Teaching a Lineage I Never Fact-Checked

I was standing in front of a room, mid-sentence, telling a group of students where the practice came from. Warm voice. Total confidence. The names, the lineage, the meaning of it all, delivered exactly the way it had been delivered to me. And somewhere in that sentence a small cold thought arrived and would not leave: I have no idea if any of this is true. I am repeating a thing I was handed. I have never once checked.

That is an uncomfortable admission for someone who teaches, so I’ll say it plainly. I had inherited my history secondhand. I trusted the person who gave it to me, and trust felt like enough. It was not. Trust is what you extend to a teacher. It is not what you extend to a claim.

The moment the story cracked

The crack came when I finally read the primary texts for myself instead of hearing them quoted at me. The Yoga Sutras are short. You can read them in an afternoon. And when I did, I found that a lot of what I’d been told they said simply wasn’t in there — it was commentary, or interpretation, or in a few cases pure invention laundered into the tradition until it wore the tradition’s clothes.

I wasn’t angry, exactly. I was embarrassed by how easy I’d been. I had taken a practice that is fundamentally about discernment — about seeing clearly, about not being fooled by your own mind — and practiced it for years without applying an ounce of discernment to its own history. I had been a good student and a lazy reader. Those are not the same person, and I’d confused them.

Why context is a defense, not a decoration

Here is what I understand now that I didn’t before. Context is the immune system. It is how you tell the tradition from the marketing, the philosophy from the dogma, the transmission from the sales funnel. And we have never lived in a moment that needed that immune system more.

Look at what’s on offer. Mood-not-practice apps that flatter you into opening them. One-size sequences sold as ancient secrets. Disposable PDFs. Feeds that learn which flattering version of the story keeps you scrolling and serve you exactly that. A guru economy that runs on keeping interpretation scarce — because if you could read the source yourself, what would you need the middleman for? All of it is slop: confident, well-lit, and shaped by what someone needs you to believe. You cannot decentralize what you do not understand. If you don’t know where the practice came from, someone will always be happy to tell you.

What I built, and why I built it this way

So I did the thing I’m forever telling students to do: I ran an audit. Not on my practice — on my values. What do I actually believe a practitioner is owed? The answer came back plain: the right to check the source yourself, without a guru holding the only key. Then came the uncomfortable second question — had I built anything that embodied that, or had I only ever said it? Saying it is free. Anyone can post that you deserve the primary texts. I wasn’t willing to only post it.

So I built Ashtanga Tech to be the opposite of the slop — real tools instead of a sales story — and Culture and Context is the humanities piece of it. It’s the thing I wish someone had handed me at the start. I could have written you an essay warning you that you’re being sold a myth; you’re reading part of one now. But the essay isn’t the answer. The course is. The building is the argument.

It’s short by design. Four sections: History, a Philosophy Introduction, the Yoga Sutras themselves, and one I simply called Real Ashtanga — because that’s the honest question under all of it: what is actually the tradition, and what is scaffolding somebody bolted on? It’s a companion, not the full canonical Humanities degree, and not a replacement for one. The point is to get you practitioner-deep — able to hold the source and reason from it — without a PhD, a pilgrimage, or a guru holding the only key. I designed it to run alongside the physical work, paired with Foundations of Advanced Practice, so your literacy and your body mature together instead of one lagging a decade behind the other. That was my own mistake: my body got advanced while my understanding stayed a beginner’s.

And it lives on a platform I own, not on rented land. That isn’t a technical footnote; it’s the whole argument made concrete. Your practice, your reading, your record of both — those sit in your garden, not Meta’s, not some app that can change the terms or vanish next year. I’m not going to preach self-authority and then host your understanding on infrastructure that answers to somebody else. The platform is the proof I practice what I teach.

Who this is for

This is for the practitioner who feels the pull to know, not just to do. Who has noticed the story they were told is a little too clean, a little too flattering to whoever told it. You’re not looking for another authority to obey. You’re trying to become the authority — the executive of your own practice, able to cite the thing instead of merely repeating it.

Picture a year from now. Someone quotes a sutra at you to win an argument, and instead of nodding along you know the passage, you know what it actually says, and you know where the paraphrase went sideways. That isn’t scholarship for its own sake. That is freedom. The alternative is another year reciting someone else’s clean story in a warm, confident voice, hoping it holds — which is exactly where I was standing when the cold thought arrived.

If that’s you — if you’d rather hold the primary source than the paraphrase — here is where it lives.

Know where the practice came from. After that, nobody gets to tell you what it means. That is the whole freedom I was after, and it started the day I stopped believing a story I’d never bothered to check.