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Michael Joel Hall
A silhouetted figure stands at the edge of a flowing river made of glowing paper sheets, carefully selecting individual pages as an orderly bookshelf horizon glows gold behind them.
Science and Tech

The Best Dumb Phone Is Already Strapped to Your Wrist

The cellular Apple Watch gives you everything a phone is for and none of what makes it toxic.

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Practice

Meditation, the Limb I Kept Skipping: Building a Method for Stillness

For years I treated meditation as the part of the practice you get to eventually. Here is why I finally built it a real curriculum, on a platform I own — and who it is for.

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A silhouetted figure stands beside an empty yoga mat in morning light, their posture reflecting uncertainty, while a wall calendar shows sporadic practice marks.
Practice

A Decade of Practice, Almost No Data: Closing the Explanation Gap

I ran a values audit on my own practice and didn’t like the decade of obedience I couldn’t explain. So instead of writing a post about agency, I built the controls. This is that story — Agentic Ashtanga.

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"Breathe in, Breathe out: Understanding Pranayama in Ashtanga Yoga", surrealist painting,
Practice

The Breath Was the Lever All Along: Teaching the Nervous System

Nearly everything my nervous system does, it does without me. The breath is the one input I can grab on purpose — so instead of just saying so, I built eight guided courses to teach it like it matters.

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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.

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Silhouettes on the National Mall at dusk blur into a wrestling ring shape as fireworks form question marks overhead, suggesting a spectacle sustained by a watching crowd.
Yoga Professionals

Teaching a Lineage I Never Fact-Checked

For years I could recite my lineage and couldn’t have told you which parts were history and which were marketing. So I ran an audit on my own values — and built the answer instead of only preaching it. Culture and Context is the humanities companion that lets you hold the source, not the paraphrase.

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A silhouetted figure sits in meditation as streams of newsprint and glowing feed threads spiral into a calm pond beside a yoga mat and three folded newspapers.
Culture

The Information Diet Is the Practice

Why a yoga teacher reads three newspapers a day, and what algorithmic feeds quietly took from all of us.

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Silhouetted yoga students practice in a dim shala arranged like tracks on earth, while a teacher attentively observes subtle shifts in posture as if tracking prints in the wild.
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.

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Yoga Professionals

Good Teacher, Broke Teacher: The Business Skills Yoga Training Ignores

I learned to teach yoga long before I learned to make a living from it. So I built the business I wish someone had handed me — and then built the program that hands you the same playbook.

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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.

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