Shows / Ashtanga Tech
Ashtanga Tech
Keep the practice. Lose the guru. Michael Joel Hall on Ashtanga yoga without the authoritarianism — consent on the mat, systems over dogma, and how to practice for yourself. Each season is one course: Ashtanga Without a Guru, Practice for Yourself, The Mind-Body Organism, Culture and Context, Foundations of Praxis, and Executive Systems.
Episodes
- Ashtanga Tech
How Yoga Supports Health and Physiology
There's a line that gets repeated in yoga and medical circles both. When all else fails, yoga works. It sounds like a slogan. Then you start watching what…
- Ashtanga Tech
Musculoskeletal System Introduction
Your bones are not the scaffolding. They're alive. They have a blood supply, they have nerves running through them, and right now, while you're listening…
- Ashtanga Tech
Assume Adaptability and Competence
There's no such thing as a relatively healthy person. There's just you, today, in the body you actually walked in with.
- Ashtanga Tech
Why Yoga Works
Yoga changes your body. Not in a poster-on-the-wall way. In a shows-up-in-a-blood-test way.
- Ashtanga Tech
Organizational Leadership
Most yoga teachers think the job is teaching yoga. The adjustments. The sequences. The philosophy. All the stuff that made them fall in love with the practice…
- Ashtanga Tech
Apprenticeship & Scaling
Most yoga teachers scale their business wrong, and they do it in a very specific order. First the beautiful space. Then the cork floors. Then the staff, the…
- Ashtanga Tech
Source Transparency
A yoga class is full of claims. Engage your bandhas. This posture opens the hips. The tradition teaches us. Dozens of claims an hour. And almost nobody ever…
- Ashtanga Tech
Pregnancy/postpartum protocols
Most teachers handle a pregnant student one of two ways. They treat her like nothing changed, or they treat her like she might shatter. Both fail her. And both…
- Ashtanga Tech
Led Primary
In a lot of rooms, Led Primary is a filter. Keep pace, and you belong. Fall behind, and you stand there watching everyone else while you figure out you don't.
- Ashtanga Tech
Age-specific modifications
Most yoga teaching is optimized for a twenty-five-year-old body. Flexible, resilient, quick to recover. And everyone else is quietly told to keep up or quit.
- Ashtanga Tech
Chanting, Generally
Most Ashtanga rooms treat chanting like a loyalty oath. Everyone stands, everyone recites Sanskrit they don't understand, and anyone who opts out gets the…
- Ashtanga Tech
Breath & Nervous System
Most yoga teachers treat breath like a background app. "Remember to breathe." Thanks. Very helpful.
- Ashtanga Tech
Accessibility and Equity (Shared Ownership)
In most Western yoga studios, "karma yoga" is a spiritual word for unpaid labor. And it tends to come from the people least able to say no.
- Ashtanga Tech
Invocation
For years I played Sharath's invocation recording every morning at six-thirty. Dim lights, incense, the altar, the whole atmosphere. Students walked into it…
- Ashtanga Tech
Finances
Most yoga spaces treat money like a dirty word. The donation bowl sits by the door, nobody says what anything costs, and the teacher smiles through the…
- Ashtanga Tech
Critical Thinking & Bias
Every teacher has biases running in the background. The only question is whether they run the show undetected, or whether you drag them out into daylight. For…
- Ashtanga Tech
Motivational Interviewing
I used to be a good teacher. Knowledgeable, attentive, students got technically proficient under my watch. And then I'd go on vacation, and their practice…
- Ashtanga Tech
Transparency & Leadership
If your community can't run for two weeks without you, you haven't built a community. You've built a dependency. And you probably think that dependency is your…
- Ashtanga Tech
Toxic Teachers Steal Make Subjectivity Objective
There's a specific move a bad teacher makes, and once you can name it, you can't stop seeing it. They take their own opinion about your body — a guess, a…
- Ashtanga Tech
Peer Support & Community
For years, every single relationship in my shala ran through me. Student to teacher. Student to teacher. Student to teacher. I was the hub, everyone else was a…
- Ashtanga Tech
Your Subjective Experience Is Yours
There's a line between what you feel in a posture and what everyone else thinks you feel. In Ashtanga, that line has been crossed so many times that most…
- Ashtanga Tech
Student Autonomy & Motivation
Most yoga students can't practice without a teacher in the room. Take the teacher away, and the whole thing quietly falls apart. And that's not the students'…
- Ashtanga Tech
Succession Strategy
You will leave your community. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not by choice. But you will leave it. The only real question is whether anything survives after you're…
- Ashtanga Tech
Advanced Practices Access
For a few years, I ran a gate. I decided when you were ready. I kept the criteria to myself. And I handed out the good stuff only after you'd earned it. It…
- Ashtanga Tech
Objective Assesment
Here's a sentence that sounds like expertise and usually isn't. Your hips aren't open enough. It has the tone of a measurement. It's an opinion in a lab coat.
- Ashtanga Tech
Student Safety (Physical + Psychological)
You ask a student how a pose feels. They say "good." Their breath is shallow, their jaw is clenched, and two weeks later they stop coming to class. You never…
- Ashtanga Tech
Apprenticeship
Apprenticeship is a craft, not a costume. You are learning to see and to act with skill. You are not learning to be a second-rate copy of your teacher.
- Ashtanga Tech
Assesment Paradigms
You walk into a room. Twenty people are practicing. You scan, and something fires — that one needs help. Here's the question almost no teacher asks. What did…
- Ashtanga Tech
Social media/digital presence
Social media is everything yoga isn't. It's curated. It sells your attention. It's engineered to make you compare, scroll, and come back. You already know all…
- Ashtanga Tech
Safety & Consent
The absence of a no is not a yes. Sit with that one, because most of the traditional adjustment culture is built on getting it wrong.
- Ashtanga Tech
Boundary violations response
Most yoga teachers fail at boundaries in exactly two ways. And they usually do both, one after the other.
- Ashtanga Tech
Subjectivity and Assisting
You put your hands on a student and move them. Congratulations — you are now expressing your opinion with someone else's body.
- Ashtanga Tech
Accessibility & Props
Most yoga spaces treat props like training wheels. Something you graduate from. That's stupid, and it costs you students.
- Ashtanga Tech
Mental health crisis protocols
Most yoga teachers handle an injury the same way. Panic. Guess. Hope. I know, because I did it for years.
- Ashtanga Tech
Praise & Feedback
Someone will tell you that you changed their life. They'll mean it. And they'll be wrong.
- Ashtanga Tech
Whose Taste? Yours.
You have a body. You have sensations. And you have blind spots the size of a parking garage.
- Ashtanga Tech
Power Imbalance & Authoritarian Drift
I built a room full of skilled dependents. That's not teaching. That's a cult of personality with good hamstring flexibility.
- Ashtanga Tech
Injury management protocols
Most yoga teachers handle an injury the same three ways: panic, guess, and then either tell the student to stop entirely or pretend nothing happened.
- Ashtanga Tech
Cross-cultural adaptation
Yoga comes from India. This should not be controversial. And yet.
- Ashtanga Tech
Youthful Enthusiasm
You don't yet know whether they're excited about yoga, or excited about winning at yoga. And neither do they.
- Ashtanga Tech
Defining Taste for Community
You wear two hats, and one of them is quietly killing the other.
- Ashtanga Tech
Organizational Leadership in the Wild
Most yoga teachers become leaders by accident. You open a shala, people show up, and suddenly you're making decisions that affect their lives — and nobody…
- Ashtanga Tech
Leverage Points in Practice & Organizations
The biggest changes in a yoga room almost never come from the biggest moves. They come from the small ones nobody notices.
- Ashtanga Tech
Conflict resolution procedures
Most yoga spaces handle conflict the same way. They don't. And "keep it on the mat" works great for exactly one person in the room — the one with all the power.
- Ashtanga Tech
Complicated Components
A wobbly tree pose might be about your ankle. It might also be about the argument you had at breakfast. The practice refuses to tell you which — and that's the…
- Ashtanga Tech
Handling Imperfection
For years I hid every struggle. Only showed the poses that came easy. Covered up the Sanskrit I mispronounced like nobody heard it. And when I hurt a student…
- Ashtanga Tech
Feedback Loops: Reinforcing vs Balancing
Two students walk into the same Mysore room on the same morning. A year later one is thriving and one has vanished. Most of the time, the difference isn't…
- Ashtanga Tech
Simplicity
You can own three things and still explain the bandhas like a fortune cookie written by a thesaurus. Having less stuff is not the same as being clear.
- Ashtanga Tech
Relationships and Boundaries
A tight shoulder is almost never a shoulder problem. That's the whole episode, and also the thing it took me years to believe.
- Ashtanga Tech
Friendliness
For two years I taught friendliness as constant positivity. Smile. Be welcoming. Say yes. Never let them see you frustrated. And the whole time, it was a lie.
- Ashtanga Tech
Stocks & Flows in Human Systems
I stopped telling my students their breath was shallow. I started telling them where their energy went instead. Same fact. Completely different room.
- Ashtanga Tech
Patience
"Be patient." It's the most common advice in yoga. It's also the laziest thing a teacher can say.
- Ashtanga Tech
Ashtanga Yoga as a System
Roll out your mat and you see postures. Step back six inches and the whole thing reorganizes into something else entirely.
- Ashtanga Tech
Faith
When "have faith" means "stop thinking," it stops being faith. It becomes obedience. And obedience dressed as spirituality is how people get hurt.
- Ashtanga Tech
Introduction to Systems Theory
A system is more than the sum of its parts. That line gets quoted to death. And almost nobody actually lives like they believe it.
- Ashtanga Tech
Super-Loop: Kriya Yoga
A collection of good practices is not a system. Under stress, collections fall apart. Systems hold.
- Ashtanga Tech
Prana and the Bathtub: Systems Thinking for the Ashtanga Practitioner
Your energy is not a battery you charge overnight. It's water in a bathtub. Filling and draining at the same time, every minute you're alive.
- Ashtanga Tech
Non-Harm
"First, do no harm." It sounds noble. It isn't even in the Hippocratic Oath. And the way most of us learned it does more damage than it prevents.