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
The System Inside of You
The bureaucracy isn't only out there in the world. It moved into your body years ago, and it's running your hamstrings.
- Ashtanga Tech
Truth-Trust
"Trust me, I'm the teacher" is not a trust-building strategy. It's a demand.
- Ashtanga Tech
Emergent Properties (Insight, Agency, Resilience)
I once went looking for enlightenment inside Marichyasana D. I figured if I could just bind the arms tightly enough, something would crack open. Wrong pose…
- Ashtanga Tech
Detachment / Less Outcome Focused
Half-effort isn't detachment. It's just avoidance with a Sanskrit label.
- Ashtanga Tech
Series as Subsystems: Primary, Intermediate, Advanced
A posture was never a test you pass or fail. It's a reading. The pose is just the thermometer.
- Ashtanga Tech
The Systems at Play
You step onto your mat. The room is quiet, your breath is steady, and you're about to move through a sequence you've done a hundred times. Simple. Except it…
- Ashtanga Tech
25 Interventions You Can Start RIGHT NOW
You don't fix a bad room with better intentions. You fix it with better habits. Small ones. Ones you can start tomorrow morning.
- Ashtanga Tech
Action Indicates Priority
You say your practice matters. But your calendar already knows the truth. So does your credit card statement. So does the alarm you snoozed again this morning.
- Ashtanga Tech
25 Cult Warning Signs
A cult doesn't announce itself. It feels like the best room you've ever walked into. That's the whole trick.
- Ashtanga Tech
Systems Thinking and Time: Start Where You Are
You only have so much time. Which is exactly why pretending otherwise never helps.
- Ashtanga Tech
Case Study: FRC
Here's a question I want you to sit with. Where does the knowledge live? Not what do you know. Where does it live. Because in most Ashtanga rooms, the honest…
- Ashtanga Tech
Embodiment and Grounding
You're mid-conversation, and somewhere along the way you drifted three thoughts off. Or you're holding a pose and you notice you've been mentally drafting an…
- Ashtanga Tech
What Does a Yoga Executive Do?
You're the CEO of something unusual. Your own transformation.
- Ashtanga Tech
The Harsh Inner Critic is a Data Denier
Your harsh inner critic isn't just distorting the evidence. It's refusing to look at it.
- Ashtanga Tech
Transparency & Open Books as Trust-Building
I used to think students only wanted to know two things. The schedule and the sequence. What time to show up, and what to do when they got there. I was wrong…
- Ashtanga Tech
What is an Indigenous Insight Practice?
Some insight doesn't come from thinking harder. It comes from paying attention longer — and not to your own thoughts.
- Ashtanga Tech
Props & MVPs as Tools of Agency
For a while, I banned props in my Mysore room. I thought I was protecting the practice. What I was actually doing was teaching people to lie to me.
- Ashtanga Tech
Patience: Collecting Better Data
Patience isn't waiting. Patience is collecting better data.
- Ashtanga Tech
Language Shifts: Opt-In Commands and Sufficiency Framing
"Take this pose." "Do this now." I used to talk like that all the time. It was efficient. It was also making the room a little more brittle every time I opened…
- Ashtanga Tech
The Importance of Explicit Communication in Teaching
There's an objection I hear from teachers all the time. "If I explain everything, my students won't need me anymore." And my answer is: exactly. That's the…
- Ashtanga Tech
Yogic Agency: The Power of Choice in Your Practice
Your teacher says hold for five breaths. Your shoulders are screaming at breath three. What you do next — that's the whole thing.
- Ashtanga Tech
Consent Protocols & Safety Guardrails
When I started teaching, I adjusted people without asking. It was what my teachers did. I thought it was kindness. I was wrong about that, and I want to tell…
- Ashtanga Tech
Vikalpa: Seeing Beyond the Surface
The mirror shows your body. Your mind adds the commentary. And most of us can't tell the two apart.
- Ashtanga Tech
Assisting as Spiritual Practice
Here's the thing nobody tells you about putting your hands on someone in a yoga room. The most powerful assist you'll ever give is often no assist at all.
- Ashtanga Tech
The Philosophy of Asana
Patanjali spends sixteen words on the physical posture. Sixteen. In a text that maps everything from the cosmos to the quietest edge of concentration, the pose…
- Ashtanga Tech
Keeping Your Self Company
You are running an organization of one. And you have never once called a meeting.
- Ashtanga Tech
Executives are Accountable: Your World, Your Problems
You're the CEO of exactly one thing. Your own mind.
- Ashtanga Tech
Critical Thinking for Cognitive Bias
Your mind lies to you. Not sometimes. Constantly. And it lies to you fastest when it feels most certain.
- Ashtanga Tech
Naïve vs. Deliberate Practice
You can show up every single day and still land exactly where you always landed.
- Ashtanga Tech
Understanding Time Delays in Ashtanga Yoga
You changed the thing. It didn't work. So you changed it back. And that — that little reversal — might be the most destructive thing you did all year.
- Ashtanga Tech
What is a Yoga Executive?
You're standing on your mat, breathing, moving. And a question surfaces. Who's running this show?
- Ashtanga Tech
Integrating Systems Thinking into Ashtanga Yoga Community Support
You fire the controlling teacher. You hire a kind one. And two years later you're standing in the same wreckage, wondering how it happened again.
- Ashtanga Tech
Wise Practice
You already know the difference between a good practice and one that leaves you hollow.
- Ashtanga Tech
Leadership for Transformative Yoga Communities
If your shala falls apart the week you go on retreat, you are not a great teacher. You are a single point of failure.
- Ashtanga Tech
Samadhi: The Point of All of It
This is what the whole thing is pointed at. And you will probably never get there. And that's completely fine.
- Ashtanga Tech
Integrating Systems Thinking into Ashtanga Yoga Community Support
A teacher behaves badly. A student gets hurt. A shala quietly bleeds members. And we treat each one as its own little accident. It almost never is.
- Ashtanga Tech
Dharana: Holding the Mind in Place
Here's the practice nobody wants to admit they need. It's boring. There's no shortcut. And it's the one that makes all the impressive stuff possible.
- Ashtanga Tech
What is Decentralized Ashtanga?
Somewhere along the way, an ancient practice got flattened into a product. And most of us learned the product, and we called it the tradition.
- Ashtanga Tech
Ethics as Practice (Yamas & Niyamas)
The yamas and niyamas aren't a list of rules. They're a leak detector.
- Ashtanga Tech
Kriya Yoga: The Three-Part Discipline
The eight-limbed path is long. Patanjali knew most people would never make it to the end. So he wrote a shortcut, and he put it right at the front.
- Ashtanga Tech
The Five Ways the Mind Gets in Its Own Way
Trying to get rid of your worst mental habits is, itself, one of your worst mental habits.
- Ashtanga Tech
Deconstructing Toxic System in Mysore Style Ashtanga Yoga Education
When abuse happens in this lineage, the first instinct is always to find the bad apple. Name him, remove him, feel better. And that instinct, as decent as it…
- Ashtanga Tech
How the Sutras Are Built
If you've ever tried to just sit down and read the Yoga Sutras, and felt like you were chewing gravel, I have good news. That's not you. That's the…
- Ashtanga Tech
The Antics of Systems
You've heard someone say it. The system is broken. And most of the time, they're wrong. The system isn't broken. It's doing exactly what it was always going to…
- Ashtanga Tech
Three Metaphysical Frameworks, One Practice
Two people can do the exact same posture, breathe the exact same breath, and be doing two completely different things. The difference is invisible. It's the…
- Ashtanga Tech
Agentic Ashtanga is a Self Practice System
Most yoga traditions are trying to give you a pose. This one is trying to give you insight. And you can't hand someone insight. You can only build the…
- Ashtanga Tech
Patanjali in Context (Not Timeless, Not Isolated)
Patanjali did not invent yoga. And if you read him like he did, you'll misread almost every line.
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From Violence to Vision: The Radical Potential of Ashtanga Yoga to Combat Systemic Oppresion
Ashtanga has a violence problem. Not in theory. Not as a metaphor. As a matter of record.
- Ashtanga Tech
Where Yoga Actually Came From
The thing you do every morning is the residue of a very long experiment.
- Ashtanga Tech
Autonomy: Agentic Educational Perspectives
A student who practices because they were told to is having a completely different experience than a student who practices because they chose to. Same room…
- Ashtanga Tech
Dharana Philosophy
Dharana is what happens when the mind finally agrees to sit still. Not because you forced it. Because you stopped fighting it.
- Ashtanga Tech
Kriya Yoga
When the Yoga Sūtras finally turn from philosophy to practice, they don't start with some advanced meditation or an esoteric breath. They start with something…
- Ashtanga Tech
Kleshas Introduction
Patañjali doesn't open the practice with the solution. He opens it with the diagnosis. If yoga is medicine, the kleshas are the disease it's treating.
- Ashtanga Tech
My Teaching Journey
I started teaching yoga because a friend of mine caught dengue fever.
- Ashtanga Tech
Ashtanga Yoga as a Dynamic System
You step onto the mat with a plan, and your body has other ideas. You adjust. That's not you breaking the rules. That's the practice doing exactly what it's…
- Ashtanga Tech
Goals and Emergence
You set a goal, you do the practice, and then something else shows up — something softer or sharper or truer than the thing you were aiming at. That's not the…
- Ashtanga Tech
When the Well Runs Dry: Burnout, Imbalance, and the Practice of Awareness
When you flip out over something trivial, it's almost never about the trivial thing. The traffic is not the problem. The traffic is the messenger.
- Ashtanga Tech
Case Study: Systems Collapse vs Anti-Fragile Growth
When a yoga community cracks under pressure, we always blame the people. Almost always, the people were fine. It was the design that failed.