The opposite of entropy is negentropy — think negative entropy. Negentropy refers to order, structure, or organization within a system. While entropy represents disorder, randomness, and decay, negentropy is associated with the creation of order and complexity.

In practical terms:
- In living systems, negentropy is the process by which organisms maintain structure and order (like cells organizing and functioning properly).
- In information theory, negentropy can represent organized, predictable, or highly informative data.

While entropy naturally increases, processes that introduce energy, structure, or organization (like in living organisms or engineered systems) work against entropy by generating negentropy.

Here’s what’s really interesting for Ashtanga practitioners, I think: the more isolated a system, the more likely entropy is to arise. So the question becomes:

How do we fuel our practice and make it more and more open while also allowing for enough isolation to get an unpredictability of emergence that takes us to something greater than the sum of our parts?

I believe it is viewing our whole life as interconnected, and I think that’s the magic of the yoga of synthesis, the great yoga revolution from the last century that is slowly being lost this century.

Between backbends