Waiting to Be Given the Next Pose: Reclaiming Authority Over My Practice

There is a moment in a traditional shala that I can still feel in my chest. You are on your mat, breath steady, and you arrive at the edge of your practice — the next posture, the one you have not been “given” yet. And you stop. You wait. Somewhere across the room a teacher will, or will not, decide today is the day. For years I called that waiting humility. I told myself the discomfort was my ego being sanded down, that this was the tradition working as designed. Some of that was even true.

But I owe it to myself to name the rest accurately. I had handed the executive function of my own practice to another person, and quietly built my identity around whether that person approved of me. That is not humility. That is a power structure. And the more shalas I sat in, the more I watched the same architecture repeat: the charismatic center, the inner ring of the anointed, the low dread of falling out of favor, the way an honest question got reframed as spiritual immaturity.

The method was never the problem

Here is what I need you to hear, because it is the whole reason I still teach: the method is extraordinary. Breath tied to movement. A count that turns a room of strangers into a single organism. The vinyasa system — one of the most elegant pieces of movement engineering I have ever encountered — a practice that assesses you honestly, day after day, and reveals your body and mind to yourself over years. I would not trade it. I have given my adult life to it.

So I had to separate two things the culture had welded together. There is the method — a system you can learn to read and operate. And there is the scaffolding — the guru-centric, approval-based machinery that grew up around the method like ivy on a house. We assume the ivy holds the house up. It doesn’t. Pull it off and the structure stands — usually better, because now you can see the walls.

Cult isn’t an insult — it’s a diagnosis

I am careful with that word, because it gets thrown around to score points, and that is not what I am doing. When I say high-pressure group dynamics organized around a single unquestioned authority are, structurally, how cults operate, I mean it as a diagnosis. Scarcity of approval. In-group status. The fear of being cut off from the community and the practice in one stroke. These are levers, and they work on smart, sincere, devoted people — especially on them. Naming the levers is not a betrayal of the tradition. It is the only way to keep the tradition and keep yourself.

Because practice is systems literacy. Yoga is not a belief you adopt; it is a system you learn to read and operate. And you cannot operate a system you are afraid to examine. The moment a structure becomes exempt from your questions, it stops being a practice and starts being an authority. I don’t want authority over anyone. I want practitioners who don’t need one.

So I built it

Here is where most people expect a warm invitation to think for yourself. But I had run a values audit on myself, and it came back with an uncomfortable result: I could state what I believed about a practitioner’s authority in one honest paragraph — and I had never built anything that made it true. Talk is cheap. Decentralization that lives only in an essay is just one more thing you are asked to believe. So I stopped talking and built the infrastructure the value demanded.

I asked a plain engineer’s question: if a practitioner no longer waits for a teacher to hand them the next posture, what do they need instead? They need the count in their ears when no one is in the room to call it — so I recorded guided audio and timed, breath-by-breath count videos that hold the tempo the way a teacher would, on both sides, without the tempo holding power over you. They need to see their own practice over time instead of trusting someone else’s memory of it — so I built a Practice Recorder that logs week by week (?week=N), so the record is evidence you can read, not a story told about you. Assess, don’t guess. Now it has tools.

The part I care about most is the least visible: I built it on a platform I own, not one I rent. Your practice data lives in a garden with your name on the gate — not inside Meta’s ad machine, not trapped in a venture-funded app that will pivot or die or sell your attention back to you. I refused to move authority off one throne only to set it on another. The self-owned platform is not a feature. It is the receipt — the difference between a man who says he values your autonomy and a man who shipped the thing that hands it over.

What decentralized practice actually feels like

Decentralized Ashtanga is my attempt to hand the method back, clean. It does not ask you to renounce anything or to grow bitter about the teachers who shaped you — mine shaped me profoundly, and I hold real gratitude right alongside real clarity. The course walks through what decentralized practice even means, names the group dynamics plainly and without sensationalism, and spends most of its energy on the part that matters: concrete, high-impact moves for agency and autonomy. How to assess instead of wait. How to decide instead of defer. How to keep the parampara’s gifts without inheriting its chain of command.

Picture the after-state honestly. A month in, you open your mat and no part of you is scanning the room for permission. You call your own count. You read your own logged weeks and see, in evidence, what is getting stronger and what needs attention today. A year in, the practice is unmistakably yours — portable, examinable, owned. That is a different person than the one who waits. An operator. An owner. The executive of their own agency. That is who this is for.

If you have felt what I felt — the love of the practice tangled up with a low, persistent unease about the power around it — you are not disloyal, and you are not alone. You are paying attention. If that is you, here is where it lives: Decentralized Ashtanga. Come keep the method. Leave the throne.

— Michael