This week is one shape and a rest. We came, we stood and then we lay down. Everything added over the next five weeks gets built on top of these two things, so it is worth knowing that a session this short is a complete session and not a warm-up for a real one.

Where we are so far

1. Standing

2. Rest

Teaching note: mountain pose

The shape ha…

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Show up. Do the reps. Trust the process. Right? Right?!…

I’ve said versions of this in class before. It’s not that it’s wrong, it’s correct. We are a reflection of the sum of our endeavours, run through our metabolism and thought processes. But have we put consistency in the wrong category? Consistency is discussed as a kind of moral quality. A quality of character that filters the people who get somewhere from the people who don’t. Those who don’t achieve whatever undertaking they’ve aimed at have a problem of will.

Let’s try a little thought experiment, see whether it has anything to do with virtue at all, or whether it's closer to an instrument. Like a dial to make change visible rather than to impact it directly.

For much of my adult life I was reasonably consistent and completely unable to see it, which is a strange thing to write down. The behaviour was present but the perception has been lagging. I maintain that humans aren’t the best with time. I couldn’t hold a long enough horizon in my head to notice anything had shifted, so I kept intervening and every intervention put the clock back to zero. What eventually fixed that, was chance to be honest. I only noticed that in hindsight and I’m still not sure “fixed” is the right description.

I’ve been working with a personal trainer online for a few years. Sitting, very stressed at a desk does horrendous things to a body. For months at a time I do more or less the same workouts. Same movements, same order, the load creeping up in small increments (go progressive overload). It is not complex and dazzling and that’s the whole thing. Hold the variables still and the body becomes readable, you know what you lifted in March, you know what the fourth set felt like from the inside and you can set that against what the fourth set feels like now. The difference is available to you, but only because everything else around you remains relatively still.

Which is like experimental design in gym clothes. You can’t read a signal against a constantly moving background.

I only had the insight from comparing it with the opposite, by not having the consistency. My doctorate dealt with island politics, which I came to after years of training that had taught me to expect variables I could isolate. Sadly for me politics doesn’t do that, that’s the consistent bit. Everything moves while everything else is moving and a great deal of the honest work goes into establishing what can even be claimed. I found it uncomfortable for about two years before it became clarifying. The difficulty wasn’t that the subject was complicated, it was that there was no still ground underneath it, only following the change over time.

The body and its response to stimulus gives you still ground. It’s a much more modest claim than what many in wellness present. It’s alluring to consider that you could conjure up a potion of electrolytes to consume after a fast of a certain length and your life will be changed, or at the minimum, your abs. It’s just not the way it goes.

Here’s the shakier part of our thought experiment. Much of what is on offer in “wellness” is a change of variables, a.k.a. follows trends. Cleanses, resets, releases of every type of tissue in the body, money mindsets, the workshop that will finally unlock your full potential. Each one puts your baseline back to zero. You can be extremely diligent inside that structure and never accumulate a single reading, because a reading requires something to have stayed the same long enough to be compared with itself. An instrument you recalibrate every four weeks never gives you a reading at all.

I also run classes, I write this, there’s a subscribe button somewhere on the page isn’t there? Novelty is what can be sold and it does have its place. The uncomfortable part isn’t the selling (okay, it actually is) but it’s also that the industry sells consistency as a personal virtue at the same time as removing the conditions under which consistency does anything, then hands you the failure as yours to bear.

There’s an obvious problem with me writing any of this, which is that the answer to being sold too many things is rarely another thing being sold to you. So here is the Simple Course of Yoga, described as plainly as I can manage. I am a yoga teacher after all.

It’s small. A fixed set of practices, taught with similar asana, repeated in a similar structure. Nothing wild gets introduced in week three to keep you interested. The sessions wrap up within the hour, with relaxation at the end, so you know what to expect. Sound like a low bar? I can see on my end how many videos get abandoned part of the way through.

It is, quite deliberately, not comprehensive. If you’ve been reading everything, watching everything, and starting a different beginner’s course every January, your problem isn’t a shortage of information. It’s that nothing has stayed still long enough for you to read whether it’s doing anything at all.

This holds the variables still. That’s the whole design.

Buy it outright, or it’s included with a paid subscription here. Founding membership goes up on 1 September.

Rather than pushing towards a goal, it invites the body to soften — releasing physical tension, quieting mental activity, and creating space to simply rest.

The Sankalpa for this practice is:

“I remain steady and at eas…

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In those early yoga years, my mind became as malleable as my hypermobile body. I was able to put perspective around my crippling social anxiety and enter into the world like I hadn’t been able to before. I hadn’t changed as such, I was just less paralysed by the thoughts of the worst case scenario coming to life. Becoming a teacher helped me overcome my fear of public speaking. It’s still not my favourite but it’s empowering and ultimately worth it. Through yoga I’ve met absolutely wonderful teachers from all walks of life, in all corners of the globe. The ones that remind you that normal people are ultimately good, despite the horror you scroll through on your phone everyday. I’ve taken their classes, learned about yoga from their perspective and I haven’t ever attended a celebrity yoga training, retreat or workshop.

We all love to ogle celebrity land, it seems (sur)real. What, or who, we ogle is not the thrill though is it? It’s the absurdity and the spectacle. It tucks itself into a little pouch in our minds “they are just like me”. We think we know them because we see them so often but in reality we don’t know them at all. What they give us is the projection of our own desires and fears. Carefully curated to inflict relatability. Then we pull back the curtain (nee scandal) and there’s the wizard. Just an ordinary guy with some tools that grew out out of hand.

As part of the yoga journey, my mother and I went to India to see what yoga was like at the source. Western Yogis love to take the mick out of teachers travelling to India. Virtue signalling isn’t it? Living in the remote northern climes of Scotland, we sense there is something about places largely unhomogenised by globalisation that shapes things. We wanted to see where yoga was borne. An understanding that can only come from being submerged in it. We travelled round mainly sleepy rural places and the yoga we found was of the same modesty that I had first experienced as a teen. We found folk that reminded us of home, that cared about the human. Others experiencing tough lives but the humility to remain honest even though being dishonest would have increased their financial return. There were simple yoga classes on the rooftops in Goa. Meditation, pranayama, asana and wonderful home cooked meals from the local spice garden in the mountains of Munnar. We lived in a treehouse for those days, respecting natures, it is illegal to clear the trees, and the teacher's parents had been yogis. He was so proud when he talked about his family and his work.

There were many challenging experiences, I won’t romanticise it all. Our experience throughout India was largely segregated by gender and just like at home the women undertook much of the labour we saw, which I’m sure would be unpaid. In our day to day we were treated with respect.

These memories are a little melancholy. This was January of 2019, life was on an upward trajectory, I was working on community renewables projects, it was filling my cup. We were privileged to be able to travel. Everything changed a year later in March 2020 whereby indelible scars of Covid left our communities and society more polarised than ever. Scars, we haven’t massaged out yet.

My covid schedule, like so many others, was unrelenting. Teaching yoga and pilates online 5 days a week, full-time job through the day, teacher to my neurodivergent child and full-time masters student. Initially those Covid times brought us together but I fear the whiplash has made us more selfish. Log on to any social media platform and you’ll be sold course in anything you want. You’ll get rich doing it too. Online resources are not finite, there’s room for everyone. But these resources come at enormous cost. The rise of AI has sucked the fathoms of human knowledge into its digitised brain cells, stored in vast arrays of servers, in racks by the tens of thousands. Everyone is an instant expert in any subject they wish. Yoga flows, philosophy sprinkled in anywhere, scripts for meditations and yoga nidra. No one needs integrity or depth, and truthfully no one has ever asked. As an experiment, I did a 200 hour yoga training through covid and it took me 15 hours. The shiny badge I get to wear is as meaningless as it is ubiquitous. Yoga can make you money, but when it’s embedded in the same money making forms as other globalised businesses there can only ever be more losers than winners. The outside economy will always influence your business positively or negatively. Businesses that survive, must, sooner or later scale or reinvent themselves. Take yoga studios, they had to run teacher trainings to keep the doors open, but the problem is, that model ate all the yoga classes for the folks that just wanted to come to class… However, if fighting my way through a tiny local economy has taught me anything, it’s that evolution doesn’t always follow a growth trajectory. The skill is being able to identify a niche, without turning into another 'find your niche' guru. So for this autumn, I’ll test my theory out. I am going to do a simple series. Yoga for people who are satisfied with quality, sustainable basics. This will be available for Substack subscribers, wellness club members and folks on my email list that want to join in and it won’t be busting the bank.

Stay tuned for news.

Identity is the engine underneath modern yoga. It runs on a kind of capital that has nothing to do with money. At least not at first. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spent a career arguing that money is only one currency among several, and that the others are more powerful precisely because we don’t see them as currencies at all. Tokens come in make guises.

Bourdieu outlined social capital: who you practise with, whose retreat you went on, the teacher whose name you can drop, the celeb teacher you set up an Instagram account to follow. There is cultural capital: the Sanskrit you’ve half-learned, the texts on your shelf (whose translation mind), the ability to tell a real lineage from a weekend course. And there is symbolic capital: the aura of legitimacy that hovers over all of it, the sense that you belong to something old and true. The most authentic.

In the hands of many, Yoga turns out to be a near-perfect machine for converting one form of capital into another and the totems are how the conversion is made visible.

So the mat is not just a mat. The leggings are not just leggings. The training is not, mostly, just training. Each is a token you can buy and then wear, and each one buys you a small increase in the community’s standing. A little more belonging, a little more authenticity, a little more of the vibe. The leggings named after air, land and ocean cost more than the elements ever charged, and we pay it gladly, because we are not buying fabric. We are buying our way, a few inches further into the room. That is the genius of it, and it is genuinely a kind of genius: the industry has learned to sell the feeling of depth as a consumer good, priced by the ‘gram.

Where the trick reveals itself is that Social capital circulates. It moves sideways and around: you gain status, you confer status, the community passes it between its members like warmth through a crowded room. However, economic capital does not circulate. Economic capital flows in exactly one direction, and the direction is always up and out. Up to the brand, up to the celebrity ambassador, up to the conglomerate that owns the label you thought was a small wellness company. Out of your account, out of the local studio that can barely make rent, out of the hands of the teacher who is paid by the head and taxed by the hour. The money goes one way, and the warm feeling of belonging is sent back down the line in its place. This is a remarkably good deal for everyone except the people spending the money.

Follow that flow far enough and you arrive at the part nobody puts on a tote bag. The whole edifice rests on a tradition that took shape over centuries in India, carried by people and their ideas about the human condition. Devotion over a deposit. The global industry built on top of that inheritance is now worth well over a £100bn a year, and the apparel alone, just the leggings, a market of around £30bn. Almost none of that returns to the source. The economic capital that the tradition generates does not flow back to the tradition. It flows to the people best positioned to package it, the celebs. We have become very in honouring the roots in our captions and very quiet about the fact that the roots see none of the fertiliser.

There is much yoga dedicated to the principle being violated here, and it is firmly one of the only limbs that are generally taught (even though it permeates the entire tradition). I am sure there is something in the yamas about hoarding. Yoga asks us to consider holdong things lightly, to take only what we need, to notice the difference between using a thing and being used by our wanting of it. It is, when you sit with it, a direct instruction against the entire apparatus described above. Except it’s being sold back to us at full markup, in sage green, in a four-way-stretch fabric, by a brand that would prefer we not think too hard about the word printed on the inside of the waistband.

I want to be careful, because the point is not that wanting a nice mat makes you a bad practitioner, or that money and yoga must never touch. Teachers deserve to be paid, nice equipment is a real pleasure. Building a school, as I’m doing now, means asking people for money in exchange for something I believe is worth it, and I’d be a fraud to pretend otherwise. The point is narrower and, I think, more useful. It is simply to see the direction of the flow, and to ask, each time we reach for a totem, what exactly we are paying for and where exactly the money, and the other forms of capital, are flowing. Are we buying the practice, or are we buying the look of the practice? Is this teacher’s value in their teaching, or in their reach? And when the economic capital moves, as it always will, is there any version of this in which it ever moves more broadly?

See the practice itself, is the actual thing, the breath and the attention and the slow unclenching of a life, has always costs a floor and some time. Everything else is the totem.

Rather than focusing on getting sleep, the practice invites rest, easing physical tension, calming mental activity, and reducing the kind of alertness that can lead to waking in the early hours.

The Sankalpa for this…

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Rather than focusing on getting sleep, the practice invites rest, easing physical tension, calming mental activity, and reducing the kind of alertness that can lead to waking in the early hours.

The Sankalpa for this…

Read more

Wellth is now infrastructural. If you are not optimising, you are regressing, opting out. If you aren’t building, you are falling behind. The wellness industry does not shout this at you, it is way too sophisticated for that. It whispers it about you, to your friends, it wears beige tones, and posts aspirational content that leads you to frictionless checkout pages. Your are funelled towards inadequacy so ambient you stop noticing the source.

The message, underneath all the clean branding, is consistent: who you are right now is a draft. You’re Beta testing and you haven’t made it past your before photo.

The to-do list is the literature of our time. You may have tried some of it. Tick with me:

• The 4am alarm.

• The cold shower/swim/plunge.

• The journalling.

• No screens before bed unless you are wearing yellow aviators.

• F*ck it, just Let Them.

The perfectly sequenced habit stack that promises to optimise your brain chemistry before 7am. Not forgetting the supplements, your fasting window, the evening wind-down protocol, apps that watch, I mean score your sleep, the one that tells you whether today is a day for effort or recovery.

None of this is inherently wrong, some of it may even be helpful. What I want to point out is what it all rests on: the assumption that the problem is you. Your lack of structure, your inconsistency, your failure to implement correctly.

The industry is never the variable, you are.

Yoga philosophy observed something about the human mind nearly two millennia before the first productivity podcast: every living thing moves according to its nature. Not a nature it should aspire to or to a future it must engineer but a condition that is already inherent.

In Sanskrit, this is called *prakṛti*.

In classical yoga, most clearly articulated in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and drawing from the broader Sāṃkhya philosophical tradition, prakṛti refers to the fundamental material nature from which mind, body, and experience arise. It is not a personality type or a brand archetype. It is the grain of the wood.

Everything has one and importantly, you cannot improve against the grain indefinitely. You can force it for a while but the energy cost is untenable. Eventually, if you keep planing at the wood, there are more shavings on the ground that wood on the block. It materialises in exhaustion, in hesitancy and a feeling we can never quite shake that something is not quite right even when everything looks correct on paper. We just don’t feel like ourselves.

The 4am alarm doesn’t fail because you lack discipline, it fails because it was designed for someone else’s constitution and then marketed as universal. Yoga philosophy would call that a category error. You have been attempting to run someone else’s operating system on your hardware and wondering why it keeps crashing.

In the Yoga Sutras Patanjali defines yoga as *citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ* or the quieting of the fluctuations of the mind. Notice here what that is not, it is not a construction of the self. Not the addition of better habits onto a deficient self. It suggests a reduction of interference with what is already functioning.

This is where yoga’s logic diverges sharply from the optimisation industry’s. Modern self-improvement is always additive. More habits, more structure, more intensity, more output, more tasks on the to-do list. Layer practice upon practice until a better self emerges. Inversely Yoga aims to move the obstruction. What is getting in the way of what already exists?

Think about the moments in your life when you felt most effective, not most productive, but most effective. There is usually something recognisable in them. A time of day that suits your nervous system, a working rhythm that doesn’t feel like resistance, a pace that felt sustainable without requiring constant renegotiation, or you were undertaking something that you were just naturally gifted at. Those moments are glimpses of your nature relatively unobstructed.

Could we journal around the question of what is currently in the way? How we may subtract a duty from our list instead of constantly adding.

This is no argument for complacency, nor a self-acceptance as consolation prize. It is closer to what happens when you stop building against the grain and start working with it.

When you understand your actual rhythms, cognitive, energetic, relational, you stop spending energy on the internal negotiations. Discipline still matters, growth is not futile, effort is wonderful. But effort needs a bit of guidance.

The practical lens yoga offers is not how do I become better? It is: under what conditions am I already clear? When does your energy feel generative rather than depleting? What mode of working comes naturally, not because it is easy, but because it corresponds to something real within you? Which patterns repeat?

From those answers, you can begin to build something that actually fits. Not a habit stack borrowed from someone else’s morning. A scaffolding designed around your own grain.

For me considering philosophy, how we think and what we can know offers a surprisingly lucid analysis of human functioning. One that speaks directly to the modern preoccupation with performance.

No 4am alarm required.

Yoga Nidra is often translated as “yogic sleep” but its role in yoga philosophy is less about sleep itself and more about learning how to rest the mind in that particular state of consciousness. Traditionally, it sits alongside practices concerned with pratyāhāra, a soft withdrawal of attention from constant stimulation and habitual thinking. Practised lying down and guided step by step, yoga nidra uses sensation, breath, and simple imagery to reduce mental effort and physiological arousal. It was never intended as a method for forcing sleep, rather as a way of creating the internal conditions in which rest becomes possible. That framing matters when yoga nidra is now widely used to support sleep. I think we owe it more than explaining it as the state between being awake and being a sleep.

Take insomnia, it’s is rarely just a problem of not sleeping. Contemporary research increasingly understands insomnia not simply as a failure to sleep, but as a state of hyperarousal — where the mind and body remain on high alert even when there is no immediate demand. This can show up cognitively as racing or repetitive thoughts, emotionally as low-level anxiety or vigilance, and physiologically as elevated heart rate, muscle tension, or stress hormones lingering into the night. In this state, the problem is not a lack of tiredness, but an inability to downshift.

People with chronic insomnia are often exhausted yet remain alert, tired but wired. Cortisol levels remain elevated into the evening making it difficult to shift into rest mode. With this the mind becomes vigilant at the very moment it is being asked to let the days' events go.

From this perspective, trying harder to sleep is part of the problem. The effort to rest keeps the system activated.

Yoga nidra works differently. Rather than aiming directly at sleep, it systematically reduces arousal. Attention is given something neutral to follow so the mind is not being asked to be quiet or too focus on one single point. The body is allowed to remain still(ish). There is no requirement to achieve anything. This matters, because sleep itself cannot be commanded, it always arrives emergence from other conditions being ideal.

Clinical research on yoga nidra is modest but consistent. Studies report improvements in sleep latency (which is the time taken to fall asleep), perceived sleep quality, nocturnal awakenings and stress levels among people who practice yoga nidra regularly. The proposed mechanism is not sedation, instead regulation: parasympathetic nervous system activation, reduced muscle tone and decreased cognitive effort. These are the ‘just so conditions’. EEG studies suggest increased alpha and theta activity in certain regions of the brain during yoga nidra, indicating a state of deep rest with maintained awareness rather than conventional sleep and rather than the whole brain entering a certain state.

This helps explain why many people experience yoga nidra as transformative without it being a guaranteed solution. What often changes first is not the night itself, but the relationship to bedtime overall. Instead of lying awake monitoring sleep, counting hours, or bracing for another difficult night, attention is redirected. Performance anxiety is relieved over time. The nervous system is no longer being asked to solve a problem cold, so sleep may follow. Sometimes it doesn’t, at least not immediately.

From both a philosophical and scientific perspective, yoga nidra is useful for the same reason: it addresses arousal rather than sleep itself. In classical yoga, nidra was not valued because it produced sleep but because it allowed the body to rest while the mind remained present, rather than alert or agitated. It induced pratyāhāra as discussed above. Modern sleep research describes insomnia in similar terms, it’s not a lack of tiredness but an inability to reduce arousal. Yoga nidra does not resolve this by inducing unconsciousness. It allows a means to practice the transitions out of heightened alertness and into low arousal. Sleep, when it comes, is a consequence of that shift rather than the goal.

Framing yoga nidra as a “cure” risks reproducing the very logic that keeps insomnia in place: effort, monitoring, and self-correction. Framing it as support for rest does something else entirely. It removes pressure. And paradoxically, that is often when sleep begins to return.

In yoga nidra, sleep is not the aim.
It is the side effect of a nervous system that no longer feels it has to stay switched on.

One of the reasons practices like yoga nidra are often misunderstood is that contemporary yoga culture places such a heavy emphasis on asana. Physical practice can be valuable, but when it becomes the primary or sole expression of yoga, it limits what the tradition is actually offering. Asana trains strength, mobility, and sometimes concentration, but it does very little to help us observe how the mind responds to rest, uncertainty, or the absence of action. From a philosophical perspective, this is where yoga was always most interested, not really in how we move but how we relate to experience when there is nothing to do. Without practices that explore stillness, attention, and down-regulation, we miss a crucial opportunity to understand ourselves more fully, and to live the practice beyond performance or effort.

Have you experimented with yoga nidra? Let’s discuss.

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This Yoga Nidra practice is designed to support sleep by helping the nervous system settle and the mind disengage from overactivity.

Rather than trying to fall asleep, the practice focuses on rest allowing the body to soften, the breath to become natural, and mental tension to unwind. For many people, sleep follo…

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Yoga, apparently, should help with this. However that framing only makes sense if you assume everyone has the same room to move.

Sometimes other people’s needs come before our own. Not because we don’t know ourselves, or because we lack courage, or because we’ve failed to do the inner work. It’s due to the fact we are embedded in relationships and responsibilities that don’t disappear just because we’ve had an insight.

Parents don’t opt out on hard days. Carers don’t clock off. Partners, friends, and family members don’t exist in neat, boundary-friendly compartments. Life is relational. Yoga, at its roots, has always understood this.

Patañjali describes practice as something that should be sthira and sukham, this means steady and easeful. My first yoga teacher often taught from this perspective. What we miss is that this is not a fixed state: it’s a relationship. What feels steady and easeful in one season of life may feel rigid or impossible in another. Balance isn’t achieved once and for all; it’s continually renegotiated in response to changing conditions.

Sometimes that renegotiation looks like swinging too far in one direction, then correcting, then overshooting again. A parent might hold firm on needing one evening alone, then feel the guilt so acutely they overcompensate by saying yes to everything for weeks. A carer might finally ask for help, only to withdraw the request when they sense even mild inconvenience in the other person's response. Someone might enforce a boundary at work, then spend months second-guessing whether they've damaged a relationship they depend on. That pendulum movement isn't failure. It's the process of learning where steadiness collapses into strain, or where softness turns into self-erasure.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we never get to prioritise our own needs. It does mean there are times when doing so comes at a real cost and pretending otherwise flattens reality. What the “people-pleasers are liars” narrative conveniently ignores is power.

Not everyone has the same freedom to say no. For some people, “just setting boundaries” isn’t a mindset shift, it’s a material risk. If you’re working multiple jobs to stay afloat, navigating racism or sexism at work, dependent on family housing, living with visa insecurity, or parenting alone without support, authenticity is not a neutral act. It’s something that can jeopardise safety, income, or belonging. In those situations, accommodating others isn’t a personal flaw. It’s the mathematics of survival.

This is where another yogic concept, viveka, aka discernment, matters. Viveka isn’t about choosing the most self-expressive option. It’s about seeing clearly what’s actually happening and responding appropriately. Sometimes discernment means recognising that saying yes now is what keeps the ground beneath you intact. That doesn’t make it unconscious or dishonest. It makes it situationally intelligent. A pragmatist.

The people most comfortable preaching radical authenticity usually have buffers: financial cushions, career flexibility, access to therapy and social capital. If a boundary backfires, there’s something underneath to absorb the shock. Many others don’t have that luxury.

Still, it’s often peripherlaised people who are labelled “people-pleasers” for doing what they must to keep a job, stay housed, protect their children, or maintain fragile support systems. Nothing really to do with a lack of insight. When this gets framed as a character issue, attention is quietly shifted away from the systems that make accommodation necessary in the first place.

This is a familiar move. It’s how neoliberal logic operates: turn structural pressure into personal failure, then offer self-improvement as the cure. You, alone, are responsible. Boundaries become another metric you’re failing. Self-care becomes another product to buy. Authenticity becomes another standard you can’t quite reach.

Yoga gets folded into this story too, stripped of context and reduced to a tool for individual optimisation. Yoga has never ignored power - for good and bad.

The Bhagavad Gita doesn’t begin with a lesson on boundary-setting. It opens on a battlefield, with duty, fear, grief, and impossible choices all present at once. Arjuna’s crisis isn’t that he doesn’t know what he wants. It’s that every option carries loss.

The text emerges from a society organised by hierarchy, where duty was determined by birth, where some people’s choices were structurally constrained by others’ power, where accommodation, or lack thereof, was built into the social order. It observes that not everyone has the same room to move.

Viveka, then, isn’t about choosing the ideal option. It’s about discernment within the conditions that actually exist, seeing clearly what’s possible and responding accordingly, because every choice contains a compromise.

Not everyone can say no to a boss, a landlord, an immigration official, or a family member they depend on. When someone working two jobs can’t “prioritise themselves” they aren’t broken. They’re navigating a system designed to extract as much as it can from them. And it’s worth saying this clearly: collective care is not people-pleasing.

In many communities, survival has never been individual. A grandmother cooking for everyone. A neighbour watching children. A friend covering a shift so someone else can rest. These are not signs of dysfunction. They are expressions of interdependence, a value yoga has always recognised, even if modern wellness culture struggles with it.

Yoga is not about becoming a perfectly bounded individual. It’s about learning how to regulate, respond, and act wisely in relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the world we actually inhabit.

Yes, boundaries matter. Absolutely. Old customs clash with new ideals and that takes courage to speak up, act differently and practice patience, balance matters too. But balance, in yoga, isn’t moral purity. It’s the ongoing practice of finding enough steadiness to stay upright and enough softness to remain human, within conditions we didn’t choose. When faced with constraints placed upon us from others.

Shaming people for survival strategies while ignoring power structures isn’t healing. It’s just individual blame dressed up in therapeutic language, a very perpetuation of the harms that divide us.

A more honest enquiry isn’t “Why can’t you set better boundaries?” It’s “What makes it unsafe for some people to set them at all?”

If yoga has something useful to offer right now, it’s not another instruction to fix ourselves. It’s a way of seeing clearly, being mindful of viveka, so we can tell the difference between where we have choice and where we are constrained.

Until conditions change, many people will continue to accommodate, adapt, soften, and stretch not because they are lying to themselves but because they are responding intelligently to the world as it is right now.

Yoga begins there: with discernment, not judgment; revealing truth.

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We’ve inherited ways of thinking about ourselves that treat the mind and body as fundamentally different. Science teaches us to see the body as a machine of interlocking systems. Philosophy has long elevated the thinking mind above the feeling flesh. Together, these frameworks create a kind of disembodiment: a curious distance from our own sensations, even though we’ve never actually experienced a moment outside our bodies.

When body becomes machine

Modern science has given us extraordinary gifts by breaking the body into understandable parts. The heart is a pump, the brain a processor, nerves like electrical wiring. This mechanistic view traces back to Descartes in the 17th century, who split reality into mind (the thinking thing) and matter (the extended thing governed by physical laws). Treating the body as a kind of machine allowed scientists to make lifesaving discoveries, understanding how the heart works as a mechanism led to treatments that save lives every day.

Something got lost in this useful abstraction. We began to objectify our own bodies. When you learn about “the nervous system” or hear that “hormones” are causing your feelings, it’s easy to feel like a passenger in a vehicle, separate from the very sensations coursing through you. The body becomes something to be examined, fixed, optimised, as opposed to the living seed of your experience.

Contemporary science often swings to the opposite extreme of classical dualism but ends up equally discombobulated. Instead of separating mind from body, we reduce mind to brain. “The brain does this, the brain decides that,” we say, as if we are essentially our brains with bodies attached as afterthoughts. Our inner life of feeling and meaning gets explained away as “nothing but neurons firing.” This is still trying to understand ourselves from only half of Descartes’ split, now the material half instead of the mental one.

The more we focus on mechanisms, the more our direct, felt experience recedes. We treat emotions as outputs of the nervous system rather than qualities of our whole self that act in a loop to drive a nervous response. But as William James observed, “a purely disembodied emotion is a nonentity.” Without the living body, feelings literally make no sense.

The long shadow of the split self

This tendency to separate the sensing body from the “real” self runs deep in Western thought. Plato’s philosopher achieves wisdom by rising above bodily desires. Descartes argued that the thinking mind is immaterial and can exist independently, “quite separate from and transcending the body” which matches what yoga philosophy discusses. If your body is other than your true self, of course you’ll distance yourself from bodily feelings or regard them with suspicion or even fear. This consideration of the mind and body as separate can leave us feeling fragmented, living in our “heads”, feeling like the thinking self is one thing and the warm, breathing, sensing body is something alien attached to us or vice versa.

Finding our way back

Despite these entrenched frameworks, our actual experience keeps insisting that mind and body are not really two. When you’re truly absorbed in dancing, gripped in reading, or even just walking on a crisp morning, where exactly is the split? The separation reveals itself as an artifact of analysis, not a feature of lived reality.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that “the body is the vehicle of being in the world”, the medium through which we perceive and engage with everything (very bhagavad gita). Does your mind float free? Every thought arises with a texture of sensation, a quality of breath, a subtle shift in posture. Your hunger, joy, or pain isn’t happening to a body-object you own. It’s happening as you.

Even science is coming around to this. The paradigm of embodied cognition emphasizes that abstract thinking is rooted in physical experience, the mind is a full-body phenomenon, not just cortical computation. Reasoning and emotion are inextricably intertwined. If you could somehow strip away the body from mental life, you wouldn’t get a clearer mind, you’d have no mind at all.

This is why practices that bring us back into the body, yoga, dance, mindfulness, or simply paying attention to breath, can feel so profound. They aren’t teaching us something new. They’re helping us recognise what was always true: the divide was false from the start.

Coming home

Therefore, frameworks of the nervous system and mind-body dualism served and serve important purposes. They advanced science and medicine in remarkable ways. But they also gave us an abstract picture of ourselves that leaves many of us estranged from our own sensations, living at a remove from the only life we actually have.

The irony is that we have only ever experienced life as whole embodied beings. Your thoughts exist through your body, not apart from it. Your identity is inseparable from the particular body you inhabit, the specific history written in your muscles and bones, the unique way you carry yourself through the world.

Becoming cognisant of the limits of the dualistic outlook opens the door to a more integrated understanding of ourselves, one where intellect and gut feeling, brain and viscera, “mind” and “matter” reunite into the living, breathing unity they’ve been all along. This isn’t just intellectual insight. It grounds us back in the immediacy of being alive and present in a body.

In a world that constantly pulls us into our heads or into virtual abstractions, reclaiming the wholeness of our embodied mind can be quietly radical. It’s an act of self-understanding, certainly. It’s also something simpler and more essential: paradoxically coming home to the only place we’ve ever actually been.

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The Yoga Sūtra does not diagnose noise: It diagnoses movement.

Vṛttis are not intrusive thoughts, nor are they distractions in the casual sense. They are the mind’s fundamental activity: the way experience is organised, stabilised, and made intelligible around a centre that feels like “me.”

Even the most refined vṛtti (correct perception) is still a movement. Still a way of saying this is what is happening, and this is who I am in relation to it. Yoga is not interested in erasing that process. It is interested in what happens when the process is no longer mistaken for the seer itself. It challenges a logical error equating the content of a thought with you.

Occasionally, in practice, something subtle occurs. The mind does not stop. Experience does not disappear. But the familiar grip, the emotional entanglement caused by the thought, the sense that experience must be held together, interpreted, or claimed, just, loosens. When that happens, the body often responds too.

Modern affective science has a name for this response. An emotion I didn’t know had a name until I read the work of Alan Fiske this week. That emotion is called kama muta (sanskrit for “moved by love”). It refers to an emotional state characterised by warmth, tears, or a softening in the chest, arising when perceived separateness gives way to felt connection. Something we talk around in our Yoga philosophy study group. The term seems foreign but the phenomenon precise. It describes what it feels like when relationality, that is the sense of belonging, becomes perceptible to you. Unlike emotions organised around appraisal, desire, or threat, kama muta does not centre the self as an agent or object. Instead, it arises when habitual patterns of self-referential sense-making momentarily relax.

In affective science, kama muta is specifically the emotion that arises when communal connection suddenly intensifies, not conceptually but somatically. In other words, it’s a felt sense not constructed in the thoughts alone. The self doesn’t disappear; it is held. And that is why it feels warm rather than empty, moving rather than neutral. It’s prickling.

Through a yogic lens, this maps not to dissociation or depersonalisation, but to a momentary easing of the sense of separateness that vṛttis normally maintain. The result is not absence, but relation. Experience continues without being immediately stabilised around identity, memory, or interpretation from the past. It’s where the small ‘s’ self and the big ‘S’ Self briefly meet.

What interests me is not that yoga often produces this feeling. It is that yoga philosophy has always described the conditions under which it becomes possible to keep reminding ourselves of that sense of belonging that seems to be slipping through our fingers more often these days.

To understand why this 'moved by love' feeling is so rare, we have to look at how the vṛttis normally operate.

In the Sūtra, vṛttis are divided into five categories: perception, misperception, imagination, sleep, and memory. These are usually taught as types of thought, but they are better understood as modes of sense-making. Each one stabilises reality in a particular way. Each one reinforces continuity, coherence, and identity.

None of them are pathological. The problem is not that the mind moves, but that it forgets it is moving.

When vṛttis dominate experience without being recognised as vṛttis, the self feels solid, separate, and effortful. Experience becomes something to manage. Meaning must be maintained. Continuity must be defended.

Yoga names this error avidyā, not ignorance, but mis-seeing. Taking movement to be essence. Taking organisation to be identity.

What is rarely discussed is what it feels like when that mis-seeing momentarily weakens.

This is where kama muta becomes really intriguing. Psychologically, kama muta arises when narrative drops away. There is no story being told, no memory being consulted, no projection being run. The mind does not disappear, but it stops insisting. Experience is no longer organised around self-reference.

From a yogic perspective, this is not transcendence. Nor is it liberation. It is simply a moment in which the vṛttis are present but not sovereign.

The Yoga Sūtra describes this as draṣṭuḥ svarūpe avasthānam, the seer resting in its own true nature. That phrase is often treated as an abstract ideal, but in lived experience it is often registered somatically before it is understood conceptually. For example, you feel the muscles of the body soften because it is no longer doing the work of holding the whole self together.

This is why these moments are often accompanied by tears, and why those tears do not always belong to a sad narrative. They are not catharsis or release but sometimes a marker of de-effort. Relief.

Vṛttis require energy. They stabilise, interpret, and maintain coherence. When that effort eases, even slightly, the system responds. Not with drama, but with relief.

Wellness culture tends to immediately appropriate these moments. It asks what has been healed, what memory has been touched, what breakthrough has occurred. Yoga philosophy would say that this misses the point entirely. The moment is not about personal meaning. It is about the temporary failure of the structure that insists there must be a personal centre at all. This is why the feeling fades without residue, why it cannot be integrated and usually shows up as a surprise. Trying to reproduce it results in a category error.

Yoga is less about accumulating states and more about loosening identification.

The mind does not need to be silenced, only recognised in its true nature.

When that recognition lands deeply enough, even briefly, the familiar architecture of experience relaxes. What arises in its place is a momentary contentedness.

Psychology calls that kama muta.
Yoga would say the vṛttis briefly took a back seat for just long enough to show that suffering is not inherent in experience itself, but in the compulsion to organise experience around a defended sense of yourself.

For a moment, you get the briefest glimpse of who you are when nothing needs to be held together.

If this stirred something in you, you might enjoy exploring how it feels in the body, not just the mind. Breath is one of the simplest ways we meet connection and calm.

That’s what The Quiet Science of Breathing is about simple, practical pranayama to help you feel more at home with your breath, and with yourself.

Explore your Breath

The nasal cycle is not obscure, controversial, or new. But it’s still a surprise to come across such an omission. It tells us something about how breath has been taught, and how we can be using discernment to improve our teaching skills.

Throughout the day and night, airflow naturally alternates its bias between the left and right nostrils. At any given moment, one side allows slightly more airflow while the other is relatively more restricted. This alternation is not congestion, imbalance, or dysfunction. It is a normal autonomically regulated process known as the nasal cycle. It continues whether we are awake or asleep, attentive or distracted, trying to regulate our breath or doing nothing at all.

Many (all I’ve ever come across) approaches to breathwork and pranayama implicitly assume that symmetry or measured asymmetry is the goal. Evenness becomes correctness. Variation is quietly framed as something to resolve if it can’t be controlled. When the breath doesn’t behave as expected, we often reach for technique to right it.

So how did something so fundamental as a natural, well observed, breath phenomenon like the nasal cycle go largely unmentioned for so long?

I don’t think this is a failure of attention so much as a matter of inheritance. Yoga was never intended to be a physiological science in the modern sense. It was transmitted through observation, lived experience, metaphor and practice. That is what gives it depth. But when yoga entered contemporary teaching frameworks, interpretation often took the place of mechanism. Symbolic explanations filled the gap where basic physiology was never introduced.

At the same time, modern breathwork culture has leaned heavily toward agency. We are encouraged to activate, regulate, optimise, and shift our internal state. The nasal cycle offers no such promise. It does not respond to effort. It does not reward intervention. It simply demonstrates, again and again, that the body is already regulating itself in subtle, gently biased ways.

Yoga, as described in its philosophical records, absolutely stands up to scientific scrutiny. Physiology and yoga philosophy meet more cleanly than we might expect. At its core, yoga is not only about control, but as a means for oneself to bring about seeing clearly. Avidyā, or mis-seeing, is described as the root of suffering. Vidyā, or clear seeing, is the beginning of freedom. The nasal cycle shows us how the nervous system already alternates between states of emphasis and rest. Airflow shifts from one nostril to the other throughout the day without conscious input. Alternate nostril breathing mirrors this natural pattern, offering a simple way to engage with the body’s existing regulatory rhythm rather than forcing change.

Understanding this physiology does not diminish yoga. It grounds it. It returns philosophical insight to the body, where it becomes lived rather than conceptual. This indicates what an astute observation of the human condition yoga is.

This has practical implications for how breathwork and pranayama are introduced. Most of us have had the experience of trying to breathe through one nostril when it feels almost impossible because it’s blocked, uncomfortable, or oddly distressing. Without an understanding of what’s normal in the respiratory system, it’s easy to assume something is going wrong. In teaching contexts, that uncertainty can quietly translate into more instruction, more cueing, more attempts to correct. For beginners, especially, this can create the impression that their breath is a problem before they’ve had any chance to understand it.

The nasal cycle quietly undermines that assumption. It reminds us that not every asymmetry is a problem, and not every sensation calls for intervention. Regulation often precedes instruction. What we teach in yoga can be an invitation to infer our own body’s innate messaging. A wiser teacher is not the one with the most techniques, but the one who knows when to step back and allow the system to do what it already knows how to do with any of the techniques.

This insight has shaped how I now teach breath. Rather than beginning with techniques, I start with orientation: how breathing actually works, what variation looks like, and how the nervous system already regulates itself long before we intervene. When people understand the physiology, they stop trying to force calm. They become less anxious about “doing it right”. The breath becomes something they can meet and use to support, rather than another thing to manage.

That orientation is the foundation of my science-based breathwork for beginners curriculum. Not because beginners need less depth, but because they need more clarity. When people are given a clear, grounded understanding of breathing, they practice with more confidence and less effort. They also tend to stay with the work longer, because it feels supportive rather than corrective.

This is why the nasal cycle still matters in practice. Not because it gives us a way to control the breath, but because it offers information that informs our practice. It can be felt directly, without complex interpretation. It provides a non-cognitive feedback loop, something we can notice without analysing or narrating. Most importantly, it allows us to observe regulation already happening, before we attempt to influence it.

From a scientific perspective, that is entirely sufficient.

Most people do not need more breath techniques. They need reassurance that their body is not broken. They need permission to stop forcing calm. They need a basic understanding of how breathing already works. When that understanding is in place, techniques land more gently, and often work better precisely because they are no longer being used to fix something.

This is the quiet promise of teaching the science of breathing alongside practice. It doesn’t replace yoga. It supports it. It makes teachers more discerning, students more at ease, and the breath less of a battleground.

That isn’t a hack. It’s discernment. To me, feels very much in the spirit of yoga.

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If you’re curious to explore breathwork in a way that accounts for this variability rather than trying to override it, I’ve put together 21 Days of Pranayama as a simple, supportive entry point. It’s designed to build respiratory literacy gently, so practices like alternate nostril breathing make sense in the body before they’re asked to “work.” Short daily practices, clear explanations, and no pressure to perform or get it right.

→ Join 21 Days of Pranayama here:

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Classical yoga philosophy is far less interested in outcomes than in misperception. A practice may produce ease while simultaneously reinforcing the very distortions that yoga is meant to undo. This is why the same practice can be either skillful or harmful, not in a moral sense, rather a structural one.

The concept that helps us make sense of this is upāya.

Although the term itself is most fully developed in Buddhist philosophy, its logic runs throughout the Yoga Sūtra. Patañjali does not offer a single privileged method. He offers a range of interventions like breath, devotion, inquiry, sensory withdrawal, concentration and explicitly acknowledging that minds are afflicted in different ways. Practices are prescribed not because they are true, but because they are useful in particular conditions.

Usefulness, however, is contextual. This is where the kośa model becomes critical.

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The Kośas: Where Experience Is Organised

The pañca-kośa model describes five simultaneous fields through which experience is structured:

• Annamaya – the material body

• Prāṇamaya – physiological and energetic regulation

• Manomaya – emotion, reactivity, sense-making

• Vijñānamaya – belief, identity, interpretation

• Ānandamaya – baseline affective tone and coherence

The kośas are not levels to be transcended. They are domains in which suffering can organise itself. A practice may stabilise one kośa while intensifying fixation in another. Regulation at one layer does not guarantee clarity at the next.

A breathing practice, for example, may improve physiological resilience while quietly strengthening cognitive control or self-monitoring. Stillness may soothe emotional reactivity while reinforcing avoidance framed as insight.

Nothing about the technique determines this. The determining factor is how mental activity—vṛttis—is operating within and across these layers.

Vṛttis: How Experience Becomes Afflicted

The Yoga Sūtra places vṛttis at the centre of the problem:

vṛttayaḥ pañcatayyaḥ kliṣṭākliṣṭāḥ (YS I.5)

Mental modifications are of five kinds and may be afflicted or unafflicted.

The crucial point is not the type of mental activity, but whether it obscures or reveals reality. Even correct understanding (pramāṇa) can be afflicted if it reinforces identification, control, or spiritual superiority.

This is why calm is not a reliable indicator of freedom.

Kośas vs. Vṛttis

These frameworks answer different questions:

They are not interchangeable maps. A person may display a settled nervous system and refined emotional regulation while remaining deeply entangled in afflicted beliefs, narratives, or identities. From the outside, the practice “works.” From the perspective of yoga, the problem has simply moved.

Where Upāya Actually Lives

Upāya operates in the relationship between kośas and vṛttis.

A practice is skillful when it addresses the dominant layer of suffering without reinforcing distorted cognition elsewhere. A practice becomes unskillful when it stabilises comfort at the cost of clarity.

This reframes the role of the teacher. Teaching is not the delivery of universally effective techniques. It is the capacity to perceive where suffering is organising itself and to intervene without strengthening the wrong form of control.

It also reframes the practitioner’s responsibility. If a practice becomes something you must defend, repeat compulsively, or identify with, it has ceased to function as upāya. The means has replaced the end.

Yoga isn’t all about perfecting techniques. It was about learning to recognise when the mind uses even wisdom as a defence.

The most skillful practice, in the end, may be knowing when to change it or when to stop.

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In order to make sense of the world science became my sanctuary. Amidst a backdrop that was often chaotic and noisy, inspection of the human body offered something of a “simple” framework. I found a profound sense of comfort in the idea that if I could just understand the levers and the force vectors, I could solve the puzzle of human suffering. It felt like I could hold on to a map as a means of wayfinding in a storm.

And in many ways, this is Yoga Philosophy 101. We stumble onto a mat seeking, either looking for, or accidentally finding answers. At a minimum to explore the questions that pop up from our subconscious every now and then. We are pacified by the rules we find there, a sequence to follow, an alignment to master, a “right” way to breathe and all will be revealed. Either deliberately or by accident we allow ourselves to be soothed by such a simple framework that promises that if we do X, then Y will follow. We think our nervous systems enjoy the certainty of the blueprint.

The Container and the System

Over the last few years as I’ve progressed through my PhD research (and so far beyond), my relationship with that “simple” framework fractured, in fact, it shattered and following diagnosis, can never be pinned back together.

In the study of complex systems, I’ve learned something humbling: you cannot satisfactorily understand the part without looking at the system it is contained within. A gear is just a piece of metal until it is placed inside a clock; a femur is just a bone until it is part of a person walking through a gale on a windswept coast.

The framework is never the whole story. It is merely a crude sketch of the territory.

This is where yoga philosophy in the shape of the Bhagavad Gita has become an unlikely practical manual for movement. In the Gita, we are introduced to the concept of kṣetra (the field) and kṣetrajna (the knower of the field).

For years, I focused entirely on the kṣetra, the physical field of the body, the biomechanics, the “apparatus.” I thought that if I could just optimise this field, the person would be fine. My research into complex systems has taught me that the field is constantly being influenced by the “system” it lives in: the nervous system, the history of trauma, the environment, financial circumstances and the spirit of the “knower” inhabiting it (which is where I think the transformative gains of yoga reside).

From Biomechanics to Person-Centered Presence

Moving toward a person-centered approach was the moment I stopped trying to force the person to fit the framework and started looking at the system as a whole.

This has shaped my work, this evolution is reflected in how I’ve split our focus:

• Strength is our study of the framework. We can use movement or asana to respect the “architecture” of the body. Hold it loosely and create a structure, like waylines on the map, that lead the nervous system to the required state (up, down, or sideways).

• Resilience is our study of the system. Through practices like philosophical study, Yoga Nidra and Restorative Yoga, we may address the “knower” of the field. We work on our Saṃskāra the nervous system is approachable, giving rise to the state of mental clarity required to navigate the complexity of just being alive.

The Geometry of Being

I used to think that being a good teacher meant having all the answers, knowing exactly which muscle was “off” and how to click it back into place. Now, I realise that true science (and true yoga) is about having the courage to stay in the “unresolved moments”. Our minds, our creativity are our common apparatus of enquiry and we have no idea what they are crafted from.

It is the recognition that while biomechanics was a means of making sense of the geometry of your spine, only a person-centered approach can tell me about the weight you are carrying on your shoulders. Only intuition and experience can test the biometric hypothesis.

This Sunday, as you move or rest, I invite you to look past the “blueprint” of what you think your body should be doing. Instead, notice the system you are contained within. You are not a machine to be fixed; you are a complex, beautiful system to be understood.

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From an evolutionary perspective, this is entirely logical. The human mind evolved to scan for threat, anticipate danger, and monitor social belonging. Problem solving and horizon scanning, are our raison d’etre. Our brain is exceptionally good at problem-finding, future-projecting and self-surveillance. These capacities kept us alive. They were never designed to make us calm, content, or perpetually at ease.

Freud’s theories are bourne of this same recognition. The mind is not a neutral instrument; it is a history-bearing system. Early experiences, relational dynamics and unresolved conflicts leave traces that continue to organise perception long after the original conditions have disappeared. Much of what shapes our adult lives operates outside conscious awareness. What once served a protective function at in modern times often appears pathological.

Yoga philosophy has had language for this for thousands of years.

It calls these traces samskaras: latent impressions formed through repeated experience (in this lifetime of previous). Samskaras are not thoughts we think; they are tendencies we live from. They shape what we notice, what we avoid, and how we interpret experience before conscious choice enters the picture.

In this sense, Freud’s theory of psychodynamics and yoga are not offering competing explanations. They are describing the same patterned mind from different epistemological traditions. These patterns are Samskaras, which either bring ease or create suffering.

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Vrittis: what the mind actually does

The Yoga Sutras open not with a promise of peace, but with a description of mental activity. In Sutra I.5–I.11, Patanjali lays out the vrittis, the movements or fluctuations of the mind. Crucially, these include both accurate and inaccurate forms of cognition:

• Pramana – correct perception

• Viparyaya – misperception

• Vikalpa – imagination or conceptual overlay

• Nidra – sleep

• Smriti – memory

This matters more than it is usually given credit for. Yoga does not divide the mind into “good” thoughts and “bad” thoughts, nor does it suggest that misperception is a moral failure. Misperception is simply something the mind does: Ergo, we should expect it rather than attempt to avoid it.

Viparyaya, seeing things inaccurately, is not an error to be eliminated; it is a recognised mode of cognition. The problem is not that the mind fluctuates, but that we are unaware of how it fluctuates and mistake those fluctuations for reality itself.

Psychodynamic theory would call this unconscious process. Yoga calls it misidentification.

From survival patterns to internal policing

Culturally, we do lots potentially to make this worse. We are taught, and pass along these ideas memetically, that certain thoughts and emotions are unacceptable, unproductive, are dangerous. Anger? It must be managed. Grief? Should be processed efficiently and in private Doubt? Shame? These are framed as weaknesses. Fear is always to be succumbed to or something to overcome.

Psychodynamic theory describes this as the development of defences: unconscious strategies that protect the self from anxiety or threat. Yoga would say that aversion itself becomes a samskara, aka a learned reflex to turn away from particular forms of experience.

When difficult thoughts arise, we assume something has gone wrong. In reality, the mind is doing exactly what it has been conditioned to do.

Why yoga gets sold as “calming the mind”

This is where modern yoga often goes astray. Yoga is frequently marketed as a way to “quiet,” “still,” or “calm” the mind (which it absolutely can). While calm may arise as a byproduct of practice, it is not the aim described in the Yoga Sutras. The goal is not the absence of vrittis, but freedom from unconscious identification with them.

Sutra I.2—yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ—is routinely mistranslated as “yoga is stopping the mind”. A more precise reading points to cessation of identification, rather than an abrupt or forced suppression. Nirodha is relational, not coercive.

When yoga is sold as mental control, it reinforces the very fear it claims to resolve. Overtime this message reinforces the idea to students that a busy mind means they are doing it wrong. That anxiety during stillness in class is a failure. That intrusive thoughts are obstacles rather than objects of understanding of the nature of our own samskaras.

This turns yoga into another performance metric, another form of internal self-policing.

Wellness culture and the fear of inner life

Wellness culture amplifies this misunderstanding. It privileges clarity, positivity and emotional regulation (love and light Madeleine). This discussion about pummeling our chattering brain into submission quietly pathologises ambiguity, restlessness and doubt. A wandering mind is framed as dysregulation and difficult or persistent emotions as something to be fixed.

Silence and stillness therefore become threats. When external stimulation drops away, internal movement becomes visible and without a framework for understanding it, that visibility is alarming. Terrifyingly unusual. When combined with the other issues marketed as problems we enter into survival mode… Our yoga practice that’s meant to undo those deep grooves unwittingly reactivates those samskaras. The problem is not the content of the mind, but the absence of a relationship to it.

Yoga as a method of knowing the mind

From a yogic perspective, the fear is not of the mind itself, but of unmediated identification with experience. Yoga does not ask the mind to be obedient, positive, or permanently calm. It asks that the mind, more importantly the minds patterns or tendencies, to be known.

This is where yoga and psychology often collide, both are technologies of insight. Both seek to bring unconscious patterns into awareness not to erase them, but to loosen their grip on our everyday.

Yoga uses embodied attention to reveal how perception is shaped. No promises of purity, transcendence. Just a promise understanding and to clear the blockage so we can move forward.

From verdict to process

We are afraid of our minds because we have been taught to treat mental activity as a verdict on who we are, our whole identity, rather than as a process unfolding within conditions.

Yoga Sutra I.5–I.11 quietly dismantles this fear by normalising mental fluctuation, including misperception. Nothing has gone wrong when the mind wanders, worries, or imagines. The work is simply to notice, then choose.

When thoughts are no longer treated as truths, intentions, or identities, something shifts. Fear gives way to curiosity. Curiosity gives way to discernment.

And over time, discernment becomes trust—not in the mind as a perfect instrument, but in our capacity to relate to it wisely.

That is not calm.

It is freedom.

Come and meet your samskaras

I teach a monthly yoga nidra class, usually on the last Tuesday of every month. Feel free to check it out here (link available if you can’t make it live). Paid subscribers get the practices directly in Substack.

We live in a culture obsessed with personal optimisation. There’s always something. Always areas of ourselves that need improving. Ways of shutting up that stupid mind, honing the body, developing a brand, oh and the nervous system should be bloody nervous... We treat ourselves like reno-projects. We are followed with the little red bubble, we are an overwhelmed OS desperate for that bug-fix, only to be edited and refined in the next quarter. Beneath all of that work sits a mostly unexamined assumption:

that there is a solid, coherent “me” in there somewhere and it’s my job to fix it.

What if the “me” we’re fixing isn’t the sort of thing that can be fixed at all?
What if it’s not the sort of thing that even exists in the way we imagine?

This is where David Hume, of all people, wanders unexpectedly into yoga philosophy, a Scottish empiricist meeting the battlefield wisdom of the Gita. The conversation between them is surprisingly tender. Afterall, the self is our true frame of enquiry.

The Self you can’t seem to find

Hume’s famous insight is simple:

When I look inside myself, I never find “me”.
I find only a fast-moving stream of perceptions.

No permanent centre to be revealed, no hidden core. Just a jumble of sensations, thoughts, moods, preferences that arise, shifting and dissolve.

Hume’s conclusion, in modern language: there is no “you” to be fixed, because there is no fixed you. While it seems at first glance a little nihilistic, it’s more phenomenological. It isn’t that the self is meaningless, only that it isn’t the kind of stable object we imagine it to be. Hume is simply reporting what he finds when he pays attention and not attempting to define something absolute.

This is what is striking to me about philosophy, despite trends, hustle culture, strangely, this eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher sits closer to the yoga tradition than most wellness influencers ever do.

The Gita’s two S(s)elves: One changing, one not

The Bhagavad Gita approaches identity from a different cosmology, but it offers a distinction that makes Hume’s insight even more illuminating:

1. The small-s self

The personality, the moods, the habits, the “field” of your psychological life. The personality, the moods, the habits, this “field” (or kṣetra) includes your automatic reactions when you’re stressed, the thoughts that loop at 3 a.m. and the emotional weather systems that rolls om in without asking permission. Importantly it’s subject to change, distortion. It’s reactive to life’s proverbial weather.

This self is, like Hume’s bundle, more a process than an absolute thing.

2. The capital-S Self (Ātman)

This part is Unchanging, Unaffected. The witness behind all experience. Never something you build but something you remember or reveal.

Krishna describes this Self with a kind of serene confidence:

“Weapons do not cut it, fire does not burn it… It is eternal.”

The self you’re anxious to improve is not the Self that suffers in the first place.

Here is where Yoga and Hume converge: the everyday psychological self is unstable.
Yoga implores us to make peace with this observation by contributing that, instability is not a problem because it’s not who you truly are anyway.

The Modern Fix-Me Project

Yet we often take the instability of the self as evidence that something is wrong. In fact, many of us, wittingly or unwittingly, go to yoga practices today to fix that big hole we feel in ourselves. Whether we are looking for abs or deeper meaning. WE have trouble accepting that we are inconsistent, incongruent, indecisive, unstable and fallible. In the self-help world, these fluctuations are moral failings, that promise of being or doing better without considering the wider field, sells books, products and front row seats at self-help conferences. If we don’t attempt or acknowledge a will to repair theses perceived flaws, it’s evidence of insufficient discipline or insufficient enlightenment.

But if Hume is right, and the Gita agrees that the fluctuations aren’t dysfunction but the nature of the small self. Trying to stabilise it is like trying to freeze a river mid-flow. No wonder you feel exhausted. You’re doing metaphysical DIY on a house that was never built to stand still.

What the Gita offers that Hume leaves open

Hume leaves us with a dissolving self and not much else, a useful correction to ego, but existentially (and practically) thin.

The Gita offers the missing piece:

If the small self is always changing, who is the one noticing the change?

That witnessing awareness, the other who sees the moods rise, the thoughts tumble, the frustration peak, the tenderness return, that is the capital-S Self.

Not a personality.
Not an identity.
Not something that can be wounded, optimised, abandoned, or redeemed.
Just the quiet centre that has been here the whole time.

Where Hume subtracts, the Gita clarifies.

Where Hume dissolves, the Gita differentiates via acknowledgment.

Where Hume says “there is no stable self,” the Gita says that stability is very much present in the part of you that’s not meant to be stable.

What does this mean for those of us trying to live Well?

It means your difficult emotions aren’t evidence you’re failing. They’re evidence you’re attempting to live. That those parts of you that feels messy, contradictory, overwhelmed, or unfinished was never destined to be a unified masterpiece. Just a unique sort of masterpiece in the making.

Accept the invitation to relief, you can stop trying to fix the parts of you that were never broken just passing part of the process.

This is the quiet compassion at the heart of the Gita and it sits beautifully beside Hume’s empiricism: both insist that when we stop insisting on a perfect, coherent I, something that more accurately describes that emerges.

It turns out the door opens the other way.

It’s no wonder we end up thinking in absolutes at this time of year.
Too much. Not enough.
On the rails. Off the rails.
Aligned; then a fallen from grace (we can but hope the fall is not infront of work colleagues at the Christmas do).

What I have been musing on as I study Yoga philosophy, is that they have never been fond of such binaries. Yoga seems to understands the appeal of absolutes. They make life feel simpler, neater, easier to measure and safer somehow. However, the deeper layers of Yoga’s teachings ask us to stay with the complexity of being a layered human rather than forcing ourselves into rigid classifications.

I realised this again, in the most unpoetic setting imaginable: the pub Christmas gathering, too much dinner sitting heavily in my stomach, conversation ricocheting around me, that peculiar mix of overstimulation and fatigue setting in. On top of that the Christmas jumper is scratchy and smells attic musty. I wasn’t having a spiritual moment. I wasn’t glowing with yogic insight. I was just… human. Slightly overwhelmed, slightly overfed and slightly amused by it all.

In these plain moments, yoga lets us see something deeper. I could feel the different layers of myself, the koshas, operating at completely different speeds. My physical body was tired, my energy scattered, my mind flicking from thought to thought, my deeper knowing quietly whispering that none of this chaos was a problem. I hate it here (thanks Lily). Also a sense of bliss in the mundane, a joy at just sort of participating. Letting the discomfort step aside, to let the more human states take the stage.

The koshas aren’t much about harmony, I’m unconvinced they can be aligned. Perhaps they are closer to descriptions, a label for what appears from our inner domains however fragmented. To me knowledge is enlightenment in a sense and being able to label something that was previously elusive seems to fit that bill. Koshas also don’t assign morality to either state. A December night out is just as legitimate a moment of being as a perfectly composed half-lotused meditation practice. The layers move, collide, drift apart, reconvene. That is their nature. That is your nature.

Really what seems more common is that we’ve been taught to make meaning out of this misalignment. Modern wellness turns spiritual life into munroes to be bagged, with pictures from the summits primed for review. Did you stay mindful at the buffet table? Did you drink less this year? Did you keep your practice consistent in the midst of social chaos? These questions are designed to flatten us, so a product in January can pick up the pieces.

The koshas ask something far more interesting and far more merciful:
What is the state of your whole system right now? Can you perceive it?

The typical December has us answering with something like: overstimulated, delighted, exhausted, craving connection, craving silence, tender, chaotic, fulfilled — all at once. Which simply means the system is alive and responding to life exactly as it unfolds.

Yoga during the festives, however you like it, candlelit, in a book, covered in blankets or arrived at via yoga nidra should act as an anchor, not as ballast or a coordinate correction. It doesn’t arrive to purify your December choices or drag you back into virtue. It just gathers the scattered parts of you into one soft place for a while, quite simply to hold.

In a season built on contradictions, Yoga is a small reminder that consciousness itself is not binary. We are not either awake or asleep, disciplined or indulgent, aligned or off track. We are porous beings moving through gradients of experience, often all in the same afternoon. Sometimes through the power of thought alone.

Perhaps that’s why December is such an unexpectedly honest spiritual teacher. It refuses to let us pretend we’re single-layered. It shows the clash between our energy, our intellect, our hunger, our fatigue, our longing for connection, our longing for quiet. It makes us visible to ourselves. It reveals how deeply paradoxical an experience it is to be human.

I suggest letting yourself loose a little in December, letting the fullness of life spill over its edges just a smidge. This isn’t the opposite of practice, maybe it is practice. Maybe it’s the month that reveals the shape of your humanity more clearly than any well-behaved routine.

Absolutes shrink us. Let the koshas widen the frame again.

December, in all its excess and contradiction, might be the one time of year when the layers speak plainly enough that we’re finally willing to listen.

”Find your edge. Lean into your edge. Stay with your edge.”

Edges have become the place where we’re supposed to meet ourselves. Yin yoga, the edgiest of practices is having a renaissance. So I’ve been thinking: can edges only make sense if we stay connected to the centre?

Without a core, the edge is just exposure. An event horizon of that black hole inside ourselves that we can never fill.

This is true in practice, in philosophy, in the nervous system and, as I learned over the years of my PhD, features in systems of any kind.

When Your Life’s Work Becomes an Edge Case

During my PhD, I spent years studying islands, places that academics often describe as peripheral, remote, “edge cases”. You hear it in the language: the margins, the periphery, the fringe, leading from the bleeding edge.

From living on an island, I knew that view was wrong, even though its all pervasive. The island isn’t marginal, to all, for some of us it’s central. For me, and many others, it’s the core of our life, our work. The island shapes our entire orientation. How we think, and how we feel, and how we do.

During my studies, I realised I had drifted toward the academic edge, caught in theory, performance, expectations, exploring the external gaze of academia, while the real centre was always the lived texture of island life itself.

Islands taught me something yoga had been whispering for years: you can only understand the edge when you’re anchored in the centre.

When you aren’t anchored, even the smallest swell feels like a storm.

The Seduction of the Edge

Edges are seductive, dramatic. They promise transformation.
They carry a certain aesthetic, heroism, particularly in wellness culture.

However, edges are also unstable. They move with weather, emotion, expectation,and context. They can’t easily be traced. In complexity science, an edge is where emergence happens but it’s also where collapse happens. A system with no centre of gravity can’t learn from the edge. It can only react to it. Humans aren’t any different.

This is where my “meta-with-one-T” brain always kicks in, the gestalt part of me that sees the pattern of the pattern. When everything in life feels sharp and demanding, it’s almost always a sign that I’m looking at the edges of things rather than the shape of the whole. The shape of the whole is always intricately linked with the shape of the centre.

Dharma: Yoga’s Word for Centre

In yoga philosophy, we sometimes talk about dharma as a kind of inner orientation. It’s the quiet compass that keeps us from drifting too far from ourselves.

People often translate dharma as “purpose,” but that’s too linear, too modern.
Dharma is not destiny.
It’s not productivity with a Sanskrit label.
It’s the steady principle inside you that everything else can organise around.

It is the inner island.

When dharma is forgotten, edges become threatening.
When dharma is remembered, edges become teachers.

Working at the edge isn’t inherently good or bad but surely it can only really be meaningful in relationship to the centre from which it stretches.

Gestalt Thinking: You Need the Whole to Understand the Parts

Gestalt, put simply, is the idea that we understand things as whole patterns before we understand their individual pieces. It’s a way of seeing that asks: what’s the larger shape here? What’s the organising story underneath the details? Gestalt is where we see things as wholes before we ever notice the parts.

Often when life gets complex, there is a zooming in on the sharpest detail, the thing that feels most urgent, most intense, most demanding. The specialisms, the niches and the identities and subcategorization. Those are important, the sharpest of detail is rarely the only truth: just a bright edge.

I discuss in yoga all the time, that my idea of a truth is untouched by my attempts of observing it, but surely it must sit somewhere in the pattern beneath the pattern, the less often considered core from which everything else emerges.

When I say I think in a “meta-with-one-T” way, this is what I mean: I instinctively look for the organising centre, despite the loudest edge.

This is yoga. This is gestalt. This is systems thinking. And it’s also just… being human.

What would if feels like to return to the core

Returning to the centre is rarely dramatic. It’s subtle, almost unimpressive.

You don’t need to reinvent yourself (of course you can).
You simply stop abandoning yourself.

This is dharma in motion.

Edges are neither earned nor chased

We are obsessed with working at the edge but edges without a centre will always shake us loose. They are just lines, linear untruths, confuscated as we mistake the part for a whole story.

I’ve come to reason that yoga has been offering the fact that edges are not the point for some centuries. Edges are the place where the system speaks back to us. They are feedback, not foundations.

The centre is where we should aim to build from, it hosts our values and judgement where dharma sits. The centre is island, quiet, overlooked, steady, wild the weather around it becomes.

To work at the edge, you need a core that can hold.

And remembering that core might be the most important work we do.

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