A silhouetted figure pauses in a yoga pose with one hand at their lower back, light highlighting their torso while shadows pool below.

The Body Won’t Let You Lie

You already know what you should do. That’s not the problem. The problem is that knowing doesn’t hold. You mean well, right up until there’s something at stake. A competitive moment. A conversation that matters. A situation where the right thing is expensive. And then some other mechanism takes over, and you do the thing you didn’t quite mean to do. You have a story about it afterward. Everyone has this experience. The interesting question isn’t why — evolution explains that clearly enough. The interesting question is whether there’s a different foundation for ethics. One that doesn’t depend on willpower in the moment. Here’s what the yoga tradition actually says about this, which is not what most teachers say. Ahimsa — non-harming — shows up…

A silhouetted yoga practitioner prepares for a jump-through with slightly bent elbows, facing two glowing doorways representing different teaching approaches.

You’re Practicing the Picture, Not the Pose

A student once asked me whether a quadriplegic could do chaturanga. She meant it as a trap — obviously not, so stop being precious about “functional” versions and admit some poses require certain bodies. I said: it depends on what chaturanga is for. She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Chaturanga is that low push-up position. Four limbs, chest hovering above the floor, elbows at ninety degrees. Everyone knows what chaturanga looks like. And that’s exactly the problem. We’ve confused the pose with the picture of the pose. Chaturanga creates specific joint actions: shoulder extension, elbow flexion, scapular protraction, trunk stabilization. That’s what it’s for. The aesthetic — the specific arrangement of limbs we call chaturanga — is one body’s solution to creating…

Silhouette of a person with sunlight reflecting on tranquil water.

Who Is Your Honesty For?

“I’m just being honest.” This sentence has preceded more cruelty than almost anything else I know. It’s used to justify whatever someone wanted to say, frame unkindness as virtue, and make the person on the receiving end feel small for minding. The speaker’s conscience clears. The harm still lands. There’s a distinction worth naming, because most people never make it: honesty as information versus honesty as punishment. Honesty as information: you say something true because the person in front of you needs it to move forward. The content matters. The timing matters. The relationship matters. You’re trying to transfer something useful. The measure of success is whether they could actually use it. Honesty as punishment: you say something true because you’re frustrated, because you’ve decided…

A silhouetted figure stands between desert and savannah, faint animal tracks forming patterns in the sand while distant shapes of a crocodile and lion suggest the land is watching back.

Your Body Speaks in Patterns

“Listen to your body.” If I had a dollar for every time someone said this in a yoga class without explaining how, I could fund a retreat center. The problem isn’t the sentiment. Your body does have things to say. The problem is the advice assumes your body broadcasts in real time, in plain language, and that you already have the vocabulary to understand it. Most people don’t. What they experience is blur: something hurts, something doesn’t, something feels okay. That’s not body literacy. That’s just having a body. Body literacy is learnable. But it requires pattern recognition, not tuning in. Not a single session. Many sessions. Here’s what’s happening under the surface. Your body compensates constantly. When one part can’t do something, other parts…

A silhouette stretches in a doorway while a foggy corridor of identical doorframes extends behind them, symbolizing flexibility that never progresses.

The Intermediate Trap

Three years in and you have the sequence memorized. You know the Sanskrit names, or most of them. You can get through Primary without stopping to think about what comes next. You have also stopped noticing anything. That is the intermediate trap. You learned the shapes and skipped the system. This is the thing about yoga that nobody tells you at the beginning, mostly because it sounds like a contradiction: the people who are often practicing best are the ones who have just started. Not because they are more flexible or more focused. Because they are paying attention to what is actually happening, instead of managing how it looks. A beginner has no performance to maintain. They arrive, they try, they fall. They breathe because…