The AI Revolution Isn’t Taking Your Job. It’s Giving You Another One.
AI feels like empowerment, but it’s quietly turning us into our own accountants, lawyers, and help desks — unpaid.
A Decade of Practice, Almost No Data: Closing the Explanation Gap
I ran a values audit on my own practice and didn’t like the decade of obedience I couldn’t explain. So instead of writing a post about agency, I built the controls. This is that story — Agentic Ashtanga.
The Sticky Moment
Why the hardest part of Ashtanga isn’t a pose, but the quiet shift from following instructions to actually inhabiting the practice.
Paradise Is Just Having Enough
What if paradise isn’t abundance or success, but the quiet shock of realizing you only need a small, specific enough?
Time Capsule Treasure Hunt
In the summer of 1996, my cousins and I buried a time capsule in my parents’ backyard. My mother is the oldest of seven sisters. Five of those six sisters got pregnant within about a year of each other. I was the only boy in that batch. Due to our close proximity in age—and one of my aunt’s early passing—we spent a lot of time together in the summers. I loved the summer. On the rural dirt roads and sandy private beaches of Colonial Beach, Virginia, for three months every year, I felt less like an only child and more like a sibling. I have brothers, but they were out of the house by the time I was ten. Colonial Beach gave me peers my…
The $636 Rent Subsidy That Built My Yoga Career (And Won’t Build Yours)
How decades of below-market rent — not discipline or talent — quietly underwrote a yoga teaching career that’s no longer possible to build.
The Comeback Was a Business Model
The podcast host said something about aspect ratios. That’s what got me. Not the feminist reading of Valerie Cherish, not the bit about the laugh track—something about the way the camera in Room and Board, the show-within-the-show, was always slightly wider, flatter, more exposed than the documentary-style footage following Valerie around. Old Hollywood aesthetics on one side of the lens. New Hollywood surveillance on the other. The visual grammar was the argument. I had not thought about The Comeback seriously in twenty years. It aired in 2005. Nine episodes. HBO canceled it. Lisa Kudrow won a SAG Award for it, and still nobody talked about it the way they talked about, say, Arrested Development. Now, watching clips in between podcast timestamps, I kept thinking: this…
!["Breathe in, Breathe out: Understanding Pranayama in Ashtanga Yoga", surrealist painting,](https://michaeljoelhall.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/"Breathe-in-Breathe-out:-Understanding-1-300x300.png)
The Breath Was the Lever All Along: Teaching the Nervous System
Nearly everything my nervous system does, it does without me. The breath is the one input I can grab on purpose — so instead of just saying so, I built eight guided courses to teach it like it matters.
A Coach With a Whistle
What if the care you feel counts, even when it comes out sounding like a whistle instead of a hug?
You Are the Watcher
What it actually means to “observe your feelings” — without pretending they aren’t real.