A post shared by Angela Jamison (@angelazjamison) on Jun 22, 2018 at 6:28pm PDT

I didn’t hear the first whisper of Krishna until the age of 22. A field was created by the way we said his name. I am only realizing now, 25 years later, that this field has held dear friends to me all this time, and very slowly showed me how to be a friend in return.

Here is how it happened. Halfway into my bachelor’s in philosophy, my mentor Dr. Fost started talking to us about divine play. Lila. It was I tiny liberal arts school near Portland, Oregon. Philosophy class would have 2-5 people in it and we were only allowed to read original texts (20-80 pages per day), no commentary. We met most days in a heavy high-ceilinged Greek Revival hall built in 1928. Over the course of that year, my little mind started to move towards the teachings of Advaita Vedanta. By senior year, when the philosophy club got a tranche of cash for a special event, I convinced them to bring an Advaita scholar to campus. Eliot Deutsch. A translator of the Indian sages for western mind, founder of the discipline of Comparative Philosophy. He would teach us about nonduality.

So he came, all the way from Hawai’i. I was his little host, walking him across dewy lawns to his lunches and lectures, watching the way he greeted our humble college. On Wednesday night, he Delivered. It was the intellectual event of the year, and none of us understood more than half of what he said in the third-floor conference hall overlooking our grove of mossy 200-year-old oaks. It got contentious! A hot fight about play, between my mentor and his colleague from English. Sigh. I was geared up for a full serving of enlightenment the next night, but what we got was something entirely different.

Eliot made us forget the intellectual knots of metaphysical debate; let us think deeply about friendship. His talk on “creative friendship” was nothing less than a peak experience, an epic high in the realm of ideas. He used that lecture to enclose us in the same field of intellectual love that contained his entire scholarly life.

What I think I remember is the idea of the super-best-friend. Krshna as the one who loves Arjuna into the best version of himself, mischievously and fiercely; who makes his own hard sacrifices and takes no bullshit on the way. One who creates whole realities like this, with the tool of friendship, has known one thing: how to be One who Loves. Eliot’s term, if I remember? All action, it is the expression of a love that cannot merely stay still – undifferentiated – nondual. We are not—he submitted—enslaved to our karma. Friendship is a holy vehicle of human choice wherein we create whole worlds. If we have love.

The bitterness from the night before transformed into a field of eyes sparkling for each other.

What matters now about that night 25 years ago is that Eliot created a field of creativity—invoked it explicitly and filled it with goodwill. The highest form of philosophy, he was saying, is shared novelty. Some of the most cherished people in my life today were in that room.

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The same is true of all the Mysore rooms I’ve been in where the spirit was strong. My teachers’ rooms, specifically. If Sharathji was holding them, they were fields of consciousness and play, fields of internal battle, and for those who were ready they were also fields of creative friendship. THIS is the change angent: the consciousness field itself. Not the things (postures) in it.

This topic is too vast to discuss. But it’s coming to the fore, awkwardly, in words because I’m seeing now that my work going forward is to try to constitute fields of shared consciousness. To the degree that I am able. That’s the transmission I received, more than anything in particular. How to hold a space.

A Mysore room is so many things, and around all of them, necessary for the radiance to happen, there needs to be a container. An electrificed charge of deep silence that drives the senses inward, so deep and so much that the heart sends out its web to hold us together with our people.

Technically, there are things that increase the chances of a field springing forth to hold a group. Think about the way our teachers did it: to join the field, you commit for a month of shared time and space; you become cohort of spiritual friends; the group follows a clear discipline together with a lot of shared silence; each person should infuse wisdom teachings into each day. And within all this, with luck, the durable matrix of connection becomes extra bouncy and resilient through the crucial practice of just hanging out.

For the first ten years of teaching our local Mysore program in Ann Arbor, I’d also take an away-workshop every so often for a teacher who I mentored. Instead of going many places, I just went back to the same handful of small shalas every year.

This is because Sharath was extremely skeptical of workshops – they increase teacher ego tremendously, because we get treated as special on the road. What he wanted for us was the mundane nature of Mysore style – that we constitute a home program and build the field. Workshops were ruining the practice, it was often said.

The best students still say this. I got to hear Hamish give this warning to us kids over dinner again in November. Oh yeah. Thanks man. Let’s not forget.

For those first ten years I broke this excellent rule, and badly. My concession was to keep the spirit of it through a commitment to only visiting a few of the same places repeatedly. Until they grew bored of me. Meantime, with each visit, I would be even more delighted by them. It was tremendous. My shy, loyal heart loves a long duration. I worked so hard following that rubric, and loved it all so, so much. Thank you, all of you who joined me there.

Each visit, the host teacher would have them write me a letter, to a no-reply account called AJPhoneHome. Say anything, free associate, tell me what you want to study this weekend; it is all confidential. I’d read the whole sheaf of emails twice on the plane, using my ethnographic data analysis training to pull out common themes. That is how I could guess what to put into the container of our talks together.

On Friday evening, our first meeting would just be the ethnographic report. I’d simmer it all down to the main 2-4 key themes in the letters. It was never not beautiful, for me the reader of the leaves and for the students who made them. A big, comforting, hilarious mirror. I loved looking into it and seeing all of them.

The field of practice within a single shala ways always TIGHTLY coherent. People practicing silently together, but stitching the 8-limbed method into their own life path in a way uncannily on theme for another person in the opposite corner whose name they didn’t even know yet.

The whole point of sitting together was to throw light on the web of connection that was already there, glinting that radiance off of a few particular jewels, and then shut up again about these things for a year.

To work, this all had to be unscripted. An agenda from the facilitator (me) would kill the organic revelations within the field. The point of these meetings was not to impart knowledge – I had none. It was to see the field they already had created through their shared consciousness, rejoice in our awareness, and allow new positive intentions coalesce at the intersections of each web.

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At our home shala in Michigan, I do none of this. I just show up. We all do. That’s it. Yesterday over chai and transportive cardamom Madelines, after Led Primary, we were talking about how the world is so hard now. Ukraine and Gaza. And the uncertainty. Untold future wars. The deluding of the mind, the aggression in the zeitgeist, the unbearable suffering of Beings.

I feel a physical ache in my heart now, often. To feel the world now in a realistic way, without pretending it’s something else. This is the feeling of staying connected, and staying real.

Something that digested yesterday with the chai, as we shared how we feel this ache in the heart, is a specific way that it helps to have a shala.

Ours is both local and virtual, so the lives that intersect in our meetings circle the whole globe. Many aspects of this world-moment are knit into our ashtanga container. Within this shala, we were thinking about how each of us knows the single life line of individual friends. People we know to be alive to their lives; spiritual friends who are on an 8-limbed path that breathes us all together and apart.

What helps me, above all, is to sink my awareness into the knowledge of just one or two of these beautiful, intentional lives. To do “find my friends” on the spiritual plane, sensing the truth, goodness and beauty that this One traces onto the planet with their life. Just today. How do they move through this world today?

Here we are. The crisis roars; the wars are real. And friendship by friendship, creativity holds its own field. There are Ones finding a measure of liberation by taking action from love. We suspect, in our shala, that meditating on, cherishing, just a single friend for who they are can be enough to hold the aching heart in balance. And a whole shala of spiritual friends over long time, it makes a bright universe.

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Up at 4 on a Monday. So I guess this time has become protected. Protected by habit, and by the way this little consciousness latches on to a loop.

Relationship is protective. Ritual is protective. Radical acceptance is protective.

Ashtanga yoga, it’s only made up of relationships. They can be of any sort. And it does seem each individual tends to have just a few versions of the same relationship over and over. May as well make them good, but also open them up to creativity as much as possible.

Jayashree and Narasimhan made me understand this explictly. It was in 2009 that they gave me the first protection incantations. Invocations. Summonings.

May he protect us both. May he nourish us both, with knowledge. May our study together have brilliance and no misunderstanding. May the cows and the scholars be protected. May there be peace in the three kinds of forces acting upon us: cosmic forces out of our control, the forces of the world around us, and the forces within us. Peace.

Their mantras lightning-redesigned reality for me. Sitting on the floor of their little library, bare lightbulb flickering off in the afternoon power cut. Our motorbike-shaken bodies quivering, then going slack and dewy in the heat. A vinyasa to soften western mind. Then the protection spells, billowing around us and sealing us en caul.

A membrane than does not decay, but only if it is constructed correctly from the start.

These teachers’ transmission, like Sharath’s, is not other than magic. And we all know, I hope, that 80% of magical practice is for protection. Or maybe it is 99%.

Like Sharathji, they received the confused little sprite that I was, accepted her, and filled her with what knowledge she was able to take in. They all shook out the shabby fabric of my reality and then swaddled up my wandering soul with theirs. The spiritual generosity of this oct. And in many cases it doesn’t last.

But what does it mean when the magic actually takes, to remain in the membrane of a student-teacher relationship when reality changes again? What if your teacher is dead?

What does it mean for a student, specifically? Here is what I can see. It shows up as naming our teachers always, as citing our sources, as elder care if we had been so lucky, as reverence for their legacy. Those whose relationship is blessed like that, mutually: I see they are full of life now, and are never not grieving. This is not time to discard the past or remake the world. It is time to intuitively hold our teacher’s memory in the blessings of protection.

I look out and see those who glide along their path inside the air-chariot of unconditional love + human acceptance that the protection mantras create. And those who do not, who leave a trail of tears of broken relationships behind them—either because they chose unwisely from the start, or because they did not have the strength to accept the human parts of their teacher when they inevitably came to the fore.

That bit has been the strangest experience of my life – watching my teacher, this epic person, be transformed into either a super-human or a scapegoat in so many minds.

The adharmic relationships may be karmic, but they are NOT fate. Not at all. Not when we have transformative technologies at hand. A person can stitch real love together from shreds, re-narrate their path out of truths that really will hold, really will bless the path.

In fact, I find it is common, to get several years down your path and regret the way that it started. Something in our intention, or our protection, was not correct. Our first teacher did not have a transmission. We were without blessing. Yes! That is what real magic is for. Wholeness minus wholeness equals wholeness.

Dominic says this in fewer words, speaking of relationships. This is someone who combines his wild mind with Saturnine moral discipline. He is the one who had the generous charisma to make us all cry 3 ½ years ago at Sharathji’s 50th birthday party, recounting stories of Sharath’s childhood and the true nature of his personality and his gifts.

And this same teacher, Dominic, is one who has always held the poison of gossip or his own reactivity to ashtanga drama in his throat. He could do so for lifetimes, if that is what it takes. And from that place, when there is an interruption in love, he just says: Fix it. Go, fix it.

It is either in us, or on us to stitch together a relational path full of love, respect, blessing and realness.

Or not. Many people try to make a go of it without protection. The idea of a blessing is not the same as the action it requires.

Rocket said to me last summer, regarding a particular practice often deemed risky, wild and esoteric: it feels protective. Yes. This too is a teaching. From the place of real intelligence, and real discernment, to magnetize with the protective nature of our own methods. To then trust them, give ourselves to them, and allow them to protect us.

Sharath was about that sort of faith. He named his firstborn for it. It’s not mind-numb. It’s heart-alight. So much so, that our animal bodies know they can trust the path. They are protected.

OM

*Photography by the brilliant Kitty Schulz

Optima dies… prima fugit.

In the lives of mortals, the best days are the first to flee. – Virgil, Georgics

Again at 4 am on Monday, with the candlelight and the cat. The full moon glows the snow like it’s radiating from within. Crystalline snow this time, spiky LED particles for a desolate rave where there’s no food left and the deer and foxes and bunnies huddle together for warmth. We’re miles from any streetlight or snowplow out here.

Saturday was two months since Sharathji died in the forest. I taught our radiant group of beginners (the shala does a two-month series of classes to share basic breathwork, meditation and movement principles with the townspeople, with no agenda that they become ashtangis). Then a text from Dhawi reminded me of the anniversary, and that landed heavy. No time has passed since he died, but my world is inside out.

Ashtanga is deep down in an in-between time now. An inter-regnum, or time between regimes. Same as the entire nation-state system, here at the horriffic halftime of this morbid decade.

My lens on Gaza, Ukraine, the Gulf States, Sudan, North Korea and America in 2025 is the old Gramsci line about regime change: “The old world is dying an the new one struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Zizek translated this as “now is the time of morbid symptoms.”

Yeah. Monsters are real and they are flooding the breaches in the nation-state system. But ashtanga, also in regime change, is giving awe and wonderment, moral excellence, reconciliation and repair, compassion and kinship, and the thrilling aspect discipline that frees the mind. Instead of matching the energy of the moment, ashtanga as I’m living it is generating a radiant moral opposite to 2025. I’m between the worlds of the one my teacher created, and the one I’ll inhabit for the rest of my life. I want this liminality to remain unresolved. May it continue filling me with creativity, gentle perception of the good, and childlike verve.

Yoga resolves apparent opposites, teaching our cells the truth of the principle that like increases like. However! Yoga can also generate duality where we need possibility and freedom. Pratipaksha bhavanam. Cultivate the opposite.

For weeks I’ve been remorseful about the comedy emerging from my heart. Every time I’m asked for words on who Sharathji was, what emerges is mischief and dad jokes. It’s trite. It feels disrespectful, as a senior student charged to carry his legacy, to fail to convey the depth and enormity he also kept hidden.

But I’m finally understanding that there was duality he cultivated in me as a deliberate teaching. I arrived in Mysore with a decade of practice in my cells, on the foundation of a rural farm kid’s instinctive lone-wolf discipline. My primary emotion, was reverence for Yoga. My primary thought, was that I could never adequately pay respects for this sacred methodology. Good intentions. What these looked like, though, was SELF-seriousness. Humorlessness. Refusal to bring my whole playful carefree self to the mat.

Now I see that Sharath summoned the dork in me. The dork in him recognized it. Saw it under my seriousness, silence and restraint. Physical humor, mischief and dad jokes were a step toward our true nature. Tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam.

The first conference I gave at the shala, on the 7th day after his death, was unbearably light hearted. Listening back to the recording, I speak of toe socks, of the Jedi mischief in the way he chose to die. Next I recorded with Scott Johnson, and what came forth was the memory of him putting his new tiger-telephoto lens in my face in Durvasana, a physical joke on the grip of my driste. Same energy with Harmony too. The silly morsels. Leaving a record absent the ache of human suffering and the horror of loss.

I want to examine my time with him and see the answers to the universe, and the heart of devotion that serious student-teacher relationships express so beautifully in this world. Those are not absent, but mostly my grief is a comic strip. That was how he worked with me: serious to the point of absurdity. That is what it took to make me know the part I was missing.

So I go forward with a chronicle of slapstick ashtanga. This is the transmission he gave to the hyper-serious student. A little workaholic, tasked with something that isn’t work at all.

The first book I loved as a teen was My Antonia by Willa Cather. In 2020 I drove to Red Cloud, Nebraska, and stayed in her childhood home with the ghosts. So many ghosts out there alone in the covid cornfields. Cather’s book is about a kid from Virginia who’s haunted by nostalgia, who encounters Virgil’s insight about how “the best days are the first to flee.” About how we idealize the past, turn it into set pieces, and vacate the present of sweetness.

The best days are the first to flee has been a mantra for me ever since. A check on the way my mind idealizes the past and makes the present unspecial.

But that’s not how the situation of Sharath’s death works at all! What’s present to me is the hilarity. His death has moved into me as lightness and ease. A death certificate that acts, in my cells, like the biggest possible permission slip for the secret dork to take form. For the cosmic joke to glimmer through even in this era of monsters, moral horror, morbid symptoms.

He gave me a lot. A LOT of funny stuff, painfully funny, against a background of discipline and devotion. It took me SUCH a long time to get it. Years. God, it was all so much.

And it’s not like I don’t recoil now from this comic book phase of my grief. I do recoil. It’s not like I don’t judge the way that I’m being changed by seeing him die with these same eyes. Judgement is there. But I do see that this is what he asked of me, to hold and share the transformative intensity of this yoga while also expressing the truth of the light heart.

If I am understanding him correctly, what appears as dad jokes is no less than the comedy of the cosmos.

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I have discontinued the old TinyLetter subscription to this blog. But you can sign up here for the new subscription.

This poem is by Éva Ancsel. It’s translated from Hungarian by Ann Arbor Ashtanga practitioner Lilla Homolya. The image is a still from Tarkovsky’s gorgeous 1966 film Andrei Rublev, and is shared by Ann Arbor Ashtanga shadowshala (virtual) practitioner Ksenia Vlatkovic.

Ashtanga is art and science. Art in the way of esoteric masonry, bookbinding, permaculture, and secret societies. Science in the way of weird science: not equations but lab chemistry and freaky particle accelerator physics.

If you see the film, I think you’ll agree that Rublev the icon painter (like the bell caster Boriska) is the soul of his place in time. He’s a practitioner of ultra-technical science whose art can only evoke spirit and unify his world if done in soulful, technically precise relationship with the mentor he adores, and with the squirrely insolent mentee who is the breaker and yet keeper of his heart.

A bell can only be cast in one way. Only the way Boris—no, not Boris—Boriska, does it in Andrei Rublev.

After all, they are not casting it for their own use.

Six weeks out. Christmas Eve dawn at DTW, heading back to the west coast.

This is the end of my 24th year of ashtanga practice. It’s the beginning of my 48th year of living. Feels like the weirdest possible halftime show. Halfway into this no-going-back decade, and into this life. Half of that life in the yoga.

Does daily ashtanga practice even make sense for multiple decades? Suddenly people are asking me this, like there’s a surge of doubt in the method, or just a mis-definition of ashtanga itself.

Yes, the yesest yes. Continuity is the course, for me personally. Yoga methodology is the reliable source of clarity and truth that I know. And this is just getting started, for me. I don’t always even know what Yoga is, but do sense that it knows me. It is in a process of knowing me, now more than ever. And giving that clear knowing back to me, a glimmer at a time.

I experience the same doubt about ashtanga and teeth brushing. C’mon. Worth interrogating. Teeth brushing takes time; it’s repetitive; we’ve already done so much of it. It’s kind of a kids’ thing really. Why not try something else?

For me personally, some physical intensity is important. Genetically. Not just asana, but in work and daily life. Asana itself is slow and careful for me now, unlike in my 20s. Of course. It’s 25 degrees below freezing. I do glorious working class labor in the Mysore room, run around the forest on frozen ground most afternoons, and have been lifting weights since 2021. Not the life you choose if the goal is an easy Natarajasana. But this life, strangely, is what my heart chose. The asanas serve this particular life.

I’ve contacted the parallel Angela who doesn’t know Yoga. She seeks intensity and truth through ultra high stakes work, as a journalist in Gaza or Ukraine, her freedom to intimately connect with others limited by sensory overwhelm and social anxiety. (I was a political beat journalist for the main newspaper in Oregon by the age of 20.) I admire that person, but the difficult thing yoga s-l-o-w-l-y made me know is that my soul path is quiet service. Service to our animal selves, nerd intimacy, life relationships, digging one deep knowledge well and translating the findings down there into a different kind of “news.”

A day without formal practice does feel similar to skipping the toothbrush. Moss grows on neglected teeth, in the folds of the untrained mind, as well as the kapotasanaless psoas.
So, yes. I will be rising early to practice on my family’s bathroom linoleum this week. After cleaning the teeth.

Sure there’s a hygiene thing here – conditioning my discernment, expression and embodiment. Mind, speech and body. But what interests me now is how my experience in yoga is fueled by a mystery. Why does the method hold such mystique, still?

Yoga philosophy is practical; analytical mind should be able to put it a box with and tie it just-so with a bow. But no. The generator for practice lies very far from my rational mind, somewhere in the outer dark unconscious – whispered through from future selves, or past ones, or other beings entirely. This unknown where the drives reside, it is source of extreme creativity. The more I turn into it, the more energy there is to connect with others, share the practice itself, create weird stuff, make weird choices, and just keep letting go and letting go of the concepts and identities that got me this far. Practice isn’t so much a discipline now. It’s a mystery, and an entrancing sweet smell that draws me because it’s making me more alive to living itself.

Back to the weird question – whether ashtanga sadhana makes sense decade upon decade.

This is urgent. The existence of the question is urgent. It suggests to me that we’re teaching wrong somehow. That Patanjali’s Sutra 1.14 isn’t the immediate take on someone like me: of course she is just getting started. Do people not know 1.14?

Is there a fallacy of misplaced concreteness? An idea that “ashtanga” means a concrete set of moves and vinyasa counts? That it’s one single man’s idea? Again so strange. Ashtanga is a path in eight limbs. Five can be taught; three can be caught. (I’d submit that the 6th one can be taught too.)

The asana practice is the entry level. It’s there to train the senses, to make us know how to move our energy, and yes to get us super clear – and super freaking skillful- with the physical body that supports the mind on the spine. Sometimes it’s just easier to stay razor’s edge present for 120 minutes of flowing movement than 120 minutes of raw flowing mind; but it’s all ashtanga if you’re on this path.

The body piece is thrilling. Being excellent technicians, of a physical art. Pursuing the (self-) knowledge to inhabit the forms brilliantly.

How to bear load on the arms with the exact joint rotations and muscle movements that are right for your shoulder girdle. How to jump while also exhaling or inhaling. How to feel the three arches of the foot with such clarity that energy rises through the knee joint, flows over the adductors and dives into the center of the cervix or prostate. How to draw the subclavius lightly down around the collarbone so the humeral head rests at home in the joint and the breath blooms right into the intercostals. How to gaze on the nose in a backbend in a way that feels like you’re looking right at the tip of the tail, releasing the meat-hooks of the sub-occipitals in gravity as the piriformis spreads like a hammock and the spine fills with liquid light.

THIS is the entry level practice. I’m doing it every day and rarely not delighted by the dance party in the cells of self and other. No more or less special than brushing the teeth devotionally. My god, the way of continuity – and the value of doing the thing for a long time without a break. It was set up like this from the start.

This post ran 4 pages, with ideas we could teach in the first 100 hours of the practice, to set up others in stable way from the start. To correct for the wrong knowledge that ashtanga is for kids. So that each one knows how to make the practice their own, how to cast a line out into the mystery and begin a continuous relationship (only if they are so inspired) with whatever it has to offer them. Individually. But this plane’s boarding so I’ll trim that off for some other time.

Happy New Year, everyone. 2025 may not be less weird, but we do have resources to meet it.

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Monday morning at 4 again. Candlelight, cat, windchimes, wood stove. Moonpie purrs into my thigh like a little tiger.

This space has opened up in my life, because the architecture of everyday mind is in flux. Witnessing a man die, at the height of his life. It’s the Mother of all rug-pulls. The top layer of my unconscious got whisked right out, and now there’s none of the usual automaticity and half-presence holding the whole thing together. I feel everything.

The furniture of my life is still here, but what is gone is the scrim of dissociation between that furniture, and the ground of being. I was comforted by the scrim. It was made up of podcasts, comfort food, and the wetware that every screen activity installs in the mind. Media isn’t addictive because we love screens; it’s addictive because it monopolizes huge amounts of our personal working memory and cognitive circuitry. It’s wetware. Malware, sometimes.

When I recoiled from Netflix my partner joked: Ahhh that’s just the grief. True, but it’s also the ecstasy. Death has given my deep mind this craving for presence, even if all I’m going to do with it is feel the cat purr, and sit with some feelings, and try to create.

In response to Death, I am deliberately, naturally, sacrificing some of my copes. The cynicism, the little loops of media addiction, a basic unconsciousness of my own wounds and fears. These copes have been functional! For a long time they buffered my mind from the fact of death, and the super-charged crackling presence that bursts into flame when you face it.

Now feels like a time of stitching a reality back together. Based on some combination of intention and accident. This is a big topic, but in brief what’s different is a total lack of the old protective cynicism. How dangerous. Huge clarity on my own areas of denial and wounding, and how they have conditioned my mind unconsciously in the past. Plus a weird bias towards action, rather than the previous habitual action of taking no action. And, also strange, an increased appreciation for materiality. Like, once I stitch the new rug of everyday mind together, I think I’ll stake it down a little bit.

This fall, after 15 years in our shala, I put a shingle on the street. For 15 years it’s been hyper-minimalist, a huge blank canvas on Main Street that I can share with artists and dancers in the evenings. But I felt called, weirdly, and finally hung a little sign, then the certification that Sharath told me seven years ago to display. Last weekend, a student helped me put up curtains, and now the place is cozy for the first time.

For those first 15 years, the shala existed in non-material, non-conceptual space. Just a flame, a rave, a flash mob, lots of flowers, a movable altar, and really good floors. A shala made up of breath and movement and relationship. Effervescent.

That’s always been important to me, to not materialize it over much, not build our house of breath on the sand of material things, or illusions of identity, or personality. If you know, you know. That’s why we were fine in 2017; why the crew is fine now. Avoiding the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

But curtains. A sign. Plants. A tiger on the threshold of our fairy door. They make sense now. My remit is to run this shala. For my students yes as always, but also now and for a long time for my teacher, for the method, for the community. I already knew that, but now I really know it. Tent stakes are called for.

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It’s been four weeks, today. Same as the last three of those weeks, I’m up at 4 on my day off in Michigan winter. Candlelight, cat, and decaf espresso.

I woke up saying I love you I love you I love you I love you. That has been going on for a couple years, an uncool and unchosen mantra that rises up from the unconscious to try to trick my mouth into speaking it, whenever I’m in a liminal state. On the thresholds: dreaming/waking, hungry/sated, living/dying. I love you I love you I love you.

Tamping down the lunatic I love you loop, the first thought as I sit this morning is of the six tastes, and especially the periods of global community bitterness I’ve lived through in this practice: in 2006, ‘09 and ‘17. How strongly those bitter times contrast with the sweetness of this time. I wouldn’t fully taste the now without them. For me personally, right now, and this past month; this is the sweetest ashtanga has ever been. In almost 25 years, nothing has come close to this frankly precious quality of time.

Like this espresso, bitterness has powerful motility. It is composed, Ayurveda teaches, of the elements air and space. Bitterness is the expression of pure vata. Entropic. A touch of bitterness in the upper regions of the gastro-intestinal tract gets the waste products moving. It is bitterness which transports fully digested experiences out of the system. That was the case in 2017; most of us still remember what we went through then. The pursed lips and subsequent hit to the solar plexus as we learned our own community/family secrets. It’s not a problem. Bitterness has its own goodness and function. Being with it, for years, makes the sweetness of now so complex.

Sweetness, according to Ayurveda, expresses the elements of earth and water. Of the six tastes, it is the closest to the ground. Unlike bitterness, which is made of air and moves so easily through space, sweetness is something you can touch, and hold. It slows you down. Kapha dosha.

This is a tangible time, sometimes too real. The sadness, devotion, connection, messiness. The recognition of the person and the scene we had, and how much we actually loved them. The raw irrepressible kindness that comes out of people in a crisis. The terraforming of community from an archipelago into a single continent – a Pangaea of grief. Where everyone can walk (and do asanas) upon the fault lines. It is sweet taste that draws us together, draws the tongue to the roof of the mouth, draws the eyelids softly together. Sweetness is a concentric movement of earth and water.

For me personally and some others who were there when it happened, there’s been a resistance to stepping out of the eternal snow globe (leaf globe) of that day. Back into cyclical life. I’m not sure I understand this suspicion in me, the unwillingness to move forward from the worst possible thing that has happened. It’s complex, and has to do with love. With having a teacher. With relationship. But at the root it seems to be that there is real insight in this time – truth, goodness, and beauty, that love and death forced to the surface at the moment of the crash.

I’ve spent all of life low key dreading the moment I have to be present for death – my own but especially that of anyone I love. It’s been this terror in my cells, a repressed animal knowledge. The thing is, facing this worst possible experience – the experience that ends experience – seems to have turned that animal terror into something else. I don’t know what yet. Some kind of grace.

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It’s 21 days now since the afternoon in the Shenandoahs, when my teacher died. This morning I sat in the new moon dark in Michigan, where the fresh snow on the forest makes everything soundless.

The memory washes over me first as touch. His sacred body. Enough said.

The leaves under foot and the cool earth under that.

And the people who held me – the stability of their backs under my hands and the sadness and shock in their chests. “The literature” teaches that first things we say in a crisis, a potential trauma, set the pathway for the grief process. Yes. But I think the first five people who held me have helped determine my process so far. It is beautiful. Full of renewal. How strange and good that every single one of them would be a powerful practitioner, with a hard-earned ability to bear witness when the worst possible thing happens. The worst possible thing. People who practice a granular daily encounter with the edge of will and surrender, which showed up then as an instinct to stay together in our bodies… while abjectly accepting – without negotiation or resistance – that he had left his.

The memory comes in as the things we said. Action words. God words.

And finally, for me, as images. The light was golden. Slanting across the valley before us and through old trees, starlight extinguishing into the leaves on the ground where we knelt. Finer than a bed of funerial marigolds, that carpet of leaves in the forest.

Individual faces cracking from action into recognition, with these bolts of pure sadness. And his face, finally, so beautiful. Beautiful. Still and a little ashen. So totally free. A moment that will anchor my mind, the rest of my life.

Words don’t exist for the purity of this moment. The beauty, goodness and truth of it are a radiant orb of pure safety for my spirit. I know I’m not the only one inside of it. This light dome is full of crazy amount of vitality, and a togetherness that goes beyond kinship to uncanny karma.

Everyone is different. But for me, none of this is intrusive. There are no cracks in my everyday mind, where this floods back in. It’s like a museum diorama of an ancient scene, which today I chose to visit. To be nourished by the rawness of reality and the truth of life and death. The total radiant mystery of life and death.

I have been through a different experience lately, something legitimately traumatic, in which another’s past cruelty does lash back intrusively. My psyche holds this, and returns it to me unwanted, I think specifically because I’m alone in the experience. It is only real to me. There will never be acknowledgement, so the healing is my own to do. Isolated by the truth of it. Whatever trauma is for me personally, it is this alienated thing, that comes back demonically, and walls me in to its aloneness. Bromides about “letting go” only suppress it. It’s in the circuitry and very slow to resolve. Still workable. Just slow.

The recent literature on trauma is pretty interesting. I started with Peter Levine, which is great if a bit passe now. But like many in the yoga world have gotten the most from Polyvagal Theory. This is a whole body of work and practice around the social nervous system, how we are connected or disconnected by voice, body hexis, nervous system resonance, even the electric conductivity of the skin. How it is through the social nervous system that states of activation or trauma are resolved. This was all baked in to Mysore style, well before the philosophy came around. The philosophy itself is a product of a highly alienated capitalist society – it can never uncover the absolute root of modern trauma, because that alienation is all it knows.

But Mysore style, and the death of its greatest master ever, is a different field of intelligence. The isolation that trauma theory gives us tools to resolve isn’t our starting point. Relationship is the whole universe of ashtanga. We start by joining something that already existed, a hundred-year lineage of shared breath. The con/spir/acy before conspiracy theory. The relationship is within ourselves, within time, within a shared breath space – be it present or remembered.

The ways that SharathJi would perceive mind in bodily movement, the wild receptive intelligence of his hands, the impersonal nature of it all: these were his whole life, and they condition our experience of his death.

Back in the diorama of that day, the scene is the most normal thing I have ever experienced. It’s easy to say this event was crazy. Unthinkable. I felt that way at times the first week. Now I feel I’ve moved in to a new normal that is continuous with that moment. The tragedy and peace of it are continuous with life. It’s not going to be this windowless room in my psyche that I tend to alone. It’s full of souls, and life, and the spinning wheel of infinite time.

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My teacher’s between worlds, until around the solstice.

He’s a weather system expanding and contracting, moving over the surface of the waters and the forests and the cities. Another beginning, formless and void. A heavy cloud system laden with electricity. How will he return to earth? A saint, a goof-ball, a tiger enthusiast, a guru? How will his yoga condense – as tapas, stand up comedy (his telephoto lens in my face in durvasasana left an impression), as community, as an individualized path?

It’s the 14th day now. Shiva–saffron scooter Shiva– and I exchange namaste emojis through the planet, praying for rain. Narasimhan sends thrilling breadcrumb texts, dense as osmium, that I’ll be turning over for the rest of my life. Harini and I shoot the breeze. Dear friends waking up after the last funeral share how they feel now. The specific density of Lakshmipuram — the other end of the energetic pulse that shot out on the 11th in the Shenandoahs.

These are the people who spent 53 years in my teacher’s orbit, watching him expand and contract as a human being, later riding the seasonal waves in consciousness—and expat invasions—that his movements made for them. It helps to have a toe on the ground there with them.

Grief is a weird doorway. Now I live inside the frequency of Maha Mrityunjaya, as democracy in my country comes to an end, the world ignores Sudan’s refugees, drone quad-copters shoot hospitals in Gaza with square bullets made in Florida, Ukraine comes ever more to the brink. World news filters in from the scholars around me, while in grief I seek neither headlines nor numbing entertainment. My heart is suspended in a hidden ribbon between the two, inside this globally distributed network of love and vulnerability. The only way to exist at all now, I feel, is to accept the complexity without armoring the emotions.

Yesterday I woke to this line, shouted across a packed room. “Annngelaa. CONNNTROOLL yourself!” A line he used repeatedly one season when I was jumping out of my skin in excitement about asanas.

This frequency I’m on – of “had to be there” jokes, of a totally specific loss that includes some trauma, and a specific community – contains the energies of everything else happening now. It’s not a bypass. In response to losing him, there is room for feelings of shock, horrible loss, despair, gratitude, transformation and all the rest. It’s an open channel created by relationship, amid so much contradiction and complexity. Yoga is that.

When Sharath condenses finally, my prayer is that he will return to us in human form. Not a saint. A guy who did something enormous, who had a specific skillset, and all the normal human fallibility. Whose individuality is the watermark on our memories.

Not, on the other hand, some totem. Some object that we use as a projection screen, a universal ATM to pay out psychic needs, or the keeper of “correct method.”

There is a narrative that attachment to the guru is an obstacle that prevents you from enlightenment. Yes totally, if you’re looking for some sort of spiritual authority figure to put on a pedestal as an object representing pure wakefulness. A hollow totem. But what if, for many hundreds or thousands, ashtanga was never that? What if we were never in it to become some untouchable unflappable shadow of ourselves? What if the fallible funny awkward relationship was itself the jewel in the lotus?

If so, the learning is that individual people are temporary. Scenes are temporary. Treasure it all while we can.

Speaking from experience, there is repressed grief in the most hardcore spiritual communities, from Christianity to Buddhism. The focus on transcendence, on another world where we have perfect bodies or perfect minds, helps numb the pains of the flesh. I respect this – there is some truth in it.

But for me, it is the mundane that is most infused in my teacher’s spirit. The echoes of the dad jokes, the uncanny perception of the body, the occasionally freakish ability to read a room. Ashtanga is a practice of relationship and of the body. One of being present with our fears and false narratives until they loosen and unravel into nothing.

It is lived-in. It is not an idea. For this, I will affix the term of endearment – Ji – to his name. Notice the usage in his native language. Ji is not grandiose. It is a diminuitive honorific. It holds the complexity of this treasure.

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Today is the eighth day since my teacher left. I bore witness the depth charge of it, straight through the center of the planet from Virginia to Karnataka. And also something else, a kind of radiant expanding resonance that I’m still sounding out.

Back some time before 3:36, my eyes were in the treetops, his hand in both of mine. It was all so subtle. Hard, too. CPR is really hard. And also the whole time, a sparkle in the trees, the uncanny sensation of being watched. And not with eyes.

Some time later, a generation or 25 minutes, or 10, the EMTs brought us into the earth. Of course. We made the first calls to India. That was the first blast, heavy, a big soul falling in the forest. A whole expansive oaktree of a person, far heavier than I had understood. The gravitas of a generation. I had underestimated him; maybe you did too.

And the response through the planet, from people on the phone, was a weight dropped on the heart, the breath punching out as an awful “no,” and then returning with keening wails.

I made many calls those first hours. The internet is a terrible way to learn. It’s a broadcasting, outside of relationship. So having borne witness, I bore the news too. There was nothing else to do. My body was full of action, near empty of sleep, for the next week.

What draws me to write now for the first time in years is the resonant bubble that remains. And expands. I lost a teacher once before and that was nothing like this. It was quiet. This is beautiful-awful. It is not quiet.

There was a conference not so long ago, maybe 2019, where Sharath had a strange tangent about the sounds he heard inside his heart. Do you remember it? He spoke of the silence of the heart in a spiritual sense, but then within that silence, he told us about “so many sounds.” I initially listened as if it was his goofball aspect speaking. But no, this wasn’t goofy. It was surprising. He was sharing something real and cosmic, the vibration of an unstruck bell that he heard in his silence after practice. I began to listen for it in myself, having been guided by him. And yes, in the deepest silence and concentration, there is an unstruck bell in the center of the chest. It makes many silent sounds.

His bell struck.

It radiated into us in waves, the first responders, and then the 50 students with us on the mountain. Then everyone we called. And then more, and more.

This frequency does things.

First it seeks out negative polarities, the situations where two positive magnets repel each other. It flips this to a mutual magnetism, pulling souls across years of difference or weirdness or feigned unfamiliarity. In the first hour after, ears ringing, I was in the arms of people whose interpretations of the practice I think differ from mine, the stupidity of those thoughts collapsed in the reality of our need for one another. The direct, immediate, effect of the striking of the bell. Dissolving a particular avoidant energy that he observed among us, a tendency he really disliked.

Second, the frequency of his heart bell creates uncanniness. Mandelbrot uncanniness. Dense repeating patterns of reference and thought, like a tesseract drawing itself in the air, repeating its pattern first in 3 minds, then 10, then 50, then a hundred, now millions.

We keep thinking the same thoughts, having bizarrely strange dreams and emanations of mind, saying the same words. At the center of the bubble is this absolute density of shared psychic experience that may remain through our lives, if we can stand that much beauty.

This repetition of thought and word keeps happening, in a million channels that cross-reference each other. The process is both concretizing and expanding the tesseract itself. David and Kat called this an intertextuality, the correct term I think for synchronicity that uses not just the heart but now the internet to express itself.

His heart was a powerful strange attractor in life, drawing all kinds of different minds, different motivations, different karmas. I witnessed all this over many years, as his heart softened and its attractive power increased at a patterned, geometric rate. And then suddenly when his his heart bell struck and the pulse simply stopped, that strange attractor that began in his heart became inifinitely MORE strange and MORE attractive.

If charisma is the property of a group and not its leader, as Max Weber wrote, maybe also this dense synchronicity is the property of groups. What matters to me is the natural shape and duration of the vibration of the bell. Yes it will be loudest in the first moment, but it is space itself that dissipates the resonance, across more and more people and across the earth, as the sound slowly falls back into silence.

Third, this struck bell creates state change. From rumination to concentration. From future fretting to the present moment. From solid self, to interdependent bone-wracked soft-bodied grief. From solid matter to highly charged hair. Every action and moment I witnessed inside our immediate 4-day grief container shone with these facets. Words, touches, looks of recognition became jewels to give away and to treasure.

I can only guess there is some law of weird nature, by which his death-resonance will quieten as it expands. But that is not happening yet for me personally. At our shala where I practiced this morning as a student, the air dense with flowers and hearts soft in grief, it was present. I’m so grateful the students can bathe in it. Tomorrow will be the same. And there will be some people who catch the sound of it – maybe in the form of a kind of intimate relational silence – even years from now in time.

It is awful. And it’s the most beautiful human experience I have had, and continue to be having.

P.S. I’d been irritated at Drake for copying my alter-ego. The nerve. This (0v0) came to life in 2007, and he founded 0v0 in 2012. But then that other owl passed out of relevance this summer, caged in a rap battle with Drake’s better, so I figure the guy’s got enough problems. And, it’s also time to bring back the original.

P.P.S. For years, there was an (0v0) newsletter on tinyletter. I sent the last of those in January 2021 and it feels presumptuous to resurrect that list and blast hundreds of old subscribers who haven’t heard from me in years. So here is a new one where you can opt in if you want. I presume substack will enshittify at some point, so will keep insideowl.com, which I own, as the primary anchor for this blog. More to come in this space.