Charlie and me doing what we do.

Colonizers gonna colonize.
Oppressors going to oppress.
Its your body, its your choice.

These aphorisms help push back against self-reinforcing loops of domination—social, cultural, political, even spiritual. It’s a systems insight dressed in streetwise wisdom. Could I be any more explicit? Hello!

In Systems Thinking, Donella Meadows would call this a reinforcing feedback loop—where the outputs of a system feed back into it and amplify its behavior. Oppression, like colonization, is often maintained not by a single decision or act, but by persistent patterns, institutions, and narratives that replicate themselves over time.

This is why practices like Ashtanga Yoga can be quietly revolutionary. When practiced with awareness, they cultivate true inner freedom—and the ability to see, question, and ultimately disrupt these harmful loops. But yoga divorced from its roots—or co-opted by the very systems of oppression it seeks to dissolve—can also become just another tool of colonization. Which is why the how and why of practice matter as much as the what.

Discipline matters, but independent thinking, high conscientiousness and empowered agency should be the emergent properties from practice.

In reclaiming bodily autonomy, ethical clarity, and collective responsibility, you’re not just doing yoga—you’re decolonizing it.

One of the most radical things we can do in an economy that commoditizes our attention is to focus on what we want, not what someone else tells us to.