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.

For bell casting, you need a special kind of material. To find such material, you must be prepared to travel to the ends of the earth, to search for it with tremendous patience, all the while forbidding yourself from thinking about how you might lose your head if it’s not ready in time.Because bell casting must not be rushed.

There are critical moments in bell casting. Those who doubt and stop at such times should not be argued with; they must be compelled to continue working. But a good bell caster suffers from this forced coercion.

If someone catches fire during bell casting, they should calmly, casually, and almost off-handedly tell the person next to them to extinguish the flames.

Bell casting can only be led by someone who knows how to do it—it doesn’t matter if they’re young.

Bells must be cast with seriousness, as they are not for ordinary use but are meant to call people to shared practice.

A bell cannot be cast without the experience of our forebears, but inherited knowledge alone is not enough.

If the bell rings and everyone rejoices, the one who cast it should, if possible, cry far from the eyes of others because its sound is not perfect—for there is no perfect bell.

If someone is dissatisfied with the bell they cast, they may, in a moment of despair, blame their ancestors for not passing down their secrets. But curses won’t help.

Instead, it is better to set out on a journey to find even better materials and cast a perfect bell.

And a bell must still be cast in the same way even if the commission is so grand—or calls for such a new type of casting—that one lifetime is not enough to complete it.

A bell, therefore, must always be cast the way Boris does—with patient passion—even if the caster knows they will never hear its chime.

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.

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I asked the shala if they wanted to practice on Christmas, and they emojied back like:

Yeah, did you even need to ask? Yes the ritual remains on religious holidays, apocalypse days, and snow days. You still don’t know the schedule?

Oh, right. That was when I realized: some time last year the entity that is the shala crossed a threshold. Ten years of practice without a break. What a surprise. In that time, the organization has convened for every practice day. I was not tracking this, but realized that subconsciously the log I’ve been keeping for the group on Slack since March – an entry for every practice day we take in lockdown – has been a way of tending the space. Today, following Led Primary, I posted Shala Log #245 to note that practice was complete, I’ll see them again Sunday, and 2021 has begun.

Zoom sickness is real. The app is problematic. Still, Led Class with its thumbnails of mats and cats explode my heart. Many of us teachers find that Led is easy on the deep mind, whereas observing Mysore style practice grinds away at the soul somehow. I think our community should be extremely cautious about what is happening to our most experienced Mysore teachers right now, and not expect the most knowledgeable of them to labor too long each day in Zoom rooms. Reducing Mysore to 2D has the potential to erode the skills cultivated by years in Mysore rooms learning to teach with our teachers. I have a theory about why and how, for another time.

Led is different and kind of amazing. There, I have learned to syncopate my sentimental noises between the beats of the count. How to mute myself out while toddlers climb up parents’ standing poses, and cats lay in laps for ut pluthi. How to catch three people doing the same thing simultaneously on three continents, and connect them in sync with a couple of words. It brings a lot of energy, which has been harder for individuals to generate in isolation; and it eases the loneliness in a real way.

Over the years, the hardest thing about working in a transient town has been that I often get just a year or two to teach the foundations to people on post-docs or at the beginning of a tech career that soon takes them to India or Singapore or SF. So I invest deeply for a couple years in people who ten go out to the wider ashtanga community and, I thought, would never return. It is just a lot of goodbyes. But now a good number of those long-departed are back, from kind of everywhere.

And a few more new souls have found their way to us through fairy doors in the digital, in ways no less real than walking up to the shala. So OF COURSE the Zoom thumbnail collage blows my heart into a million pixels. How can we all be here, actually breathing in synchrony, actually meditating in the same way as a whole? Our coming together makes such a positive difference for us all.

While I count, I study what I can about their surroundings, the movement of their ribs as they breathe. Sometimes there will be two different people in Seattle or Tampa or Minneapolis and the light in both rooms will change at just the same moment, because one cloud just moved. Always the dogs on various continents get rowdy in unison (how do they decide?); there is no perceptible logic to the children, roommates and cats. I want more than anything to introduce them all to one another in the real, put them in a room to breathe together, to learn again through gesture and touch and the carefully unsaid.

Later, I have no intention to settle for two-dimensionality. But it’s good in the way that early internet ashtanga (The EZ Board, Ashtangi.net) was good: a search function for like minds that can later give way to the more-real. I predict some resistance in transition back to 3D, because it will be awkward and uncontrolled and intimate and scary…. But that’s for later.

FALL

In September it got too cold to teach outside, so I rented a car and drove to Montana. Up over the Mackinaw Bridge into the rocky shores of deep Lake Superior, down through Wisconsin and Minnesota, a few days in haunted South Dakota, then a loop around Devil’s Tower up into the bottom right corner of Montana and my parents. Teaching all the way on wobbly wifi; sleeping in tents; listening to local radio for a sense of each place’s mindset; reading DeToqueville in the evenings to bookend what felt like the Death of America.

I thought I’d keep going to Seattle, to be the one person in attendance at my brother’s new show at Jacob Lawrence Gallery, but that was when the fires hit. My parents and I cleaned Billings out of box fans and furnace air filters and FedExed them west so he could keep breathing. And then, facing my anxieties about Montana and falling hard for their bribe (a new calico kitten named Allegra – the one word, an Engadin greeting, they learned on their first-ever trip out of America last year) I settled in to my parents’ basement for a couple of weeks. The biggest weeks in a very big year.

It’s been three years since they moved off the campus of the rural children’s mental hospital where they had worked since 1969. Yes, I grew up on campus of an idyllic ranch… that was really a mental institution. Long story. Now they live in town, and work as a hospital chaplain and childrens’ therapist. Other people’s trauma is their normal; they are both a little Gandalfy in their calm-under-pressure vibes, and in their taste for epic drama. Gandalfy but small (we all wear the same clothes interchangably). So it had not entirely registered with me that Dad was facing severe Covid trauma daily in the ER. Not until I was there. He brought home all we needed to know in his sad evening heart and downcast face. The deaths he was holding space for during September are too private and heartbreaking to share here. We would process together by pumping blood through the heart, biking out through corfields into the high brush plains of Yellowstone county.

My grandma’s last bike, out of many, is a BMXish fold-up cycle with wheels half the circumference of a proper road bike. She rode it into her 80s and now it’s my mom’s. I’d pump those tiny wheels 5-10 miles every night, still slowing Dad down enough to ease my worries about him going over his recommended heart rate. Best weeks of the year, just being there beside him, in motion, as he played his part in history and worked through his feelings about it all. And now I have this weird cycling habit.

On Sept 30 I was outside Oskaloosa, traipsing around places my paternal grandparents, and their parents, all lived from the middle 1800s until 1954. That morning during teaching, a weird email came in. A too-familiar name, a number to call immediately, and certain dread. My student Lisa had died for no reason in the night. Her young sons and husband were in shock; they just wanted me to know. I didn’t know what to do on a leadership level, so I drove and cried and talked to Lisa for ten highway hours across three states. She too was from eastern Iowa. And that day, I felt she was hovering both there, and around Michigan with her shala and family, and all I could do was just be with her in this in-betweeness of place and aliveness and endings.

On a personal level, losing her is a slow stab of pain, mostly because I heard so much about her sons each day in the before, and still feel right now that part of them cut off as she disappeared. On the drive back home, I got to the place of being able to tell the shala, in digital, that a vibrant and adored one of us had suddenly, unreasonably left her body. Holding the space for their loss was the job, I thought, but the next day they all just took it over. They found ways to grieve through cooking, tree planting, letters, ritualized memory, and a dozen different sorts of potent memorials. Lisa thorugh this has done an Obi-Wan, transforming into a disembodied, sweet spirit around the 2D shala.

What the students’ ability to grieve and serve in 2D showed me was that much of the value of my work is not done by me but by the community of care that forms around daily practice. I have no interest, now, in facilitating lone wolf ashtanga. I have been the lone wolf, purifying my nervous system at 3 in the morning and silencing the mind, dreaming of caves and liberation from the messiness of community life. It’s all very comfortable. Being alone feels amazing. And in this era, my work is not for that. It’s to facilitate practice in a way that helps us to find union outside of the individual, so we can be there for each other in grief and tragedy and joy and celebration. We live in a world that makes it very hard to forge communities the size and density that churches, temples, mosques and synagogues were to our ancestors. The woo-woo that held those places together doesn’t stick anymore, but the initiations of birth and maturation and death still need a collective to hold them. When you are a child and your mother dies, you need someone to bring you meals, to express how important she was in the world, to care about how sad you feel and witness what this means for your life. We all need to do this for others too, or some of our empathy function is lost. There is a long history of lone wolf practice and abandonment of others in the spiritual traditions. It has always tempted me, but now at the time at which isolation most available, it has somewhat lost its intrigue. It feels like the world needs more of us in these times.

I think a lot – a LOT – about solidarity. And about how you don’t know who you are, or how strong your practice is, and especially how real your relationships are, until there’s meaningful stress put upon you. It is then that the fake friends, fair weather practices, and superficial personae are swept away. What I saw about myself in September is that when things get tough I’m less stoic and equanimous than I feel day to day. But the shala itself showed me how strong it was. I guess a decade of daily practice will do that to you.

In October things got insane in Michigan. Insane. The highest drama history I’ve lived through. You probably heard about gubernatorial kidnapping plots and rich racists trying to cancel voters in Detroit. Look closer, and it gets a billion times weirder. Anyway, I have been learning the real estate market here for two years, since I became the lease holder for the physical shala on Main Street. I was the first person in my family to purchase a home, back in 2013, so the learning curve has been steep. But under Mercury retrograde and a collective sense of terror as the election approached, with mortgage rates the lowest they’ve ever been, and at the cusp of the dramatic inflation I expect in 2021, I saw a moment to make a move. So I doubled down on my commitment Michigan, sold a place downtown and bought the one my old-lady self will want in the forest. It was a way of opening to that collective moment of terror and using it to invest more deeply in this place.

For now I am getting to know the most obvious new neighbors: hickory and oak trees, birds with bright red heads and blue ones that flutter in groups, deer who lie down in the snow in the evening to rest, but who are gone in the morning when instead huge turkeys – their beaks buried down in their neck feathers – stand sleeping in the snow. I guess this land is particularly safe in these times for even the slowest and meatiest of creatures, a human or two included. But that’s all I know, so far. I’ve been an urban, and really an international, being for so long that it will take me time to learn what languages are spoken out here.

SUMMER – SPRING – WINTER

Summer was a whole new world of practicing outside. In the spring, the 2D shala formed itself and came to life around the planet. In the winter I went alone to South America because I could not stop dreaming about the Amazon rainforest trees, and because more than anyplace in the world I wanted to visit the home of a beloved Argentinean friend. Those memories, rich and full of color, have nourished me all year. I think the fact that I was traveling alone, and keeping silence most of the month, opened my mind up to a huge amount of sensory experience that I am still tasting, savoring, 11 months later. Before that, right at the start of 2020, I spent the holidays and New Year teaching in Seattle.

How the 2D shala formed is a good story, but it’s getting into afternoon here on New Year’s Day, and this morning is the only time I’ve set aside for writing… and there’s something important from the start of the year I want to document instead.

BEFORE THE STORM

In January 2020, I had a kind of dream.

(TW: SKPJ. I apologize if this dream offends anyone, at all. Because it is offensive in a way. But I think this dream is supposed to be shared – I think that’s why it showed up in me—and I spent all of 2020 afraid to publish various previous drafts of what went down….)

What I’m about to describe happening on the astral plane started to heal my heart of the pain that dominated the previous two years, since we learned that Patthabi Jois sexually molested some female students in the classroom. And – far more surprisingly – that a group of senior students (mostly alpha men who presented themselves as authorities over the community) had shunned and silenced the women he harmed.

The dream of restorative justice I wrote about last January weighed on my heart for two years, from the time Jubilee Cooke generously met with me in person to remove the scales from my eyes. All the teachers I’m close with have felt this soul-crushing grief in different ways: be it as guilt; self-doubt about our own discernment all these years; as loss of trust in colleagues who have failed to atone for their actions or help lead us out of the cult mentality. And especially through sadness about treasured friendships whose foundation now feels unstable. In all of this, 2018-19 was a painful time for those of us who have been around a decade or two. We lost so much that held us together, in trust, story, place and path.

I coped by going deep local, focusing on how real the practice is in the daily life of each of my students. Their clarity has grounded my faith in the path more than ever—especially because they have been so stable in the absence of a binding myth. But still I felt sad all the time for two solid years, starting when Karen Rain came forward in 2017, about the sins we as a community committed against our most vulnerable women. About how we did not take care of our most tender.

About how we became followers, when we needed to be protectors.

So in the dream, I become a snake. (Thanks to latent Christian programming for the full archetypical buildout in my dreamlife.)

There is a bolus in my belly that I’m attempting to digest (like the way pythons digest small mammals in documentaries), but it won’t decompose. So instead my body is trying to yawn it out. I yawn, and arch my spine, and try to do a kind of peristalsis to move the bolus up out of the belly. Over a long time, it inches up past my floating ribs, opening up the constriction in my heart as it moves up. It passes through the throat, stretching open the soft palate in a way that feels excellent inside my skull. But it jams into my jaw, threatening to block me from ever eating again.

I’m stuck there a while. Then I’m reminded that I am a snake now, and snake jaws are detachable. Aha! So I unhook my mandible and continue giving reverse-birth to the bolus. It is a slow, slow process and as the bolus exits my body my jaw feels healed somehow, the anger and grief stored there coming out like afterbirth as the bolus drops to the floor in front of me.

You must know who it was. But not in the form of a godman: in the form of a foetus, innocent and fleshy and reverse-birthed from my body. A person I never chose as my teacher, a person who never even knew my name, who was nonetheless deeply enmeshed in my DNA as a result of twenty years of unbroken ashtanga practice. When he came out of my body, as a foetus, I saw that he was pure potential. In that moment, his karma was unknown. Just a being, a soul, with as much innocence and deviance as beings do have. In that moment he had not become the great and terrible things he would be to the people in my world. He was genetic material, formerly part of my coding. I never quite knew he was in there. But now he’s not.

So 2020 started with a clean CRISPR edit of my subconscious. And now I’ve had a year to practice autonomously, without this tender helpless stranger lacing my double-helix. It hasn’t really been any different. There’s something much deeper imprinted in me through years in Mysore rooms and on Mysore streets, and it’s materialized by the conch, the discus and the sword—not the reduction of our ritual potency to one human being.

Except I’m not so sad anymore. There is a lingering regret that the easy trust is gone, but it’s not the ache of a terrible family secret working its way out of my system. I just practice, and do the teaching practice, and find that I deeply, easily trust this path.

I also find that I have nothing to prove.

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A post shared by Angela Jamison (@angelazjamison) on Jan 30, 2019 at 3:37am PST

1. The fantasy of restorative justice

I choked on the publish button month after month after month. Because the voices I was listening for were silent. I kept believing the silverbacks still with us would say:

I’m sorry. Our community is traumatized in part because we created a rigid culture of guru worship. I will model humility and do my part to end the cycle.

Just a fantasy? No. Mary Taylor made that move. One hero alone. She stepped out from behind the curtain onto which we project our ideas of her, becoming human, awkward and emotional. And I waited, as most of the others let her stand alone out there and take fire. Or, as they transformed the scene into an opportunity for self-promotion – the classic beta move of “I was right all along and now my hour has come.”

After Mary set the standard, I thought we would see a tide of younger teachers show the work of a soul search. We would get real about the hazards of spiritual celebrity.

If you get those moments when we are all pieces of one being, and the past is now, and the solar system is inside us, then you can read history as if everything connected. It’s an analytical tool. The question becomes: “how could a face of Being, a face of Me, act this way?” When you were 9 and you first learned about genocide, were you one of the anomalies who responded that way by nature? That tender existential soul search?

(Content warning: Oneness. Humanity of sexual assailants.) Using the analytical tool of connection, it looks like Patthabi Jois isn’t a supervillian any more than he’s a god. He’s part of a social construct built out of transference and mirrors. It is on us, now, to understand how he was made into those two extremes. Sociology 101 (Max Weber) notes that charisma is a quality of groups, not individuals. We create the godmen. That’s on us.

Why did I think all the silverbacks, and then the whole second gen, would move towards atonement? Because consciousness wants to evolve. Consciousness likes the hard lessons; they give traction and urgency. No injury; only opening. That mantra is not for the body; it’s an extreme challenge to the psyche.

I also reasoned, how could any practitioner not go to the crossroads with Patthabi Jois? Bless the wise part of this also harmful person who finally, as a ghost, is pointing us in a useful direction. You know who meets you at the crossroads, right? The devil you need. The shadow inside. In the dark night that makes you never the same again.

Going to that crossroads was the vinyasa. Inhale walk into the night. Exhale sit down with the devil and work out which part of humanity could celebrate god-man worship as women were harmed and shunned for decades. Stay there as long as it takes. Do not get up until you get the anger and the heartbreak and the fear on an empathic level. Inhale go home and talk about the lessons freely. Especially with any student who finds the conversation awkward.

That is a teacher’s basic responsibility. To model difficult growth.

We saw the crossroads, but only some of us actually went there, and even fewer came back transformed like I expected.

Eventually I learned why we didn’t get that healing “I’m sorry” from the silverbacks. The answer is that some are too broken to speak. But others: it’s that they feel entitled to their personal psychological comfort.

I take that as a warning. Growth includes psychological discomfort. Socially privileged practitioners will reproduce this entitlement to psychological comfort if we do not see what we are doing. This is dangerous for vulnerable students. Leadership includes reputational and emotional risks to protect the most vulnerable.

Throughout 2019, I believed a tide would follow Mary. Accountability would lead to atonement. Atonement would take the form of self-reflection about the social causes of misogynistic abuse in a spiritual community. After soul searching, we would see where we went wrong: collective transference through dissociative celebrity-guru worship.

Guided by humbled leaders, we would make the sacrifice of the habits that hurt the vulnerable women. The group transference. The sense of entitlement to a spiritual object in the form of a human.

A post-authoritarian era would begin. Restorative justice would be gentle. We’d wake up and stop expecting a sage on a stage, a person who can’t be expected to remember our names, to meet the most tender needs of our broken inner children. We’d tend each other’s inner children. It takes a village, not a strongman.

My fantasy wasn’t all wrong. These things are happening in places. Thank you to those broken open, connecting, making new paradigms. Your work is why I finally feel less choked.

Writing in depth here is a chosen part of my teaching practice. To be human, and fallible, as a yoga teacher in public. While silent last year, i saw so much that was beautiful – particularly the cutting edges of the ashtanga facet of modern yoga. When I have time, I’ll share what feels new in old yoga.

Ashtanga: always old; ever new.

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2. Conceptual Colonization. Or, Freud and Yoga.

Here’s the main thing I learned as an ashtanga teacher in 2019. People brought up in the west are vulnerable to mistaking a cross-cultural yoga teacher relationship as a psycho-therapeudic one. Few people know the explicit theory of transference and fewer still have received psychoanalysis (I have). But for all of us whose first language is English or German or French, &c., Freud has been in the air around us a hundred years. Because of his genius, the implicit model a western mind has for healing is systematic transference, and long-run integration of that transference. This is not ashtanga method. It is psychoanalytic method.

I had to spend many, many winters with my teacher in India to get that through my skull. He wasn’t walking me through some transference drama, the way my excellent therapists have done. He was annoyed by my transference. Every time I suppressed my own emotional intelligence, instead choosing to cultivate overwhelming devotion and thoughtless acceptance of his every instruction, I killed off the human connection that’s possible when you let your whole self into the room and don’t assume the other person reads your mind and has a perfect plan for you.

There weren’t a lot of students in Mysore in those days, in the chaos before and after the big guy died. None of the social monitoring to determine who is a devotee, and who is spiritually worthy. It was largely a community of wanderers and rugged individualists. Authorization was rare. Ashtanga was cool. In that open minded, un-crowded environment, my teacher had time to chip away at my surrender mentality. Sometimes, light would shine through my thick skull. My insistent, worshipful transference would crack and we’d be two humans in a room. Yoga.

Stop before you say this reflects a complete cycle of projection-capture. That’s conceptual colonization. It’s also a reduction of the spiritual to the psychological. And it’s upsetting, because it turns my teacher into an object, me into the subject whose growth is what matters. Western mind tends towards objectification and other forms of materialism, despite a mystic current that feels more like yoga. (I first found the latter in Martin Buber.)

The common authoritarian doctrine that “people deserve their fantasy of the perfect parent” in a spiritual group setting is neither accurate to Freud, nor accurate to yoga. What it is, when applied to yoga, is conceptual colonialism.

Now that I understand my teacher as a human, I wonder why he bothered to get to the other side of my colonial mind. The bother of it, the energetic cost. I don’t know. Perhaps because I was a particularly dissociative student. Or maybe it’s that my conditioning with psychotherapy made my drive to create a transference relationship with him painfully obvious.

All I can say is that I am grateful to have gone the distance to find the person on the other side of my spiritual object. Otherwise my entire relationship with ashtanga would reduce to reactions to him as an object, and my head would explode each time I disagree with him. Most people are quicker studies, but I was especially committed to the fantasy of psychological enlightenment.

The upshot is what you see here. A certified teacher accepting herself as an everyday human. Relating to her teacher as the most mundane kind of guru — having finally understood that role in its cultural context as a person who sees what you don’t see in a limited domain. Doing all this this in the open. Without fear.

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3. The psychological theory of enlightenment

Psychological enlightenment: spiritual perfection reduced to the level of psychology. The fallacy that an individual personality can be purified of conditioning, plus by a belief that the method to achieve this is surrender to a human god. If you just dissociate enough, your personality will disappear and you will never feel bad or screw up a relationship ever again. Weirdly common motivation in yoga. (Bad news: emotions and personalities get stronger because of practice.)

I suppose the psychological theory of enlightment happened because some cultures went without legitimate religion for 100 years, and in their hunger for transcendence they substituted psychotherapy and self-help for spirituality.

Western students, those looking to fill a void in our lives, can become so certain about this process that we feel entitled to our transference. “I need him to act like X,” is something I’ve said in the past, and heard a whole lot this year.

The psychological theory of enlightenment tells us we can’t wake up without someone to credibly fill the therapist-god shoes. And to the degree we buy that, we in turn think it’s fine to let our own students pedestalize us. Because, according to that theory, all students “need” a cosmic grandparent to put on their inner pedestals. (Pause to note the corrupt position that puts you in as the teacher….)

Expecting a yoga teacher to skillfully cultivate and hold massive amounts of group transference for the end-goal of teaching individuals to intergrate it – that’s not a thing. Charismatic leaders don’t do that. Ever. But we can be so deluded by this story of liberation that we feel entitled to our cathexis. Cathexis at any costs, even if there are bodies on the floor.

Expecting your own teacher to batch-file sangha psychotherapy leads to a particular, postmodern derangement. What happens is you convince yourself that any human behavior by your beloved therapist is arranged for your own learning process. They don’t do human things. They only act unsaintly in ways supernaturally designed to liberate you.

This is all kinds of trouble.

The tradition of the yoga student-teacher relationship as I experience it in India is distinct. It can be understood on its own terms, without the objectification or the reductionism to psyche.

Here’s the thing. Spiritual intelligence is different from psychological intelligence, just as kinesthetic intelligence is different from moral intelligence. None of these is proxy for another. Spirituality is its own domain. It’s not psychology. (By analogy: mastery of the body does not cause moral development; rather, an extreme focus on kinesthetic mastery might account for our immaturity in moral reasoning.)

This substitution of psychological growth for spiritual enlightenment is the motive for western mind to colonize yoga with Freudian ideals. I revere psychoanalysis, and rely on it to conduct myself professionally. But, Krishnamacharya yoga, learned with someone who has a non-internet human relationship with you, is not conducted the same way.

It’s hard to see this, because the ideal of the adoring, omniscient grandparent got baked into the ashtanga cake circa 1970. Many of us can’t imagine the practice without the celebrity worship and ecstasy that accompany group transference.

But… all along, the mystics have moved among us, doing their practice without the inflection towards a cosmic grandpa. I’ve been talking to Danny Paradise about that, recalling the days I was locked in my transference and just thought he was a punk. But yoga from the place of radical personal responsibility + connection with everything is so real. He’s been on that program as long as I’ve been alive. Took me a while to come around.

The ethnographer in me has seen the mystic Jedi approach to ashtanga in pockets around the world all along. But now it feels like the future of a spiritual practice that makes you useful, and smart, and highly respectable in a world that needs you now. The world needs disciplined independent minds because zombie authoritarianism is coming on strong.

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4. Psychoactive texts

Say you grew up in a family of astrologers or yoga teachers in south India before the internet. Freudless. In theory, being exposed to westerners who treat you like cosmic grandpa could be completely alienating. Or, it could be thrilling. Humans are humans are humans. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

Because I don’t understand the Indian side of the Yoga/Freud comparison intrinsically, I’ll rely on a download about the differences and similarities between Krishnamacharya’s yoga and Freudian analysis. Yes, that resource exists. Last year I studied it like scripture.

I don’t believe much yoga can be learned in books. But, some publications aren’t so much books as psychoactive substances. This one is dense, unexciting, and lacks editing for a mass market. Good. Knowledge like this should be some trouble. This book guided me for months, from the day it came to me in Freud’s home of Vienna – where I’d first read it on the plane to Montenegro — then back to Michigan where it defined my summer studies, and then to the Pacific Northwest where its message finally germinated in my mind.

So in May, the wonderful Austrian Mysore teacher B gave me a copy of Freud and Yoga by Desikachar and Krusche as I was leaving her home. She directs the shala in Vienna, a city where Freud isn’t just in the air. He’s in the blood. A lot of those ashtangis are psychotherapists. They know the edges of their own paradigm and how to differentiate it from other modes of thinking, same as the book’s coauthor.

I returned to Ann Arbor and took on an apprentice for the summer. She arrived from a faraway country, and we got two months together to support her in her transition into the teaching life. When an apprentice comes, they practice beside me each morning before class, then watch me teach or assist daily, and then meet with me weekly to talk about theory and method. The schedule is grueling for them, and easy for me. At 43, with 20 years of practice experience, the practice has made me far stronger than the 10-year asana champs; in the same way, my 49 year old teacher is faaaaar stronger than me when it comes to the long haul of running a Mysore room.

Anyway, to ensure apprentices get the message that this is only the beginning their Million Hour Teacher Training (TM), they also choose a special topic of study and are asked to do whatever it takes to get me sufficiently interested in their topic to learn about it together with them. (Incidentally, so I feel comfortable inviting individuals based purely on their merit, and so they remember that they might fail, and so I can start paying down the debts of generosity I owe my teachers… this apprenticeship is free.) This summer, she knew immediately; she wanted to study the comparison of yoga and psychology. Great coincidence.

Studying alongside her for two months is how I finally reached the perspective in this post. We began with something evil, Swami Rama’s psychotherapy book, subjecting it to our best critical analysis. Are there clues in the text that the author is a psychopath? (Yes.) Would we have the clarity to recognize them if we didn’t know his story before we started? (Maybe.) Several other students at the shala jumped in and formed a reading group, and the lot of us are still processing the threads opened during that time.

Then at the end of summer, I taught a regional retreat at a Jiddu Krishnamurthi center in Cascadia. (Cascadia is a Unified Utopian Zone that transcends state boundaries in the Pacific Northwest.) During that time, I was studying the Sutras with Chase Bossart, the close student TKV Desikachar (coauthor of the psychoactive book, and son of Krishnamacharya). Chase had generously agreed to do a month-long intensive for my students on the topic of viveka according to Patanjali.

This combination of J. Krishnamurti (a close friend of Desikachar and his father) coming back into my life after a long absence*, plus Chase telling stories about his teacher which I’d never heard before and which may not be documented anywhere yet…. well, it all came together and caused a small fireworks display in my brain.

The following questions appeared.

These are all about the evolution Krishnamacharya may have gone through regarding the role of the student-teacher relationship in yoga. And more importantly, the evolution this seeded for us. By December I’d found partial answers to all of these, but I suspect you, internet, know much more. Please reply if so.

If you care about decolonizing yoga, or a non-racist yoga, or a yoga that has begun to atone for its misogyny and perhaps learned to be of service to marginalized people, these questions may open up our field of possible futures.

I. What was the relationship of Patthabi Jois to his teacher Krishnamacharya in the years after the student started wearing gold chains and teaching from stages? Did Krishnamacharya worry about what was happening there?

II. What models did the world of the 70s-90s have for the living saint? Did Krishnamacharya accept the role of spiritual authority that others asked him to fill, or (as the story goes) he did refuse it? What techniques did Patthabi Jois’s old students use to forge his saintly image for those who would come later? Why didn’t Krishnamacharya’s students do the same to him; and did they try?

III. What was Krishnamacharya’s attitude toward celebrity students? Did it worry him that his students Iyengar and Jois cultivated celebrity students?

IV. Who was Jiddu Krishnamurti, and how does his biography show the ways that westerners demanded spiritual services from Indian god-men in the 20th century? What made his Dissolution of the Order of the Star so inspiring (or horrifying) to other Indian teachers? What was his warning for us now?

V. What happened when Krishnamurti met Krishnamacharya?

VI. What can be known about how Krishnamacharya’s vision for the student-teacher relationship developed after he left the Mysore Palace? What keys to Krishnamarchaya’s method are revealed by Desikachar’s radical pedagogy?

VI. This is a little crazy… but did Krishnamacharya deliberately construct a path out of authoritarianism and set it in motion decades ago, in a way that people throughout his lineage could pick up when Krishanamurti’s warnings came due?

I’m still processing the summer epiphany, and don’t have words for it yet. But the more it settles, the deeper my suspicion that Krishnamurti radicalized Krishnamacharya late in life in a way we have only just begun to appreciate. And the more I wonder if he left any record of objection to the way his students created a following. Did he? Because he knew those god-men as humans and as his own students, what could he see in their shadows as they took the stage that Krishnamurti refused?

These questions don’t matter because of curiosity. They matter because they might reveal the roots of authoritarianism in Krishnamacharya yoga to be dying. Or rather: long dead.

(*My introduction to J Krishnamurti was Mark Whitwell telling me to read both of the Krishnamurtis in grad school in LA. He said that would help me understand the problems with Patthabi Jois, who was still teaching at that time. I had no idea what Mark meant, but did the reading and loved it.)
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5. Authoritarianism Gets Real

How to fight authoritarianism? Some ways: (1) Write its history from start to definitive finish. (2) Give up entitlement to leaders as cathartic spiritual objects. (3) Manage transference by being a whole human person in spiritual settings, and requiring anyone in power to do the same instead of playing like a saint.

(Trigger warning: same as above.) There are dozen ways to write our history. Revenge history, the study of the moral failures of past individuals, is the long lie that “I would have never done that.” CS Lewis called this chronological snobbery. For months, I’ve been countering that impulse by listening to a lot of Thic Nhat Hanh on Interbeing. He looks at atrocity through the lens of “how could a face of humanity come to this?”

This is a level of taking responsibility almost no humans have yet found possible. But ashtanga already gave us Mary Taylor, so I feel there will be more to come among us.

Again, using the research tool of “How could an aspect of my own species have done this?,” I have understood: there would be benefits to being somebody’s spiritual object. Then you get to boss them around, and they kiss your feet for it, and they’re not real people to you, and you’re not real to them. So we get religion. Corporate capitalism. Cults. Oligarchy. It is clear. Worship of power in the form of men answers the research question.

People are people. Power likes power. No surprises there.

Now several massive democracies, nation-states founded on secular ideals that once inspired many, rush towards fascism. There is a formula. These states are usually led by men who came to power through violence against ethnic minorities and favors to religious fundamentalists. Nationalist authoritarianism is not something to watch out for. Nationalist authoritarianism is here. It’s getting stronger today, tomorrow, next week. It’s in America. India. China. Parts of South America. Parts of Europe. And more…

We know now that ashtanga has its own history of authoritarianism, embedded within a greater context of liberation and healing and discipline and play and wonder. Its history of cult behavior is short enough we can piece together our own experiences of it, and its genealogy. If you know the history of an idea, and then you know it’s just one choice among many. A bad vibe that has a beginning, can also have an end.

Looking back, you can see: spiritualized authoritarianism was one way of doing yoga. And it’s now effete. As the global nation-state situation grows violent, the stronger the need to design the spiritual future creatively. We can use the ideas and historical knowledge at hand to cut through cultures of compliance. Mystics are great at resistance, because their minds are free.

Two of the key dying democracies are on opposite sides of the world. Yoga thrives at these poles. One starts with A, and one starts with I. In these nations, authoritarianism is turning towards fascism. As we make the ashtanga of 2020, please remember the aesthetic and the attitude that accompanied the original fascist ethno-state. It started with a stage. Add a charismatic male leader, and behind that large portraits of the same man. Then on the grounds before the stage, rows and rows of adamantine bodies, moving in synchrony, the model of coordinated mental and martial power.

As fascism takes form form again in the world, I’ve been on the lookout for new uses of its visual lexicon. Because this is how hypernormalization works. My friends: fascist imagery was already re-normalizing itself last year. The First Order. The Sith Cathedral. Evangelical megachurches. The Magisterium. Michigan Trump rallies. And….

Yeah. And that. See it? I know this is really hard to look at, but please. That aesthetic, and that attitude, is in our shadow too.

And because authoritarianism is an aspect of ashtanga history, our lizard brains contain the code for how to double down on transference onto spiritualized authorities. When we could instead let the mass guru thing die. We know in our bones how to center our practice around the pedestal and the person on it – whether we obsessively love or obsessively critique that object. What an easy way to find psychological comfort in uncertain times. To fill the void of parents, and presidents, and bosses who care.

Please. This is important. There are a million ways to nurture our practice for the future. A million ways it can look. A million ways we can express care, loyalty, investment, and faith. Obsession with authority is, we have learned, the worst of all known ways.

Understand our yoga’s authoritarian streak from the inside, from the beginning. Then gently, let it end.

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A post shared by Angela Jamison (@angelazjamison) on May 23, 2019 at 5:33am PDT

I. Pre-empting future suffering.

Ashtanga’s exhaling, everywhere. I returned home from India in March to the news that our shala’s rent was multiplying so many times over that we might have to close. No. Time to go into long-term planning mode.

The same week, two of the shalas I looked to as leaders – in Boulder and in New York –announced they were closing due to unaffordable rent. This is America ruled by real estate mafia: passive income for the 1%, double shifts for those of us who are actually productive. It’s a very challenging time to teach large group classes. A socialist esoterica school doesn’t get to have 2500 square feet on Main Street.

Except for when it does. I got quiet here to sort it out. I didn’t want to say a thing until deals were sealed. That’s done now. We have a long term plan and two contingency plans for stability.

They thought I might survive by opening a “yoga studio.” ADVERTISE. Build a following around my name as a brand. Run classes all day, with a variety of formats. Train teachers to take on my responsibilities as the main asana instructor, while I lead the business instead. Redefine my work to satisfy the building owners who want more rent. No. I’m not turning the shala into a store. Commodification is not a long term thriving strategy.

Ashtanga DOES need to exhale now. It is time for this practice to contract; become smaller; go back underground to do a ton of inner work. I will teach through this time and I will love it. The ashtanga I fell in love with 20 years ago was a tough-minded yet mystical counterculture. And as that, our shala will continue in a signless upstairs space on Main Street, where we’ve been for ten years. To survive, I’ll be running a variety of anti-capitalist-within-capitalism experiments. New organizational strategies are taking shape, little bit little. It’s so clear now that the ashtanga-splosion that happened the last ten years – obsession with postural achievements and worship of teachers –has been an avoidance of just looking inside. So now, we look inside or die. What will remain of this practice – given the economic pressure we are all under – desperately needs organizational forms that support grounded self-reflection, outside of the internet and yoga vacations. We will see what happens in Ann Arbor. The micro-experiments are up and running….

Something else I was quiet about… until the incisions were sealed.

The week after the news of our rent increase, I had arthroscopic surgery on my right anterior meniscus. The knee was fine as it was, but I saw a restriction in my mobility coming decades down the road. The time to stop and prevent future suffering was now.

Blame my practice if that’s the story you are telling. You’d be wrong, though it’s true I have practiced ashtanga daily since April of 2003, and much of the 3 years before that. I’m not pursuing flexibility. Rather, the coup de grace for my strong, mobile knee came when I collapsed upon seeing my father in pain. Long story. Two months in Mysuru healed the MCL; 4 minutes on an operating table gave the meniscus new life it would not have enjoyed in any other era.

Surgery was wonderful. I watched, without the meds. You know that thing, when peak experience bends time? The mind slows perception so you can count the stitches in the baseball that’s flying at your face. Watching a tiny knife inside my knee was like that.

The surgeon allowed me to watch the procedure, with one shot to the L3 to numb the lower body for 20-30 minutes. He doubted my ability to stay calm, watching my own body opened up without feeling. He had the anesthesiologist roll a stainless steel cart alongside my bed, needles and a face mask ready to go the second I lost my composure. And then he tested me, describing the procedure while we both listened to the heart rate monitor speed up as things got real.

Realizing this was a test, I took a controlled belly breath and asked the heart to slow. Magic. The surgery team prepped for 50 minutes; I kept the heart slow and steady enough to earn their trust. They said this level of control shouldn’t be possible. But then something happened. Over the course of a minute, I lost sensory AND motor function below the L3. The diaphragm would contract up under my ribs on a conscious, controlled exhale, and then halfway through the next inhale all ability to feel and to DO would drop away. If there is one thing I always have, one strategy above strategies, it is the ability to breathe with consciousness and control. One breath, I had it; and the next round I had half. Only the bottom of the exhale and the top of the inhale. But I needed the breath to stay deep and slow in the belly to keep the heart rate impressively slow. One false heartbeat, and they’d snap the gas mask on my face and sign the down-regulation job over to the drugs.

There was the face mask. There was the anesthesiologist with a hand on the mask. There was a wheel of gleaming tools rolling towards my leg. And I could not ask my breath to inhale, or feel it if it did. This is weird, but I prayed to the heart rate. Not a prayer from the heart, but a prayer TO the muscle, asking for a particular rhythm. Specifically I prayed to the beep. And all nine of us in the operating room stayed with the beep for four long minutes of meniscus shave. Please beep, be steady. Take care of our patient.

She beeped. The mystical thing was knowing in my unconscious gut that the breath was down there in the belly even while my pranamaya “I” was offline. My training in nervous system self-regulation couldn’t help; but the autonomic system had me. For half of every breath cycle, there was nothing my “I” could do. This was visceral-mystical game, half the inhale and half the exhale as will, half as surrender, and the heart holding both sides accountable. That shot in the spine represents the most drugs I’ve ever done in my life. It was a very good trip.

I said no to the Oxycontin they offered for no good reason; a day with ice and the books of Sheldon Pollock was sufficient. I tried to watch Innerspace too, but the real thing’s better.

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II. Authorities of Post-Authoritarianism.

Sometimes you just need to hear it from a man. And old man.

You know? The realizations. The “new paradigms.” The re-programming instructions on how to fix yourself. It helps to hear it from One Who Knows.

Yoga is in a big post-authoritarian moment right now. This is positive. Thank god. (Insert subconscious grandpa god-image.) Thank… the men who have come to save us…?

How is this post-authoritarian again?

Please think about John Friend. Sorry. Not the man, the syndrome. The man with a roll of paradigms inside his coat, one for every era. Savior – Power Abuser – Savior again. Doesn’t matter what story we’re all telling, he just needs to be the one with the Solutions. The movable Savior.

Anyone can be that guy. What is required is a careful understanding of victimhood. He describes the Problem, and uses one or more Victims to illustrate why his Solution is necessary. If someone notices the pattern, the Savior himself moves into Victim mode, giving birth to new Saviors who become emotionally invested in defending him and his holy Solution. It’s totally fine if you hold some Solution dear – new paradigms can be great. But just go behind the energy for a minute. The second the Savior plays Victim, you know he’s not in it to help anyone at all. He’s playing for power. This means many more future rounds on the Savior-Victim-Problem wheel.

So: yoga’s anti-authoritarian moment. It will have authorities.

Basically modern yoga is entering Season 2 of Westworld.

This spring in the ashtanga world, I’ve had old men (I’d call them colleagues, but they genuinely might be insulted by this) tell me I suffer from years of submission into the authoritarian/patriarchial culture they themselves embody… and which now they can cure me of. I thought my anger about this was just my own, but this month some of the senior teachers I respect most have told me they also can’t believe this moment we are in. Having to listen to angry, dominating men tell us how we’ve been wrong all these years.

Please.

Dominating men: do you imagine we need you to think for us? Do you think for a minute that we didn’t see your authoritarianism problem the minute we walked in the door? Do you think we didn’t create discrete, systematic, non-authoritarian ways around you from the start? We never needed to change you; we just made sure to show you enough respect you wouldn’t get obsessed with dominating us, and to stay sufficiently invisible that you wouldn’t “fall in love” with us. The anti-authoritarianism we’ve always had isn’t a Solution. It’s not a workshop title. It’s just that unlike the Saviors, a lot of us have minds that are grounded. We don’t get lost in big ideas. We use our brains.

We hear one woman say she was mistreated: we believe her. It’s just good sense to a grounded mind. Women don’t lie about abuse. And abuse can come from Perpetrators, from Saviors, from Saviors playing Victims. Dear Savior: you ever exploit someone who opened up to you, humiliate a vulnerable person for power, “fall in love” with a woman in your care? Is this question upsetting? Sorry. Don’t worry: the answer doesn’t make you a Problem because those of us with a grounded thinking process try to stay out of that game. But still, if these questions are upsetting, please lay off the Savior thing. It’s not helping anyone but you.

Putting energy into the Savior thing keeps us locked in a dominance system that was already old when I started yoga twenty years ago. It’s a way to keep dominating old men in power. But anti-authoritarianism grew up without saviors from the grass roots of grounded minds of generations of both men and women. I will explain.

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III. Futurism

Going forward, Yoga will see an anti-authoritarian paradigm coalesce. It’s good in the long run, bizarre in the short run. There will be gurus of consent culture and trauma commodifiers. We will pay money and attention to learn about the post-authoritarian paradigm, from authorities who spend their days self-promoting on the internet rather than serving in classrooms. I want to talk about the established sources that the new authorities of anti-authoritarianism will mine for ideas.

The new gurus will get their material from nurturers. From field-tested anti-authoritarians. From people whose M.O. was always to be hyper-sentisive to the vulnerable, and to risk their own reputations on defending them. From people who have the moral intelligence to go against the flow of their professions if that is what it takes to protect their students. I’m thinking especially of a generation of senior women and men who teach only to their personal students, whose material is a non-branded form of asana that they created out of years of study and service. I suspect ashtanga lost some of these service-driven teachers, because our asana obsession and authorization/ certification hierarchy can be a distraction from a real commitment to serving those in need. My guess is that most of these people defected before my time, but some of them stayed and worked within the subculture. My first decade of practice, I ran across a dozen of the ones who stayed. These are the strongest teachers in the field. They aren’t writing about their work; they are DOING their work. If you’re here to co-opt my ideas about anti-authoritarianism, I won’t help you find these people whose practice and insight are so much better than mine.

….But I can say the ways that I have been post-authoritarian for the first ten years of my teaching practice, and how I learned to be like this. The reason to note this living history is, again, to challenge the proposition that the post-authoritarianism is new, and that there is anyone who can speak of it with authority.

Post-authoritarianism, consent culture and trauma sensitivity are the background intelligence of all of today’s yoga; since I started practicing it’s been a muted mycelial intelligence that makes this whole thing sustainable. It’s the nurturers – both men and women – who made yoga what it is now, and who continue making it every day. The majority of what we know isn’t from Saviors; it’s from servants.

For 18 months, every teacher I know who operates from nurturance has been alienated, devastated, even traumatized to learn that ashtanga yoga has a history of sexual abuse. Worse, we are still as a subculture muting vulnerable women. All of the nurturing teachers are sad for the women. Most of us are sad for the authorities who are broken because they didn’t nurture correctly when they should have, and can’t find a way to process their cognitive dissonance and guilt now. Our generation of nurturers is soul-searching, and blaming ourselves that we did not somehow do better. I am sorry. We are sorry. That we didn’t see. We’re worried about EVERYONE else, whatever their perspective on historical abuse of power in our practice.

Nurturers are great at moral labor; we’ll carry that guilt the Saviors are shoving off. And while we do so, our hearts go to any women who has ever been abused, silenced or shunned. This is how nurturance operates inside a person’s mind. It’s a kind of mind that rushes out to the most vulnerable person and asks what can be done. The answer is never to a Solution. It is so much more more humble than that. It is meeting their needs, without disempowering them by Saving them.

Repeatedly I tell the Saviors I have never been an authoritarian, that I don’t have the problem they want to fix in me. Because I have been taught and mentored by nurturing men! But a woman who is not broken and does not need saving is not of value in the Savior world. There are spaces online where ashtanga teachers discuss the discipline. One by one, non-authoritarian teachers have realized, we are not even heard in conversations about authoritarianism. If women say someone is not safe, we are disbelieved. If we say we are not Victims, we are disregarded. It’s fine. We just go back to our work of nurturance.

You know how the mind of an authoritarian works? It believes our broken-hearted softness makes us weak. For this reason, in the near future, anti-authoritarianism will pass from the everyday work of meeting needs on students’ own terms, to an intellectual property of the Yoga Alliance. It will be used in service of that organization’s epic colonialist dominance move. This moment in yoga history will end quickly, but it’s exciting to watch because it points to how authoritarianism could truly die. Dialectically. In our own times, on a large scale, we could see the emergence of a deep, even devotional, simple, non-sectarian, post-colonialist understanding of yoga. The sublime performative contradiction of colonialist, authoritative anti-authoritarianism could make the whole edifice explode. Think about it. Then what remains is the same old mycelial network, teachers who do the daily work of nurturance without thinking that makes them Saviors.

Here is why Yoga Alliance anti-authoritarianism will eat itself: it will be driven by people whose minds are not grounded. Leaders who don’t have that basic thing, the part of you that makes it impossible to play follow-the-leader, or to pretend the boss is always right. That healthy ego that keeps you out of cults. Narcissist leaders lack healthy ego, and their institutions lack enduring values. Their legitimacy claim is to Save you of their ills. History wrote this plan out for us already. It predicts things will get culty for a minute. Enemies will be sought and persecuted; saviors will play victims. Then it’ll pass, and the professionals will still just be here taking care of our students above all, and doing our reverent best to honor a priceless, ancient tradition from a world we can just barely understand.

I’m just the loudest of a deep background of teachers who serve. Most of us are nurturing women. And some of us are the kind of alpha-male the Alt-right never understood: the leader who lives to shelter others. My generation is full of these nurturing teachers, and we are the ones studying the wounds that the culty aspects of yoga creates. This is what nurturers do. We take responsibility.

This is a whole world of practitioners who have all along acted out of what I’m going to call futurism. Futurists are NOT idea jocks with a platform (any savior here to change the world: Elon, Zuckerberg, heads of state, the Yoga Alliance). Futurists are stewards of history, Earth, and human bodies. In yoga, it’s people who know that our role is to take care of our students, and of this practice that we fundamentally respect. Growing in to the ideology of service that my fellow nurturing-teachers taught me by example changed the entire meaning of my life. Before teaching, the meaning of my life came from the past. “Actions leave traces” was a statement that helped me find the meaning of the present in history, and I devoted my 20s entirely to historical study. When I started teaching, I realized that “actions leave traces” can’t be a warm, sweet, nostalgic trigger anymore; it’s a mantra that has me examining the first, second and third order effects of every teaching move I make. Teaching is not about me, and it’s not about short-run effects. It’s about what happens far from here and now. It’s about this student’s body when he is 85, and about what will come of Yoga in a century if we treat it as sacred – and if we don’t.

I learned futurism by tuning in to the murmur of the nurturance network. I’ll sample the murmur below. This is not language of dogmas, or solutions, or enemies. It is the mundane shoptalk of nurturers. People who identify risks early, and who are the first responders any time they can be there for someone in pain. The particular topic below is recent intuitive responses to routine abuses of power. The teachers who talk like this with me share the idea that what we’re working with is priceless and sacred. Students’ experiences are sacred. And the yoga tradition: yes, priceless.

I have found some of the futurists who populate the non-ashtanga world. We are united by horror at what the Yoga Alliance is angling to do to future yoga (remember, we see risk early). And we are drawn together by our worry about the effects of gymnastic internet yoga on the next generation of practitioners. Still, most of what I know about futurism is within ashtanga. In that world, futurism sounds like teachers talking over coconuts, or WhatApp across 12 timezones. This is not an ideological program. It’s the background value system of the quiet nurturers I admire most. I can tell you their murmur has had this post-authoritarian theme for the entire decade I’ve been looped in. (About a dozen of you might recognize our conversations in this anonymized stream.) Let’s just un-mute this background hum in yoga consciousness for a minute. Again, this is my anonymized verion of nurturers thinking about the future, feeling weird about aspects of the present that don’t bode well and need to be addressed quietly for students’ sake:

“…I feel weird about this idea that teachers have some sort of wisdom or grace the student doesn’t understand until they submit. Yeah me too. Surrender is a thing, but westerners turn it into a bypass. How many people have I met who got injured in a workshop after the teacher lectured about the importance of surrender? I feel terrible for these students who go through this. It’s also such a tragedy for yoga. Let’s not infantilize people….”

“…I feel weird about training my students to bow to images of other humans. Like, can idolatry of humans ever be a healthy example? It feels so dangerous for them. And I’d be mortified if they ever treated me like that later. Gotta do the right thing on this one….”

“…Ok so what does it look like to give power to students? Encourage them to learn to practice alone? Be radically faithful to them, but never ask them not to study elsewhere? Say ‘I don’t know’ a lot? Suggest to study the tradition early, so that they also feel like it is theirs – the teacher isn’t the guardian of the meaning? Give them the opportunity to hold us accountable by coming early any morning to practice alongside us? Exaggerate fallability; ask them to check our memory or facts…?”

“…I mean, can a shala exist without instagram? I think that is where students go to look for teachers now? I don’t know but doesn’t someone have to try to set an example for another way? Maybe that’s what is happening now – yoga teachers commodifying themselves and working full time to feed the mediabeast – but long run there’s gotta be people who show there is another way. I’m gonna sit this one out for the team…”

“… I feel weird about new students objectifying my teacher like some sort of god. It’s dehumanizing. It’s like western students feel entitled to having their own personal super-human to throw all their projections onto, like this is psychotherapy. This feels super dangerous, like a setup for alienation later. It feels important to just relate to teachers as humans and be open about the fact that we don’t assume they are always be right or always have a good reason for what they do. This culty vibe is just not safe for the future…”

“…Wow there is some seriously wrong unsolicited advice going down in classrooms. I can’t believe how disturbed my student is by this random thing a senior teacher said to her years ago. Leaves a mark. Dammit, it’s so sad for the student, and obviously the teacher was just projecting. I mean, you’d think our colleagues would understand the basics of consent? This is tricky because how we get across the idea that unsolicited advice is garbage, without playing the savior and creating some sort of perpetrator energy around the person who gave the bad advice? Seems more important than anything not to start up a victim cyclone about something a student can also maybe decide to blow off…”

“…I feel weird that old men sleep with young women who look up to them as teachers. Yeah, this makes me afraid for young students. I don’t understand how you’d ever sexualize a student? Are we the only ones who feel an incest taboo? Maybe at this stage we just don’t pretend this is legit, even if it means we’re socially ostracized for it? Maybe warn the young women…?

“…I feel super weird about yoga teachers making a big deal about their devotion to their teacher – they’re training their students how to be ritually submissive. Yes. Super awkward. Probably this is well-intentioned, but dangerous for the people in our care. Let’s keep our heart-feelings about our teachers to ourselves…”

“…I feel weird about the workshop circuit – this idea of acting like the authority and then leaving before I even know the effects of the work. Yeah, that’s super challenging. Amway Ashtanga – let the local teacher send you the money, and fix the mess you create. I mean, let’s find every way we can to take long-term responsibility for the instructions and the touch that we give…”

“…I feel weird about teachers in really attention-getting clothes, or almost no clothes. Can I say that? No I don’t think there’s space to say this out loud. Yoga’s still in second wave feminism right now; women’s power here is seen as super capitalist and individualist. Dudes will claim this gives them cover to go shirtless when they teach. But when I pay close attention to students I see it creates sexual overtones, and that’s why it matters for future students to do things another way. If we wait it out, feminisms that center the vulnerable will get popular enough to help out here. I can’t believe ashtanga still in second wave feminism…”

“…Sometimes I get an impulse to adjust someone outside the clear plan we have for their practice. Do you ever just roll with that? I dunno, kind of no. I used to before I really thought how the law of cause-and-effect plays out in my realationships; but increasingly I just feel super weird about random touch. I think the deeper my understanding of consent goes, the clearer I get about the intention of my every action in the classroom…”

“…I feel super weird about marketing stuff to students and especially about taking money from them if I’m not actually working for them. Yeah, that’s definitely weird. Easy money feels dirty because it’s not ours. Their resources matter. The money we earn is the money we work for. We’re not passive income bots…”

…And so on.

This is actual, anonymized shop talk from 2019. It must be offensive to some, but you may as well know it’s there humming in the background as a constant protective force.

This is the process of nurturing teachers anticipating problems – by feeling weird in their guts – and solving them before they arise. Gentle futurism.

By contrast, the Savior identifies problems far after the fact, and imposes new idea-based paradigms to solve the limited aspects of reality he perceives as the Problem. The point is to see the world from above and impose authority from that place.

Nurture is not an IDEA. It’s a methodology that works with the exact situation at hand, and never makes big moves. “Move slow and plant things,” the permaculturists say, in contrast to the authoritarian’s “walk soft and carry a big stick.”

Grounded thinking literally leads to ground-up forms of action. It’s small, gradual, slow, and mostly anonymous. Not idea-driven and centered around single personalities. Nurturing teachers emphatically do not need authorities to them straight. They need authorities to talk all day, from very far away, and stay out of the way of the work on the ground.

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