Intense focus after Ashtanga practice and difficulty with eye contact — anyone else experienced…

Intense focus after Ashtanga practice and difficulty with eye contact — anyone else experienced…

This is Ashtanga Yoga Tech Support. Real questions from the yoga community, answered. The Question I’ve been practicing Ashtanga for about 3–4 years now, usually 5 days a week. During practice I often do the asanas with my eyes closed or with a very soft minimal gaze. My drishti is usually intensely around the third eye area, and the navel and at the tip of the nose depending on the posture. After practice I often experience a very intense, laser-like focus. It almost feels like a powerful, concentrated energy.

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Read more: https://ashtanga.tech/tech-support/intense-focus-after-ashtanga-practice-and-difficulty-with-eye-contact-anyone-else-experienced-this/
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A Teacher on Their Phone During Yoga Class? That’s Not Okay… or is it?

A Teacher on Their Phone During Yoga Class? That’s Not Okay… or is it?

This is Ashtanga Yoga Tech Support. Real questions from the yoga community, answered. The Question Hi everyone! I’m fairly new to yoga, (had my first class a few years ago and had been doing it very on and off for until a few months back when I started going more regularly) so I don’t exactly know what is “standard practice” in different classes and how the teacher should/can behave – which is why I was hoping to get some thoughts on this. Recently I went to my first yin yoga class – we were doing the (what I gathered) standard yin yoga elements, so very relaxed, mostly on the ground with eye.

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Read more: https://ashtanga.tech/tech-support/teacher-on-her-phone-during-yin-yoga-am-i-overreacting/
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How to start a realistic home practice as a beginner

How to start a realistic home practice as a beginner

This is Ashtanga Yoga Tech Support. Real questions from the yoga community, answered. The Question Hi all, I'm new to ashtanga and I want to start building a realistic home practice with a long-term vision. Where do I start and how do I keep going? I've been going to led classes 2x a week for a few months now with a great teacher. At the same time, don't want to be dogmatic about Ashtanga. Is this possible? I'm still a relative beginner with yoga in general and love exploring different styles, but so far ashtanga has touched me the most. submitted by /u/philosop…

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Combatting Overstimulation

Overstimulation often comes with lots of feelings and emotions. Irrational irritability. A short fuse. Half-cocked in the f-you position. Or maybe the deep desire to just be left the hell alone. You know it’s happening when you’re trying to meditate, and every noise is a nuisance instead of a call to return to practice. I often quote my friend Cory’s retelling of the “kitchen noise” as the monastery. When you’re a monk, all of that sound from the kitchen is dinner getting ready. What a joy to hear! And what a good reminder to get back into focus. But when the sound of your next meal sounds like nails on the chalkboard, you know something’s up. We’re getting fed. That’s a joy. So, great. You…

The Quiet Signals

This week’s thread is about the signals hiding in plain sight — the ones that ask us to pay closer attention. Does getting stronger require suffering? Gretchen Reynolds reports that light weights and consistent effort produce the same gains as grinding under heavy bars. The muscle doesn’t care about spectacle. It cares about showing up. Sound familiar? On the mat, tapas isn’t about dramatic effort — it’s about the steady heat that transforms without burning. What happens when a tech CEO puts down the smartphone? Danny Hogenkamp hosts phone-free parties, runs a Luddite Club, and uses a flip phone after hours. It’s pratyahara in practice — choosing which inputs deserve your attention, and discovering that the world gets richer when you stop scrolling through it….

The Long Game

This week was about patience—and the strange math of how things actually change. Why does practice work in mysterious ways? Because transformation isn’t linear. You show up, nothing happens. You show up again, nothing happens. Then one day something shifts and you can’t point to when it started. Systems thinking calls this “stock accumulation”—the gradual building that suddenly tips. Yoga just calls it showing up. The same patience lives in splitting the sequence. Taking half of Primary instead of rushing through the whole thing isn’t giving up. It’s recognizing that depth requires time, and time requires honoring your actual capacity. The ego wants completion. The practice wants presence. Three teachers, one text: Vyāsa, Iyengar, Desikachar all reading the Samadhi Sutras across centuries. Not to find…

The 40Hz Protocol: Ashtanga Yoga as a Multimodal Gamma Entrainment System

The 40Hz Protocol: Ashtanga Yoga as a Multimodal Gamma Entrainment System

Neuroscientists are designing elaborate protocols to induce gamma oscillations in the human brain — flickering lights, transcranial currents, near-infrared light helmets. A 2024 review in Frontiers in Neuroscience catalogues four distinct stimulation methods to achieve what the brain needs to perceive clearly, move well, and regulate emotion. Reading it, I kept having the same thought: Ashtanga yoga already does all of this. Not metaphorically. Simultaneously, and without a single device

Currents

This week kept circling back to the same question: where is your energy actually going? It showed up everywhere. In the prana vayus—those five currents that move breath and life force through the body—the practice isn’t about forcing energy somewhere new. It’s about noticing where it already flows and learning to work with it. Integrating the vayus means letting apana ground you while udana lifts, letting samana gather while vyana spreads. The whole system breathing together. The same principle showed up in unexpected places. When your favorite tech company goes bankrupt, the community that forms around the abandoned hardware is practicing a kind of aparigraha—non-grasping—while simultaneously building something new from what remains. When you reclaim your feed from algorithmic noise, you’re doing the digital equivalent…

Jungle Physicians and Insight Through Ancient Wisdom and Modern Practice

Jungle Physicians and Insight Through Ancient Wisdom and Modern Practice

In an age of relentless distraction, the quest for insight—that deep, intuitive understanding of ourselves and our place in the world—has never been more urgent. We seek clarity in a sea of information, purpose in a world of fleeting trends, and connection in an era of digital isolation. The answers, as a series of profound questions suggest, may not lie in the latest technology, but in the timeless wisdom of ancient traditions and the rigorous discipline of practices designed to turn our awareness inward. By exploring indigenous ways of knowing, the offerings of wisdom traditions, the nature of consciousness-altering states, and the cultural calls for awareness, we can chart a course toward a more insightful existence. At the center of this journey lies Ashtanga yoga,…