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.
!["Breathe in, Breathe out: Understanding Pranayama in Ashtanga Yoga", surrealist painting,](https://michaeljoelhall.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/"Breathe-in-Breathe-out:-Understanding-1-300x300.png)
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.
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.
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.
Why a yoga teacher reads three newspapers a day, and what algorithmic feeds quietly took from all of us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.