Writing – Page 3 – Michael Joel Hall

Culture

The Future of Yoga Economies

A companion to The Digital Caste and The Architecture of Generosity. The conversation about yoga economics runs the same loop. Teachers can’t make a living. Studios can’t stay open. Students can’t afford classes. Everyone assumes the problem is price — find the right number and the system works. It doesn’t. And price isn’t why. The deeper problem is that yoga communities are trying to operate inside an economic framework designed for scalable products. Yoga isn’t one. It’s a discipline transmitted through relationships, repetition, and time. That makes it profoundly valuable. It also makes it economically awkward in a system that rewards growth, efficiency, and scale. The pattern is predictable. A studio takes on significant overhead — prime real estate, renovations, staff, marketing. That forces prices…

Shala Digest

Interoceptive Awareness Protects Against Stress

A 2017 study found that interoceptive awareness, the ability to sense internal body signals, is linked to greater stress resilience. Yoga trains this capacity directly.

Shala Digest

Keep the Method, Lose the Throne

Ashtanga’s method is a gift; the guru-centric machinery is optional. I didn’t just say so — I built the self-owned platform that unbolts one from the other.

Shala Digest

Name It. Move On.

It’s about telling the truth about your mood without turning it into a lifelong identity—or a daily beatdown.

A silhouetted figure crosses a bridge made of numbers that dissolve into mist, moving from rigid counted steps toward a fluid horizon shaped like a body in motion.

Practice

Practicing Without the Teacher’s Count: Making the Sequence My Own

I ran a values audit on myself and didn’t like how cheap talk is. So instead of posting that practitioners should be able to practice alone, I built the tool that makes it possible — every pose, both sides, counted breath by breath, on a platform I own.

Shala Digest

Flight Simulator

It’s about why yoga practice makes some people weirdly calm when life throws them—sometimes literally—off the horse.

Shala Digest

Ashtanga Yoga: Your Practice, Your Choice, and Your Subjective Experience

This episode is on the topic of subjectivity in Ashtanga Yoga.

A silhouetted figure pauses on a sunlit sidewalk to hold a door open for another person, their deliberate gesture creating ripples of light that spread outward.

Culture

The Architecture of Generosity

A companion to The Digital Caste People talk about yoga economics as if the central question is price. Class rates. Membership tiers. What a teacher should earn. Price matters — but it isn’t the variable that governs everything else. Overhead is. Overhead determines what prices are even possible. And once prices are fixed, the culture of a space starts to bend around them. I learned this slowly. Like most teachers, I spent years looking for the price that felt fair — one that worked for the student waking up at 5am on a teacher’s salary and also for the one who’d just come from the office. Same discipline. Different bank accounts. Eventually it became clear: this wasn’t a pricing problem at all. In many yoga…

Shala Digest

Portable Yoga

When you’re practicing far from the “real” yoga scene, yama and niyama are the parts that still work anywhere—and they tell you what’s healthy.

Shala Digest

Be the Filter

It’s about how to learn from imperfect teachers without swallowing their whole worldview along with the useful stuff.