Practice – Michael Joel Hall

A silhouetted figure stands between desert and savannah, faint animal tracks forming patterns in the sand while distant shapes of a crocodile and lion suggest the land is watching back.

Practice

Your Body Speaks in Patterns

“Listen to your body.” If I had a dollar for every time someone said this in a yoga class without explaining how, I could fund a retreat center. The problem isn’t the sentiment. Your body does have things to say. The problem is the advice assumes your body broadcasts in real time, in plain language, and that you already have the vocabulary to understand it. Most people don’t. What they experience is blur: something hurts, something doesn’t, something feels okay. That’s not body literacy. That’s just having a body. Body literacy is learnable. But it requires pattern recognition, not tuning in. Not a single session. Many sessions. Here’s what’s happening under the surface. Your body compensates constantly. When one part can’t do something, other parts…

Two silhouettes face each other across open space with a subtle glow between them, the teacher's posture mirroring respect and the student standing in calm certainty.

Practice

Waiting to Be Given the Next Pose: Reclaiming Authority Over My Practice

The method saved my body and my attention. The power structure around it nearly cost me both. I could have written a post about it. I built a platform instead.

A seated silhouette in soft sunrise light connected by a short measured glowing thread to a receding barbell, illustrating the shrinking interval between recognition and reaction.

Practice

A Little Better: On Watching Your Mind Get You Hurt

Knowing what your mind does won’t stop it—but practice shortens the gap between recognition and reaction.

A silhouette stretches in a doorway while a foggy corridor of identical doorframes extends behind them, symbolizing flexibility that never progresses.

Practice

The Intermediate Trap

Three years in and you have the sequence memorized. You know the Sanskrit names, or most of them. You can get through Primary without stopping to think about what comes next. You have also stopped noticing anything. That is the intermediate trap. You learned the shapes and skipped the system. This is the thing about yoga that nobody tells you at the beginning, mostly because it sounds like a contradiction: the people who are often practicing best are the ones who have just started. Not because they are more flexible or more focused. Because they are paying attention to what is actually happening, instead of managing how it looks. A beginner has no performance to maintain. They arrive, they try, they fall. They breathe because…

Practice

Performing the Practice vs. Reading It: Why Inheritance Isn’t Understanding

A student asked me why the closing sequence comes last, and I heard how much of what I knew was inheritance, not understanding. I could have written a post about it. Instead I built the map — 81 lessons, on a platform I own. The thing is the proof.

A silhouetted figure stands at a crossroads where desert merges into a city grid, with constellations above and faint tracks and threads in the ground symbolizing memory as navigation.

Practice

From Obedience to Inquiry: When I Started Asking Why in Practice

The values audit behind Foundations of Praxis: I kept teaching that beginners deserve to understand from day one — then I stopped talking about it and built the on-ramp. Designed sequence, guided audio, count videos, a Practice Recorder you own.

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.

Practice

My Teaching Journey — Ashtanga Tech

I started teaching yoga because a friend of mine caught dengue fever.

Ashtanga Tech — the podcast. Keep the practice, lose the guru. Michael Joel Hall on Ashtanga yoga without the authoritarianism.

🎧 Listen to the podcast: https://pub-477a42ee397942aa87e96485ef790f2c.r2.dev/podcast/ashtanga-tech/feed.rss
If a stuck practice or a bad room is on your mind — text CULT to 202-816-5612.

A silhouetted figure stands before a glowing vinyl record portal amid cosmic dust, questioning whether their unconventional entry point into Ashtanga yoga is valid.

Practice

Ten Years of Practice, No Idea Why: Building the System I Couldn’t Find

For years I mistook obedience for depth. The day I started reading my practice as a system instead of a set of instructions — and started instrumenting it like one — everything I’d called discipline turned out to be drift.

Practice

how does compression work help you find concavity without fighting your hips?

This is Ashtanga Yoga Tech Support. Real questions from the yoga community, answered. The Question I've been thinking about using compression work with my legs parallel so I can find the concave quality in my stomach while letting my hips move naturally. Does that make sense as a way to work? — from a MJH note Our Response Yes. That’s exactly the direction.Compression work with parallel legs gives you a container. You get to feel what your abdomen does when your hips aren’t externally rotated, when there’s no flinch pattern steering you away from the midline.

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Read more: https://ashtanga.tech/tech-support/how-does-compression-work-help-you-find-concavity-without-fighting-your-hips/
All content: https://mjh.yoga

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