation—mokṣa—with awakening kuṇḍalinī, and with transforming consciousness through precise ritual practice. Rather than emotional wounds and personality traits, they describe mantras, deities, sacred syllables, visualisations.

And then came the insight that rearranged everything for me.

The chakra isn’t a spinning vortex of energy sitting there fully formed, waiting to be detected—the way the modern model often implies, as though you could scan for one like an organ on an ultrasound.

It’s found within, yes. But it’s opened.

The texts weren’t saying notice what’s already spinning there. They were saying: visualise this lotus. Install this mantra. Contemplate this deity. Bring it into being through your own imagination and intention.

The doorway is real, and it genuinely opens inward.

But you have to open it with your imagination and intention.

These weren’t descriptions of a fixed anatomy waiting to be found, the way a surgeon finds an organ. They were the subtle body being cultivated—brought alive, activated, made real through the practice itself.

I had spent years telling people we were uncovering something ancient and pre-existing inside them.

The texts were describing something closer to architecture.

⸻

Taking the backward step

So I did the only thing that felt honest.

I stopped talking about the chakras.

I couldn’t speak about them with the confidence I’d had, so I stopped speaking about them at all, and went back to being a student. Reading. Practising. Sitting with teachers. Letting myself not know for a while.

There’s a Buddhist instruction I’ve always loved: take the backward step. Turn the light around. Begin again, not knowing.

Beginner’s mind isn’t a consolation prize for people who’ve misplaced their expertise. It’s the more accurate position. And it’s a beautiful place to teach from, once the ego finishes its protest march.

Mine marched for quite a while.

That took a few years. The chakras are only circling back into my teaching now.

⸻

Holding both

Here’s where I’ve landed, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit.

The openings people had in those rooms were real. I was there. No amount of historical correction touches that.

And the story I was telling about where it all came from was, in places, simply not accurate.

For a long time I assumed I had to choose. That if the history was shaky, the experience must have been hollow—self-hypnosis in Sanskrit fancy dress. Or that if the experience was real, the history couldn’t matter much.

It turns out the practice was never resting on the history.

It was resting on attention. On the body. On what happens when a person is given a structure, and permission, to turn inward and actually stay there.

Those are old technologies. Older than any of the maps we’ve drawn over them. And they don’t stop working when we get honest about the maps.

What’s changed isn’t whether I trust the work. It’s that I no longer need it to be older than it is, or tidier than it is, or the only version there ever was.

I’m coming back to the chakras with less certainty and more to offer. A smaller claim, held more carefully, with a much bigger world behind it.

Seven centres are no longer the whole map.

They’re one doorway.

And walking through a doorway knowing it’s a doorway is an entirely different experience from mistaking it for the house.

⸻

And who knows—I could have this all wrong too.

That’s not false modesty. The scholarship keeps moving. The people who read these texts for a living disagree with each other, sometimes sharply. In a few years someone may well come home excited about something that makes this essay look adorable.

I hope I’m quicker to listen next time.

Maybe that’s the real teaching hiding in all of this. Not the number of chakras. Not which century a text was written in. But the willingness to say I got that wrong, out loud, without it costing us our sense of self.

Anything that can’t survive a question was never that sturdy to begin with.

She was right, for what it’s worth.

It only took me a few years and a fair amount of ego to say so.

I’m grateful she kept bringing it up.

⸻

If you want to dig deeper

I’ve leaned on other people’s work throughout this, and it would be poor form to make an argument about honouring sources without naming mine.

Christopher Wallis (Hareesh) — The Real Story on the Chakras (2016). The essay that reframed this for a lot of us. He’s a Sanskritist working from primary sources, and he’s careful to say he isn’t out to make anyone wrong. Read it at hareesh.org, or on Medium if you prefer.

Anodea Judith — Chakras Ancient and Modern: How Do We Know What’s Real? Her public response to Wallis. Gracious, curious, and worth reading alongside his piece rather than instead of it.

Anodea Judith — Wheels of Life (1987). The book that started it for me, and for a great many others. Whatever the history, it opened a door a lot of us needed opening. I still hold it with gratitude.

Christopher Wallis — Tantra Illuminated (2012). The fuller picture of the tradition these practices actually belong to.

Kurt Leland — Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016). A detailed account of how our version assembled itself, layer by layer, through what he calls an unintentional collaboration between clairvoyants, Indologists, psychologists and energy healers.

Mark Singleton — Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford, 2010). For the āsana parallel.

Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) — The Serpent Power (1918). The translation that started the whole journey west. Worth knowing, if not necessarily worth trusting.

If you only read one, start with the Wallis essay, then read Judith’s reply. The exchange between them is a small masterclass in how to disagree well.

With love.

Stuart Watkins

But something is almost always in the way.

The tradition names them precisely. Granthis — knots. Three of them, tied alo…

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In Zen, you still sit alone, on your own cushion, most days. But you also return, again and again, to sit with a teacher. Sometimes for decades, before anyone even suggests you might be ready to teach.

In Buddhist Tantra, transmission matters. Not metaphorically. Literally. A lineage holder passes something on that cannot be found in a book, no matter how carefully you read it, and cannot be reached by thinking your way toward it. It has to be felt, in the body, in the room, in a nervous system that has done the work meeting one that hasn’t yet. You keep returning to them to be checked, corrected, kept honest.

In Mahayana Buddhism, the teacher-student relationship is considered essential, not optional. Not a nice-to-have. A structural requirement of the path.

Walk into a serious martial arts dojo and you’ll find the same thing. Nobody promotes themselves. Nobody wakes up one day and decides they’re a black belt. Someone senior, who has walked further down the same road, tells you when you’re ready. And usually, you’re the last person to agree with them.

The practice itself is often solitary. The sitting, the forms, the discipline. Nobody does that part for you.

But across all of these traditions, one thing is assumed without needing to be said.

We all have blind spots. Some live in the mind, as beliefs we’ve mistaken for truth. Many more live lower than that, in the body, in patterns we can feel humming beneath the surface long before we ever have language for them. And left entirely to our own devices, we cannot see either kind.

So alongside the solitary practice, there are regular meetings with a teacher. Not once. Not as a formality on the way to a certificate. Again and again, for years, sometimes for life. Someone whose entire job, in that moment, is to point at the thing you can’t see in yourself.

Without that pointing out, practice quietly drifts. It stops being about dissolving the ego and starts, almost invisibly, feeding it instead.

This is why a kind of constant humbling shows up in Zen, in Buddhist Tantra, in Mahayana, in the dojo. Not humiliation. Humbling. The ongoing, unglamorous experience of being seen more clearly than you can see yourself, and being gently corrected because of it.

That’s not a flaw in the system. That’s the entire reason the system exists.

Yoga was no different.

The guru-shishya relationship sits right at the root of the tradition. Not as a quaint cultural detail, but as the mechanism itself. A student found a teacher, often after years of searching, and stayed. Sometimes for a lifetime. Knowledge wasn’t distributed. It was transmitted, person to person, in relationship, over time, the same way it was in Zen, in Tantra, in the dojo.

I know this in my own body, not just as an idea I’ve read about.

I remember sitting in front of Ram Dass, and with other great teachers, feeling something far bigger than admiration moving through my body. A love and a clarity so deep it was almost too much to stay standing inside of. In those moments I’ve felt like a small child again, not in a diminished way, but wide-eyed, undefended, unable to perform my way out of being fully seen. Beautiful. Thrilling. And if I’m honest, sometimes a little frightening too, because there was nowhere left to hide.

That kind of transmission doesn’t come from a book, or a certificate, or one workshop. It comes from sitting close enough, and often enough, to someone who has already walked further down the road than you have.

Yoga was never the exception to this rule. It was one of the traditions the rule came from. The regular meetings. The humbling. The being corrected by someone who could see what you couldn’t. That used to happen in Yoga too.

So what changed?

Maybe it was one too many gurus getting exposed for abusing their power, until an entire generation of practitioners quietly decided the safest teacher was no teacher at all.

Maybe it was one too many glossy magazine covers, warping what Yoga was even understood to be, until the whole point of practice started looking less like humbling and more like performing.

Probably it was both, feeding each other.

Then something familiar happened.

It took something rooted in devotion, patience, and lineage, and turned it into a product. A weekend. A certificate. A retail transaction with a diploma at the end of it.

The 200-hour teacher training isn’t inherently the problem. It can be a genuine beginning, a real container for study, and I know good teachers who’ve come through exactly that model. I had a life changing experience at a 200-hour month intensive in India. But somewhere along the way, “beginning” quietly got relabelled as “qualified,” and “qualified” quietly got relabelled as “master.”

Commodify something for long enough, and eventually people forget it was ever anything else.

And so here we are, with modern yoga.

Where it’s become entirely normal to complete a 200-hour teacher training, add a weekend reiki certification, and quietly begin referring to yourself as a healer, a guide, or even a master.

I want to be careful here, because I’m not trying to mock anyone. I remember being young, enthusiastic, and convinced I understood far more than I did. Most of us have been there. It’s an easy place to end up, and a hard one to notice you’re in.

But I keep coming back to the same question.

When did we decide that Yoga was the one contemplative path where you don’t need a teacher?

You didn’t self-certify. You didn’t graduate yourself. Someone further along the path, who had earned the right to see you clearly, told you what you couldn’t yet see in yourself. That was the deal, for thousands of years.

Somewhere between the studio boom, the Instagram era, and an industry that needed a constant supply of newly certified teachers to keep the business model running, that requirement quietly disappeared.

Nobody announced it. It just stopped being asked for.

I think part of what happened is genuinely understandable. In one very real way, it’s even empowering.

For centuries, priests and gatekeepers held the keys to the sacred and decided who was worthy of direct access and who needed an intermediary. Charlatans dressed themselves as masters and, instead of empowering the very students who trusted them, quietly disempowered them. Entire communities built around a single guru have self-destructed under exactly that concentration of power, sometimes publicly, sometimes catastrophically. I’ve written before about the teachers who abused their power, and I’ll keep writing about it, because it’s real and it matters.

So the collective shift away from needing a teacher, away from handing our authority to any one person, makes complete sense. It isn’t confusion. Often it’s hard-won wisdom.

The guru is within. I believe that too.

But believing it and embodying it are not the same thing, and the distance between them is not a weekend, or a year, or even a few years. It’s a long road, one that keeps asking us to go deeper for decades, not just at the start when everything feels bright and certain. And somewhere along a road that long, walked entirely alone, things get shaky. The ground shifts in ways we can’t always name, let alone find our way back from by ourselves.

That’s not a failure of the inner guru. That’s simply what long roads do. Which is exactly why we need a teacher we can trust, not to hand our power to, but to help us keep walking when our own footing gives way.

But I think something else happened alongside it too, something quieter and less examined.

We started confusing independence with maturity.

We started treating “I trust my own inner guidance” as the entire teaching, rather than one piece of a much longer conversation. Self-trust matters enormously. But self-trust without any outside mirror has a way of just becoming a very convincing echo chamber.

Because waking up and growing up are not the same thing, even though they can feel identical from the inside. A profound opening, a peak experience, a flash of clarity on a retreat, none of that automatically matures the structure carrying it. Growing up is slower. It’s developmental, not momentary, and it rarely happens in isolation, because the very structure that needs to mature is the same structure doing the looking. You cannot out-see your own vantage point. Something outside it has to.

The ego doesn't give up so easily. It's remarkably resourceful, willing to lie dormant for twenty years if that's what it takes to find its way back in, dressing insight up as attainment until openness starts to feel, from the inside, indistinguishable from arrival.

Without a teacher, or a lineage, or someone willing to lovingly interrupt you, how would you ever know the difference?

I don’t say any of this from a place of having arrived somewhere myself.

I’ve had teachers. Flawed, human, imperfect teachers, some of whom I still learn from today, across more than one tradition, because no single lineage ever held the whole of what I needed. And what they’ve given me isn’t just information alone. I could get information from a book. What they’ve given me is correction and guidance, offered with enough love that I could actually receive it. The kind you can’t give yourself, because you’re standing inside the very blind spot you’d need to see.

There’s a particular kind of tenderness that only shows up in the presence of somebody who has walked further than you and still chooses to sit down beside you anyway. Not because they’re better than you as a human being. Simply because they’ve made the mistakes you haven’t made yet, and they recognise them the moment they see you about to make them too, and they love you enough to say so.

That’s not weakness. That’s how every serious tradition on earth has transmitted wisdom for thousands of years.

I don’t think it’s an accident that martial artists, Zen practitioners, and Tantric lineage holders all insist on the same structure. Not because they’re rigid or hierarchical for its own sake. Because they understand something about the nature of ego that a 200-hour month long intensive simply doesn’t have time to teach.

So what does this actually mean, practically, for those of us on this path?

I don’t think it means blind obedience to the first person who calls themselves a teacher. Discernment still matters. Enormously. Especially now.

But I think it might mean something like this.

Find someone who has walked further than you, and stay close enough to be corrected.

Resist the urge to self-certify the moment you feel a shift.

Notice the difference between conceptual learning, insight and mastery. They are not the same thing, no matter how convincing the insight felt in the moment it arrived.

Stay a student for longer than feels comfortable.

Because the moment you decide you no longer need anyone to see what you can’t see in yourself, is often the exact moment you need it most.

The path was never meant to be walked entirely alone.

Not because we’re incapable.

The eye cannot see itself.

We cannot see the back of our own head.

With love,

Stuart

Om Namah Shivaya is often translated as:

I bow to Shiva.

But Shiva, in this context, is not simply a deity somewhere outside of us.

Shiva represents pure awareness. The silent, unchanging presence beneath thought, emotion, personality, story, and identity.

So the mantra can be understood not only as an…

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One camp believes the answer is another supplement, another wearable, another protocol, another optimisation.

The other throws its hands in the air and says, “It’s all too much anyway.”

Neither feels particularly wise.

The middle way asks a different question.

What signals am I sending my body today?

The body is listening all the time. Every sunrise, every meal, every breath, every hour spent indoors, every hour spent scrolling, every conversation, every moment of stillness or movement is information. Our biology is constantly adapting to the environment we create around it.

Of course, this understanding can easily tip into hypervigilance—constantly analysing every choice, chasing the perfect routine, trying to optimise every aspect of life. I’ve been down that road, and I don’t believe that’s health either.

Rather than trying to control every outcome, I find it more useful to cultivate rhythm.

Not rigid discipline.

Not careless abandon.

Rhythm.

A way of living that honours both our biology and the reality of modern life.

What follows is not another self-improvement project.

It isn’t a prescription, and it certainly isn’t a checklist.

Think of it more as a compass.

A gentle way of orienting yourself towards the kinds of signals that human beings have lived in relationship with for thousands of generations.

You won’t do it perfectly. Neither do I.

Some days the rhythm flows effortlessly. Other days life gets messy.

The practice is not perfection.

The practice is returning.

Whenever you notice yourself drifting—towards overwhelm, towards numbness, or towards the endless search for the next solution—simply return to the fundamentals.

Return to the signals.

Dawn

Wake close to sunrise whenever life allows.

Before reaching for your phone, orient yourself to the day.

Drink water. I choose structured, mineralised water, but the deeper principle is simply to rehydrate after a night’s sleep.

Cleanse the body. Tongue scraping. Jal Neti if it’s part of your practice. Oil pulling if it genuinely belongs in your life rather than becoming another task to complete.

Wash. This doesn’t need to mean a full shower. Even washing the face, hands and feet marks the transition from sleep into wakefulness.

If time permits, massage warm oil into the skin. Not as another beauty ritual, but as a way of waking the tissues, improving circulation and reconnecting with your body through touch.

Then step outside.

Feet on the earth.

Eyes towards the rising sun.

Take a few slow breaths.

Allow your body to remember where it is.

Morning

Move before you consume.

Walk.

Practice yoga.

Hang from a branch.

Squat.

Twist.

Jump.

Breathe slowly.

Wake the spine before asking it to carry another day.

If coffee is part of your life, consider allowing your body to wake naturally before reaching for caffeine. Many people find waiting around an hour after waking helps distinguish genuine alertness from borrowed stimulation.

Sometimes I chew a few cloves or soak fenugreek overnight. Beautiful traditional allies—but exactly that: allies.

The foundations of light, water and grounding always come first.

Through the day

Return to daylight often.

Drink enough water.

Move regularly.

Break up long periods of sitting.

Let the spine move in every direction.

Spend time outdoors.

Eat food that genuinely nourishes you.

Chew slowly. Choose foods that actually require chewing. Our jaws, teeth and digestive system evolved expecting mechanical work, not just soft, ultra-processed foods.

If most of your meals are soft, consider chewing mastic gum for ten or twenty minutes. Not simply to freshen your breath, but to continue tending one of our most ancient human functions.

Breathe through your nose whenever possible.

Let your eyes regularly settle on the horizon and varying focal points such as trees, instead of only the screen in your hand.

Movement doesn’t need to be heroic.

The lymphatic system relies heavily on muscular movement and breathing. Fascia responds to load, hydration and variation. Small moments of movement repeated throughout the day often matter more than one intense workout followed by ten hours of stillness. Move like a cat.

Midday

If possible, let your strongest work and your main meal sit somewhere around the middle of the day.

Not as a rigid rule.

Simply as an orientation.

Eat without rushing.

Chew thoroughly.

Walk afterwards.

Then return to your work with renewed clarity.

Late Afternoon

Don’t let the whole day accumulate in the body.

Walk again.

Stretch.

Lift something heavy.

Play.

Garden.

Cycle.

Lie on the ground.

Put your legs up the wall.

The aim isn’t simply burning calories.

It’s restoring circulation, decompressing the tissues and reminding the body that it was designed to move.

Sunset

Whenever possible, notice the evening.

This sounds almost too simple to matter.

It does.

The changing light is information.

It tells the nervous system the active phase of the day is coming to a close.

Walk.

Sit quietly.

Practice Agnihotra, meditation or prayer if these are part of your life.

Allow your pace to soften before expecting your mind to do the same.

Evening

Lower the lights.

Reduce unnecessary stimulation.

Eat simply.

Read.

Stretch.

Share a conversation.

Take a bath.

Sit in silence.

Sleep in a cool, dark room.

Aim for consistency more than perfection.

One Final Reflection

Health isn’t built by winning a war against the body.

Nor is it found in abandoning ourselves to chaos.

It grows through relationship.

Relationship with light.

Relationship with water.

Relationship with movement.

Relationship with food.

Relationship with breath.

Relationship with the seasons.

Relationship with the earth beneath our feet.

Relationship with one another.

These aren’t hacks.

They’re the ancient signals our physiology has always understood.

The modern world often asks us to override them.

This map is simply an invitation to remember them.

Every moment is a signal.

The question isn’t whether your body is listening.

It is.

The question is...

What story are your daily habits telling it?

Before asking,

“What supplement should I take?”

Try asking,

“Which signal needs my attention today?”

Most of the time, that’s where the deepest work begins.

A Personal Note

This isn’t my routine.

It’s my orientation.

Some days I follow it closely. Other days life, travel, family or work pull me in different directions.

The aim is not perfection.

It’s remembering.

Remembering that beneath all the noise, the body still speaks a very old language.

And it has been quietly waiting for us to listen.

Not because it’s trendy. Not because someone told me it was a biohack. Simply because it works.

There are evenings when thirty minutes in a thoughtfully prepared bath does more for my body, my mind, and my spirit than any other practice I can think of. And when life is particularly full and there isn’t time for a long soak, a simple hot foot bath is often enough. It’s remarkable how quickly the body softens. The whole family loves it. We all seem to drop into a quieter place. Conversation slows, shoulders relax, and something in the nervous system remembers how to just be.

The more I’ve explored this practice, the more I’ve realised it isn’t just some leisurely health spa experience. Across cultures and throughout history, our ancestors understood something we’ve largely forgotten.

The bath was medicine.

Long before wellness became an industry, people turned to warm water, minerals, herbs, steam, and ritual as a way of restoring balance.

In Ayurveda, bathing, herbal oils and steam have long been used to soothe the body and settle the mind. Traditional Chinese Medicine has used hot foot soaks, ginger baths and herbal washes to warm the body and support recovery. The Romans built magnificent bathhouses that served not only as places to wash but as centres of community, conversation, massage and healing. In Japan, the traditions of onsen, sento and ofuro elevated bathing into an art of presence and renewal. Finland’s deep reverence for the sauna reflects the same understanding, while Turkish hammams, Russian banyas and countless Indigenous traditions around the world all recognised something similar: warm water has an extraordinary capacity to help human beings come back into balance.

Different cultures expressed it in different ways, yet they arrived at a remarkably similar intuition. The bath wasn’t simply about getting clean. It was about returning to ourselves.

Modern life has quietly stripped much of that away. Baths are often dismissed as indulgent, old-fashioned or simply a way to relax after a stressful day. But I think they’re far more than that.

A well-prepared bath creates a space where the body finally unclenches. Breath deepens without effort. The mind gradually stops analysing. The endless momentum of the day begins to dissolve.

Warm water immersion has been shown to increase blood flow to the skin and muscles, promote relaxation, and encourage the parasympathetic—or “rest and digest”—state of the nervous system. Many people also find an evening bath supports deeper sleep. But if I’m honest, I think the deepest medicine is harder to measure.

Water has an extraordinary way of inviting surrender.

You can’t rush a bath. You can’t really multitask inside one, although some will try to. Something shifts after the first ten minutes. The urge to do something begins to fade. Your breathing slows naturally. The body starts letting go of tension it didn’t even realise it was carrying.

Perhaps that’s the real medicine.

My own ritual is simple. I shower first, washing away the day before preparing the bath itself. I fill it as hot as feels comfortable, add fresh rosemary, sliced ginger, Dead Sea salt—or whatever good mineral salt I have on hand—sometimes magnesium salts, sometimes a little bicarb soda, and then I simply leave it. Sometimes I add my friends Steep product to the bath. That always takes it to another level!

Fifteen or twenty minutes.

Just as you would steep a beautiful tea, I let the herbs infuse the water before I climb in. By then the whole bathroom smells alive. The rosemary has released its oils, the ginger has warmed the water, and the minerals have dissolved into something that feels less like a bath and more like an herbal elixir.

It’s one of the reasons I love what my dear friend Amanda Noga is creating through her beautiful brand, Steep. The name says it all. These botanical bath blends invite us to slow down and treat bathing as ritual rather than routine. I have no affiliation whatsoever—just genuine admiration for someone helping bring this forgotten practice back into modern life.

I’ll often take the ritual a little further. A beeswax candle. Some natural incense. Occasionally a little rosemary or loose herbs smouldering on charcoal. Sometimes white sage or Palo Santo. The room slowly fills with warmth, aroma and steam. The senses soften. The pace of the mind follows. Don’t be tempted to have the phone with you while you bathe.

What began as “having a bath” quietly becomes ceremony.

After twenty or thirty minutes—sometimes longer if time allows—I’ll finish with a quick rinse under the shower. It feels like a simple closing of the ritual. Washing away the herbs, the salts, the sweat, and whatever else the body feels ready to let go of.

Then I’ll rehydrate well.

And often, I’ll simply lie down for five or ten minutes before doing anything else.

Sometimes the experience is surprisingly profound. There are days when a properly prepared bath leaves me feeling even more restored as a good sauna session. Different medicine, certainly, but no less powerful. I think it could actually be more powerful.

If you don’t have a bath, don’t let that stop you. A simple foot bath can be remarkably effective. Hot water, good mineral salt, a little ginger and/or rosemary, twenty quiet minutes and no phone. It’s amazing how often the whole body responds when we simply take care of the feet.

Perhaps that’s the deeper invitation here.

We spend so much of life trying to improve ourselves. We search for the next practice, the next protocol, the next supplement, the next breakthrough.

Sometimes the deeper practice is allowing ourselves to be held.

Held by warm water.

Held by stillness.

Held by silence.

Perhaps that’s why, across so many cultures and generations, people have kept returning to the bath. Not because it is luxurious, but because it reminds us how to soften.

So tonight, prepare your bath with care. Let the herbs steep.

Then steep yourself.

The world can wait.

We dive into some of the themes that continually arise on the path: practice, presence, relationships, growth, and navigating everyday life with a little more awareness.

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Rather than asking, “Who am I?” Jñāna Yoga invites a subtler question:

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As we begin to recognise these ever-changing qualities, we also discover s…

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Across traditions, the open sky has long been used as a mirror for awareness itself—vast, spacious, clear, and already complete.

Rather than trying to fix the mind or force stillness, this practice invites us to relax, soften our gaze, and simply rest in the o…

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Spiritual life seemed to move toward simplicity, silence, contemplation, freedom and transcendence.

Ordinary life seemed to involve mortgages, school drop-offs, overflowing inboxes, ageing parents, relationship challenges, tax returns and leaking taps.

One felt sacred.

The other felt like an obstacle.

One appeared to lead toward liberation.

The other appeared to pull me away from it.

It took me years to realise I had misunderstood the assignment.

The question was never how to escape ordinary life.

The question was how to discover freedom within it.

The spiritual traditions themselves don’t always make this easy.

Many of humanity’s most revered spiritual figures stepped away from conventional life in search of truth.

The Buddha left palace life.

Christian mystics entered monasteries.

Yogis retreated to caves, forests and mountaintops.

Renunciation has a long and noble history.

And for some, it remains a beautiful and authentic path.

Yet most of us are not monks.

Most of us are householders.

We have families to care for, communities to serve, work to do, and responsibilities that cannot simply be abandoned in the name of spiritual development.

So what then?

Are we destined to live a second-rate spiritual life?

Did the great traditions reserve awakening for those willing to leave everything behind?

This is one of the reasons I find the authentic Tantric traditions so compelling.

While some spiritual paths emphasised renunciation, later Tantric traditions explored what awakening might look like in the midst of ordinary life.

Not a rejection of the world.

Not an indulgence in the world.

But a life fully lived without becoming completely captured by it.

The householder was not viewed as spiritually inferior to the monk.

Simply confronted by a different curriculum.

Marriage becomes practice.

Parenting becomes practice.

Work becomes practice.

Conflict becomes practice.

Service becomes practice.

The world itself becomes the training ground.

Not because it is easier.

But because it demands everything of us.

The Buddha’s great insight was not merely the rejection of pleasure.

Nor was it the embrace of hardship.

It was the discovery of the Middle Way.

A path beyond indulgence and asceticism.

Beyond grasping and rejecting.

Beyond becoming lost in the world and attempting to escape it.

I suspect this teaching is just as relevant today as it was twenty-five centuries ago.

Many modern seekers seem caught between these same extremes.

On one side lies complete immersion in the world.

Busyness.

Consumption.

Achievement.

Endless distraction.

The constant pursuit of more.

On the other side lies the fantasy of escape.

The belief that freedom exists somewhere else.

Another retreat.

Another festival.

Another workshop.

Another teacher.

Another pilgrimage.

Another peak experience.

Another spiritual high.

I’ve certainly fallen into both camps at different times in my life.

There is a phrase attributed to Christ that has always resonated with me:

To be in the world, but not of it.

Not separate from life.

Not detached from humanity.

Not hiding in a cave.

But also not completely captured by the endless demands, dramas and distractions of the world.

To participate fully without becoming possessed by what we participate in.

To love deeply without clinging.

To serve generously without making an identity out of service.

To engage wholeheartedly whilst remembering something deeper remains untouched.

This feels remarkably close to what the Buddha pointed toward through the Middle Way.

And it feels remarkably close to the heart of Yoga.

Not escape.

Not indulgence.

Freedom amidst participation.

The Zen traditions point toward something similar.

A famous image in Zen is that of returning to the marketplace.

The practitioner does not remain on the mountaintop.

They come back.

Back into relationship.

Back into community.

Back into ordinary life.

Not because awakening has failed.

But because awakening was never about escaping reality in the first place.

The marketplace becomes the monastery.

The ordinary becomes the path.

Life itself becomes the teacher.

I have always appreciated how Robert Thurman speaks about the Bodhisattva ideal.

The awakened being does not simply disappear into some transcendent elsewhere.

They return.

They participate.

They engage.

They become available to the world.

This feels increasingly important to me.

I’ve spent time in ashrams, monasteries, retreat centres and pilgrimage sites. Each offered something precious. I’ve sat with remarkable teachers and had experiences that profoundly shaped the direction of my life.

Yet increasingly I find the real test of practice waiting back home.

In conversation with my wife.

In raising daughters.

In showing up for students.

In caring for family and community.

In meeting the countless ordinary moments that make up a human life.

These days, I often contemplate these questions whilst sitting in a school pick-up line, paying invoices, preparing classes, walking the dog, or making dinner with my family.

Twenty years ago I imagined spiritual life would eventually take me away from ordinary responsibilities.

Instead, practice seems to be drawing me more deeply into them.

Not as a burden.

But as an opportunity to embody what I’ve spent so many years studying.

How do we remain open-hearted amidst pressure?

How do we stay grounded amidst uncertainty?

How do we participate in the world without becoming possessed by it?

How do we love deeply without clinging?

How do we serve without losing ourselves?

These seem to be the real questions.

To be a householder is not a compromise.

It is not a consolation prize.

It is not a lesser path.

It is simply a different monastery.

The kitchen becomes the meditation hall.

The relationship becomes the teacher.

The children become the gurus.

The community becomes the sangha.

The ordinary responsibilities of life become the curriculum.

A Yoga that unfolds in kitchens, bedrooms, gardens, laundry rooms and workplaces.

In relationships and communities.

In school pick-ups and difficult conversations.

In caring for ageing parents.

In helping those in need.

In paying attention to the person standing directly in front of us.

Perhaps this is what it means to be in the world, but not of it.

Fully engaged.

Deeply caring.

Yet inwardly free.

Not withdrawing from life.

Not becoming lost within it.

Walking the Middle Way.

Again and again.

The Yoga of Ordinary Life

On August 23rd I’ll be offering a workshop exploring these themes through the lenses of Yoga, Tantra, Buddhism, meditation and contemplative practice.

Together we’ll explore what it means to walk the path of the modern Yogi/Yogini householder: to cultivate presence amidst responsibility, freedom amidst commitment, and depth amidst the beautiful messiness of everyday life.

Not Yoga as performance.

Not Yoga as identity.

But Yoga as a way of living.

I’d love to have you join us.

The Yoga of Ordinary Life
Sunday 23 August
Sivananda Ashram, Beaconsfield

People who once couldn’t stop talking about yoga are now talking about why they stopped doing yoga. Former teachers are returning to church, long-time practitioners are publicly criticising yoga communities, and some have walked away from spiritual practice altogether.

And honestly?

I get it.

I also wonder whether some of us simply got ahead of ourselves.

It’s common in yoga to experience a first wave of openings. A retreat cracks us open, a meditation changes our life, we discover pranayama and stillness, and suddenly the world feels different. In that enthusiasm it’s easy to think, This is it. I’ve found my path.

Sometimes that leads people to quit their jobs, complete a 200-hour teacher training, become full-time yoga teachers, and begin imagining a life of international retreats, sponsorship deals, magazine covers, and somehow getting paid to wear stretchy pants and talk about consciousness.

Again, I get it.

The imagery was seductive.

Many of us were sold a romantic picture of yoga, and many of us sold it to ourselves.

But without depth, humility, and guidance, eventually the initial high wears off. The bills still arrive, relationships still require work, and our unresolved conditioning remains remarkably intact.

And the ego, being the clever little shape-shifter that it is, quietly reappears wearing mala beads and speaking a bit of Sanskrit and esoteric lingo.

Burnout often follows.

This isn’t a criticism. It’s simply an observation.

Because Yoga was never meant to be a short-term project. It was never meant to be another identity to put on. Traditionally, Yoga was understood to be a lifelong path, perhaps even a many-lifetimes path.

This is partly why practitioners had teachers, mentors, gurus, and communities of practice. Not because teachers were considered perfect—far from it—but because genuine practice is humbling. We need people who can lovingly point out where we've gotten ahead of ourselves, remind us to slow down, and encourage us to take what Zen calls a backward step—to turn the light inward and return to practice.

To become less interested in arriving somewhere and more interested in learning how to practice.

And yes, even this has become murky.

Over the past few decades, we’ve seen far too many respected teachers and spiritual leaders abuse their power. Some exploited students sexually. Others manipulated people psychologically or financially. Many simply failed to embody the values they spent years teaching.

For some practitioners, this wasn’t merely disappointing. It was devastating.

People didn’t leave yoga because they became cynical. Some left because they were genuinely hurt.

And honestly?

I understand that too.

Perhaps one of the painful lessons of these years is that no teacher, no lineage, no tradition, and no institution is immune from human shadow. Not yoga. Not Buddhism. Not Christianity. Not any of it.

The problem was never yoga itself.

Nor was the problem devotion.

The problem arises when devotion becomes blind and discernment gets surrendered.

I feel deeply fortunate. I’ve had teachers who embody humility, integrity, and a genuine commitment to practice. Not perfect human beings, but deeply sincere ones.

And perhaps sincerity and honesty is enough.

For nearly three decades, yoga experienced an extraordinary rise in the West. Studios flourished, teacher trainings exploded, and yoga apparel became a multi-billion-dollar industry.

And let’s be honest—it sold incredibly well.

Shiny magazine covers. Exotic retreat destinations. Beautiful people in stretchy yoga pants doing impossible postures on tropical beaches at sunrise.

The imagery was seductive.

Who wouldn’t want a practice that promised health, vitality, community, purpose, flexibility, inner peace, and perhaps enlightenment before breakfast?

But eventually the marketing and reality begin to separate.

Because Yoga was never about looking spiritual.

It was about seeing clearly.

And those are not always the same thing.

Living in Perth, I’ve often heard people say we’re about ten years behind Los Angeles. Having spent many years travelling between Perth and LA, I can see some truth in that.

Many of our friends and colleagues in California witnessed this shift years ago. Studios closed. Teacher trainings shrank. The glamour faded. The excitement cooled.

And now we’re seeing similar changes here.

To some people, this signals the failure of Yoga.

I see something different.

I think we’re witnessing the end of the yoga boom.

And I think that’s a good thing.

Because after more than twenty years of practice, teaching, retreats, mistakes, breakthroughs, injuries, recoveries, and countless cups of chai, I find myself falling more deeply in love with Yoga, not less.

Because after more than twenty years of practice, teaching, retreats, mistakes, breakthroughs, injuries, recoveries, and countless cups of chai, I find myself falling more deeply in love with yoga, not less.

Not Yoga as an industry.

Not Yoga as an identity.

Not Yoga as something to post online.

Yoga as a way of living.

A way of paying attention.

A way of relating.

A way of meeting reality.

Now, I realise there’s a paradox here.

Yoga is very much my livelihood. It’s one of the hats I wear in this life. I run retreats. I teach classes. I write articles. I have a website and a social media presence. Like any teacher trying to make this sustainable, I need to be somewhat organised, somewhat savvy, and yes, have a reasonably coherent brand.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that.

The question is one of balance.

Can we hold the paradox?

Can yoga be our profession without becoming our performance?

Can it be part of our identity without becoming our entire identity?

Can we share the practice without becoming fixated on image and being perceived as spiritual?

Because if all our attention goes into brand, image, and business, eventually the centre of gravity shifts.

The practice begins orbiting the ego rather than the ego gradually surrendering to practice.

And that rarely ends well.

Yoga asks much more of us than a beautiful feed, a successful retreat, or a full class.

Sooner or later, it asks for our honesty.

Our humility.

Our willingness to be wrong.

Our willingness to fail.

Our willingness to be ordinary.

And if our ego becomes too inflated, if we start believing our own mythology, life has a remarkable way of humbling us.

Eventually we are all brought to our knees by something.

Loss.

Illness.

Ageing.

Failure.

Heartbreak.

Disillusionment.

The practice doesn’t exempt us from being human.

If anything, it invites us more fully into our humanity.

Perhaps this is why the deepest practitioners I’ve met seem to become quieter over time.

More ordinary.

Less interested in appearing wise.

Less interested in being special.

More interested in kindness.

Presence.

Practice.

These days, I’m far less interested in appearing spiritual and far more interested in being honest.

Can I stay present during difficult conversations?

Can I sit quietly without reaching for my phone?

Can I meet uncertainty without immediately trying to escape it?

Can I love well?

Can I serve well?

Can I keep practicing?

Am I actually listening as someone speaks?

Those questions feel infinitely more interesting than whether I can put my foot behind my head.

And thankfully.

Because I definitely can’t.

So is Yoga dead?

No.

The yoga boom may be coming to an end.

Good.

Let the fad fade.

Let the glamour soften.

Let the performance exhaust itself.

What remains may be smaller. It may be quieter. It may never attract the same numbers.

But perhaps what remains will also be more sincere, more mature, and more grounded and genuinely loving. Less interested in collecting spiritual experiences and more interested in embodying actual wisdom.

The people who remain won’t necessarily be the most flexible, the most photogenic, or the most followed online.

They’ll simply be the people who keep showing up.

Breathing.

Practicing.

Failing.

Learning.

Beginning again.

The yoga boom may be over.

But the true practice of Yoga—with a capital Y—is, thankfully, just getting started.

And it’s not for the faint-hearted.

Because sooner or later, Yoga asks everything of us.

Our attention.

Our honesty.

Our humility.

Our relationships.

Our habits.

Our identities.

Our carefully constructed stories about who we think we are.

It asks us to keep showing up long after the novelty has faded. To practice when no one is watching. To begin again after disappointment. To remain curious after certainty collapses. To keep opening our hearts in a world that often encourages the opposite.

It’s beautiful.

It’s demanding.

It’s humbling.

And perhaps that’s precisely why, after all these years, I’m more in love with the practice than ever.

With love,

Stuart Watkins

Ram Ram राम राम

Much of yoga can be understood as learning to hold and integrate apparent opposites: effort and ease, activity and rest, expansion and contraction, right and left, masculine and feminine, solar and lunar.

Pranayama offers us a direct way of exploring these polarities within our own bodies an…

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We hear stories of Ram Dass meeting Maharaj-ji and being shattered open by unconditional love. We read about the Buddha awakening beneath the Bodhi tree. We hear accounts of profound meditation experiences, mystical openings, and life-changing ceremonies.

It’s hard not to be moved by these stories.

It’s also hard not to compare.

At various points on the path, I think many of us have wondered:

Where is my guru?

When is my breakthrough coming?

What experience am I still missing?

I’ve certainly been there.

If I could only have that mystical experience, that ceremony, that opening, meet my guru, then surely everything would finally click into place.

But life has a funny way of humbling us.

The older I get, the more I appreciate that we all seem to arrive carrying different karma, different conditioning, and different lessons to work through. One person is softened by grief, another by parenthood, another by illness, another through service, another through contemplative practice, and another by grace that seems to come from absolutely nowhere.

Perhaps there isn’t one curriculum.

There are billions of them.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a recurring assumption in yoga communities, meditation circles, and plant medicine spaces. We often imagine that if we can just wake up deeply enough, everything else will somehow take care of itself.

I understand the appeal of that idea because awakening can be utterly transformative.

And yet, life keeps happening.

The difficult conversation still needs to be had. The children still need to be picked up from school. The bills still need to be paid. Relationships still ask things of us. Old emotional patterns continue to surface. We still get hurt, become defensive, lose patience, make mistakes, and occasionally behave in ways that don’t reflect our highest insights.

This isn’t a failure of awakening.

It’s simply the next stage of the path.

Ken Wilber has been enormously helpful here. Human development isn’t just about waking up. It’s also about growing up, cleaning up, and showing up.

Waking up is recognising a deeper dimension of our being.

Growing up is maturing psychologically and spiritually.

Cleaning up is becoming willing to meet the unresolved conditioning and unconscious patterns we’ve spent years avoiding.

And showing up is bringing all of that into the messy, beautiful responsibility of everyday life.

One movement does not automatically accomplish the others.

I’ve met people who have had profound spiritual experiences and are still incredibly reactive. I’ve met people who can speak eloquently about non-duality and esoteric matters and still struggle with intimacy and relationships. I’ve also met deeply ordinary people—parents, carers, teachers, neighbours—who may never describe themselves as spiritual at all and yet embody tremendous presence, humility, and love.

Again, if I’m honest, I’ve found all of these tendencies in myself.

Alan Watts famously said:

“If you get the message, hang up the phone.”

He was speaking about psychedelics, but I think the wisdom applies much more broadly.

Sometimes the ceremony is the phone.

Sometimes the retreat is the phone.

Sometimes the awakening itself is the phone.

The point isn’t to become fascinated with the experience. The point is to receive the message and then ask:

How do I live this?

Yet if we’re not careful, we start organising our lives around the next extraordinary experience.

The next retreat.

The next ceremony.

The next festival.

The next transmission.

The next awakening.

Meanwhile, we can find ourselves poo-pooing and pushing away the so-called ordinary experiences, as though the sacred only lives in the extraordinary.

But our actual life is happening right here.

Ram Dass continually brought everything back to relationship and service. It wasn’t enough to touch unconditional love. The question became: Can you embody it?

Can you bring it into your marriage?

Your parenting?

Your friendships?

Your work?

Your community?

Can you bring it into the supermarket, the traffic jam, the family dinner table?

He famously joked:

“If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.”

I thankfully feel at my best when I’m around my parents. But I must admit, there are certain people who still know exactly how to bring out the worst in me.

And that’s where the work is.

That’s where the practice is.

To make that which is unconscious, conscious.

To lovingly illuminate the places where we’re still contracted, still defended, still identified.

Because eventually every awakening has to come down from the mountain.

Every insight has to enter relationship.

Every glimpse of freedom has to find its way into ordinary life.

Jack Kornfield titled one of his books After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. What a perfect title.

Because after the ceremony, there are dishes.

After the retreat, there are emails.

After the awakening, there are relationships.

After the mystical experience, there is still the ordinary, miraculous business of being human.

Perhaps integration is exactly this: the slow, humbling, and often beautiful process of allowing our deepest insights to permeate everyday life. Not escaping our humanity, but inhabiting it more fully. Not transcending the messiness of being human, but learning to participate in it with a little more wisdom, a little more honesty, and a little more love.

Perhaps the real work begins not when we wake up, but when we begin embodying what we’ve seen.

With love,

Stuart Watkins