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.
Why the hardest part of Ashtanga isn’t a pose, but the quiet shift from following instructions to actually inhabiting the practice.
After 10 weeks of trauma-informed yoga, 52% of women with chronic treatment-resistant PTSD no longer met diagnostic criteria, versus 21% in the control group.
A study of over 15,000 people found that meditation and yoga practitioners had smaller right amygdala volume, the brain region tied to fear and negative emotions.
What if paradise isn’t abundance or success, but the quiet shock of realizing you only need a small, specific enough?
Anyone can preach consistency. Instead I built it: one pose added each week, deep-linked to a Practice Recorder that logs what you actually did — and that you actually own.
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…
How decades of below-market rent — not discipline or talent — quietly underwrote a yoga teaching career that’s no longer possible to build.
A student once asked me whether a quadriplegic could do chaturanga. She meant it as a trap — obviously not, so stop being precious about “functional” versions and admit some poses require certain bodies. I said: it depends on what chaturanga is for. She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Chaturanga is that low push-up position. Four limbs, chest hovering above the floor, elbows at ninety degrees. Everyone knows what chaturanga looks like. And that’s exactly the problem. We’ve confused the pose with the picture of the pose. Chaturanga creates specific joint actions: shoulder extension, elbow flexion, scapular protraction, trunk stabilization. That’s what it’s for. The aesthetic — the specific arrangement of limbs we call chaturanga — is one body’s solution to creating…
Female yogis over 60 had thicker prefrontal cortexes than non-practitioners, suggesting long-term practice may protect against cognitive aging.