The Technopoly and the Cave: When Efficiency Replaces Thought

Media theorist Neil Postman warned that a “technopoly” arises when societies surrender judgment to technological imperatives—when efficiency and innovation become moral goods in themselves. Once metrics like speed and optimization replace reflection and dialogue, education mutates into logistics: grading automated, essays generated in seconds. Knowledge becomes data; teaching becomes delivery. What disappears are precious human capacities—curiosity, discernment, presence. The result isn’t augmented intelligence but simulated learning: a paint-by-numbers approach to thought. 🤖 Do Artifacts Have Politics? Political theorist Langdon Winner once asked whether artifacts can have politics. They can—and AI systems are no exception. They encode assumptions about what counts as intelligence and whose labor counts as valuable. The more we rely on algorithms, the more we normalize their values: automation, prediction, standardization, and corporate…

The Four Stages of Absorption: How the Mind Refines

Yesterday we introduced the distinction between seeded and seedless samadhi. Today we look inside the first type—samprajñāta—to understand its internal stages. Sutra 1.17 describes four modes of distinguished samadhi. They’re not separate experiences but a graduated refinement—the mind’s object becoming progressively subtler as absorption deepens. 💭 Vitarka: Gross Attention The first stage is vitarka—coarse, discursive attention directed toward an object. The mind settles on something (breath, mantra, image) and holds it. Thoughts still arise, but attention keeps returning. This is where most of us spend our meditation practice. The object is present. We know we’re meditating. The mind is active but increasingly steady. 🔍 Vicāra: Subtle Reflection As concentration deepens, vicāra arises—subtle reflection on the object. The gross qualities fade; subtler aspects emerge. Instead of…

The Barista’s Battlefield: When Karma Yoga Looks Like a Picket Line

Four years. That’s how long Michelle Eisen has been fighting. The 42-year-old Starbucks barista who helped spark the first successful union at the coffee giant back in 2020 is still on the front lines—now part of an open-ended strike affecting 150 stores nationwide. In Chris Crowley’s intimate New York Magazine profile “88 Minutes with… Michelle Eisen”, we meet a woman who didn’t expect to still be here, still pushing, still believing. And yet, there’s something profoundly familiar in her story—if you’ve spent any time on the mat. The article opens in a Glen Head café, where Eisen notes with evident irony that the very “coffee-shop atmosphere” she’s sitting in was “brought to the States by Howard”—Howard Schultz, the Starbucks chairman emeritus she’s been fighting. There’s…

The Yoga Studio as Sanctuary: When Practice Meets Crisis

Two accounts from the Bondi Beach tragedy offer yoga practitioners a profound meditation on what our practice prepares us for—and what we can never truly prepare for. The first tells of lifeguards and strangers rushing toward danger; the second describes those locked inside a yoga studio, waiting in terror while the world exploded outside. Together, they illuminate the many faces of Karma Yoga: action and stillness, rescue and refuge, the courage to move and the courage to remain. 🕯️ “Church” Becomes Fortress Nadine J Cohen calls her Sunday double yoga class “church”—a ritual of movement followed by lying down, leaving “high on Zen and vibes.” On this particular Sunday, the first night of Hanukkah, she was walking toward family, doughnuts, and celebration when gunfire shattered…

FRC Hip Protocol Day 1: Unlocking Internal Rotation

This is part one of a two-day Functional Range Conditioning protocol designed to systematically develop hip rotation capacity. Today’s session prioritizes internal rotation while maintaining external rotation—tomorrow we flip the emphasis. The logic is simple but profound: by leading with one rotation and supporting with the other, you get focused neurological drive, reciprocal inhibition benefits, and balanced joint centration. No rotation bias for the hip to compensate for elsewhere. 🔄 CARs Warm-Up (5 min) Standing Hip CARs: 3 rotations each direction, per side. Full range in both directions, but add a 2-second pause and slight “push” into your IR end range on each rep. Video References: CARs Guide | Hip CARs Video 🔥 Primary PAILs/RAILs Block: Internal Rotation (12-15 min) 90/90 Position—Front Leg: 2-minute passive…

The Pharmacology of Tapas, Part 1: The Silence We Keep

She teaches six days a week, adjusts with precision, and hasn’t missed a Mysore practice in three years. She’s also been on tirzepatide for eight months. She hasn’t told anyone. Not her teacher. Not her students. Not her practice partner who shares a cup of chai with her every Saturday. When someone compliments her “discipline” or asks about her “transformation,” she deflects to “clean eating” and “consistency.” The lie tastes like ash, but the alternative—admitting she’s on a GLP-1 agonist—feels impossible in a culture that treats pharmacological support as spiritual failure. She’s not alone. 🤫 The Substances We Don’t Discuss Across yoga studios and Mysore rooms, practitioners are quietly managing their bodies with tools they cannot name aloud: peptides for tendon healing, biologics for autoimmune…

Epigenetics and the Role of DNA in Gene Expression

Grasping DNA and its Influence on Wellness Let’s get this straight: the simplistic notion of biological determinism—the outdated belief that our genes are puppeteers pulling the strings of our health—has been thrown out the window. In the old days, genes were seen as tyrannical blueprints ruling over biological function. But after the Human Genome Project wrapped up in 2003, it was more like, “Hey, genes are just suggestions, not orders, depending on the company they keep.” Sure, those genetic quirks may seem like a family gift that keeps on giving, but remember, environment and lifestyle also hold the pen in this narrative. Diet, toxins, mood management, and stress? All these shape gene expressions, a ballgame known as epigenetics. It’s about factors “above” or “beyond” the…

External vs Internal Cueing — and why deliberate self‑observation is the teacher’s work

Teachers live in language. The words we choose to cue a pose or movement change where a student puts their attention, and that shift changes how the body organizes itself. In motor‑learning research the distinction between “external” and “internal” cueing is now a fundamental principle—and it was a woman, researcher Gabriele Wulf, whose work beginning in the late 1990s helped define and popularize this idea. Her experiments and reviews showed repeatedly that directing learners’ attention to the effect of a movement (external focus) often produces better performance and learning than directing attention to body parts or muscle actions (internal focus). (frontiersin.org) What the two cue types mean What the evidence says (brief) Important nuance for teachers: neither cue type is “evil” or a silver bullet…

The Blind Spot Paradox: What Cognitive Science Reveals About Avidya

Here’s a paradox that would have made Patanjali smile: the smarter you are, the more confident you are in your own objectivity—and the more wrong you’re likely to be about it. Research on what psychologists call the “bias blind spot” reveals something the yogis named millennia ago: we see clearly the biases in others while remaining remarkably blind to our own. In Sanskrit, this fundamental blindness has a name: avidya. Usually translated as “ignorance” or “spiritual blindness,” avidya is identified in the Yoga Sutras as the root klesha—the foundational obstacle from which all other suffering flows. It’s not ignorance of facts, but something more subtle: a distorted perception that mistakes the impermanent for permanent, the impure for pure, the painful for pleasurable, and the not-self…

Two Kinds of Stillness: With Seed and Without

We’ve spent several articles looking at what brain science reveals about practice—shrinking amygdalas, thickening prefrontal cortexes, immediate metabolic shifts across seven brain regions. Today we turn to what the yogis themselves said about where this all leads. In Book One of the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali describes two distinct forms of samadhi. Getting them confused can mean mistaking a way station for the destination. 🪷 Samprajñāta: With Seed The first type—samprajñāta, also called sabīja or “with seed”—is blissful, luminous, real. But consciousness still relates to an object. A trace remains. This is the samadhi most practitioners touch in deep meditation—the quiet mind, the sense of expansion, the peace that seems to pervade everything. It’s valuable. It’s part of the path. But it still leaves seeds—vāsanās, mental…