I am very critical of what I see as liberal culture’s abandonment of leftist politics. Because I have identified as a leftist since I was in college, I am deeply motivated by a hope that we can recover what has been lost. In order to do that, we have to look in the mirror.

At the same time that we organize against the authoritarian tendencies of a politics that has lost its mind, we have to think critically about our own political assumptions. It is not enough to blame the “other side” for everything that is wrong with our politics. Just as it takes a deeply un-self-aware, narcissistic person to think that the reason all their relationships fail is because of some fault in their partner, it is a toxic symptom of collective narcissism to see the ugliness of the ‘other side’ and not pause to consider what circumstances gave rise to that ugliness. To see ugliness of character and infer that this ugliness exists because such people are intrinsically ugly is an ugly idea that emerges from our own ugliness. To be a mature adult is to set aside adolescent self-righteousness and own our own shit.

And so it is in the spirit of ‘owning our own shit’ that I attempt to trace some of the foundational ideas of ‘liberalism’ and ‘leftism,’ while suggesting that the current political paradigm requires more intellectual and practical resources than what has come before — precisely because what once worked is no longer working.

Leftism vs. Liberalism

I identify as a ‘leftist,’ which for many will just read as ‘liberal,’ but there is an important distinction to be made between ‘leftism’ and ‘liberalism’ — although of course on certain issues they overlap.

A ‘leftist’ is someone who sees capitalism itself as the root of systemic inequality and alienation, while a ‘liberal’ generally accepts capitalism as the basic structure of society. Both liberals and leftists may recognize the need for governmental reforms that ameliorate the negative impacts produced by unrestrained capitalism (inequality, wage stagnation, dismantling of worker protections), but a leftist will often go further than simply ‘softening the edges’ of capitalism. The degree to which a ‘leftist’ will advocate for systemic change varies — with some calling for the abolition of capitalism, while others opt to ‘socialize’ certain industries necessary to human flourishing (i.e. healthcare, housing, transportation, education, energy). A ‘non-abolitionist’ leftist may still want to leave some industries to operate within the structures of capitalism, while removing from profit-centered systems those industries that provide for uniquely human needs. (A modern example of such a leftist is the Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders.)

When it comes to the role of state governments, there is another important general difference between liberals and leftists. Liberals are institutionalists. They believe in the gradual progress through a refinement of institutions (education, courts, elections, and policy reforms). Leftists, by contrast, often argue that institutions are structurally-biased toward the powerful and the wealthy, and thus to implement any substantial change requires forms of mass movement, direct action, labor organizing, and sometimes revolutionary struggle.

However, not all leftists are revolutionaries in the traditional sense; instead, they advocate for a cumulative reform from within existing institutions that may in time be seen as a kind of ‘soft revolution’ — which some may prefer, because it can avoid the sorts of violence often characteristic of extra-governmental revolutionary movements.

Similarly, not all ‘liberals’ are of the Left. Liberalism, by contrast with its contemporary association with people on the Left is actually a pervasive cultural and ideological narrative that extends across the political spectrum and is variably represented in both the modern-day Democratic and Republican parties. The difference between these two parties is therefore not always whether or not they are ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ — because even those who identify as conservative are often libertarians and free-speech advocates. Libertarianism (‘live and let live’) and free speech are typically considered principles that emerged from the tradition of liberal political theory.

To understand these distinctions, let’s take a moment to address these theoretical origins.

The Theoretical Origins of Liberalism

Liberalism was initially a theoretical movement advocated by philosophers like John Stuart Mill and John Locke. Two important emphases of classical liberalism are ‘natural rights’ — life, liberty, and property (Locke) — and ‘liberty’ — freedom from coercion (Mill).

Locke’s reasoning for establishing ‘inalienable rights’ was a fundamentally theological one interested in responding to a specific question: How can we explain legitimate political authority if humans are naturally free, equal, and created by God? Because our right to life, liberty, and agency belongs to God (and we, as humans, also ‘belong’ to God), according to Locke, it cannot be ‘alienated’ or ‘given away.’ How can something that belongs to God be given away, if it doesn’t belong to us in the first place? Locke’s reasoning, therefore, was actually religious in character — not secular. Through a purely secular understanding, rights can be seen as fundamentally arbitrary. If there is no ‘ground of being’ or ‘divine source’ of our rights, how do we have a foundation by means of which to justify their continuation? Cultural and philosophical relativism (the idea that there is no objective or universal ground to anything), from this perspective, actually deflates the ethical commitment to human rights.

Mill’s reasoning for liberty stemmed from a distrust of the majority. No authority — be it governmental, societal, or religious — wields a monopoly on truth. All such authorities are inherently partial and therefore biased, which justifies the need to protect minority opinions and belief structures from the tyranny of the majority. The only justification for limiting someone’s liberty, Mill thought, was when it prevents harm to others. This is the so-called ‘harm principle’: your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. As this paraphrase suggests, the concept of ‘harm’ for these early theorists of liberalism was primarily a physical one; thus, the more recent broadening of harm to include various forms of verbal harm, ‘hate speech,’ etc. would arguably have been considered by Mill as a stretch — or perhaps even a distortion — of the harm principle that would exceed its original intent.

The Theoretical Origins of Leftism

In addition to the emphasis on rights and liberties, Western culture — since its transformation during the period somewhat ironically referred to as the “Enlightenment” — has been animated by a commitment to egalitarianism. If all human beings are created equal, so the thinking goes, then society and political structures should reflect the inherent equality of human beings. Equality doesn’t mean that everybody looks, acts, or feels the same. It doesn’t flatten difference. However, it does suggest that certain inequalities perpetuated by political structures are unjust — because they reflect not the inherent differences of human beings, but the effects of individuals and groups who wield disproportionate power in a given political circumstance.

The egalitarian left, therefore, opposed monarchy, supported ‘republicanism’ (a political structure founded on egalitarian ideals), and championed the poor and working classes. Their ideological foundations were committed to equality before the law, secularism, citizenship, and wealth redistribution — not just in the spirit of ‘giving handouts to the poor’ but in the spirit of maintaining the collective health and justice of a society.

Egalitarianism found its most ardent theorist in the figure of Karl Marx. While ‘socialists’ existed before Marx wrote his famous works, Marx was the most significant philosopher of a political system that was founded upon ideals of equality. Marx’s early philosophical manuscripts are effectively spiritual in nature; they emphasize the ‘species-being’ of which we are all a part. Importantly, for Marx, socialism and communism were not just political ideals — they were considered by him to be the inevitable culmination of a society aimed toward justice. On this assumption, he was fundamentally Hegelian. Hegel believed that there was a natural logic to the unfolding of history. History was the ever-moving trajectory of a foundational ‘synthesis.’ For Hegel, the spirit of history was always bending toward resolving a ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’ into a more inclusive synthesis — which is why some consider Hegel’s philosophy to be a spiritual one. He is, after all, the most famous philosopher of that tradition known as ‘idealism.’

Marx believed that the capitalist system is fundamentally exploitative — and therefore ‘class consciousness’ and forms of class struggle are the collective engine of ameliorating disproportionate power dynamics that perpetuate structures of inequality. Political movements are therefore necessarily liberative and emancipatory. They are aimed at continuously resolving the class inequalities that are produced by unfettered capitalism. The emphasis on labor movements is grounded in the principle that workers must ‘seize the means of production’ in order to avoid a social and political circumstance in which the means of production serve the interests of only the few — i.e. the wealthiest segments of society (hello, billionaires and trillionaires).

The Individual and the Collective

An important distinction between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘leftist’ is therefore a relative emphasis on either the individual or the collective.

Liberalism is largely an individualistic theoretical system. The individual is the sacred locus of society, and liberal policies are focused primarily on codifying rights in founding documents like the U.S. constitution. The ongoing ‘liberal project’ proceeded from these documents by working to extend certain rights to groups who may have been previously excluded from them — the right to vote for women, the right to education through a ‘public school’ system, and the civil rights movement are some recent examples.

Leftism is, traditionally, more focused on the collective. As we just discussed, it has therefore historically been focused on organized labor. Whether through the work of organizers or through the organic solidarity that emerges through workers’ shared experience, workers may unionize or create worker cooperatives to challenge decisions made by business owners, capitalists, and corporate elites whose eyes are focused on the prize of profit and not on the material interests of workers themselves.

Therefore, while a ‘leftist’ is one who is focused on the ‘collective,’ this need not be read as the entire collective of a nation — although of course it may be, in the case of mass movements for a living wage. Instead, the ‘leftist’ understands the importance of grassroots organizing and of cultivating solidarity between individuals who share a particular experience and who seek the same ends within an important arena of their lives. The Leftist, therefore, doesn’t necessary start ‘at the top’ but rather at the grassroots, asking ‘how can this group of individuals experiencing a particular injustice be organized in such a way so as to protect against the an injustice produced by the decisions of ruling person or class — whether it be a business owner or property developer?”

The Tension between Liberalism and Leftism

It is not difficult to conceive of liberalism and leftism as complimentary projects.

The struggle for the extension of rights and the autonomy of the individual can be compatible with collective organizing and the coordinated influence of grassroots power. However, there is nevertheless a tension between liberal values and leftist values — what Chantal Mouffe has referred to as the “democratic paradox.”

In Mouffe’s analysis, liberalism tends toward consensus, rational-deliberation, and individualism, but neglects the role of conflict, power, and collective identity in the formation and evolution of a polity. At the same time, she criticizes a version of the leftist view that seeks to overthrow liberalism and its institutions. Instead of a ‘consensus politics’ (liberalism) or a purely ‘conflict politics’ (some extreme forms of leftism/anarchism), she advocates for a broadening of what we conceive of as ‘the political’ and highlights the necessary role of ‘agonism’ in the political process. The basic observation is that consensus alone is not sufficient as a political criterion. Sometimes consensus will bear certain fruits, but it is not enough to implement more substantive changes that are seen to be necessary.

Because politics is always about power (and how that power is distributed and codified in various political structures and institutions), a purely consensus-based, process-driven politics will always presuppose an existing set of power structures — and therefore not wield the tools necessary to challenge or subvert them. In other words, no deliberative process is ‘strong enough’ to alter sedimented structures of power, because it is through collective action and the development of another ‘power center' that we become capable of exerting sufficient pressure on dominant structures so as to effectively change them.

In short, Mouffe’s insight is that conflict is inevitable in politics. To imagine that politics will or should always be genial, polite, and well-mannered, and that through the right deliberative engagement with our opponents we will ‘get there in the end’ is, from this perspective, a liberal fantasy. Mouffe names the intrinsic conflict of politics ‘agonism’ — useful because of its close linguistic cousin, ‘antagonism.’ In antagonistic relationships, we see our opponents as ‘enemies’ and in turn destroy the bonds of our commonality. In ‘agonistic’ relationships, by contrast, we see our opponents as ‘adversaries.’ An adversary is someone whose legitimacy we recognize. We respect their equal right to pursue or support the political project that animates them — no matter how ‘incorrect’ or ‘ill-informed’ we may perceive their political ideas to be.

Mouffe formulated her theory of political agonism many years before our current political context emerged. It is therefore a fruitful theoretical framework to work with, because few would likely dispute the observation that U.S. politics has become almost entirely antagonistic — flirting with ideas of ‘civil war’ and fantasizing (as well as actually achieving) the removal of perceived enemies from the political community. In this phantasmagoria of antagonism, the other side has become the ‘enemy,’ and not only are they supporting the ‘wrong side’ — by doing so, they reveal themselves to be ‘evil.’ And when people are seen as evil, what logically follows is that this evil cannot be persuaded out of someone or rehabilitated. Seeing someone as evil entails seeing them as intrinsically corrupt, lacking any goodness, and morally depraved — a stain on the individual that can never be removed.

So considered, there can be only one response to evil: eradication.

The Pervasive Moral Absolutism of the Political Field

A certain kind of moral absolutism has emerged alongside (or perhaps as a result of) this growing antagonism. What follows is my own speculative characterization of how each side has morally ‘absolutized’ itself, however I don’t pretend that this is the only way to consider the matter. It is a simplification that suggests a certain truth-value in way of pointing out how our politics has become strangled by moralized projections that will continue unabated unless we step off the wheel of this ‘karmic’ cycle.

For many on the Right, the Left is seen as having corrupted the long-standing ‘order of things’ and embraced relativistic, nihilistic, and decadent-narcissist, self-involved lifestyles that destabilize traditions, boundaries, and hierarchies that helped give meaning to social and cultural life. They perceive the Left as encouraging a cultural entropy and an ideology of ‘deconstruction’ that fractures the bonds of society. To put it crudely, one version of the Right’s position is that what falls under the Left’s banner of ‘progress’ amounts to an ongoing dismantling of anything that has come before, an approach to history that sees only an incessant parade of the ‘problematic’ and imperalistic, and a sanctimonious contempt for anyone who lives in ways that the Left sees as ‘conservative.’ The Right sees the Left as having radically changed culture over a short period of time without their consent, and when they express frustrations about this change that they experience as deriving from ‘power centers’ that don’t include them, the response from the Left is to ‘get in line with progress’ or you’re a bigot, racist, or the king of all political insults — a white supremacist.

For the Left, the Right is seen as defending systems of exploitation: capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and imperialism. By privileging ‘tradition,’ they are endorsing ways of living that have historically excluded many groups of people. When challenged, their ‘moral righteousness’ takes the form of prejudice, fear-mongering, and the scapegoating of marginalized groups for society’s ills (LGBTQ, immigrants, non-white citizens, the poor). The Left sees the Right as abandoning the spirit of America as a nation built on ideas, and seeking to replace it with an authoritarian, un-American ‘blood and soil’ nationalism that requires hatred and exclusion of minority groups to perpetuate itself. The more recent explosion of anti-semitism, overt racism, transphobia and a virtue placed on vice is seen as evidence of the complete corruption of the Right’s moral authority, and a terrifying abandonment of anything that feels expressive of the good of humanity — compassion, empathy, and tolerance for others who think, live, and feel differently. Because the Left sees itself as being rooted in these human values, the hyper-vocal, online Right’s apparent collapse into trolling, hate-mongering, and appropriation of ‘free speech’ as freedom to say the ugliest, most offensive thing (while calling this freedom to be ugly a ‘beauty’ of America) marks a development of character that not only feels unjust — it feels inhuman.

Shifting Affect: Starting from another Paradigm

If one of the shared features of both Left and Right at this moment is a slip into antagonism and the negative, divisive effects it engenders, then the million-dollar question is: how do we shift our political affect from antagonism to agonism?

The goal of pursuing an agonistic democracy is importantly not to get everyone to think the same way, or to have the ‘right’ opinions on everything — as if such a circumstance were ever possible. It is to pursue a different cultural affect or emotional starting place that would hopefully allow us to meet each other with empathy, sincerity, and a commitment not to converting the other side to every political position, but to understanding each other enough to see the humanity behind whatever bullshit may arise at the surface.

Here, I think, we require different tools and a revivified political theoretical framework that can address our shared emotional disposition of distress. Hate emerges from distress. When hate clouds our perception and becomes projected on others, it becomes a corrupting influence that obscures our imagination and obstructs the political process. We cannot get anywhere if we allow ourselves to be indoctrinated with a ‘good and evil’ binary. The only way to see through the evil we project on others is through a willingness to momentarily set aside our assumptions and beliefs and to truly listen.

Listening is a practice that requires imagination and a willingness to reside in the ‘I don’t yet know’ — rather than in the assumption that we already know everything, and that there is therefore nothing new to learn. For someone on the Right, this may be the willingness to learn that not all democrats hate America or are actively trying to change their way of life. For someone on the Left, this willingness may require someone to set aside their assumption that everyone on the Right is overtly or secretly bigoted — even if a seemingly bigoted statement comes out of their mouth.

Listening in this way presupposes a condition of one’s nervous system that allows one to ‘respond’ rather than ‘react.’ Reactivity breeds more reactivity; but, conversely, responsiveness breeds more responsiveness. Sometimes it is only because of one individual’s cultivated capacity to inhabit a more responsive space that a volatile conversation can transform into a fruitful one. The ability to be responsive in conversation can be an innate gift of certain individuals, but in a capitalist society that is animated by speed, stress, and agitation, many of us have to cultivate responsiveness through other means. The cultivation of responsiveness is therefore a necessary virtue and value for a healthy political life.

One such mode of cultivating responsiveness is through contemplative practices. Meditation, yoga, and other somatic modalities refine and subtlize the nervous system. The effects of these practices over a sustained period of time inevitably affect our habits of communication. We soften and become gradually more tender, as the hard edges of our insecurities melt into a spacious and more open sense of clarity and creativity. The effects of contemplative practice are therefore political, insofar as the way that we feel in our bodies influences and affects our communication, our sense of what’s possible, and as a result our perception of everything around us.

A byproduct of contemplative practice can also be the relinquishing of dogmatic assumptions; because as we become more spacious, creative, and resilient, we begin to subtly perceive that we have perhaps not been seeing the whole picture. Reality is not always what it seems to be, and the identities we define ourselves through can begin to reveal themselves as straightjackets we’ve unconsciously imposed upon ourselves. As a result of taking contemplative practice seriously as a form of political activism, we become subtly liberated from the assumptions, biases, and prejudices that have shaped the lens through which we perceive the world. We become more open to the possibility that the world is not a closed system, and the knowledges we’ve adopted are always only partial views within the kaleidescopic complexity of embodied life.

To shift our political affect therefore requires more techniques and intellectual resources than what currently reign as the ‘established forms of political action.’ While the resources and insights that emerge from the depths of cultivated wisdom and intuition produce an expanded sense of agency, without a theoretical framework that re-invigorates the leftist paradigm, even the meditation-born insights and energetic resources can be misdirected and depleted.

The values of liberalism and leftism are necessary starting points, but they are perhaps insufficient to meet this moment. We have to tell new stories of human interconnectedness. We have to reconnect with what it is that spiritually unites us. We have to revivify an engagement with political theory for a world that is different than the one Locke, Mill, and Marx were embedded in. And perhaps most importantly, we have to recognize how significantly the evolution of modern technology has created unforeseen forms of psychic and social oppression; the struggle against the forces of ignorance and ideological conformity they engender is not just personal. It is profoundly political.

I wrote this long and meandering reflection in the first term of my PhD research, as I attempted to trace certain implications of the medieval, ‘non-dual’ pratyabhijñā (‘recognition’) school of philosophy for the purposes of cross-cultural and contemporary insight. It is therefore not a ‘complete’ set of considerations or arguments, but rather the reflection of an ongoing theoretical and speculative process. Any threads of thought that are left unresolved are therefore surrendered to the open horizon of further inquiry — to be taken up, refined, or refuted as the dialectic of knowledge and ignorance is perpetually negotiated and re-negotiated.

“To be sure, we need history. But we need it in a manner different from the way in which the spoilt idler in the garden of knowledge uses it, no matter how elegantly he may look down on our coarse and graceless needs and distresses. That is, we need it for life an action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and action or merely for glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act. We wish to use history only insofar as it serves living. But there is a degree of doing history and a valuing of it through which life atrophies and degenerates. To bring this phenomenon to light as a remarkable symptom of our time is every bit as necessary as it may be painful.”

~ Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life”

In his essay, “The Uses and Abuses of History for Life”, Nietzsche makes one of his infamous provocative claims: history, as it is narrated in the modern world, is a corrupting influence. It restrains what he sees as the ‘force of life’ by overdetermining the horizon of possibility accessible to the human imagination. In his typical brand of colorful prose, Nietzsche describes an over-historicized world that has domesticated the willing and desiring function of human beings, capturing them in a tedious net of historical “thinking, reflecting, comparing, separating, and combining.” The impulse of life he describes as an unhistorical instinct, a forward-oriented directionality characteristic of ‘beasts’ – which, while being initially and instinctively free, is ultimately made impotent by a blinding gaze backward into the deadening logic of an objectivized past.

While Nietzsche does not deny the need for a certain kind of history, he rejects that form of over-historicization that subjugates the capacity for action. Every revolutionary act, every work of the innovative artist, every victory of a person or people, for him, is born in the womb of forgetting; action emerges from the spacious vitality of an unhistorical atmosphere. That condition by means of which radical creativity takes place is characterized by a suspension of knowledge, because knowledge – according to a view he borrows from Goethe – negates life. The scholar and the historian, lost in their retrospective ruminations, shift around endlessly with regards to a future horizon in their debilitating assessment of past knowledge. The person of action forgets historical knowledge so as to liberate their commitment to bringing something new into being.

At the foundation of Nietzsche’s polemical essay is a clear dichotomy established between the historical and the unhistorical, between culture and nature, between knowledge and action, between light and darkness, between the known and the unknown. These dichotomies warn against the paralyzing influence of too much knowledge, which, rather than serving as an emancipatory, life-affirming activity, turns out to be that which strips human beings of their vital nature. History, insofar as it is necessary and useful, he thinks, should serve this vital nature – and be constructed in such a way that it does not over-determine our identity but rather expands the trajectory of it. The structuring narratives of history organize the parameters of experience in a manner that defines and delimits the acceptable range of subjective possibility. The categorical imprints spawned by a backward-looking humanity encourages an obsession with witnessing the past in the present, and of projecting the coordinates of a constructed history onto our current lived experience. So understood, history becomes a tyrant, and life ultimately becomes oppressed by the disenfranchising influence of previously created categories and distinctions.

Like many great philosophers, Nietzsche’s insights – while born in a particular cultural context – bears a truth-value that still resonates to the present day. Indeed, to not see him as so resonant could easily trigger his anti-historicizing argument, for to enclose his insights within a historicizing gaze would defend a picture of knowledge that permits a philosopher’s sphere of influence to extend only as far as the prevailing constructivist ideology of cultural and historical contexts would allow it. From such a perspective, Nietzsche, and indeed all philosophers, become not voices that speak forward but instead become intellectual artifacts surrendered to a doctrine of historical “placing” — where they can then be analyzed, categorized, and studied at arms length. The so-called ‘history of philosophy’ has a tendency to perpetuate the same kind of historicizing attitude that Nietzsche seeks to reject, and therefore to take Nietzsche at his word – to take his thinking seriously as a hypothesis – perhaps requires us to trace the life of his argument in the present.

At a time of significant social and political upheaval – when the circumstances of the moment seem to require novel solutions and perspectives –, humanity appears destined to repeat itself. It repeats itself not only in the regurgitation of reactionary political projects, but also in the limited imaginative range accessible to those who would oppose them. Humanity seems incapable of dreaming into being alternatives that are not subjugated by the compulsion to catalog contemporary conflicts according to a linear logic of historical continuity. The potency of perceived potential is paralyzed by a picture of a pre-determining past. Insofar as an imaginative vision of the future is operative, it is primarily constrained between divisive discourses of a ‘toxic other’ and nightmare fantasies of collapse, decline, apocalypse, and catastrophe. Both visions, Nietzsche would likely confirm, are symptoms of the incapacitating blindness brought about by a history that serves the dead rather than the living.

Where Nietzsche’s analysis ultimately falls on its own sword, I think, is in assuming too quickly a false dichotomy between knowledge and action. In aligning action with forgetting, he implicitly defends a conception of memory that strips it of creativity. If memory is considered simply the passive recollection and reproduction of the past, then it becomes necessary to subdue memory so as to align with the upsurge of life’s latent creativity. If life is by definition a phenomenon that must empty itself of cultural knowledge and history in order to thrive, then knowledge becomes posited as outside the living that gave it life in the first place. While it might be cathartic to temporarily bracket out all knowledge – to forget in order to create –, one has difficulty seeing how such a prescription would not succumb to a pervasive kind of inverted knowledge that could devolve into a different kind of life-negation. If we purge creativity from our conception of memory, then creativity is perhaps less empowered than it is ignorant. Is such a notion of memory not itself a byproduct of philosophical history? Memory need not be a splash of water that douses creativity’s flame, but rather could be the replenishing oxygen that allows it to burn ever more brightly.

The conception of memory that Nietzsche traffics in is not unique to him. He borrows it from a cultural and historical context that largely understands memory as an immobilizing form of musing on what lies behind us. Like what takes place in the cautionary tale of Black Mirror’s episode, “The Entire History of You”, too much memory breeds nostalgia, which in turn makes the present look pale by comparison. The society in this episode has developed a technology called “the grain”, which is a brain implant that records everything a person sees and hears, allowing them to replay every memory of their lives at any moment they please. This unfettered access to personal memory leads to exactly what Nietzsche fears – the characters hollow out their present by constantly choosing to live in the past. The disappointing and uncomfortable lack of fulfillment encountered in the ‘now’ leads the characters to become memory addicts, replaying over and over in the theatre of their own mind an idealized past more easily enjoyed than the monotonous terrain of their current circumstances. The moral of the story seems to be something altogether Nietzschean: in order to live fully, we must have the capacity to forget. The mediocrity and frustration of an unsatisfying present triggers two possible responses aimed at existential fulfillment: (1) to passively succumb to what is known and remembered, or (2) to actively and creatively push forward toward the dark horizon of an unseen future.

To emancipate ourselves from the straightjacket of Nietzsche’s reductive dichotomy between memory and creativity, it becomes necessary to ask a few clarifying questions. Are memory and creativity truly at odds with each other, mutually exclusive, or is there a conception of memory available philosophically that understands memory to be fundamentally creative? Does the perceived danger of life-negation extend from too much memory, or has the function of memory simply been misunderstood? Are the dystopian characters of Black Mirror victims of memory, or is memory being held hostage to a pervasive cultural fantasy that makes the characters ill-equipped to face the intolerable tension of inevitable boredom and discomfort? Is it memory we’re talking about here, or is it a masquerade of memory? Is memory really analogous to replaying a movie in one’s mind, or is it something else entirely? Is history simply a curated collection of memories to be catalogued and recorded, or is it something else? And if history is something other than congealed memory, then what, after all, is the function of memory?

Another assumption to be challenged in the work of Nietzsche on history is his characterization of knowledge. His implicit epistemological framework reduces knowledge to the accumulation of categories, distinctions, and narrative structures that over-state and over-define the real. Knowledge is like a web of gravity, repressing the creative instincts of an otherwise spontaneously alive humanity. In this view, knowledge is something that encumbers life, and life is a dynamic forward-oriented movement that should not and must not be so encumbered. So characterized, knowledge is then something that must be shirked from the shoulders of individuals, liberating them from the intoxicating numbness of a generalized mediocrity. If the acquisition of knowledge, according to his view, is a plodding, tedious affair – one that recedes from life rather than enables the expansion of it –, then we could say the prescription for a more Nietzschean philosophy is, first, to restrain the archival instincts of a Western historicizing imperative, and, second, to harness language in the service of liberating the imagination.

While Nietzsche’s critique carries a polemical force, its character and coordinates are ultimately reducible to the fabric of a particular philosophical language-game. As already suggested, to conceive memory as a faculty of mind that absents creativity is not a necessary, but rather a contingent conception. A conception of memory so constituted fails to account for the creative emission involved in every re-production of a memory. An approach to memory that imagines it as a kind of passive replay of past perception will fail to acknowledge the upsurge of novelty that shapes memory not as a mere television re-run of awareness but as a reorienting gesture of the imagination. The epistemological assumptions latent in Nietzsche’s essay depict knowledge as a kind of halting contraction – one that has relinquished a connection to the pulsating vivacity of the expansively new. The remedy he offers is to cultivate a kind of discernment about when to perceive historically and when unhistorically. Nietzsche writes,

Cheerfulness, good conscience, joyful action, trust in what is to come—all that depends, with the individual as with a people, on the following facts: that there is a line which divides the observable brightness from the unilluminated darkness, that we know how to forget at the right time just as well as we remember at the right time, that we feel with powerful instinct the time when we must perceive historically and when unhistorically.

It is clear from the above quote that the relevant distinction to be made is not one between knowledge and action, because it is through a ‘dependence on certain facts’ that one is able to ‘draw a line’ between the historical and the unhistorical. Such an aesthetic cultivation of one’s discernment or judgment is not a gesture outside knowledge, but one that arises from a certain relationship to it. The kind of knowledge posited here includes, embraces, and motivates action, rather than serving as an obstacle to it.

Nietzsche’s emphasis in the above quote on what he sees as necessary existential conditions of ‘cheerfulness’, ‘good conscience’, ‘trust, and ‘joyful action’ points to the significance of temperament not only for philosophers, but for indeed anyone who is interested in liberating their capacity for action. The need for a form of philosophical praxis that involves and includes a consideration of how emotions are both engendered by and engendering of both knowledge and action is implicitly defended in Nietzsche’s reflections. Rather than a reasoning that has been divorced from affect and the terrain of human emotions, reasoning depends upon and indeed always implies the impetus of an affective register that structures and organizes the framework of possible knowledge. The conception of reason often associated with the Western tradition is one that sees the operation of reason as negating or transcending the passions of the body. In a kind of renunciatory gesture, the body is distrusted as a ‘meat tube of piss and shit’ that must be mastered and subjugated so that it cannot corrupt the otherwise purified domain of human reason.

The Positions of the Pratyabhijñā

The above extended reflection on one essay by a German philosopher from the 19th century may at first appear tangential to a project focused on an Indian philosophical tradition that was at its height between the 9th and 11th centuries in medieval Kashmir. But the reflection is intended to illustrate a larger philosophical objective: to situate the pratyabhijñā philosophy as a world philosophy that can illuminate, clarify, and in some instances critique the arguments and positions of philosophers from sometimes radically different historical contexts. This process of construction, reconstruction, and re-appropriation has long been a practice accepted as worthwhile within the discourses of academic (and indeed non-academic) philosophy. Philosophers interact with previous philosophers and their ideas in a way that, more often than not, assumes the continuing vitality and significance of this previous work for contemporary philosophy. In other words, philosophy is, in part, a commentarial enterprise. With each new philosophical reader, a previous philosopher is reimagined and his or her contributions re-intepreted and re-envisioned for the purposes of clarifying a response to certain seemingly perennial philosophical questions or problems.

The academic philosophical container that currently delimits a range of canonical philosophers permitted within the scope of philosophical discussion and debate reflects a historical bias toward European thinkers. A simplified defense of this circumstance is often predicated upon the word ‘philosophy’ itself. As the English equivalent of the Ancient Greek word ‘philo-sophia’, the tradition of philosophy is itself imagined as a specifically Western one that, due to its connection to the philosophical forefathers of figures like Plato and Aristotle, should be understood as a uniquely European intellectual discourse that is inevitably confused by projecting it onto non-Western traditions. This eurocentric position with regards to philosophy also is inversely articulated by some Indian apologists and their defenders, where spokespersons for Indian thought seek to reject characterizing the intellectual life of India as ‘philosophy’ precisely because it narrows the field of Indian thinking and reduces it to the priorities and preoccupations of Western thought. What is left intact by both of these visions of incommensurability is the pervasive mythology of an East-West divide, where both traditions are seen as ultimately diluted, misunderstood, and even disenfranchised by bringing them into conversation with each other.

Of course, what is undoubtedly true about the history of philosophy is that it is ongoing, and canonical figures are continuously added to the bibliography of philosophical references. As new contemporary thinkers enter the conversation and develop innovative and paradigm-shifting perspectives, the list of possible philosophers embraced within the tradition of commentarial and secondary literature expands. As recently as the 20th and 21st centuries, we welcomed into Western philosophical considerations the work of figures like Foucault, Derrida, Heidegger, Sartre, Quine, Wittgenstein, Whitehead, Deleuze, Gademer, Bergson, Searle, Sellars, Brandom, Husserl, Rawls, Whitehead, and so many others. Indeed, the practice of philosophy is one that remains radically open to the contributions of novel thinkers. In some instances, these thinkers consider themselves ‘Spinozists’, ‘Hegelians’, ‘Platonists’ – positioning their work as footnotes or commentaries to their chosen ‘philosophical guru’, even while imaginatively re-negotiating and creatively re-working some of their foundational concepts. The degree to which these students take an interest in contextualizing the original arguments of their philosopher is wildly variable. For instance, Deleuze’s monographs on Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Bacon are often criticized for being less accurate assessments of any one of these philosophers, and more Deleuzian adaptations and re-appropriations of these thinkers that serve the commitments of Deleuze’s philosophical project rather than the ‘history of philosophy.’ This criticism, lodged broadly at philosophers and theorists from the so-called ‘continental’ tradition, betrays a tension, I think, between the ‘history of philosophy’ and a certain picture of the purpose of philosophy as a living intellectual enterprise. We will return to this distinction below.

While the embrace of new philosophers and their innovative contributions is a well-accepted tendency of philosophical activity, the embrace of ancient philosophers as active voices within the tradition of philosophy (broadly-conceived) is less frequent. But this, of course, has not always been the case. While the 14th century might feel like the far-distant past at this point, it was during this period – referred to historically as the Renaissance – that the ancient Greek philosophers were embraced as bastions of Western intellectual culture. This embrace of a certain collection of ancient philosophers gave rise to the humanities and classical liberal education more broadly. As the canonical figures of the Western philosophical tradition began to congeal and concretize into a tradition, that original spirit of curiosity capable of expanding the cultural coordinates of ancient philosophical thought began to ossify. While today’s prevailing cultural attitude toward figures of the past is one that partially reflects Nietzsche’s distrust of history as the conservative curtailing of a vital progressive impulse, there was clearly a life-affirming disposition at the root of the Renaissances’ cultural instinct. After all, renaissance means ‘rebirth’, and the period that bears its name could be considered a radical reorientation of cultural influences and socio-political forces that emerged from (and to some degree purged itself of) the violent excesses and religious domination of the Middle Ages. History at this particular moment was not an obstacle to life, but rather a creatively-reimagined cultural memory that spurred into being new thinking, new art, and thus new forms of life.

If an archeological dig in modern Greece revealed previously-unknown contemporaries of Plato and Aristotle – revealing voices and perspectives that broadened the field of Ancient Greek philosophy –, it is not difficult to imagine the significance this impact would have on the contemporary philosophical imagination. Even some academic philosophers who restrict their scope of investigation to figures of the last couple of centuries would likely be captivated by such a development, and patiently wait for the translations from philologists and translators so as to discover what wisdom lies latent in these ‘new’ ancient texts. Perhaps it would be an intellectual news event not dissimilar to the discovery of the ‘dead sea scrolls.’ And yet, if you take out the requirement that these texts be born from the soil of Ancient Greece, anyone aware of Indology’s contributions would note that this circumstance is already happening on a massive scale with regards to the philosophical texts of India. If philologists, Indologists, and even some philosophers are aware of this, then why has this ongoing philosophical discovery not taken more of the philosophical world by storm? Why has the ivory tower tradition of philosophy continued to be so circumscribed by a canonical corpus of European thinkers?

One speculative answer to this question perhaps returns us to our opening reflections on Neitzsche’s critique of history. When history becomes over-determined and when academic knowledge becomes contracted, then intellectual vitality can become hijacked by a hegemonic status quo. With regards to our contemporary moment, the obstacles to a vitalized philosophical imagination seem predicated on hyper-specialization, historicism, and a particular politics of knowledge. Let us first address the latter by discussing how departments of philosophy have responded to the critiques of euro-centrism.

Over the last several decades, philosophy departments have come under fire for precisely the lack of non-Western inclusion that we have discussed above. In response, departments have approached the problem by enacting what can only be described as a form of identity politics. According to this view, some philosophy departments that previously held positions for specialists in German Idealism, Phenomenology, Analytic Philosophy, Existentialism, Political Philosophy, and so on, are attempting to resolve the privileging of Western conversations by hiring specialists in Indian Philosophy, Chinese Philosophy, and various forms of Indigenous Philosophy. In short, the problem is cast as a matter of representation. By funding positions that represent non-Western philosophical traditions, philosophy departments are attempting to counteract the philosophical assumption that ‘philosophy’ is a tradition primarily of the West. Whether or not the philosophical arguments of the traditions these academics represent are brought into conversation with other Western thinkers or arguments is not the intended aim, although an implicit defense of that aim may be that, by broadening students’ access to non-Western traditions, a department creates the foundation by means of which such conversations and connections can be made.

In philosophy departments where philosophical education has been codified into categories of epistemology, metaphysics, logic, and aesthetics, the inclusion of, for example, an Indian philosopher in such a department, often assumes that what is acceptable from the broader scope of Indian thought as philosophy will necessarily speak through these aforementioned categories. The issue isn’t that the traditions of Indian philosophy don’t have significant contributions that can be made to these conversations, but rather that the philosophical table has already been set. The arguments of non-Western thinkers may bring rich and rewarding insights into existing debates, but the norms of philosophical praxis are presupposed. The culture of academic philosophy may be questioned, but its dominant structures remain unchanged by an encounter with paradigms of thinking that extend beyond them. Where such ‘excesses’ of thought cannot be contained within the acceptable parameters of philosophical discourse, they are designated as ‘non-philosophical’ and deemed more appropriate for some other intellectual enterprise exterior to the orthodoxies of academic philosophy.

The matter of integrating Western and non-Western philosophies under a banner simply of ‘philosophy’ is further complicated by the historicizing gaze of modern philology and Indology. Philologists and Indologists are primarily concerned with the historical and contextual situatedness of the texts they study. This is, of course, altogether necessary as an academic discipline, because if we do not have accurate translations that seek to make sense of them within their original intellectual and cultural framework, we can easily distort and misunderstand the texts, projecting onto them our own philosophical desires and intellectual fantasies. Because ancient texts often contain references to concepts and ideas that are altogether alien to our contemporary context and cultural commitments, the work of historical and philological analysis can help to convey the originality of ideas that are as yet beyond our cultural and philosophical lexicon. Insofar as there is a problem here, it is not that philologists will be philologists, but that philologists are often not philosophers, and the academic gap between Indology and philosophy is one being sutured by very few contemporary scholars. It doesn’t help, of course, that many philologists are contemptuous toward the hermeneutic playfulness often characteristic of many philosophers – exacerbating a disciplinary othering that doesn’t serve a possible renaissance of academic philosophy.

So, on the one hand, we have an academic philosophy that is overly-rooted in its own tradition and canon, and, on the other, we have a philological tradition that is interested in philosophical arguments primarily up to – but not beyond – the historical and cultural context in which they were articulated. The former attempts to absorb Indian philosophy into its existing philosophical architecture, while the latter sees any attempt to expand away from the minutiae of historical and textual analysis as a departure from serious academic work. One has codified what it is to do philosophy, and the other has codified what it is to do textual history. Both operate on the basis of an implicit – and often unconscious – intellectual value system that says more about the accumulation and coagulation of an academic habitus than it does any alignment with the virtue of a liberated intellectual creativity.

A pervasive mythology encountered in yoga communities and spiritual seekers who become enamoured with Sanskrit is the idea that Sanskrit is a divine, magical language that is, in many instances, ‘untranslatable.’ While there is a kernel of truth to this when we look to the theories of sacred speech (mantra) and the ‘linguistic mysticism’ of non-dual Śākta-Śaiva Tantra, taking this idea of a ‘divine language’ to the extreme amounts to an obscurantist over-mystification of the Sanskrit language.

While the spiritual teachings discussed in Sanskrit treatises can indeed be profound, divine, and mysterious, the grammatical form and interpretive techniques that are employed to explain or articulate ideas, principles, and perspectives are incredibly precise and largely coherent. Because the language is so codified (and for such a long period of time commentators followed the same grammatical rules and styles of interpretation), with sufficient time and a healthy dose of discipline, the Sanskrit language can be effectively learned – as much as any ancient language with so much available literature can be learned. To over-emphasize the ‘mystical’ nature of Sanskrit is therefore an ‘orientalist’ projection that places an unnecessary roadblock on the path of understanding and inadvertently rehearses the fantasy of an ‘exotic East.’

The Sanskrit language in its long and fascinating history was a cosmopolitan language of literary, religious, philosophical, and ‘scientific’ cultures that includes texts and treatises on topics we would today categorize as both ‘sacred’ and ‘secular.’ While, yes, the perspective of many Sanskrit philosophers was that Sanskrit derives from a divine source (the Veda), it is important to situate this perspective within an explanatory context that highlights the role that sound and language play in the cultivation of worlds through which we perceive, conceive, and make sense of our lived experience. To extend what is referred to as a “non-dual” theory of language to its logical conclusion, it follows that all languages ultimately derive from this divine, non-discursive ‘power’ of dynamic sound, pulsation, and articulation. However, the ‘unity’ of this sonic reality does not negate — but rather includes — the diversity of all discursive languages as the variable manifestations of a singular ‘vibratory’ reality.

While the source of all language is, from this perspective, ultimately ‘unmanifest,’ the discursive forms that a ‘non-discursive’ reality ‘brings into being’ structures itself into coherent ‘language-games’ that can be analyzed, studied, and understood.

When one begins to take an interest in Sanskrit, one of the first observations one makes is just how different and complex it is by comparison to many modern languages. This ‘alienness’ is evident in other ancient languages as well, because ancient languages are often extremely different at the level of their grammatical structure. Therefore, what at first may appear profoundly ‘mystifying,’ through deeper study is revealed to be otherwise. Because an ancient language is so different from what we are used to, the grammatical structure and the hermeneutical styles can feel beyond the reach of our understanding. Therefore, to reach beyond our current locus of understanding presumes a willingness to expand the coordinates of our imagination.

Learning any language can entail the development of a different ‘way of seeing’ or quality of perception that was not expressed (and is as such ‘unknown’) within our own linguistic context. This ubiquitous truth of language learning – that ‘the limits of our language are the limits of our world’ – becomes even more demonstrably true when studying a language that includes more words for ideas and modes of perception than those available in our native tongue. Therefore, one might say that the study of any language can produce a kind of ‘spiritual experience,’ if we understand by ‘spiritual experience’ an instance when the locus or orbit of our perception has been expanded or clarified.

Learning Sanskrit grammar and syntax, while central to the classical pedagogy through the study of Pāṇini’s grammar (the Aṣṭadhyāyi) is an unwieldy place to start for most beginners – unless one happens to have previous training in classics and the study of ancient Greek and Latin (which cultivates a familiarity with non-modern grammars). Sanskrit syntax is one of the hardest things to master, partly because a sentence’s syntax can often be elliptical: it omits a word or phrase from a given sentence, because it has been discussed in a previous sentence and is therefore implied. Due to this difficulty, it is understandable that one would first opt to focus on developing their vocabulary; and to do this, Sanskrit students turn to available dictionaries.

When you begin looking at dictionaries for unfamiliar words, a common observation is that there are many meanings associated with a given word. While this is absolutely true, there are important considerations to keep in mind that help to narrow down the possibilities when it comes to translating a word in Sanskrit.

As the previous allusion to ‘syntax’ implies, the most important ruler with which to measure the validity of a word’s meaning is the “context.” The context in which we find a word or phrase being articulated is the key to what differentiates a more or less ‘accurate’ translation from an ‘inaccurate’ one. When we say it is ‘accurate,’ we mean that it approximates or conveys a meaning that coheres with the intention of the author or commentator.

To approach this ‘ruler’ with greater clarity, we can consider context at a number of levels:

1. The context of a sentence’s meaning in which we find the word (given by the syntax of the sentence);

2. The context of the intended meaning or purpose of the text as a whole;

3. The context of the lineage and tradition of knowledge it is situated in; and

4. The historical period and worldview from which it derives.

We can look to our own language for examples of why context is so important. One example for the first level (the whole sentence) can be illustrated by the word ‘bank.’ If someone was translating English in 5000 years when all the English-speakers are presumably gone – and this future being looked up the word ‘bank’ in a dictionary – they would find at least two possibilities. Considering the whole sentence – either “I’m going to the bank to deposit a check” or “The river overflowed its bank” – reveals the meaning.

So when we do translation work, often we have to work ‘backwards’ from a larger context of understanding. If we zoom in on a particular word and solely consult the dictionary, it becomes more difficult to tease out which meaning is intended.

Someone might respond here, “what about sūtras? I’ve learned that aphoristic texts are intrinsically obscure, and one sūtra or aphorism is not always constructed like a sentence, and therefore many meanings can be derived from it.”

This is true, which is why sūtra texts are almost never found without a commentary (bhāṣya). The purpose of a commentary is to provide an interpretation of a text, and commentators use a codified hermeneutical style that serves five different functions: (1) word-division (padaccheda), (2) stating the meaning of words (padārthokti), (3) analysis of grammatical complexes (vigraha), (4) constructing the sentences (vākyayojanā), and (5) the answering of objections (ākṣepsamādhāna).

While beginning Sanskrit students do not typically work with commentaries (because they can be quite challenging and technical), when one’s skills have developed, commentaries provide an important context for sussing out the meaning of words. The second function of a commentary – padārthokti – establishes the meaning of words by stating the word and then following it with a synonym. For example, in English, we could clarify the meaning of ‘post’ by saying ‘post, as in pillar’ instead of ‘post, as in an assigned role.’ We find the same clarifying tactic used in commentaries, albeit obviously written in Sanskrit.

The interpretation of words found in commentaries can differ, depending on the commentator, which is why there is the fifth function of a commentary – the ‘answering of objections.’ If a commentator disagrees with another commentator about a word’s meaning (or their philosophical rendering), they state the competing interpretation, then give reasons why it is insufficient, and argue why they have chosen another interpretation. Because the reasoning they employ must be consistent with ‘tradition,’ according to the classical perspective, they have to defend their interpretation through methods that are accepted as valid by the tradition. One common device leveraged in the service of ‘answering objections’ is therefore the accepted technique of etymological derivation.

While the vibrational source of all language is considered infinite, practically speaking the ‘seeds’ of this eternal linguistic ‘fabric’ appear as finite. Such seeds ‘manifest’ for the Sanskrit language as roots (dhātu). From the perspective of the grammatical tradition, then, all Sanskrit words are derived (or derivable) from a relatively consistent enumeration of these grammatical roots. Sanskrit philosophical commentators (almost without exception) thus use an etymological derivation style called nirvacana to innovate and transform a word’s meaning – thereby remaining ‘faithful’ to the tradition. Tracing how a chosen meaning is consistent with Sanskrit grammar is thus one important way that commentators demonstrate their consistency with the eternal Veda, because these roots are often understood to be emanations of the transcendent Veda. By showing how a particular meaning is etymologically derivable from one of Sanskrit’s roots is a strategy for conceptual innovation that is justified by demonstrating that the meaning was ‘there all along.’

This interpretive strategy helps commentators restrain their own projections and distortions, while at the same time harnessing a form of conceptual creativity that remains internal to the methodology of the tradition itself. By contrast, to interpret a word in a way that simply reflects creative assumptions stemming from one’s cultural situatedness alone (amounting to a kind of ‘wish-fulfilment’ that selects what ‘works for me’) would be out of alignment with the traditional method. Interestingly for modern translators, learning the rules of etymological derivation allows one to potentially provide their own ‘gloss’ on a word’s meaning — as one way in which the tradition can be inhabited as ‘alive’ is by participating in the same hermeneutical operations that would be consistent with the tradition’s commentarial style and structure.

When we consult a Sanskrit dictionary, in many instances we are looking at a word that has been used over centuries of history. The variable and sometimes contradictory meanings found in dictionaries often reflect the ‘semantic drift’ of a word’s meaning over time. Dictionaries, therefore, ‘flatten’ all these historical layers and can thus be misleading. This is why it is always clarifying to consult the historical and philosophical context, so that our translation work bears a closer resemblance to the intended meaning of its authors and the worldviews and lineages they were committed to defending. Doing translation first – without some initial or accompanying study of the traditions and ideas themselves as offered by scholars, lineage-holders, and devotional leaders – makes translation a much more arduous task that is easily prone to distortion. This does not mean, however, that the modern translators and scholars are always ‘correct’ (they are, like everyone, prone to error), but without understanding (and perhaps embodying) the methods of the tradition, our objections may reflect desires and beliefs that say more about us than the text or tradition itself. As is evident in the commentarial tradition, if we don’t know how others have interpreted the texts or tradition, it is much more difficult to situate ourselves so as to object to them.

All this being said, it is true that even after we grasp the variable layers of context and what the commentaries argue, there can still often be more than one option for how a word is translated. However, often these options are more or less ‘synonymous,’ and therefore choosing one or another doesn’t necessarily change the ‘essential’ meaning being conveyed. Instead, the diversity of synonyms enables a translator to provide a different ‘flavor’ – an opportunity for the translator to infuse their translation with a grounded degree of creativity and ‘poetic flair.’

Sanskrit is a fascinating and complicated language, but we do ourselves a disservice in our efforts when we assume it is intrinsically mysterious or mystical. It can be precise, coherent, and technical, as much as it can be wildly poetic, rich in metaphor and imagery, and ever-inspiring to the human imagination.

As yoga or meditation practitioners, when we make a decision to study Sanskrit, a huge initial hurdle arrives when we notice just how challenging it is to learn. Many will opt out of this challenge, deciding they were more interested in honing pronunciation skills so as to support their practice of chanting. For those that choose to meet the challenge, fruits are born through sustained attention and a long-view of the learning process. Like with mastery of any subject, instrument, or technique, the effects arrive cumulatively over time, through the repetitive pursuit of clarity and refinement.

While the horizon of knowledge may be as yet unknown, the landscape reveals its many contours and caverns to the degree that we remain curious and open to discovering them. Some will be content and comfortable at home in a geography of the familiar. Others will be captivated and inspired by the ever-unfolding wonder of knowing – relishing reality not as a stable, unwavering crop of meaningless objects, but as a deliciously alive and blissfully pulsating beatitude.

My earliest foray into philosophy was through the lens of political theory.

After getting “discontinued” from a musical theatre BFA at Ithaca College (a tale for another day), I switched my degree to sociology and politics — which soon landed me in a class on Marxist Political Theory with Professor Zillah Eisenstein.

This single class shifted my whole relationship toward life and view of the world. I encountered an orientation that made so much sense to me as a compassionate approach to human interconnectedness – one that Karl Marx, throughout his early philosophical writings, referred to as the “species-being” of which we are all a part.

I started my undergraduate degree two weeks before 9/11, and for the four years I was at Ithaca, the backdrop of the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent war shaped a potent activist fabric throughout the college. This environment plus courses that renewed my outlook on life led to an inspired period of activism regarding the Iraq War. I retained no friends from my two years of musical theatre training, but the ferocity and vitality shared among my new friends participating in this activist milieu bonded us in a way that continues to this day.

My passion for the transformation of ideas through political theory then led me to study a masters in Political Theory at the London School of Economics. It was throughout this experience that I discovered my passion for writing and my inspired commitment to philosophical thinking. So a few years later, I decided to pursue another masters program – much to the dismay of my student debt.

After completing the masters in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City, I became disillusioned with academia and enrolled in a yoga teacher training that transitioned my work from waiting tables during grad school to teaching modern postural yoga full time.

On the surface of things, it might look like my transition was a kind of radical departure from my original political and academic commitments. After all, so many people perceive yoga and meditative practices – wrongly, in my view – as connected to a navel-gazing obscurantism that leaves the world and its problems behind. Given such a perspective, one could easily think that I became exhausted and exasperated by political struggles and took a bypassing turn toward personal self-improvement and cheesy wellness practices.

I see the relationship between politics and spirituality differently, however, and I sometimes mention in classes that I see what we are doing when we are studying contemplative traditions and practicing meditation as forms of political engagement.

Renunciatory vs. Householder Perspectives

It isn’t altogether incorrect, however, that some spiritual traditions invite us to bypass the world – electing to see its issues as fundamentally illusory and therefore best ignored in the service of focusing on more “spiritual” matters. These traditions are often referred to as “renunciatory” traditions.

Renunciatory traditions imagine the ephemeral changes of the world as un-real and therefore distractions that obscure the truth of things. They are therefore intimately connected to a “dualistic” view of the world: there is spiritual truth and reality, on the one hand, and then there is the illusory world, on the other. The traditions of classical sāṃkhya and yoga, some schools of Vedānta, and others, are examples of dualistic systems that posit this metaphysical distinction. Even some schools that refer to themselves as “non-dualistic” end up defaulting to a dualistic view of things through the very gesture of seeing “dualism” as somehow bad – thereby positing a somewhat ironic dualism between “dualism” and “non-dualism.”

By contrast, there is another set of contemplative traditions that was less known to the spiritual world until relatively recently, that we refer to as “householder” traditions. These traditions don’t negate the world and its problems, but see contemplative study and practice as an affirmation of the world and of life — through a transmutation of our perception of it. The problem, from the perspective of these traditions, is not “dualism” per se, but rather ignorance. And there are two species of ignorance referred to by Abhinavagupta in his Śākta-Śaiva texts: intellectual ignorance and spiritual ignorance.

The Two Forms of Ignorance

Intellectual ignorance (or bauddha-ajñāna) is characterized by the various forms of limiting belief, understanding, and thought constructs that arise from a limited intellect (or buddhi). It causes misperceptions and false interpretations of reality. It is the ignorance that reflects how we understand the world, reality, and the mechanisms of consciousness – an ignorance that is overcome through the process of refining our conceptions and acquiring a more expansive knowledge (vidyā).

Spiritual ignorance (or pauruṣa-ajñāna) is the foundational ignorance that constitutes our understanding as being a limited, individuated self. It's the root of the sense of separation and limitation – that feeling of being a separate individual distinct from others, the world, and the encompassing consciousness itself. It's not merely the absence of knowledge, but a contracted or limited state of knowing. The Tantrik tradition says that this type of ignorance can only be removed by an interior shift referred to as śaktipāta – the “descent of grace” caused by the freedom of reality itself (svatantrya).

Pauruṣa-ajñāna is therefore an ignorance about the very nature of the Self – expressed through the assumption that there is no Self at all. And because there is no Self to be realized, so the thinking goes, it makes sense that reality would be seen – as it is by so many – as “nothing but” a parade of atomic particles interacting with themselves. The wonder and amazement inspired by a consideration of how this could be possible or sustained at all is largely ignored. And from the perspective of this meaningless, mechanical-materialist monism, scientists then try to resolve the “problem of consciousness” – ignoring the evidence available (even to scientists) that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of matter, but rather intrinsic to it.

A culture that is embedded in a mood of cosmic meaninglessness therefore becomes a political problem, because what happens when an entire planet of individuals becomes entirely cynical and loses their capacity for wonder? What happens when meaning-making is domesticated to the space between your ears, through cultural assumptions and intellectual biases about the nature of reality?

As traditions that affirm life and provide tools to expand the meaningfulness of it, the Tantrik householder paths are extremely amenable to the socio-political dimension. But by taking them seriously, they do require us to situate politics within a different worldview and an alternative epistemological framework.

A New Political Imagination — Horizontal and Vertical Causality

Our socio-political imagination is presently rooted in a materialist metaphysical worldview, while simultaneously disavowing the spiritual impulse toward fulfilment that is evident within it. This impulse is equally present in both conservative and progressive political perspectives – albeit at opposite ends of a linear historical spectrum. Put somewhat simply, the conservative seeks fulfilment through the return to an idealized past, while the progressive posits that fulfilment in an often vaguely defined utopian future. What unites them both is a deferral of imagined fulfilment to another time – whether it be in the past or the future.

It would be a somewhat cringey cliché to say that this split of deferred fulfilment between either past or future is resolved by “being in the present moment.” But of course – as with many such modern spiritual clichés – there is a deeper set of insights that can be unpacked from this platitude. The insight has to do, I think, with a conception of causality that our culture is presently animated by – a billiard-ball, horizontal causality that imagines time, history, and experience on a straight line extending from past to future.

This is not the only conception of causation available for reflection, however; indeed, Aristotle spoke of four species of causation (material, formal, efficient, and final). For our purposes, it can be helpful to distinguish between two forms of causation – horizontal and vertical.

If horizontal causation is the exteriorized conception of historicizing causation that shapes the structure of our cultural and political assumptions, then vertical causation is an interior conception that works with techniques and practices that allow for alternative dispositions and faculties to arise within us. This is, in my view, one of the most significant and profound insights we can derive from many of the world’s contemplative traditions. There are certain fault-lines of possibility that are regulated by our attachment to a narrow view of causality, as well as how fulfilment is imagined, and how knowledge is conceived.

The Political Implications of Vertical Causation

From the perspective of the Non-Dual Śākta-Śaiva traditions, our relative degree of ignorance is proportional to the range of resources available to us as we show up and interact with each other and the world around us. We address both forms of ignorance through a synergistic process of study and practice.

If we accept this premise, then it follows that without modes of contemplative study and practice, we are likely to be existentially tighter, less resilient, and more easily capsized by the various negative tendencies of life. Living from an exteriorized horizontal causality alone can easily lead us into misunderstanding, because the potential for deep understanding requires an expanded imagination. And being pushed along by the waves of exterior causality ultimately constrains our imagination, because a compassionate understanding arises not simply from the acquisition of knowledge, but also from the emotional flexibility we develop through an alignment with vertical causation. As a result, we become reactive rather than responsive.

We can bring more energy, clarity, and creativity to our socio-political commitments and collective projects when we steep ourselves in those modes of self-inquiry that soften, subtelize, and refine our knowledge systems. By contrast, those lacking in such efforts will often project their own psychological challenges, fears, and tensions onto others – a phenomenon and tendency that has, in my view, deeply damaged the space of public discourse. Our approach then becomes quite the opposite of another species of the dreaded “spiritual bypassing” – we become more capable and effective in the face of socio-political challenges when we devote time and effort to aligning with vertical causality.

However, it would be a mistake to interpret this as suggesting that we must first do the contemplative work before we enter into politics. Again, this view collapses our consideration into another expression of horizontal politics. We study contemplative traditions and engage in subtle embodiment practices at the same time as we show up for our various community responsibilities – just as we brush our teeth every morning and go to work the same day. In instances of both contemplative and political processes, the results can accumulate over time. However, the position I’m suggesting here isn’t that we flip the script and start privileging vertical over horizontal causality. We need both, because they compliment and reinforce each other in the same way that study and practice compliment and reinforce each other.

We can simultaneously work in the service of a future world that is kinder, more compassionate, and animated by an empathy for the less fortunate, while also acknowledging that there is a certain kind of fulfillment that exceeds these commitments – a fulfillment that is cultivated through an encounter with the ever-present dynamism at the foundation of our interior world.

Going Deep

Just as there are times when we are called to be in a more focused and intensified relationship with political activity – whether in election cycles or various forms of activism –, similarly there are times when we are called to be in a more intentional, focused relationship with our contemplative study and practices. The process of engaging in annual retreats – multiple times per year, for some – is a highly effective way to derive greater benefits from practice and to replenish our resources and commitment to the contemplative process. Indeed, retreats can be an opportunity to deeply remember why we do this work in the first place. Because the palpable resonance that accumulates over the course of deep retreat is experienced as self-validating in its value and efficacy.

I therefore see retreat (and indeed all contemplative practice) as a form of political activism. From an individual perspective, there is perhaps nothing more transformative than showing up in the world with our wits about us, our tensions in check, and our resilience in tow. Contemplative practice — in both its daily expressions and in an intensified retreat format — is a radical act of deepening and expanding one’s resources and imagination. It allows us to see things differently. And, as a result, we begin encountering a newfound capacity to tell new stories, to persuade more effectively, and to write new political theories — ones that might hopefully help get us out of this mess we’re living in.

We Need New Dreams

I recently saw a memorial post following the passing of Ralph De La Rosa – a prominent dharma teacher in the Buddhist tradition who collaborated with Embodied Philosophy in the early years. This writer critiqued some of his parting words: “see you in the next dream.” They didn’t like this sentence, apparently, claiming that they would not get on board with seeing anyone in the “next dream;” because they are committed to living in the “here and now” without spiritual bypassing.

While I get the essence of what they wrote, I find this kind of simplistic distinction between “waking” and “dreaming” a bit unpalatable. It was also an unsympathetic and unimaginative interpretation of what Ralph was saying, and I didn’t find it particularly classy to offer a clapback at Ralph immediately after he had left this world.

There is no such thing as living in a world without dreams. We dream in our sleep as much as we dream while we’re awake. We dream about what we want to accomplish each day. We dream about the future and the past. And we are constantly creating new dreams within which we live and through which we perceive our reality. To suggest that there is some kind of “realistic” attitude toward the world that is exempt from all dreaming is simply the ideological byproduct of another kind of dream. However, I would say the dream of this person is more akin to a nightmare.

To separate the process of dreaming and imagination from one’s conception of political progress is to cut off your nose to spite your face. Without dreams and imagination, we would never come up with anything new. And if there is anything more apparent in politics right now, it is that the old ways are no longer working. Instead of opening up to a flexible, creative vitality that could allow us to bring new forms of human relationship and community into being, many of us are instead hardening into sanctimonious ideologies that do little more than divide us.

If the situatedness of the world is partially determined by the dreams and nightmares that are non-different from how we perceive the world itself, then contemplative study and practice is to 1) become cognizant of the dreams and nightmares that are shaping and informing our perception, and 2) take our agency back with regards to our own power in bringing a more compassionate dream into being. While the power structures that have solidified on the plane of horizontal causality do constrain and affect material, social, and psychological forces, the pratyabhijñā philosophical tradition infers that there is a limitless range of imaginative resources accessible through our relationship to vertical causality.

No structures of oppression or affliction can touch the spaciousness born of that verticality — an experiential attunement with which will make us more effective at responding to these structures.

In the end, the call to contemplative practice is not a retreat from the world but a radical invitation to perceive and participate in it more deeply. To engage with vertical causality is to reclaim the dream as a site of agency and imagination — where new forms of collective life become not only thinkable but possible in this lifetime. A contemplative politics begins when we recognize that interior transformation and external action are not separate domains, but mutually intersecting and reinforcing movements of the same pulsation of reality itself.

Subtle embodiment, then, becomes not just a spiritual commitment but a political one — where the revolution begins within, but never ends there.

Interested in joining the Kuṇḍalinī Retreat?

In today’s spiritual marketplace, “kuṇḍalinī awakening” has become a familiar phrase — often flattened into vague talk of “energy” or sensationalized as a mystical event. But within the non-dual Śākta-Śaiva traditions, kuṇḍalinī-śakti is not merely something we experience. She is the living axis of vertical causality — the power by which consciousness awakens to itself, revealing new depths of meaning, perception, and possibility.

This retreat explores kuṇḍalinī not as a spiritual spectacle, but as a subtle and dynamic principle of creative unfolding. Together, we will recover the philosophical richness and ethical implications of these teachings, while cultivating a somatic and contemplative language for engaging kuṇḍalinī as a vertical movement of self-recognition — one that empowers greater clarity, resilience, and presence in the world.

Kuṇḍalinī & Subtle Embodiment Retreat
July 10th–16th, 2025 | Live Online via Zoom | Most Recordings Available within 24 Hours
9:00–11:30 AM & 1:00–3:30 PM ET Daily (Afternoon Times Subject to Change)

LEARN MORE or REGISTER NOW →

In my previous post, “Kuṇḍalinī Beyond Yogi Bhajan,” I struck a critical position with regards to Bhajan’s “Kundalini Yoga.” My intention there was to highlight the widespread conflation of Bhajan’s system of “Kundalini Yoga” with teachings on the kuṇḍalinī-śakti that are rooted in the Śākta-Śaiva Tantrik traditions.

I clarified this distinction after receiving an email from a student, whose concern demonstrated the need for establishing some distance between what we’re doing at our upcoming Kuṇḍalinī Retreat — and what we are not.

Within hours of sending this post to the Embodied Philosophy community, I received another email — this time from a woman who had derived some benefit from her experience in the Kundalini Yoga world. She shared some of her personal story with me — which demonstrated that, for her at least, the practices had served her for where she was at and what she needed at the time.

Her message was gracious, honest, and filled with an ethos I respect: the impulse to understand, to question, and to hold space for complexity.

It also was not without some misinterpretation of what I was arguing in that previous post, and so it has given me another opportunity to clarify a few things.

When Strong Words Are Misread

There was nothing in the spirit of her email that I disagreed with. However, her response highlighted something I’ve been reflecting on for some time — that in trying to speak clearly and unapologetically about the distinctions between traditions, I may at times use language that inadvertently implies judgments I don’t actually hold. So I want to take a moment to clarify not just my intention, but the broader philosophical and contemplative orientation from which the points were being made.

Historical Clarity Is Not a Personal Critique

In my classes and writings, when I speak about the difference between modern adaptations and the historical traditions from which they derive, I often take care to note that this isn’t a statement about efficacy. Just because a practice is new, or doesn’t come from a long lineage, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. The real test of any contemplative or spiritual practice is whether it opens, expands, and ultimately serves the life of a practitioner — and that’s something only the practitioner can know from their own lived experience.

I therefore consider myself a spiritual pragmatist. If something helps a person live more meaningfully, love more deeply, and navigate life with greater wisdom, clarity, and resilience, then it’s doing its job. I have no interest in invalidating what someone has found helpful. And I would never disavow another person’s experience just because the historical or philosophical roots of their practice are different from those of my own.

But There’s a Reason We Draw Boundaries

That said, not all practices are equally safe or equally suited for all practitioners. Some traditions — especially those rooted in centuries of transmission and refinement — come with built-in safeguards. They’ve been tested, adapted, and passed on over generations of practitioners. And others — particularly those invented in the 20th century, often by charismatic leaders — don’t have that same degree of historical scaffolding or accountability.

So when I speak critically about Yogi Bhajan’s system, I’m not speaking about every practitioner who found meaning or healing in it. I’m observing the historical truth of what it was: a system largely invented by a single man, drawing on disparate sources (including Sikhism) while using the term kuṇḍalinī in ways that have little to no connection to the Tantrik traditions from which that term originates.

Distinguishing Is Not Rejecting

My recent reflection was written after that first individual reached out with concerns. She was understandably confused by the language around kuṇḍalinī and worried we might be teaching Bhajan’s version of Kundalini Yoga. So I wanted to make it clear that we are not.

But drawing boundaries is not the same thing as rejecting someone else’s path. To draw a distinction is not to say, “Your experience is wrong.” It’s to say, “This is what we’re doing — and this is what we’re not doing.” That kind of clarity is intended as an act of respect and care.

In the process of sādhana, it is important to cultivate boundaries — not to cut ourselves off from others, but to preserve the sacredness of the space we’re co-creating. And in the case of communities that have suffered abuse, those boundaries become even more important. We must name what has harmed people — not so as to shame those who experienced things differently, but to broaden awareness and understanding so that history need not repeat itself.

On Addiction, Safety & Spiritual Responsibility

In the context of recovery from various kinds of addiction, there’s a well-understood principle: healing often requires creating distance. Distance from the substances, habits, behaviours, or environments that might trigger a “relapse” and thus ultimately undermine our well-being. To create distance in this way isn’t an act of condemnation; it’s an act of generosity toward oneself and others. Similarly, in a spiritual or contemplative life, we sometimes need to draw boundaries and create distance — not to judge or reject others, but to create the conditions for safety, integrity, and a deep albeit subtle capacity for contemplative knowledge and insight. This gesture of establishing healthy spiritual boundaries is, I think, an important act of care that we can offer a modern spiritual world that loves to melt everything into “oneness” or a prematurely assumed perspective of “unity-consciousness.”

I’ve seen, firsthand, the psychological damage caused by some of the intense breathwork practices popularized in modern “Kundalini Yoga” settings — especially among those already prone to dissasociation. This is not to say that all such practices are inherently harmful, but to say that without the proper context, preparation, and support, they can be destabilizing. Because I’ve witnessed this phenomenon myself, I feel a responsibility to speak clearly about what is and isn’t being offered in the retreats and programs that we host through Embodied Philosophy.

Kālī as the Fierce Face of Love

There’s a tendency in contemporary spirituality to equate love with a kind of softness that privileges only “love and light.” But anyone who’s practiced deeply knows that love also has a fierce face. In the Hindu tradition, that face is often represented by the goddess Kālī — slayer of demons, drinker of the blood of ignorance, donning a necklace of skulls.

In a story famously found in the Devī-Mahātmya — a 5th-6th century Sanskrit text central to Śākta traditions —, we find a powerful asura (demon) named Raktabīja (literally “blood-seed”) who had a boon that made him nearly invincible. Every time a drop of his blood touched the ground, a new duplicate of him would spring forth from it. During a battle between the devas (gods) and the asuras, Raktabīja proved impossible to defeat, because any wound he sustained would multiply him endlessly.

To defeat him, Kālī was summoned by the gods. In her fearsome form, she fought Raktabīja with a terrifying intensity. To prevent his blood from touching the ground and creating more demons, she spread her tongue wide, then lapped up and drank every drop of his blood before it could fall to the ground. Ultimately, she consumes him completely, ending his reign of terror and his contageous spread of ignorance.

I should note that there is an important argument against defining the goddess Kālī solely as a goddess of destruction. The resistance to this popular trope rests on the recognition that her symbolic and theological role is far more nuanced and multidimensional than this trope implies. While Kālī is popularly depicted in often fierce and sometime terrifying forms — wielding weapons, adorned with skulls, and standing on the body of Śiva — her iconography and mythology are not about violence or annihilation.

Instead, her “destruction” is transformative: she deconstructs the negative vicissitudes of ego, ignorance (avidyā), and those internal demons that block one’s contemplative process. She is the power of time (kāla) that dissolves all forms back into their source — not out of malice, but out of necessity, to make way for renewal and regeneration. In Tantrik traditions, she is often revered as the most compassionate form of the divine, because she liberates beings by forcefully removing what binds them.

To reduce Kālī to a “goddess of destruction” is to miss her deeper function as a fierce expression of wisdom and maternal love — a love willing to confront illusion, rupture comfort, and sever attachments for the sake of deeper freedom. She is not destruction for its own sake, but the sacred force of dissolution that clears space for truth, rebirth, and perhaps even a radical transformation.

So while I personally have a deep affection for those images of Kālī in which she’s holding the decapitated head of Raktabīja, I’m not advocating that we all rage through the world with an analogous intensity. But I do believe that there is a much-needed role in the modern yoga and spiritual community for fierce discernment, for confronting certain falsehoods, for saying “no” to forms of manipulation that are often cloaked in mystical language. Because compassion doesn’t mean we blur all boundaries and speak only in buttery, affable tones to one another — nor does it suggest that we help each other by avoiding calling a spade a spade. Sometimes, a refreshing dose of critical clarity is the most compassionate thing we can offer.

As the person who wrote to me so beautifully said, two things can be true. People can have profound experiences in flawed systems. Teachers can transmit wisdom and cause harm. Traditions can be powerful and still require critique.

On Rationality, Mystery, & the Role of Thought

Toward the end of her message, the writer raised a point about rationality and whether I over-emphasize it. Do I privilege fact and reason over intuition, mystery, and the non-linear?

It’s a fair question — and again, one that I think stems from a slight misreading of what I was saying.

To put it simply, I don’t worship certainty. I don’t believe that a contemplative life can — or should — be reduced to data, logic, or tidy conclusions. But I do believe that how we think matters. I am committed to the position that theory, reflection, and philosophical coherence help safeguard us from falling into seductive but potentially harmful belief systems.

In the Śākta-Śaiva tradition, the goal is not to escape reason, but to cultivate discernment and to eradicate intellectual and spiritual ignorance — and, importantly, to know when a non-rational experience is drawing us toward expansion, and when it’s pulling us into delusion. Because common sense reveals that not all mystery is liberating. Some mystery entraps and ensnares us. Some states of awareness cut us off from the world and lead to dissociation rather than integration.

So while I would not call myself “anti-mystery,” I am pro-discernment. My interest is in a kind of theory that liberates rather than confines. And a way of thinking that makes more space for the sacred — not less.

In Closing

I write all of this not to re-litigate anything, but to hopefully express my appreciation for dialogue — for the kind of respectful engagement that deepens understanding rather than shuts it down.

We are living through a time when many spiritual and contemplative communities are developing a maturity with regards to the very real harms that have been perpetuated in the name of enlightenment. In the face of this, it’s essential that we not collapse into cynicism, disillusionment, or in “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” But it’s equally essential that we not bypass the work of critical thought — nor the process of seeking philosophical and historical clarity.

We can and should, I think, hold space for complexity — for the “both/and.” We can honor the personal experiences of others at the same time that we question the structures that made them possible. We can love both compassionately and fiercely, and — most importantly — with clear eyes.

Interested in joining the Kuṇḍalinī Retreat?

In today’s spiritual marketplace, “kuṇḍalinī awakening” is a well-worn phrase — often reduced to vague “energies” or an exotic spiritual spectacle. But within the classical traditions of non-dual Śaiva and Śākta Tantra, kuṇḍalinī-śakti is not simply an experience we might have. She is the very principle of creativity and revelation, the dynamic pulse of consciousness itself. This retreat seeks to recover the depth, nuance, and ethical implications of these teachings — and to offer a somatic language and meditative pathway for practicing them in real time.

Kuṇḍalinī & Subtle Embodiment Retreat
July 10th–16th, 2025 | Live Online via Zoom | Recordings Available
9:00–11:30 AM & 1:00–3:30 PM ET daily

LEARN MORE or REGISTER NOW—>

Recently, I received a thoughtful yet concerned email from someone in the Embodied Philosophy community expressing concern about our upcoming Kuṇḍalinī retreat. Their worry stemmed from an all-too-common misunderstanding: that the kuṇḍalinī we will explore at this retreat bears some relation to the so-called “Kundalini Yoga” popularized by Yogi Bhajan. Given the painful legacy of abuse and manipulation associated with Bhajan’s movement — a topic widely covered in recent documentaries and journalistic investigations — I want to take this opportunity to hopefully offer a clear and comprehensive clarification.

A Problem of Confusion

Yogi Bhajan’s brand of “Kundalini Yoga” has, unfortunately, become synonymous in many minds with the term kuṇḍalinī itself. This is understandable. Bhajan’s marketing instincts — and his appropriation of terms drawn from Indian spiritual traditions—was effective in creating a new religious movement that looked ancient, authoritative, and exotic, while being, in fact, an idiosyncratic, self-fashioned synthesis designed to serve his personal empire. The truth is that what Yogi Bhajan taught had no grounding in the kuṇḍalinī teachings as they are understood within the Non-dual Tantrik traditions of Śākta-Śaiva Tantra from which the term derives.

I am grateful to the person who wrote to me, because their concern illuminates the need for a greater public understanding. I want to be absolutely clear: our retreat on kuṇḍalinī draws nothing from Yogi Bhajan or his “Kundalini Yoga.” Rather, it is rooted in rigorous study and practice within the lineage of Śākta-Śaiva philosophy — a tradition I have devoted my life to exploring, studying, and practicing.

Kuṇḍalinī: The Original Vision

So what is kuṇḍalinī, in its original context?

The earliest textual reference to kuṇḍalinī appears in the Kubjikāmata-Tantra, a 9th-century text from Kashmir. In this tradition, kuṇḍalinī is personified as the goddess Kubjikā — literally the “curled one”, who is also sometimes referred to as the “hunch-backed” goddess. This “curling” or “coiling” reveals her as a subtle form of luminous creative energy latent within each of us. Far from being a technique or branded style of yoga, kuṇḍalinī in the Śākta-Śaiva tradition refers to a universal, intrinsic energetic current — the subtle pulsation of creative potential that animates all beings.

Practices related to kuṇḍalinī in this tradition involve deeply meditative forms of visualization and mantra. They invite practitioners to attune themselves to this inner dynamism, to harmonize with the ever-present wellspring of consciousness and creativity within us. This is a far cry from the intense, often reckless breathwork and extreme techniques promoted in Yogi Bhajan’s schools, which have unfortunately triggered dissociation, psychological instability, and even psychotic breaks in vulnerable individuals. While a range of deeply potent practices exist in the Tantrik traditions, no such dangerous methods will be taught in the Kuṇḍalinī Retreat — instead, we will be focusing on a subtle sequence of meditative practice that draws from the rich philosophical and practical landscape of the Śākta traditions.

Yogi Bhajan’s “Kundalini Yoga”: An Invention

It bears repeating: Yogi Bhajan’s version of “Kundalini Yoga” was not a transmission of an ancient, unbroken lineage. It was largely his invention — drawing selectively and sometimes superficially from Sikhism, sprinkled with appropriated Tantrik vocabulary, and repackaged as a charismatic, and highly marketable product. However, the sinister element, from my perspective, is not so much the adaptation of tradition — since adaptation happens in all religious and contemplative histories — , but rather the exploitative power dynamics and abuses that Bhajan’s empire inflicted on countless followers.

When we speak of kuṇḍalinī at this retreat, we are not referencing, endorsing, or building upon that history. In fact, the teachings we engage with stand in stark contrast to it. They offer not a gateway into authoritarian structures or cultish communities, but a map toward inner sovereignty, resilience, and the cultivation of a critical yet contemplative discernment.

A Note on Tradition and Adaptation

One point I’d like to make — because it’s important to the history of all spiritual traditions — is that religious and contemplative systems are never static. They evolve, adapt, and splinter over time. Claims to speak for the “one true tradition” often mask the complex, living nature of contemplative and religious history. That said, Bhajan’s distortions were not benign adaptations — they were ultimately self-serving manipulations that harmed many people. The problem is not that he created a hybrid practice; it is that he used this practice to control, exploit, and abuse.

Neo-Kundalini: A Helpful Distinction

Just as scholars distinguish between Non-Dual Tantra and what is popularly called “Neo-Tantra” (a New Age reimagining with little connection to historical Tantrik practices), we might consider the term “Neo-Kundalini” for the version of kuṇḍalinī that was taught by Yogi Bhajan. His system bears little resemblance to the original traditions of Śākta-Śaiva Tantra and its teachings on the kuṇḍalinī-śakti.

Kuṇḍalinī as Contemplative Technology

At our retreat, we will approach kuṇḍalinī as a contemplative technology — a subtle, supportive process of engaging with the creative movement of consciousness within. The practices are meditative, grounded in visualization, mantra, and subtle alignment. They are designed not to overwhelm the nervous system, but to gently open the heart and mind to greater creativity, resilience, and contemplative insight.

In a world increasingly vulnerable to dogma, doctrine, and manipulation, kuṇḍalinī practice — rightly understood — cultivates precisely the opposite: it supports autonomy, inner clarity, and the capacity to see through false claims and authoritarian traps.

Setting the Record Straight

I share all this because I believe it is vital that those of us committed to the integrity of contemplative traditions work actively to dispel the confusion sown by bad actors like Yogi Bhajan. It is time to reclaim kuṇḍalinī as the profound, illuminating concept it always was, and to offer its wisdom in a way that is safe, supportive, and authentic.

I am deeply grateful for the opportunity this exchange has given me to clarify what we are doing at the retreat — and what we are not. If you have further questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I welcome dialogue, and I am committed to supporting practitioners in finding paths of inquiry that are both safe and effective.

Interested in joining the Kuṇḍalinī Retreat?

In today’s spiritual marketplace, “kuṇḍalinī awakening” is a well-worn phrase — often reduced to vague energies or exotic spectacle. But within the classical traditions of non-dual Śaiva and Śākta Tantra, kuṇḍalinī-śakti is not a curiosity. She is the very principle of creativity and revelation, the dynamic pulse of consciousness (spanda) itself. This retreat seeks to recover the depth, nuance, and ethical import of these teachings — and to offer a somatic language and meditative pathway for practicing them in real time.

Kuṇḍalinī & Subtle Embodiment Retreat
July 10th–16th, 2025 | Live Online via Zoom | Recordings Available
9:00–11:30 AM & 1:00–3:30 PM ET daily

LEARN MORE or REGISTER NOW—>

In 2015, while I was teaching yoga full time in NYC, I started working on a side project that was soon called Embodied Philosophy – an online learning platform for contemplative traditions, yoga philosophy, and subtle practices. During the entire month of June 2025, we are celebrating our ten-year anniversary through a series of emails that reflect back on what has happened over the first decade of our existence. This is the final post of a three-part “history” of how Embodied Philosophy evolved over our first ten years. The first two parts focused on my colleagues behind the scenes who helped make it happen – and a few of the lessons I learned from them. Part 3 explores some of my own reflections, experiences, and what Embodied Philosophy looks like today as it prepares for the future.

In the previous two posts about Embodied Philosophy’s 10-year anniversary story, my focus was on highlighting and celebrating the diverse beings I have had the privilege of working with over the years.

If the last few years of Embodied Philosophy’s journey could be summed up in a simple sūtra-like aphorism, it might be this: ‘everything that expands must also contract.’”

In this part, I am sharing my own experience of reckoning and humility, shame and avoidance, and the beginning of a newfound relationship to Embodied Philosophy as a teacher. This is an emotional and vulnerable part of the story for me, and certainly something that I haven’t shared publicly. But my hope is that those who engage in similar ventures – who, like me, lacked the skills and discernment that can only be forged through experimentation, failures, and missteps – will perhaps feel at least slightly comforted, and at most inspired to acknowledge that you are not alone. As one of those old adages goes, the challenges we face can become opportunities when perceived with new eyes – if we can access the resources to respond to them with creativity and an openness to try new things, without attachment to the old things that no longer work as they once did.

In the end, I see this series of challenges not as failures, but as a kind of necessary unraveling – one that can be contextualized philosophically from the Tantrik perspective of an ever-natural expansion and contraction that exists at all levels of life.

The Cracking of the Shell: The Financial Reckoning

The mounting economic pressures post-2021 were initially expansive, but quickly transformed into a new contracted state that I for-too-long avoided acknowledging, and thus delayed decisions that were ultimately necessary.

The explosive success of our initial pandemic-era courses was a disorienting experience, because it rooted in me a rather distorted assumption that things had always been relatively easy, but now they were easier than ever. The experience of seeing how quickly an organization can find itself in an abundant state of resources for re-investment in the platform left me attached to the belief that – even as the new evidence of less than successful courses started to accumulate – we were only just one course away from experiencing the same kind of success we had before. But that turned out to be an ultimately unhelpful delusion.

As anyone who owns a business remembers from the pandemic days, it was extremely easy to access funding from the government through the forgivable Payroll Protection program, and the unforgivable EIDL loan (Economic Injury Disaster Loan). I took advantage of every opportunity to access this funding, and given my experience of seeing just how easy it was to encounter quickly-shifting success, I didn’t pause to reflect on whether or not this was a risky decision. When times were abundant, my instinct was to re-invest and expand, and I didn’t prioritize a “rainy day fund,” because it didn’t seem necessary. Now I know that times of abundance should also be conservatively focused on saving for potentially difficult times ahead – ones that I now realize are inevitable.

And so, when the pandemic loans became available, I started to depend on the EIDL funding too much when things got difficult – using them to offset an increasingly dwindling cashflow. I had started to see that we were beginning to hemorrhage money every month, but instead of making the decision to downsize, I manically shifted our strategy over and over again to try and trigger the circumstances from before – when almost every course put us in the green. In retrospect, I should have carefully analyzed where all the money was going. I should have looked more closely at all of EP’s various banking and credit card statements. But I didn’t, because I was too frightened at the time to face the truth of what was necessary.

The loan funds were slowly drained, because our costs far exceeded our revenue, and I used the extended time these funds allowed to keep my head in the warm and comfortable sands of avoidance. Because to confront the truth of what was necessary was too painful. When you are responsible for supporting the livelihoods of a staff through their payroll, you can get extremely attached to not letting them down. I was honest with the team throughout this period that we were not in a financially good position, but I always ended that honest appraisal with the encouragement that I knew we were going to turn this around. But of course I didn’t know; it was not knowledge, but a faith born of my own limited experience. And as we all know, some faiths can be blind.

So I went from the blissful repose of visionary expansion to the ever-present anxiety of financial survival mode. I started to think that a contraction of the team was necessary, but it broke my heart to imagine going through with it. I let my own shame and guilt get in the way of what should have been a pragmatic business decision that was in the best interest of Embodied Philosophy and my own financial hardship.

Sometimes we need a close friend to reflect back to us that a necessary decision is not a failure, and it is not something to be ashamed about. I cannot express deeply enough how central Irene Barber was to this process – always encouraging me to inhabit a new headspace with regards to what needed to be done (even though it's uncomfortable), while highlighting the beauty behind such a decision and the newfound maturity it expresses and conveys.

As the Buddhist adage makes clear, impermanence is not a failure but a teacher. Holding on too tightly is what creates suffering — not the letting go itself. But letting go requires support, and it was Irene who played the role of a much-needed teacher in this new need for surrender.

The Exodus: Team Contraction & Connected Goodbyes

Irene’s initial 12-week contract turned into a full time employment role. Because Irene is one of my oldest friends – uniquely special to me as the person who inspired me to come out after high school –, she knows me so well, and knows how to reflect back to me an encouragement around certain tough decisions that helps me see it from an “objective standpoint” beyond my shadow dispositions of guilt, grief, and shame. I started to confide in Irene about just how bad the monthly losses were – one month seeing losses of up to $50,000.

Irene initially managed the entire existing team, and she supported many team members to rise to new levels of confidence and leadership for the platform. But she was also giving me the real “tea”, and noted how the team had become a bit bloated – and because of this, less efficient. This lack of efficiency was not due to any fault of the team, but a result of the hodgepodge organizational structure I had created. So at some point in mid-2023, we made one of two rounds of layoffs. The first one reflected a broader editorial decision to discontinue our “somatics track” and re-focus our offerings on the original vision of disseminating yoga philosophy and subtle esoteric practices.

The somatics track at Embodied Philosophy was initially developed to expand beyond my own specialization and initial commitments at a time of abundance. The somatic field is wildly important and popular – and in many instances the somatics courses were more successful than the philosophy ones, making it seem insensible to cut them from our future offerings. But finding a broader inclusive message for EP about how the somatics side and the yoga philosophy side fit together was always a somewhat clunky and abstract exercise that led to a blurred and incoherent message of what our educational process was all about. I am grateful to a conversation I had with one of our teachers at a cafe in Oxford – Daniel Simpson – for pointing out to me that it was difficult to grasp from our website what the flagship offering was. While we have an expansive range of content, he shared how he thought the abundance of content could be leading to confusion about where to start – and as an educational platform, we needed to start refining and focusing our curriculum and vision again.

I chose to return to EP’s initial yoga philosophy mission and let go of the somatics focus, because yoga philosophy is what I know and what inspires me the most as my life’s work, passion, and intellectual project. I can bring more informed knowledge to the development of this curriculum, and because I am so clear about what I see as the need to disseminate esoteric wisdom teachings and practices, this was the most sensible way to focus the attention and vision and get back to the “basics.”

In this first round of layoffs, I met with each of the team members individually and kept my guilt in check while being honest about the facts and how truly sad it was for me to have to make this decision. Because all of the EP employees are deeply compassionate beings, they received the news with grace and understanding, and I am so grateful for what I see as their sensitivity to my humanity and how painful and difficult this was.

Reflecting Back: The Pragmatic Language of Leadership

The Embodied Philosophy project has deeply instilled in me the value of clear, professional, and ultimately pragmatic language. I take more time when I feel upset about something, letting any anger relax into clarity before speaking. The suggestion by my mother in childhood to “think before you speak” always felt somewhat incomprehensible – “what does that even mean?!” But I understand the wisdom of that with the experience of years, and I see how radical honesty can sometimes not be the best policy. If my goal is to connect-with and hopefully empower my employees, I need to start from an understanding of what each team member needs to feel seen, respected, and encouraged. The compassionate approach to leadership, in my view, is one that honors the vulnerabilities and unique emotional needs of every individual. The dry humor you share with one team member can be misunderstood and even experienced as destabilizing and negative to another team member listening in.

The decision to acknowledge and refine my approach to skilful communication I don’t see as “tone policing” myself, nor as “inauthentic.” It is a pragmatic approach to communication that is oriented around what others need to hear to feel supported and safe. Being a leader in this way has made me incredibly committed to pragmatism on so many levels – because wisdom is not a static doctrine but something that should be applied differently in different contexts, while recognizing that every relationship is different. If we cling to our ego, we lose the opportunity to co-create a shared communicative identity that is not anchored to a need for conversion, nor to a self-reinforcing and single-minded narrative that it’s “my way or the highway.” Leading with compassion and connection instead of ego is wildly important to support the contemplative health of a work-place environment. What I might think privately about certain things is irrelevant and impractical to share if such “truths” separate us from each other – or if it ultimately creates an intimidating environment where the creativity of others is silenced, muted, or ignored.

If there is one contemplative truth that has arisen from this experience for me, it is that true leadership is not about clinging to power in a way that makes others overly dependent and minimizes their agency. But neither is it necessarily about a laissez faire levelling of the sometimes necessary importance of structure — and even a responsive but stabilizing hierarchy.

An Experiment in Shared Leadership: “Contemplative Sociocracy”

At one point around 2021, I became obsessed with an organizational structure known as “sociocracy”. This incredibly beautiful organizational formula is built around the principle of validating every voice, and organizing meetings in a way that gives equivalent space to everyone – even establishing a framework for meetings that distributes minutes for others to share in an altogether egalitarian way. Out of my study and interest in this new organizational structure, I adapted the idea into what I referred to as “Contemplative Sociocracy.” For a period of time, we changed our meeting structure and tried to bring this new organizational structure into being.

While the experiment was beautifully interesting, it ultimately turned out to be not a great fit for Embodied Philosophy. Ultimately I was the one who decided to do the experiment, and therefore even the decision to experiment with it in the first place did not arise “sociocratically.” Also, it revealed other interesting truths about human difference. Not everyone wants to work in an environment completely lacking in hierarchy. While some are drawn toward such structures, others find it confusing and prefer the clarity of roles and a consistent distribution of responsibilities. Some feel safer and more confident in roles that don’t require them to share the burden of leadership, preferring to carry out project support functions while leaving the vision and brainstorming to others.

There is a widespread ideology operative today that hierarchy is a kind of “evil” that institutionalizes domination. If everyone is equal, so the thinking goes, then to not have that equality reflected in operations is oppressive and unethical. As with all such simplistic absolutes, non-hierarchical structures make sense in certain contexts and don’t make sense in others. What is perhaps more important is to approach questions of hierarchy or non-hierarchy in a pragmatic way, asking the question: “what is the right kind of structure appropriate to the truth and vision of this context?”

Too often today, we cling to definitive assumptions about what is right and impose these views on others in a gesture of self-righteous fundamentalism. What we’ve been learning culturally, I think, is that such reductive valuations often explain away or ignore the exceptions of human difference that don’t fit neatly into one particular value system or another. Ultimately, I chose to experiment with sociocracy, because I wanted to stop being a bottle neck for decision-making at EP, and I assumed the problem was one of hierarchy. But the team reflected back to me that hierarchy was not necessarily destabilizing, and I could resolve the bottle-neck issues without completely transforming the culture of work without enough inspiration from those involved to bring it into being. At the end of the day, while the idea of an orderly meeting structure seemed elegant, it was ultimately experienced as a kind of lumbering, overly-structured process that felt more stifling than liberating, and turned the spontaneity, openness, and friendliness of EP meetings into stiff, courtroom-like affairs. So one day, we simply gave it up and returned to the more creative and adaptive style that wasn’t really broken in the first place.

While we gave up “Contemplative Sociocracy”, we retained a commitment to the contemplative behind the scenes. Following the breakdown of our staff morale following the pandemic, I felt the pressing need to bring some of the contemplative wisdom to the backend of Embodied Philosophy. In one particularly esoteric experiment, we began every team meeting with a recitation of the Gaṇapati Atharva Śirṣa Upaniṣad. I wanted to bring some contemplative practice into our staff meetings, because if the contemplative commitment doesn’t extend into the workings of the organization, isn’t something fundamentally out of alignment? It was a short-lived commitment, largely surrendered through a conversation with Matt Bramble, in which he pointed out why he thought it was not the best choice for a practice. Because this chant is central to my own sādhana, and because my sādhana expresses my deepest passion and therefore my greatest vulnerability, I was initially quite heartbroken by his critiques. I might have even burst into tears in a Ptown restaurant, much to Matt’s chagrin (I may have had a couple martinis). But ultimately he was right about choosing that particular practice, even if the decision to bring practice into our meetings in general was ultimately a good way of subtilizing our attention — so that we could be more open and spacious at the start of our meetings and conversations. So a specific Sanskrit chant that reflected my own commitments was replaced by a more open-access meditation period that allowed for individual staff members to bring their own practices to the table.

From Collapse to Clarity: Irene Barber & the Path Ahead

Just before Irene came on board, I was in a very vulnerable place as a leader. Misunderstandings and awkward readjustments of orientation – coupled with unskilful and disorienting transitions – had exhausted the team and begun to circulate as a less than enthusiastic attitude toward my leadership. I took this very hard, because I’ve always been easily prone to “rejection dysphoria.” When I start to feel the whispers of distrust, I struggle to avoid spiralling into illusory assumptions based in paranoia.

Being the sole executive can be a lonely place, and I recognize that I was always at my best when I shared that space with others. With Jesse, Matt, and then Irene, I could lean on the wisdom, confidence, and clarity of these strong and capable people, because sharing the burden of executive decision-making has been a necessary way for me to distinguish between my wiser instincts and the contractions stemming from my own insecurities.

With Irene, I found the person who could help carry me through a decision that simply had to be made – which was the devastating truth that I had to let almost the entire team go. This felt like a failure, and the guilt of putting my team into a new state of financial insecurity in a job market that had become increasingly difficult was heartbreaking for me, because I felt responsible for them. But in holding on too long, I was ultimately bypassing my own needs and deepening my own financial hardship, and Irene was the one who helped me re-frame this decision as altogether necessary, as a natural process shared by most businesses, and as ultimately something that – while sad and certainly a loss – was to be celebrated as simply the right thing to do.

The devastating sadness of letting go of the team, and the fear I had about having those difficult conversations, was met with a level of love and understanding from each of them that reveals just how special these people are. They understood the reasons, accepted the truth with grace, and they compassionately reflected their awareness of how difficult this was for me. That experience itself was a teacher, ultimately communicating the truth that a storm may shift the atmosphere, changing the ground beneath our feet, but can ultimately become the fertile soil for something new.

It is always risky to decide to work with a friend who you have literally known since high school, but Irene was truly one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and she decided to stay on with me to help me transition into a new phase of a much more truncated version of Embodied Philosophy. Every colleague has taught me something valuable, but Irene has taught me how to let go, nourished by a vision of what letting go makes possible. Losing the team definitely translated to less ability to execute everything in the same way, but it also provided an opportunity to focus and streamline what Embodied Philosophy has always been about for me. And it also helped me begin stepping into an expanded role as an Embodied Philosophy teacher.

Back to the Heart and Becoming a Teacher

For those of you who have followed Embodied Philosophy for a long time, you might remember that the platform was for many years a place where different teachers taught many live courses. Every month featured a new teacher, and our certificate programs were taught by a variable range of faculty. During this time, I saw myself mostly as a content and course curator, and I prioritized giving other teachers a space to provide their offerings. I didn’t teach for the platform myself until offering a course on “Sāṃkhya Philosophy” in 2019 – and only intermittently after that for the Yoga Philosophy Certificate Program.

As the courses began to perform less well, every new monthly course became a risk that – more often than not – put us in the red. Because I had always been committed to offering teachers compensation that exceeded what a university lecturer would make for a comparable time commitment, our faculty costs gradually became unmanageable and financially unsustainable. Initially, we decided to pause the development of all new courses so we could reign in our expenses, and instead of launching any new courses we re-launched many of the past courses from our Wisdom School library.

But losing the live and online component definitely sapped some of the life and vitality from our offerings, and so if we couldn’t afford to host new teachers so regularly, one reasonable choice was for me to come out of a new kind of closet and teach more regularly for the platform. Perhaps every teacher suffers from a bit of inferiority complex, and I’ve certainly had plenty of that to work with. But that “inner saboteur” that is always there in the background need not be the governing voice. The need for live offerings without the resources to host other teachers thus aligned with a moment when I had started to gather enough confidence to put that inner saboteur in his place.

It was quite natural to prioritize other teachers in the first nine years of Embodied Philosophy, because at the beginning of this project I was still very much in the infancy of my knowledge. While I was a yoga teacher with a passion for philosophy, I hadn’t begun to fully digest the knowledge I was pursuing in a way that made me feel confident about putting myself out there. Over ten years of work during which I have curated and discussed so many contemplative traditions and topics, my work also became an education that expanded and deepened the meditation practice I started during the same time I launched Embodied Philosophy.

In 2015, I received this practice from Paul Muller-Ortega. I was just beginning to discover my passion for Non-Dual Śaiva-Śākta Tantra, which was partly catapulted by reading Tantra Illuminated by Christopher Wallis. At the end of that book, Christopher lists a number of living teachers teaching from this tradition, and naturally I researched every single one of them. But one in particular stood out to me, as I listened to an audio recording on the website for his school, Blue Throat Yoga. While all the teachers I researched had unique gifts, Paul had a clarity and potency that instantly inspired me, and I immediately signed up for a three-day dīkṣā (initiation) weekend in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Meeting and hearing Paul speak at the initiation weekend was an utterly life-defining experience. When asked if I had a teacher or “guru” before Paul, I had always responded with a somewhat suspicious skepticism of the notion of limiting oneself to a single teacher — even as I recognized the importance placed by many on the need for a lineage, or parampara. I had met many teachers, but I never felt like they were “my” teacher. Because I am skeptical by nature and need things to make sense philosophically, many teachers were quickly debunked in my mind for what I perceived to be obscurities or distortions that were out of alignment with a philosophical coherence that I needed to experience in order to feel grounded in the truth of any perspective or practice. Because this had been my experience of teachers up until that point, I assumed there was no such thing for me as “my teacher.” At best, I would say that “I have many teachers, and I learned something different from each of them.” This made sense at the time, because allowing one’s education to be monopolized by one point of view or another can lead to partial knowledge and perhaps even a kind of limited dogmatic understanding.

When I heard Paul speak, I had an experience I had never had before. What he taught made sense to me on a level that resonated with my entire being. This is it, I thought. This is the truth, and I know it in my bones. My encounter with Non-Dual Tantra demonstrated a tradition and philosophical perspective that didn’t require a leap of faith toward something that couldn’t be philosophically clarified. Everything that he transmitted resonated with me and was furthermore consistent and compatible with life in a way that would be a distortion to call “religious”, or even “spiritual”. It is philosophical, practical, but still deeply mystical. It theorizes how reality functions in a way that just feels transparently correct to me.

So I left that initiation weekend in a kind of rapture for study and practice, and was mobilized by a certainty that this teacher and this school of thought held a knowledge that I was deeply inspired to pursue. There was no inauthentic spiritual performance in Paul, no elite posture of “enlightened grandiosity”, but instead the wildly expansive transmission of someone who was in touch with a truth that was undeniably clear to me. I received my meditation practice and started practicing meditation twice a day, every day, with a level of commitment previously inaccessible to me. And because I was so inspired, I longed to have it all, and so I immediately signed up for his foundational course. When that course of study was completed, I signed up for every subsequent course until I was finally initiated as an Acharya (an authorized teacher of meditation) in the summer of 2020.

And yet, even following my initiation as a teacher in this lineage, I still felt that I needed to digest the knowledge more. While the codified processes that were so beautifully developed by Paul and the other advanced acharyas were consistent and reflected the importance of a sustainable and sequential process, it felt inauthentic for me to adopt these scripts and processes. And since receiving a meditation practice in this way was the most precious gift I’d ever received, I knew I needed to be fully grounded in my own understanding before I began offering such life-defining practices to others. Paul had always emphasized that we don’t devote ourselves to him in an act of guru devotion or subservient dependence. He is uniquely interested in empowering teachers, not in accruing acolytes; and he recoils from being called a “guru” – even though many in his kula relate to him as such. Instead of a form of guru-devotion that creates dependency, he revealed his integrity as a teacher in the way he taught us to devote ourselves to a deep and clear understanding of the teachings and practices themselves.

I took this very much to heart, and was honest with myself that there were still some gaps in my understanding that I needed to process before I could land in my own integrity as a teacher. Paul taught us that following the acharya-dīkṣā (the process to become an authorized teacher), an integrating process he refers to as “Acharya Level 2” begins. This is when a teacher becomes dedicated to a particular application of their role in the world – established on the basis of a certain cultivation made possible through a previous trajectory of study and practice. This is the moment when one develops the unique set of commitments that become a life’s work. Not simply a personal decision based on limited egoic interests, this inspired commitment arises from pratibhā – the ever-expressive creativity of reality itself – which organizes, congeals, and manifests itself in and as the mobilizing inspiration of an individual life. Pratibhā is the upsurge of aliveness revealed through deep study and practice, which clarifies how one’s unique contribution can integrate into the fabric of a much-needed contemplative culture.

My “Acharya Level 2” thus took me back to graduate school — this time with a more grounded understanding of the limitations and possibilities of academia. I started studying Sanskrit with Boris Marjonivic in 2020, and quickly realized that Sanskrit is extremely challenging. To develop any kind of proficiency requires commitment, dedication, and a long-view of the path toward even a modicum of skilfulness. I had a motivating reason to develop that set of skills, because I have always been very interested in bringing different philosophical traditions into a more fruitful and clarifying conversation.

I knew enough about the state of Sanskrit study to realize that there are so many incredible texts that are as yet untranslated, and I didn’t want to have to base my understanding solely on the translations of others. Translation always involves interpretation, and academic philologists (those who study history through ancient languages) are often rooted in translation and interpretation models that reflect objectivist commitments and sometimes a subtle performance of cultural bias. By contrast, a certain kind of creativity and contemplative experience is necessary to breathe life into certain texts – especially ones that are uniquely inscribed with deep esoteric knowledge. I wanted to develop my Sanskrit translation skills under the banner of what I’ll call “contemplative philology”, and so I applied to a program at the University of Oxford that I had had my eye on for some time — the MPhil in “Classical Indian Religions.” This is one of the only masters programs that teaches Sanskrit to students who may have come from different academic backgrounds outside the typical funnel of the “Classics.” In Classics education, ancient Greek and Latin are emphasized, and students cultivate the unique skills necessary to grapple with ancient languages that are structurally very different from modern languages. Coming from a philosophy academic background is not entirely unrelated, but it instilled in me skills of precision and argumentation that I feel are a necessary lens for an effective and illuminating interpretation of ancient Sanskrit texts.

Studying Sanskrit at Oxford was (and continues to be) a deeply humbling experience. I went in thinking that it would be a smooth ride given my preparatory years of study and practice, but this was the most challenging thing I have ever done. Stumbling through a translation at the direction of a teacher in front of a group of students (some of whom came into the program with a brilliant background in Sanskrit already) initially took the wind out of my sails. Being called upon randomly to express knowledge of Sanskrit grammar, or to do a translation on the fly without prior preparation, requires one to be okay with being just plain wrong — and sometimes feeling like a complete idiot. A previous student of the program who came to orientation said that she believed this program was the most difficult masters program at Oxford, and while I can’t speak for any other program, her warning certainly rang true for me.

As adults, many of us become increasingly uncomfortable with feeling like beginners. Children have more resilience in the face of being wrong, and it doesn’t so easily bear on their self-esteem or confidence. I’ve never been so scared in a class than when I was in my Sanskrit classes with Victor D’Avella. I would be riddled with anxiety about whether or not I would be called on next, and whether or not I would get a question that was outside my existing knowledge or understanding. While I don’t think fear is an effective motivator for everyone, and – to be fair – I don’t think Victor intended to instil fear in us, he was still a straight-shooting, rigorous, and brilliant Sanskritist who did not feel any apparent need to coddle us or tiptoe around our insecurities about getting it wrong. For some in the program, the intensity of this process and the commitment required didn’t work for them, and an initial cohort of seven students soon reduced to four. But I decided not to run away from the challenge and rest in the recognition that this was uncomfortable because I was learning; and as an adult, I have an opportunity to discover again how to hold space for the uncomfortable process of learning something new. Discomfort can be a motivating driver that reflects the necessary feelings of a shifted understanding, or it can morph into a paralyzing fear. Most of the time, it was the former – even if I was always not entirely sure that I would pass my final exams and graduate.

Thankfully, I did graduate from the program in 2023, and I took a year off before applying to the doctoral program at Oxford under my advisor, Diwakar Acharya. The second year of the MPhil was more focused on writing essays and the final dissertation, and given that writing about philosophy is one of my greatest passions, the end of the two year masters degree culminated in an extremely pleasurable experience of expressing what this educational process had given me.

I have long been curious about the relationship between Abhinavagupta’s aesthetic works and his Tantrik philosophy, and so my dissertation for the masters focused on the relationship between them – with the title “Infinite Poetry: Pratibhā, Rasa, and the Mystical Aesthetics of Abhinavagupta.”

My doctoral research builds on this work, with a closer focus on philosophical arguments of Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta’s pratyabhijñā (recognition) school of philosophy. While studying a philosophy rooted in Kashmir between the 9th and 12th centuries might sound like the kind of scholarly obsession irrelevant to modern life, I am deeply motivated by its ongoing relevance – not only in bringing non-Western thinkers into the broader conversations of philosophy, but also in clarifying a vision of reality that, were it to be more widely known, could provide resources for new and wiser approaches to life, relationships, and politics – resources that might help us get out of this mess of dogmatic ideologies and divisive rhetoric so prevalent today.

My initial impulse to build Embodied Philosophy because of a conviction that wisdom traditions matter – and that we need this knowledge now more than ever – has found its footing in a research project that is the byproduct of trying to make sense of how to clarify and communicate that original intention.

From Initiation to Application: The New Experiment of Sādhana School

My ongoing experience at Oxford has instilled in me what I feel to be a greater rigor and philosophical precision, but it also provided the kind of initiation that I needed to step up and teach.

The first experiment of my new teaching commitment at Embodied Philosophy started with a “5-Day Chakras Challenge” towards the end of my MPhil – which was less of a “challenge” and more just a course. In the summer between the end of the masters and start of the PhD, I taught a 30-Day Sādhana rooted in the teachings and practices of the Matsyendrasaṃhitā. A month later, I taught a 4-week course on one of my favorite texts, the Śiva Sūtras. In all of these courses, I recognized a consistent group of dedicated students — ones who demonstrated an inspired hunger for grounded textual study made accessible to the lives of modern practitioners. Following a survey sent to our students, Irene and I decided that, while not every EP student is ready for such a process, there is a core group of students who are uniquely open to a deeper, and more sustained process of study and practice. It also provides an opportunity to be part of a kula – a community of individuals bound by a shared commitment to the synergy of knowledge and contemplative experience. And so in the Fall of 2024, a newly focused offering called Sādhana School was born.

As many of you may know, when you’re a PhD student, you also generally have to teach. Unlike U.S. universities, however, teaching at Oxford is not required, but optional. So I decided to practice my teaching on the EP platform instead. The choice to begin Sādhana School at the same time I was beginning my PhD research was definitely a choice that reflects my habit of biting off a little more than I can chew, but as it has progressed and stabilized, I recognize how supportive it is to my studies. It also reflects my ongoing commitment to the role of the “scholar-practitioner” – serving as a bridge between often highly technical and somewhat dry scholarship and the community of intellectually curious practitioners who pursue knowledge from an intention to cultivate wisdom.

The first year of Sādhana School has completed three courses of study thus far (1: a survey of Yoga Philosophy; 2: Prāṇa & Prāṇāyāma; and 3: Rasa Theory), with a 7-day online retreat exploring Kuṇḍalinī beginning July 10th. The recent process of sādhana that concluded last week exploring the tradition of rasa theory reflects an important aspect of my PhD research. This tradition of Indian aesthetics has broad-ranging implications for the role of emotions in Tantrik sādhana, and yet this connection has often been neglected both by scholars and practitioners. The Spring sādhana was therefore a rich opportunity to do the work of bringing an otherwise quite scholarly discourse into the lives of seekers and practitioners. The questions that arose from students have provided an opportunity to clarify the connection, understand where explanatory gaps might linger, and begin work on a manuscript that will hopefully bring this important set of considerations and applications to a broader audience.

To teach and facilitate a process for inspired adults is an incredibly rewarding experience. To be in the company of people who are committed to growth, expansion, refinement, and transformation is to be surrounded by kindred spirits. These are not navel-gazing spiritual elitists who are bypassing the world’s problems to live in some spiritual fantasy. These are intensely alive beings for whom the śakti has shifted their lives in ways unique to each of them. That subtle shift toward contemplative meaningfulness has instilled in them a desire to explore knowledge that our popular culture has largely lost the perspectives, tools, and techniques to see and understand. Each and every student in Sādhana School is profoundly open and receptive in a way perhaps only possible in mature adults who have begun to grasp the ultimate point of education – a deeper point often obscured by the trade school model of education wherein one studies what will make the most money. In modern society, education has largely lost the original spirit of the humanities – wherein the focus of education is about a cultivation of wisdom, insight, wonder, creativity, and imagination. The modern humanities, in its understandable desire to assert itself in a secular realm beyond religion, has, in my view, thrown the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater.

I therefore see Sādhana School as an experiment in returning to the original spirit of the humanities. This spirit emphasizes cultivating the health of the human spirit within a vision of reality that finds meaningfulness everywhere. If the modern humanities often recoils from meaning in a deconstructive play of words that often confuses and conceals more than it reveals, then a humanities that prioritizes the spirit doesn’t shy away from acknowledging that life is ultimately an adventure of meaning. Even when skeptics deny that there is any meaning to life, in that very gesture of denying meaning a certain meaning is nonetheless asserted – namely, the “meaning of meaninglessness.” In other words, it is impossible to get outside meaning without invoking meaning in yet another way.

But, importantly for our considerations in Sādhana School, what does such a cynical worldview that denies meaning entail, and what are the effects of clinging to a vision of a meaningless world? A sobering acknowledgment of the failures of many modern religions – and their tendency toward dogma and doctrine – does not and need not imply that life is intrinsically meaningless. Things become meaningful insofar as we infuse them with meaning, and some meanings lead to distress, agitation, and ignorance, while other meanings change the world. Expanding the imagination through contemplative knowledge and embodied experience is uniquely capable of creating the conditions for a renewed enchantment of the world – not in the service of rehashing old mythologies or converting to a particular religion, but in counteracting the effects of a stale materialist dogma that has been useful for certain purposes but utterly deadening for the purposes of contemplative fulfilment.

Looking Forward: A New Era of Embodied Philosophy

As I look back on these ten years of Embodied Philosophy, what I feel most is gratitude. Gratitude for every colleague who poured their heart into this work; for every student who showed up with curiosity, generosity, and courage; for every teacher who trusted us with their wisdom. Gratitude for the failures and the heartbreaks too, because they have been my most uncompromising teachers. They have revealed the contours of my own limitations, the edges of my vision, and the unexpected beauty of starting over — not from nothing, but from the fertile ground that only becomes visible when the storm clears.

Today, Embodied Philosophy is smaller. It is quieter. And yet, it feels truer to its soul than it has in a very long time. We are no longer trying to be everything to everyone. We are no longer racing toward expansion for its own sake. What remains is a focused commitment to what inspired this project in the first place: a space for rigorous study, meaningful practice, and the cultivation of wisdom that speaks to the depth of human experience.

This next chapter will not be defined by endless new offerings or constant innovation for the sake of novelty. Instead, it will be shaped by depth. By integrity. By the slow, steady unfolding of projects that matter — new publications that I hope will contribute something of value to the world, deeper study programs that honor the complexity of the traditions we engage, and collaborations that emerge not from strategic planning but from genuine resonance and shared purpose.

For those of you who have been with us on this journey — whether from the very beginning, or just in recent years — I invite you to stick around. To continue walking this path together. What comes next will not be about growth in numbers, but about growth in understanding, in compassion, and in the capacity to see clearly and act wisely.

If these last ten years have taught me anything, it is that contraction is not the end of the story. It is the pause between breaths, the fertile silence before the next expression of life’s creativity. And so, as we begin this new era of Embodied Philosophy, I strive to step forward with humility, curiosity, and an abiding faith in the power of wisdom traditions to illuminate our way.

Interested in joining Sādhana School?

You can join our 2025–2026 “school year” of contemplative study and practice with 50% off tuition — for the month of June 2025 only.

In celebration of Embodied Philosophy’s 10-Year Anniversary, we’re opening early enrolment for the next season of Sādhana School — our yearlong program for devoted seekers, scholar-practitioners, and those who feel called toward a deeper understanding of the esoteric mechanics of consciousness.

The guiding theme for the year ahead is “Ancient Texts, Living Paths” – a deep inquiry into how contemplative principles are theorized, practiced, and embodied in the modern world through foundational texts of the non-dual Śaiva-Śākta Tantric tradition.

This coming year, you’ll join a committed community for three immersive 8-week sādhanas and a 7-day virtual retreat, weaving together the study of root texts, daily contemplative practice, and guided philosophical reflection. Each seasonal sādhana will be anchored in one of several seminal Sanskrit texts – the Spanda-kārikās (The Vibration Sūtras), Netra Tantra (The Technique of the “Eye”), Yoginī-Hṛdaya (Heart of the Yoginī), and the Parātrīśikā Vivaraṇa of Abhinavagupta.

Learn More or Register Now

In 2015, while I was teaching yoga full time in NYC, I started working on a side project that was soon called Embodied Philosophy – an online learning platform for contemplative traditions, yoga philosophy, and subtle practices. During the entire month of June 2025, we are celebrating our ten-year anniversary through a series of emails that reflect back on what has happened over the first decade of our existence. This is the second of a three-part “history” of how Embodied Philosophy evolved over our first ten years, with a special emphasis on my colleagues behind the scenes who helped make it happen – and a few of the lessons I learned from them.

A Cliffhanger Fulfilled

We ended the last part of our story with my best attempt at a ‘cliffhanger.’

The pandemic was an event that changed everything, initially catapulting our course performance into high gear, because we were well-situated to resonate at a moment when everyone was suddenly very online. But as every business and organization caught up with the moment, an online space that was not particularly competitive before the pandemic very soon became saturated by other platforms, well-minted corporations, and businesses that had a lot more resources and capabilities than a humble online platform like Embodied Philosophy.

And so the story of Embodied Philosophy post-pandemic is one of revelry and rupture, expansion and contraction. While telling this half of the story is challenging on those grounds, it is also paradoxically the moment when Embodied Philosophy’s team – previously limited to five incredibly capable people – expanded significantly in a relatively short amount of time. So I’ve decided to further sub-divide this history into another two parts, focusing on our expanded team in this post, while saving the story of our subsequent contraction for the final part of our story.

The “Trauma First Aid” Implosion

As I shared in Part 1, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, we launched the most successful course ever published by Embodied Philosophy. The context of the pandemic coupled with the course’s theme, “Trauma First Aid” (while being taught by Peter Levine – someone as close to a celebrity as you can find in the somatics world), intersected to create an explosively successful course that attracted over 2000 registered students.

Because, as mentioned previously, we were uniquely situated online at a moment of societal lockdown, the success of this course – while understandable in retrospect – was at the time it happened rather shocking. In my excitement for this sudden opportunity, my blind spot was not in appropriately preparing our existing staff for a course with sometimes over 1200 live attendees (and another 800 more watching the replay). We were also new to hosting courses on the subject of trauma, and therefore did not have the experience to know that many enrolling in this course would be seeking a level of therapeutic support that it was simply beyond our means to offer.

When Capacity Meets a Wall and Someone Walks Away

Ara and one other volunteer course host were therefore completely unprepared for the flood of comments, questions, and administrative concerns that flowed ceaselessly through the zoom chat window. Having previously only hosted courses with a maximum enrolment of 350 students, our staff was so overwhelmed – traumatized, even, if you’ll forgive me this darkly ironic turn of phrase – that it quickly transformed from something to celebrate into something that was symptomatic of a deeper need for organizational re-structuring.

Before I had the experience of watching someone walk away from a full time role at Embodied Philosophy, I held the very naïve assumption that certain staff members would always remain a part of the Embodied Philosophy experience – especially those ones I couldn’t imagine working without. With Ara Cusack, in particular, I felt we had struck a unique kind of gold: a capable, adaptive, disciplined, resilient, and hard-working team player. After the first session of “Trauma First Aid” – which I’m not mincing words when I say was a total “shit show” –, Ara called me up and kindly handed in her resignation. Because I saw her as an EP “ride-or-die”, this was my first truly unanticipated heartbreak.

As often happens with these things, her decision hadn’t come out of the blue, based on one frustrating experience. “Trauma First Aid” was simply the proverbial ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’, revealing a truth that had been germinating and evolving for her over some time. In my subsequent reflections on what had happened, I realized that we had neglected to acknowledge the mounting pressures that Ara was under as the platform continued to grow. It was thus a failure of management to give her the appropriate space in which to effectively communicate her concerns, tensions, and the stresses she was experiencing. As sad as it was for all of us who worked with her to see her go, Ara performed a great service with her resignation by teaching me about what can happen when a staffing structure doesn’t adapt quickly enough to accommodate a growth of work responsibilities.

Replacing One Powerhouse with Two

Jesse and I thus recognized – albeit too late – that Ara was working the job of two people (perhaps even three), and so when we sought out a replacement, we expanded what fell under her umbrella into two ‘project manager’ roles. Therefore, from the sadness and misfortune of losing an incredible employee, we were blessed with two uniquely gifted colleagues: Ross O’Brien and Casie Stockdale. It is impossible to speak too highly of these remarkable individuals. Casie works with an attention to detail and such thoroughness that she continuously revealed areas of possible refinement for us at an administrative level. Casie is ever the sober-minded person in the room, encouraging the kind of ‘slowing down’ that is necessary to help make work digestible and repeatable. Casie is the kind of employee who you never have to worry about doing her job; when the list of her immediate tasks was exhausted, she wouldn’t sit around twiddling her thumbs, but would find a new area that needed attention.

Ross is a perfect example of someone deeply devoted to the subtler teachings of yoga, with great editorial instincts, writing chops, and a high-level grasp of project support that – from the very beginning – exuded that of someone with great leadership potential. Ross had a quality of calm, confident, and capable warmth that made everyone on the EP team feel seen and supported. Together, Casie and Ross brought a new kind of energy to the possibilities of EP’s project management; with the two of them on board, Embodied Philosophy finally began to meet its expanding needs with the right level of sustainable support.

From Margarita Moments to Strategic Backbone

An upside of the circumstances surrounding the pandemic was that we had ample resources to bring in new hires, and therefore another important individual officially came on board at this time – a long-time friend who had been advising me on Embodied Philosophy since the beginning named Matt Bramble.

I met Matt very early on when I was working on Embodied Philosophy, at an ayahuasca retreat in upstate New York. Through our conversations at that retreat, we discovered not only a shared interest in the group experience we had just shared but a confluence of knowledge around the marketing strategies that I had been leveraging to build and expand the EP platform. At that time, Matt co-owned a marketing agency, and before he ever considered coming on board, we would have dinners together in New York City – often with way too many margaritas – and he would consult with me on strategies and approaches that I hadn’t considered, and together we would celebrate the milestones of seeing these strategies work, and the course performance improving over time.

Just before “Trauma First Aid,” Matt was already beginning to run our social media advertising campaigns, but as things grew significantly at that time, Matt became a regular part of our weekly meetings – becoming as close to a COO as was possible for an organization that didn’t really have formal executive positions outlined in the standardized way of many businesses. Matt is a strong, direct, and imaginative thinker, and he is probably the first colleague who I really leaned on – and in a lot of ways deferred to – in making many important decisions. Together, we decided to build an entirely new custom-built website, with a customized learning management system (because, in previous systems, we always felt like we were trying to fit a square peg in a round hole). Because we didn’t have the right agency doing the work, that process turned out to be a bit of a time-consuming headache, and we ultimately went with another agency. We couldn’t have accomplished any of that without Matt’s rich experience working in B2B spaces and his ability to speak a language that I had no previous aptitude for. Besides serving in a new kind of executive role, he also ran all of our ads. With Matt behind the wheel of our course enrolment campaigns, we were in very capable hands for the first time.

Provincetown Connections and Getting Bigger than Before

Over the course of Matt and I’s friendship, we both developed an affection for Provincetown, and in the early years of the pandemic we both moved there – seasonally for me, and full time for Matt. When I arrived in Ptown one particular summer, Matt had become friends with a vibrant young yoga teacher named Chase Hiffernan. Matt knew that I needed a personal assistant, because I have always struggled to stay organized – as anyone will have observed who has seen my computer desktop or the number of unread emails that I have in my gmail inbox (what I have often playfully described as a ‘dark abyss where emails go to die’). At Matt’s recommendation, I hired Chase, who not only became an incredible asset in helping me stay on top of my own tasks, but also a dear and very fun friend.

In addition to Casie, Ross, Matt, and Chase, soon afterward one of our course hosts was promoted to a newly created “Community Manager” position. Mika Gainer brought many new ideas to this area of operations and managed a small team of new “Learning Navigators” (affectionately referred to as “Navis”) – who were tasked with opening up the course sessions, introducing our various teachers, and communicating a new set of ‘best practices for learning’ to our registered students. Mika did a wonderful job expanding what this new role of community management could be, beyond anything that we had until that point considered.

Also at this moment of new energy, I hired Chris Walling to take over the direction of our MindBody Therapy Certificate Program. Chris had a great deal of experience, and knew the somatics world extremely well. He is also just a hoot to work with, and given his therapeutic chops, our conversations were always extremely helpful and encouraging. He was able to analyze and ‘diagnose’ issues that were arising for the team, and so Chris brought an additional level of executive leadership support to the platform that was both clarifying and transformative.

Editorial Expansion: Thoughtfulness and Integrity

Additionally, Stephanie and I wanted to expand the editorial team, and so we eventually brought on LeTonia Jones and Patricia Tillman. LeTonia is a gifted writer with a passion for the intersection between somatics, contemplative practice, and social justice. She hosted contemplative writing sessions for our Wisdom School members and helped curate articles that enriched the platform tremendously. Patricia (Trish) is also an excellent writer, and she contributed many articles on various yoga-related topics, and she also helped make connections to yoga teachers and speakers who participated in a number of our online events. With a small but not insignificant number of people working on editorial ideas, Stephanie took on an increasingly expansive role as Managing Editor of the EP platform.

At a time when student customer service emails were coming in at a rapid pace, we brought on board Ichha Nihalani – an India-based Learning Navigator who had illustrated a level of commitment and professionalism that made her a natural fit for a more continuous role. Monitoring the Embodied Philosophy helpdesk can be a challenging task, as the correspondence we receive can sometimes be less than compassionate and quick to conclusions that imagine EP as a massive corporation without human beings on the other side. While many of us had worked in the helpdesk at various points over the years, it is Ichha who demonstrated the kind of resilience, compassion, and flexibility of heart to serve beautifully within a very important customer service role. Even after the major staffing changes that ensued in 2023 – and which I will discuss in the next “chapter” (Part 3) – Ichha continues to serve in this capacity at EP, and we are much the better for it.

A New Academic Chapter and an Old Pattern

At the end of 2021, I decided to complicate my life by pursuing further graduate study at the University of Oxford, this time studying “Classical Indian Religions” – a unique masters program I had my eyes on for some time, that emphasizes Sanskrit translation study. About a year into the program, Matt – who, while working part-time at EP had still been working full time with his ad agency – needed to step away to work more committedly to that full-time role again, as they pursued the possibility of being acquired. When Matt stepped down, Ross was promoted to EP General Manager and did an admirable job juggling the responsibilities of team management during a time when EP had started to become somewhat heavy and bloated.

Towards the end of EP’s pandemic growth spurt, Anthony Swindell and Bethany Surface were the last to be promoted from their roles as Learning Navigators into project support roles that expanded Ross and Casie’s orbit. Anthony is a kind and generous person who took over some of Ross’s responsibilities when he moved into general management. He worked alongside Stephanie and I to develop and support the Buddhist Psychology Certificate Program and a newly condensed Yoga Philosophy Certificate Program. On the somatics side, Chris Walling, Casie, and Bethany worked on the Awakened Body Certificate Program and the Embodied Yoga Therapy Certificate Program. Bethany ultimately took over the role of Community Manager and developed a wonderful (but sadly short-lived) experience for members in a new EP “Member’s Circle.”

The Weight of Too Much

In a very short period of time, Embodied Philosophy went from being a team of five to a team of fifteen. However, while these hirings were quick and responsive to the evolving needs of our various offerings, the organizational structure and managerial workflows were not always clarified or carefully considered. Managing so many moving parts started to become unwieldy, and tensions once again began building for the team. Ross O’Brien, who had taken on a significantly more robust role as General Manager, was under a lot of pressure, and his strength of boundless consideration and understanding for everyone on the team started to give way to burnout. In wanting to preserve as much of what we had built as possible, I once again took too long to recognize the necessary structural changes that needed to be made. As a result, around mid-2023, Ross shared that he wanted to shift his relationship to EP from full-time General Manager to part-time consultant.

Then Entered a Friend: Clarity and Connection

I knew that we needed to do some major restructuring, but I didn’t know how to do it. Then, when I was home visiting family and friends in Seattle, I had a conversation with one of my oldest friends, Irene Barber, who had recently stepped down from her role working for a large Seattle-based agency that worked on organizational structuring and design with major corporations. I spoke to Irene about the current EP situation, and we decided to bring her on board for a 12-week organizational consulting project that would begin with a four-day in-person work retreat in New York City. In November of 2023, EP flew all of its team members to NYC, and over these four days Irene led the team through group activities that helped her get a sense of the EP landscape by drawing on the collective wisdom and experience of the existing team. Besides these working sessions, the team socialized over lunches and dinners, and for the first time in EP’s history, a group of people who knew each other only through zoom meetings were able to connect with each other as full human beings, colleagues, and friends. It was a rare and beautiful experience, even though it was fairly soon thereafter that this large team was forced to shrink considerably in the face of a burgeoning financial hardship for the platform.

Calm Before the Storm

I have left a discussion of this hardship out of this part of our story to emphasize the beautiful growth of the EP team. While a larger team does not come without its share of unique challenges, it was an exciting time full of collaboration and teamwork. But sadly, it was not sustainable, and I took too long to admit to myself that preserving Embodied Philosophy at this scale over the long term was not going to be possible.

In the next and final part of this ten-year anniversary story, I will share a bit of what happened, and how it led to where we are today. While the team is almost as small as it was in the beginning, that necessary contraction does not in any way reflect on the value and strength of every person I’ve mentioned. All of the contributions by these gifted colleagues coalesced to create the Embodied Philosophy that many of you may know. I am incredibly grateful for the years that I worked with them, and if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.

See you in Part 3…

In 2015, while I was teaching yoga full time in NYC, I started working on a side project that was soon called Embodied Philosophy – an online learning platform for contemplative traditions, yoga philosophy, and subtle practices. During the entire month of June 2025, we are celebrating our ten-year anniversary through a series of emails that reflect back on what has happened over the first decade of our existence, and what lessons were learned along the way. This is the first of a two-part “history” of how Embodied Philosophy materialized, with a special emphasis on my colleagues behind the scenes who helped make it happen – and a few of the lessons I learned from them.

Because the pandemic hit right in the middle of the last ten years, a history of Embodied Philosophy can be sorted into what happened before the pandemic, and what happened during and afterward. While I began working on this project in 2015, it was only up until the middle of 2016 that I was doing everything largely on my own – even though many important ideas were forged through brainstorming sessions with my then-partner, Jimmy Nataraj (Nataraj Chaitanya), and other close friends.

A history about anything can be told in various ways, but for one rooted in a celebration of how we made it to this 10 year milestone, I wanted to begin the story from when it was more than just me working on Embodied Philosophy. The academics would say that a history should be told as objectively as possible, so perhaps this isn’t quite a history. It is more of a retrospective gesture of gratitude for the people I’ve worked with, and – in keeping with the spirit of Embodied Philosophy, wherein nothing need be excluded from a contemplative life – I’m sharing a few of the very subjective lessons I learned from them, whether in feast or famine.

Before the Team: Dreams, Delusions, and the Awkward Gift of Unskilled Persistence

When you start with a dream and just enough wishful – or slightly delusional – enthusiasm to make it happen, it may come as no surprise that you quickly discover what skills and abilities you lack. For myself, the ins and outs of running a “business” (a word I’ve never been comfortable calling EP) was completely outside my wheelhouse. The necessary skills of hiring people and managing a team, for example, was something that I never really thoughtfully considered, and what I needed to learn was limited to whatever I was trying to do at that moment. It was about three years before I even thought about creating a “business plan” – although a few people did mention that I should; but since it didn’t feel urgent, their good advice was ignored.

Before other people were involved, I made things up as I went along, working on EP in the mornings and evenings when I wasn’t running around teaching yoga. No regular schedule was possible or required, which was great for someone like me who has always struggled with sticking to any discipline in work. Kavitha Chinnaiyan once playfully called me a “perpetual delinquent,” which tracks, given that when I was a yoga teacher in NYC I got fired from Equinox and suspended for six months from Kula Yoga (by Nikki Vilella, no less) – both times for missing a substitute teaching gig at 7am. But… what is time anyway?

The Internship Experiment

When I could no longer follow the whim of my own fancy and had to get slightly more serious, a big initial hurdle was figuring out what kind of help I needed, and who would be the right kind of people to bring onboard. Because there was no revenue in the beginning, I started with the least risky investment – internships. Matty Espino was my first intern, and he was a proverbial godsend. He was hard-working, quick to understand what was needed, and he was proactive in doing what needed to be done without too much direction. I am incredibly grateful that this was my first experience having someone work with me, because Matty definitely set a standard for what was possible.

It wasn’t until later that I realized that hiring someone at an entry-level position is not always the best decision when you are starting out. But Matty did not fit the usual definition of someone at the entry level, because even though he was young, fresh out of college, and idealistic, he was incredibly capable. But when you have a star on your hands, and you don’t recognize the implications for someone of performing an unpaid role, and if you don’t cultivate a path of employment quickly enough, they will inevitably have to move on. And so before I developed the courage to defy my own scarcity mentality, Matty made the natural and understandable decision to pursue an opportunity that had a clear path ahead. And in retrospect, I recognize what contributed to this lack of retaining someone who had the chops: I myself didn’t yet know what that path was going to be at an organizational level.

There was one other intern in those early days, but their time was so brief that I’ll save that story for another day. So the internship approach lasted through two very brief experiments, and the frustrations helped me realize I would need to apply a portion of our very limited budget to a paid part-time contractor. After all, even if an industry has normalized the internship model as a way to get your foot in the door, “free labor” in any form creates a lopsided energetic relationship.

The Shift to Paid Help: Hiring Missteps and Lessons Learned

So I posted a job opportunity through our fledgling email list, circulated it on Facebook, and eventually interviewed a few people. I chose the first person I liked, and paid scant attention to his qualifications. He showed the most passion for the mission of Embodied Philosophy, and at that time, this felt like the most important thing in a staff member. But the flair of an interview did not translate to a fruitful working relationship, admittedly because I simply didn’t know how to manage someone. I was new to the whole delegation thing, and I was easily confused about the boundary between what was doable and what was too much to expect from someone working a limited number of hours. But that confusion can go both ways – overworking someone when they seem like they can do it all, and failing to give someone the right attention when they are underperforming. Eventually, I just had to acknowledge that the dynamic was not a match for what was needed, and the comedic foibles that ensued from this experience taught me about my own limitations as a manager.

With a few short-lived attempts at finding the right people under my belt, I learned that I didn’t know what kind of support I needed nor how to choose the right people to help move EP forward. So if I didn’t have the skills for interviewing strangers who answer a public job posting, then a logical alternative was to start closer to home with people I already trusted and believed in. Out of an implicit sense of my own limitations came the blessing of Rebecca Paul.

Friendship, Flow, and Shared Vision

Rebecca had attended my yoga classes when I taught at goodyoga in Brooklyn, who became a closer friend after she attended an annual retreat that I used to offer in my hometown of Port Orchard, Washington. As our friendship deepened and I spoke with her a lot about my work building Embodied Philosophy, we eventually decided to work together. What a difference a talented friend can make. Rebecca was fully in it from the get-go. She was excited about the work and understood what was needed. Because we were (and still are) such close friends, there was a period when she lived with Jimmy and I in our apartment in Harlem, and so life conversations segued seamlessly into working sessions with a level of convenience that lacked any of the issues that come with hiring someone who you don’t yet know.

Rebecca and I worked alongside each other in a way still unique in the history of Embodied Philosophy, and she shared with me an equivalent level of enthusiasm, vision, and commitment. Because she had a depth of work experience that far exceeded my own – mine being mostly limited to the areas of yoga teaching and waiting tables –, her collaboration taught me the valuable lesson of choosing colleagues who hold skills and knowledge that are necessary but which exceed my own. But perhaps the most important quality she had was that she challenged me. She offered different perspectives and approaches to things that I hadn’t thought about, and through that experience I discovered the importance of sharing agency over the vision and possibilities of Embodied Philosophy with other people – even if, at the time, I still struggled to allow my vision to be shaped by others.

While there are many advantages to working with someone you know so well, and who knows you just as deeply, the boundary between work and friendship can become blurry sometimes. I had not yet learned the lesson of how to support someone by establishing the right energetic container around work, and I had not fully grasped how the intrinsic power dynamic of being someone’s boss can lead to unskillful tendencies in communication. But because she is one of my best friends, and we both are direct and don’t shy away from a good debate, we were able to iron out those kinks, and I gradually learned more about what she needed.

However, despite her significant influence on EP, she was still a part-time contractor, as I hadn’t yet felt that EP had the means to invest in a full-time employee. Naturally, Rebecca couldn’t sustain her livelihood on what I was able to offer her. So at a certain point, it was in her best interest to seek out work that could pay her what she’s worth. Even as we shifted away from working together, she was always a friend who helped support and guide the process of finding her replacement. Because she knew that I wasn’t skilled at interviews and knowing what to look for in potential colleagues, she conducted the interviews that brought Jesse to Embodied Philosophy.

Systems, Scale, and a Sustainable Structure

Jesse Jagtiani was hired when I still wasn’t sure about whether or not to hire a full-time employee, but because Jesse is a powerhouse who perseveres with strength and determination, she asked for what she wanted, gave good arguments for why it was necessary, and thus became Embodied Philosophy’s first full-time employee sometime early in 2018. Jesse had recently completed her doctorate in education at Columbia University Teachers College, and was therefore well-situated to help me transform EP from a humble online platform into a sustainable organization. It was Jesse who first realized that in order for us to grow and give more opportunities to future employees and teachers, we needed to offer more courses. At that time, we had started offering a few online courses, but only about one every three months. In one of our first meetings, Jesse suggested that we start offering a new course every month – an idea that hadn’t even occurred to me. It is odd now to think of how scary it felt initially to risk such growth, but without Jesse expanding on the vision of what was already working, we would never have accomplished what became possible as a result. When we started publishing new courses every month, Embodied Philosophy became my full time job. After slowly letting go of most of the in-person yoga classes I was then still teaching in NYC, in the summer of 2018 I gave up my last weekly yoga class at yogaworks in Soho, and what had been for three years my side hustle and passion project transformed into my life’s work.

The Birth of Tarka: Collaboration and Editorial Vision

With Jesse’s full-time support and collaboration, we established a monthly schedule of new courses, and with the resources this afforded us, in a very short period of time we expanded the team. Being the sole editorial decision-maker for EP was a somewhat lonely process, so I knew that I also needed to work with someone who was a scholar-practitioner of yoga, who had a rigorous knowledge of contemplative traditions and links to the academic community. Through an email exchange with Chris Chapple (a professor at Loyola Marymount University), I was introduced to Stephanie Corigliano, who I tasked with leading the project of creating what was then a monthly online journal called Tarka.

With Stephanie, for the first time I had the opportunity to work with someone who could brainstorm with me editorial themes and ideas anchored in an extensive knowledge of yoga philosophy and its various applications – both socio-politically and across disciplinary boundaries. Stephanie was central to developing many of the ideas that became courses (and later our certificate programs), but perhaps her biggest contribution was in curating many of the articles still available within the vast archive on our website. Through her outreach and curation, she forged connections between EP and many yoga scholars that would become writers, teachers, and contributors to our various offerings. From the beginning and still to this day, Stephanie and I’s meetings are inspirational, thought-provoking, and fun. Because we share a dryness of humor, a passion for what we study, and a compatible vision of what the yoga scholar-practitioner is all about, working with her has been a source of invigoration, scholarly refinement, and laughter.

The Team Expands: From Idea to Infrastructure

Around the same time that Stephanie came on board, Jesse and I decided that we needed to hire a project manager. Through an application and hiring process guided primarily by Jesse, we fell in love with two applicants – Ara Cusack and Molly Hunt. Because we were so enamored with both of them, one job turned into two jobs – with Ara tasked with managing most of the project support responsibilities, and Molly serving as a customer service representative – who also turned our instagram presence from the occasional post into a beautiful daily feed of contemplative art, inspiration, and poetry. Molly is one the most kind-hearted and caring people I have ever worked with, and she brought a warmth to our weekly meetings that was infectious and full of charm.

With a team of five, it felt like we could do anything and everything, and so our weekly team meetings became a mixture of distributing responsibilities for the projects at hand, and throwing my new ideas into the mix regarding what comes next. Ara Cusack had a skill for project management and a capacity that seemed boundless. There was not a thing we put on her plate that she couldn’t accomplish, and her organizational skills were more refined than anyone’s on the team. She developed processes, and transformed our word-of-mouth workflows into training materials that could be used for future employees. While everyone served an equally important function, Ara went above and beyond anything we could have expected or anticipated. But when someone’s abilities seem inexhaustible, it doesn’t mean that they are; and believing that they are can lead to burning someone out when you haven’t checked in with them about how things are feeling more broadly. But at this point of the story, that lesson had yet to be learned…

With a small agile team of this size, it was a fruitful time that seemed conducive to letting my vision of things run wild. There were countless possibilities explored in those meetings that never materialized into what we offered publicly, but I was so intoxicated with the project of building Embodied Philosophy that I never held back when the creative muse inspired me with a new idea.

Looking back, while this allowed us to accomplish a lot for being such a small team, I hadn’t yet understood that there is an important distinction between brainstorming new possibilities and working in a focused way on the details, structures, and workflows of what we had already established. It would be a few years before I learned that a leader’s constant visioning forward can be overwhelming, because blurring the difference between management conversations and future visioning can lead to confusion about what to focus on or what to do next. Because I hadn’t learned the difference at that point, this confusion often went unspoken (and it wasn’t until someone else – who you’ll meet in “part two” – came along that this was brought to my attention). It seems silly now to admit it, but it didn’t occur to me at this time that others were less interested in hearing me go off on yet another tangent about my latest idea than they were in developing a continuity and stable structure of repeatable and predictable work. There is a difference between being the one who carries the vision, and those who are tasked with transforming a rapid flow of new ideas into an actionable sequence of realistic tasks and workflows.

A Time of Abundance, and the Temptation of Growth

Aside from tensions that were slowly building beyond my awareness, this was a time of abundance for the Embodied Philosophy platform. Everything we threw at the wall seemed to stick. With the exception of one course, everything we offered generated enough revenue to allow us to pay the bills, our staff, and sometimes significant payouts to course teachers that has been unmatched ever since.

From this place of relative ease with regards to course performance, we also had resources to invest in the next stage of Embodied Philosophy. From a foundation of monthly online courses, we expanded the educational vision by introducing two new year-long certificate programs – one in Yoga Philosophy and one in MindBody Therapy. Stephanie and I co-directed the Yoga Philosophy Certificate Program, and I brought on board a friend, Scott Lyons, who was responsible for building the curriculum and establishing the faculty of the MindBody Therapy Certificate Program. The first year of these programs we had over 300 students enrol in either one of these programs.

Tarka in Print: An Aesthetic Fulfillment

Beyond the courses and certificate programs, Stephanie and I had a dream to pursue an arm of Embodied Philosophy that would eventually become a publishing house. To that end, we decided to transform Tarka into a physical journal that we initially planned to release quarterly, four times per year. For that, we needed a book designer. One of my long-time acquaintances in New York City was an incredibly talented graphic designer and artist, Ryan LeMere. I had initiated contact with Ryan after I saw a post on Facebook of a launch party he hosted for his journal, Aligned. From the aesthetic of that party to his graphic design and art, everything about Ryan’s aesthetic conveyed to me that this was the kind of designer I wanted to help us elevate and refine the visual identity of the Embodied Philosophy platform. The first time I approached him, he turned me down. Then, after about a year, Ryan reached out to say he was available. We met for coffee in Greenwich Village, and that conversation initiated both an ongoing professional collaboration and one of my life’s great friendships.

We hired him to design our new print version of Tarka Journal, and he helped us develop a visual vocabulary and overall aesthetic both for the journal and for Embodied Philosophy more broadly. The first issue of Tarka, “On Bhakti,” was printed in late 2019, and we were exuberant about how beautiful it turned out to be. As someone who loves books, to this day Tarka Journal is one of the offerings I am most proud of. Our publication of new issues has slowed down in recent years, but it is still a project Stephanie, Ryan, and I are working on – with a new issue, “On Power,” scheduled to be published this year. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Returning to the timeline of our story, we were planning a launch party in New York City for April of 2020. Everything at Embodied Philosophy was looking good, and the possibilities seemed endless. For five years, while there were plenty of mistakes and opportunities we didn’t pursue, as a whole there was rarely a moment when it didn’t feel like things were moving in a direction of growth and expansion. Because this was – up until that point – the experience I knew and subsequently trusted in, I didn’t imagine nor was I prepared for a time when we would be forced to minimize the platform, instead of broadening and expanding its possible offerings.

2020: A Turning Point and the Precarious Horizon

Then, as we were planning the celebration of Tarka and well into the early months of our new Certificate Programs, a well-known crisis emerged in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic — as you will know from your own experience — changed everything. Initially, it led to the most successful course we had ever offered, a course on “Trauma First Aid” with Peter Levine, which was understandably a very resonant course at a time of profound collective trauma. But it also overwhelmed our fragile staffing system in a way I didn’t have the foresight to predict or prepare for.

The pandemic thus marks the beginning of what I’ll call the ‘precarious years of Embodied Philosophy’ — spurred by a lifetime-defining health event that created struggles for me and the platform, as it did to billions of people around the world. While this period initially led to the biggest team we’ve ever had (13 full-time or part-time employees and contractors, plus 4 learning navigators) and many exciting accomplishments, I made some poor decisions stemming from a belief that what had worked before, and in the early days of the pandemic, would work in the same way again.

Perhaps it was a wise farmer who once said, “don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” I never understood the meaning of that bit of folk wisdom until – through hindsight of the last five years – I can see that for too long I had been counting way too many unhatched chickens. But some chickens did hatch, and the next half of our story includes more fascinating characters, talented colleagues, and many moments for which I am deeply grateful.

The first five years of Embodied Philosophy were defined by a gradual but sustainable growth made possible by the work of a small but mighty team. The challenges and opportunities of this period were animated by excitement, even while a gradual strain was building for a project that had started to exceed the capacities of those who were working on it. This strain reached a tipping point when it culminated in the mind-bogglingly unexpected course performance of “Trauma First Aid.”

The repercussions of this experience – and the choices that were made afterward – dramatically changed the scale and trajectory of Embodied Philosophy, leading to another five years of wonderful colleagues, unique challenges, and ultimately some very difficult decisions.

But that’s a story to be continued in Part 2…

Gone are the days when emotions were largely considered something to be restrained. While the “stiff upper lip” – a disposition of remaining calm and unemotional in any situation (no matter the difficulty) – may still linger in the norms of some (especially British) classes, things have most definitely changed. By contrast to the ‘stiff upper lip’, perhaps the social value of this new state of things could be playfully described as the ‘limp lower lip.’ To over-regulate one’s emotions or those of another is largely considered anathema to a life well lived, in which the free expression of one’s emotions can be a sign of someone liberated from oppressive forces. The Victorian period marked the inverse of this era, when Sigmund Freud developed his practice of psychoanalysis (a precursor of modern psychology still practiced today), in which individuals investigate (sometimes ad nauseum) the experiences of their lives and the repressed emotions latent within them. Psychoanalysis and modern therapy allow emotions and traumas to be explored in a safe private container, allowing individuals to experience a kind of narrative catharsis of repressed emotions through an accounting of early childhood experiences. In recent years, personal issues and traumas have become the bedrock of a new kind of social currency. Rather than an orientation toward keeping emotions contained within the private sphere, many now share their traumas and personal challenges on social media platforms, a new cultural virtue that is perhaps implicitly justified by the feminist axiom ‘the personal is political (or at least social)’ and that every intimate personal consideration should be shared because it will help a community or audience.

When Freud made his paradigm-shifting proclamations about repressed emotions and the unconscious, he was working within a cultural milieu in which emotionless rationality was paramount. The philosophical defence of this attitude was that, while reason and rationality are capacities that must be cultivated through critical thinking and education, reason and rationality were objective human faculties, whereas emotions are subjective by nature. Of course, it turns out that rationality was born from a patriarchal ideological environment, where women were seen as rationally rudderless and overwhelmed by their emotions. As such, they were considered ill-suited to the matters of state, politics, and the level-headedness required for commerce. We see this earlier condition reflected in words that remain widely used today. A term that was coined by the ancient Greeks and adopted theoretically by Freud, the word “hysterical” (from the Greek “hystera”) means “womb”, and was initially imagined as the result of a ‘wandering uterus’, a medical or psychological condition said to cause women to become overly emotional. For Freud, hysterical became the name of a neurotic condition that he considered specific to women. This gendered meaning has since been critiqued and rejected by feminist thinkers, however the imperative statement “don’t get hysterical” is still used in modern parlance. Even the semantic shift toward its association with comedy (“that comedian was so hysterical!”) could perhaps be traced back to a patriarchal response to a fantasy of female hysteria, because ‘in the face of such silly, emotional women, all one can do is laugh.’

In today’s social marketplace, those emotions that would previously have been seen as features of a neurotic psychological condition have become rich and effective resource materials for the information economy. Keeping your emotions private is less respected than putting all your stuff out there for the world to see, which is labeled a kind of courageous – even radical – gesture of freedom and honesty. The burgeoning field of thought and practice around trauma will perhaps one day be considered the completion of Freud’s initial theory of repressed emotions. For if the public space of the ancient Greek polis was once considered a place of citizenship, debate and deliberation, it was characterized by the sequestering of emotions into a ‘private realm’ in the collective pursuit of a common good. From a picture of the common good supposedly deduced from a principle of ‘objective reason’, the tides have turned toward a generalized rejection – although not often made explicit – of a ‘common good’ and the embrace of something like the ‘emancipation of personal good’. In a late capitalist economy of individualism, the personal good is as valuable as what makes it different from the status quo. Hence, the battle cries of ‘tell your story’ and ‘speak your truth’ transform into a socially-sanctioned impulse to express yourself in all your beautiful and heart-breaking emotional complexity.

Insofar as the ‘common good’ is still prevalent as a political value, it is now dispersed into various social groups and identities that are often circumscribed by shared emotional, psychological, or socio-political experiences. The idea of a common good that would embrace and include all of these groups is now considered a suspicious – and to some people even a malevolent – privileging of one group’s particular good that will necessarily exclude or marginalize groups that do not buy into this notion of the good. We can see the ramifications of this ideology pervasive in our politics. The discourse and statements of politicians running for office focus on a collection of ‘single issues’ that will build a large enough coalition to win, and any talk of the common good is basically absent – discarded as a quaint relic of the colonial past. The single issues that bear the most political fruit are generally the ones that produce the most emotional capital; at least for the moment, those emotions that produce political benefits are seemingly that of fear and anger. The more a people’s fears, anxieties, and resentments can be harnessed, the more likely they will be to get off the couch and vote. Indeed, once considered an obstacle to citizenship and the art of persuasion, our politics have become almost entirely driven by two emotions that have a tendency to divide us.

Whether or not one agrees with the original ideology of an objective common good, it is not difficult to recognize the damage that is done by releasing the floodgates of emotion and manipulating them at the convenience of political power or social capital. But doesn’t this circumstance imply an opposite side of the same cultural coin? Those societies deriving from the intellectual history of Europe and the Anglo-American world are perhaps caught in a loop spawned by an early history of emotional repression. If emotions were for too long repressed and subjugated, then the inverse of that repression is a liberation of emotions. Instead of keeping things private, it becomes a kind of social responsibility to not repress your emotions. And since emotional experiences are deemed mostly individual or based on group identification, a common good that transcends personal or group identification is mostly imagined as a negative repression of individual emotions. The common good can then become, at best, a principle of ‘tolerance’ or ‘pluralism’; and while these are incredibly important virtues to be cultivated (especially in our times), what remains intact is the siloing of different identity and group-based emotions that – though necessary to creating a culture of mutual respect – amounts to a rather un-inspiring political project lacking in a newfound vision of emotional solidarity. In the face of our present cultural dichotomy between either repressed emotions or divisive emotions, an alternative presents itself: cultivating an alternative socio-political vision that mobilizes shared emotions not so as to drive a wedge between identities and groups, but rather to inspire and unite us around what we might call a ‘new political work of art’.

To even begin imagining such a contemplative political vision requires us to understand how we are situated, and to cultivate an awareness of the implicit theory of human emotions that is operating in the background. This implicit theory assumes a doctrine that emotions are subjective feelings that arise in the mind, and – from the perspective of trauma and somatic studies – are features of an embodied history that can only ever be specific to one particular body at a time. While we may share traumas and the disorientation of social marginalization with others, how we relate to others with regard to these experiences is as potentially variable as there are numbers of physical bodies in the world. While certainly not untrue from a certain perspective, what characterizes this picture of emotions is that it is ultimately contingent to autonomous bodies that are necessarily distinct from one another. Even after the personal became political, the dominant picture of emotions remains rooted in individualism and will by definition frustrate any vision of the collective if the notion of the ‘collective’ or the ‘common’ is purely rooted in individualistic affirmation. Since it is arguably pragmatically impossible to give political voice to every unique narrative and story of every individual life, a conception of emotions solely rooted in separation can contribute to the inevitable decline of shared norms, values, and commitments. Indeed, this fraying of social bonds has long been in motion, but in recent years we have watched – many of us with horror – as this circumstance comes to a fever pitch.

Augmenting our Understanding of Emotions through Rasa

Of course, we are not looking to dismantle this understanding of emotions, as certainly it has had a fruitful impact on society – often giving voice to the voiceless. Instead, an investigation of emotions as they are understood in the theory of rasa will augment our understanding of emotions with another level of knowing. Resultingly, the hope and intention is that we not only become wiser in our relationships and more skilful in our politics, but also that we learn how to use our emotions rather than simply make space for them. The theory of rasa as found in the work of 10th century philosopher Abhinavagupta and some of his contemporaries reveals a consideration of emotions that is, as far as I am aware, utterly absent from the Western intellectual landscape. As a philosophy that is focused on how drama and poetry produced certain effects in the reader or observer, it is typically studied by academic specialists exclusively with regards to these artistic practices. However, in Abhinavagupta, Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, and others, an ancient theory takes a “spiritual turn” and in so doing holds implications that extend far beyond the domains of theatre and literature. These theorists consider how our experience of art articulates something about experience in general. As a result, a philosophical understanding emerges that expands our understanding of aesthetic emotions into a metaphysics of emotions more broadly. Therefore, it could be a salve uniquely beneficial to a moment when our understanding of emotions has congealed around a limited range of assumptions, doctrines, and traditions of psychological knowledge.

A key feature of rasa theory is that the aestheticized emotions (rasas) are “universal” or “common”. Or, rather, when rasas are evoked through aesthetic experience, they participate in a set of “commonized” (sādhāraṇīkaraṇa) emotions. An idea of the universal that is necessarily emotional is in sharp contrast to an idea of the universal that is beyond the sphere of emotions. Extrapolating an implication of this view, even “objective reason” is not divorced from emotions but is rather what emerges from the emotions being organized in a particular way. People only participate in certain forms of reasoning because they are emotionally inclined to do so. Another way of expressing this is to say that all knowledge arises from a particular mood or temperament, so if we want to change our knowledge, we have to address the epistemological function of cultivating another mood and temperament. As being universally emotional beings, refusing to acknowledge that emotions inform our ability to engage in reasoning or ‘critical thinking’ is to sidestep an important contemplative process that would contribute to our ability to transcend the current impasse of social division and cultural distress.

In this sense, the “objective” or “universal” is something that has to be seen as interior to a particular emotional resonance. For Abhinavagupta’s theory, the resonance that is most universal is śānta-rasa – the rasa of peace and equanimity. It is a compact mass of embodied bliss that we all share and have the capacity to encounter through the right aesthetic conditions. While rasa theory in its textual sources is a theory of aesthetics – and especially drama, or theatre – its implications extend to the theatre of social and political life. The rasa-inspired prescription I’m suggesting is therefore three-fold: (1) we transform our relationship to the arts as something that has significant social and political implications by harnessing and refining our emotional capacities, (2) we develop a personal playhouse of contemplative sādhana that understands emotions not as obstacles to contemplative experience but its very foundation, and (3) we begin to construct a new socio-political theory that recognizes that our media, our public discourse, and the technologies we are attached to is a collective performance that is unconsciously evoking and animating certain emotions at the same time that it neglects other emotions. This last aspect of rasa’s implications is the furthest from our grasp, but perhaps the most important for our times. If we do not want to live in a world of hate, fear, and anger, we have to recognize the way certain narratives, mythologies, and stories that we cyclically repeat to ourselves are performances creating the conditions for the world we are living in. We are locked in a dialectic of political options that are unimaginative and assume the objective inevitability of the status quo.

One area in which we can leverage rasa theory in the service of a new social performance that evokes the equanimous rasa for a wider range of peoples is what is often referred to as the art of persuasion. The core of the prevailing idea is that, if we just reason with people, give them the right arguments and counter-arguments, and if we show them “the facts”, then they will ultimately become persuaded by the clarity and validity of one’s position. As a practice conceived in this way, the emotions are considered unimportant, because persuasion is intended to appeal to humanity’s capacity to reason. But again and again, those who desire to persuade others find themselves stumbling on the emotional rigidity of someone’s personal or political position. There increasingly seems to be no amount of persuasion that will shake someone free of their ideological commitments, unless those being persuaded are already emotionally responsive to persuasion articulated in a logical way. Alternatively, if we reimagine persuasion as a process that first understands the locus of emotions around which someone’s position is constructed, we can begin to discover how storytelling, narrative, and innovations of imagination are more effective at persuading others than the rigid norms of linear logic. Because reason, according to this view, is a faculty that necessarily includes emotion, a more pragmatic ‘art of persuasion’ will begin to acknowledge the truth revealed in the expression itself – that persuasion is an art. If persuasion is a form of art, and all art has a medium (the material an artist uses to create a work of art), then rasa theory inspires us to expand the medium of persuasion beyond its attachment to norms of intellectual debate toward an embrace of those experiential manifestations of creativity that persuade not just at an intellectual level, but at an emotional one. From a form of “objective reasoning” we shift to an “aesthetic reasoning” – a reasoning that transforms emotional stagnation and contraction into a reorganization of those liberative emotions that culminate in peace and equanimity.

This reflection was inspired by our Spring course of study in Embodied Philosophy’s Sādhana School exploring a tradition of aesthetic knowledge known as Rasa Theory. This Spring sādhana continues the work of building a new community of yoga practitioners, teachers, and deep spiritual practitioners who are committed to the deeper teachings and subtle practices of yoga. If you’re interested in learning more about the curriculum and schedule, go here.

I personally don’t have any aspirations to go to space. Trip to the moon? I’ll take a hike through the rainforest, thanks. That freezing barren rock they call Mars? Ew(!), you’ll find me at the beach. But the amount of half-baked cultural commentary I’ve seen on how “shameful” and “disgusting” it is to see a group of women get on a space ship – because, I don’t know, the earth is dying, the snow caps are melting, billionaires have too much money, and the trees are turning into A.I. (or whatever) is just the latest example of simplistic, superficial “analysis” parading as critical thinking. The old adage that “two things can be true” was once common sense, but like with so much folk wisdom, that adage now feels like a dead artifact.

If two things can be true, then humanity is at the very least capable of managing multiple projects simultaneously. We hold the capacity to be vigilant and proactive about the ecological crisis while also celebrating moments that express that all-too-human desire for adventure – for plunging into the unknown.

“But only rich celebrities can do it, and everyone else can’t afford eggs, it’s so offensive!” Rampant and unprecedented wealth inequality is definitely offensive, no doubt about it; but what feels like a stretch to call “offensive” is the inaccessibility of new technology for everyone immediately (even when certain individuals they choose for that publicity stunt space mission may be cringe – *cough* Katy Perry *cough*). But when has truly new technology ever rolled out in an egalitarian way, and when did the fact that it doesn’t become a justification for arguing that we shouldn’t be doing it in the first place?

When that rich girl Sara in my high school had a cell phone before everyone else did, the school didn’t explode with misdirected rage at something we couldn’t yet afford. When commercial planes started flying (which I don’t remember because I was living my previous life as a very wise house plant), it took nearly 50 years before airplanes were accessible to the broader population. Why? Because, like it or not, new technologies are expensive. The original IBM computers, for example, cost over $15,000 (adjusted for inflation), and yet no one was creating a proverbial black list of the obscene individuals who disrespectfully purchased one of those computers when no one else had the means as yet to.

“Sure, Jacob, but the political and cultural circumstances are uniquely unjust and unequal. We’re spending billions of dollars on space missions and not feeding the hungry or using those resources to build universal health care.” The United States being the most wealthy nation on Earth, I think its safe to say there’s definitely enough money for both; we just happen to currently have a system that works fast for private space obsessions, and works far too slow to create the healthcare system we need. And while we may want to fight for a world where billionaires contribute more to the system that supports health care or to lowering prices, it isn’t currently the legal responsibility of wealthy space-obsessed CEOs to balance their space investments with contributions that create universal healthcare. Performing your politics through public shaming is easy; working to create the conditions for meaningful social and political change is hard. But the former, while it may make someone feel better in the short term — by taking a hit off the bong of social righteousness —, is ultimately not going to change anything beyond perhaps the number of followers who like to get high off the same drug.

It is adolescent to imagine that billionaires will ever do the right thing, no matter the short-term effects that are garnered through boycotts and fleeting campaigns of shaming and mockery. And believing this to be an effective form of political action exempts us from any accountability or responsibility for what is only ever the right thing in politics: to refine our skills of persuasion, and to get our hands dirty in the difficult work of institutional change. It is our responsibility to animate the political process and put pressure on our local and federal governments to change the structure that has, for example, made universal healthcare so impossible. But before even that is possible, we have to have the will to participate in that process (yes, even the frightening one we have now), and to fight for a radical shift in our political and economic structures – which takes a lot more will and discipline than what it takes to get on TikTok and broadcast your outrage as if it’s an ultimately effective form of political activism.

“Okay, but if nothing changes, the rich will destroy the planet with their greed and then use their advanced space technology to leave the poor behind to suffer on a dying planet.” Okay, that’s a fair hypothetical, but the issue here doesn’t seem to be the phenomenon of space exploration, but the system undergirding it that would allow billionaires the power to flee the wasteland of a festering planet. How is an egalitarian world ever going to be built by stifling the awe, wonder and imagination of those inspired by the “final frontier” of space travel? If we don’t want to see these technologies controlled by a few wealthy douche bags (I’m looking at you, Elon Musk. And Mark? I wore JNCOs in high school but I still wasn’t cool), then direct your critiques to the system that created them.

Musk totally sucks, it’s true, but go back through history and you’ll find an endless list of shitty people doing otherwise incredible things. Conflating the art with the artist, or the maker with what he/she/they have made is one of the most blindingly pervasive idiocies of modern progressive morality. Van Gogh was a bad guy, but I don’t want to live in a world without his art. Most writers are narcissists, and probably a lot of them make bad partners or friends, but getting rid of all books written by people we deem reprehensible doesn’t make the world less ugly – it makes it less beautiful. As Sondheim wrote in Sunday in the Park with George, “give us more to see.” Electric vehicles and space travel are astonishing achievements of the human imagination; we can say that without sacrificing our values. We can admit that and still work for a world that puts safeguards in place around the disproportionate and corrupting power of billionaires.

But let’s take some responsibility as well. Billionaires didn’t arise from a vacuum of evil; they emerged from a system that we allowed to thrive for decades. Getting fixated on the morality of individuals or the technologies they had the resources to create is an exhausting form of virtue signaling that might make someone feel ethically superior in the short term, but at the end of the day it changes nothing – except perhaps the number of followers who feel vindicated by some enraged Tiktoker’s shrill, undergraduate diatribes. While I have had my feet firmly planted on the Left since the events following 9/11, I am concerned now that the Left has lost its imagination. It has squandered its creativity by normalizing and even “objectifying” its ideological commitments (call them addictions, even), and then doubling down, instead of adapting, when it is clear that these ideologies do not resonate with enough people to make a real difference.

Becoming suspicious of adventure and exploration, and rushing to accusations of privilege to police the excitement these moments engender in others is like walking into a party with the explicit intention of ruining the vibe, kicking over the punch table, telling everyone they are bad to be enjoying themselves when others can’t enjoy, and then farting on your way out the door. What if we shifted our approach to progressive politics from one that is currently addicted to apocalyptic shame and blame (and a strangely ironic Christian obsession with the “original sin” of individuals who have power we find morally reprehensible) to one that embraced a more affirmative vision of adventure and exploration as a core value of building a more egalitarian world? In other words, what if we spent more time cultivating a vision of collective collaboration and freedom, and less time being self-appointed jurors in the courtroom of public opinion?

Saving the world from ecological crisis might become less depressing (and therefore something people actually want to get involved with) when it is animated by vision of a future earth that affirms and adds to people’s sense of themselves, rather than a vision that is all about austerity and a demand that people change into a version of themselves that they don’t recognize. People change usually because they are inspired to change, not because they’ve been shouted down and convinced that, if they don’t, they are evil enablers sinning against the planet.

Perhaps we need more love-drunk myths of future possibility, and less narratives of anxious self-righteousness about how “those people” are to blame, and if they don’t get it right, we’re all going to die. If we want to win the culture wars, we have to tell a more beautiful and compelling story than the ones as yet available. We have to tell beautiful, epic stories that are meaningful, and that people want to live in. Telling stories about the meaningless of everything, the pointlessness of life because humanity will be extinct in 20 years may feel like an “objective” narrative, but like every narrative, it has a mood, a flavor, and if you want people to read it, it has to stoke a fire of curiosity, creativity, and possibility – even if we do ultimately all die from ecological collapse or because an asteroid manifested by the lizard people burns us all up in a fiery blaze.

Would we rather move toward a future we cannot really know with our eyes brimming with wonder and amazement, or do we want to walk into the unknown depressed, anxious, and existentially lost? We have a choice in the stories we choose to tell, and it’s a necessary choice to make. If we neglect that responsibility, the stories that are going to win are often the ones that evoke division, hatred, and ignorance (hello, conspiracy theories) – and this is a symptom that arises from both Left and Right.

We don’t have to simply regurgitate the political knowledge that we believe fully represents the situation; in fact, we shouldn’t, because it clearly isn’t working. We can become not just political activists, but political artists – or political theorists who critically imagine a better world in the light of a realistic and pragmatic understanding of humanity’s habits and limitations. We also should feel comfortable admitting that some of the previous ideas were simply wrong. None but the most masochistic among us want to live in stories of the apocalypse; everyone else will ignore, avoid, and escape these stories so as to live in their more comfortable fantasies. But whether we traffic in a fantasy of the apocalypse or a fantasy of political utopia, it is all still fantasy. Fantasies can take us out of the world and away from each other, or they can connect us.

Fantasies are things we can create out of fear, or on the basis of a wiser political imagination. And if we play the game right, and if we tell the story well, that fantasy of a collective, collaborative humanity might actually become something that we can live within. May we all learn the lesson that it isn’t sustainable to ask others to live in our nightmares. However, if we can dream a seemingly impossible dream (whether it is born in sleep or in conversation or in community), and if we can communicate that dream compassionately and clearly, we might find ourselves in the company of others who want to build that dream with us. But first, we must dream, imagine, and create – and, while cultural critique can be a necessary aspect of any creative process, it need not default to the impotent, paralyzing, and ultimately powerless impulse to destroy the wonder of human curiosity that, like a child, courageously ventures into a boundless forest to discover magical creatures and “whosits and whatsits galore”

“After a bird tied by a string flies here and there without finding a resting place, it finally settles down at the place where it is bound. Similarly, the mind, after flying here and there without finding a resting place, settles down in the breath, for the mind is bound to the breath.”

~ Chandogya Upaniṣad

The shape of life is infinitely malleable, and that malleability can flow in both limiting and expansive directions. To the degree that we become adapted to different systems of knowledge, structures of belief, and doctrines about how the world functions, our lives take on certain characteristics that are born out of these systems. Since we are all to varying degrees indoctrinated by our own cultural conditioning, personal experiences, political commitments, and visions of the good life, our breathing bodies become somatically attuned to that indoctrination. As a result, our awareness becomes similarly toned and transformed by the organizing impact of these various modes of situatedness and understanding.

I am not aware of any scientific studies that analyze the relationship between how individuals breathe and the cultural contexts in which they live, but it is consistent with the understanding of prāṇa we find in the yoga tradition that the attitudes of mind particular to a given culture will give rise to a corresponding style (or styles) of breathing. If the mind is bound to the breath, as the above passage from the Chandogya Upaniṣad suggests, then the shape of the mind will in various ways determine the texture of the breath. This texture may be perceived as subtle, but – as so many ancient and modern yogis and yoginīs have discovered – even a slight shift in the way we breathe can move mountains. As constellations of stress and agitation shift, the way we relate to our identity and our experience changes. In short, changing your breath can literally change your life.

There is thus a reciprocal causality between the mind and the breath. When the mind is calmed and clarified, the breath follows. When the breath is harnessed, softened, and deepened, the mind takes on a corresponding character of levity and lightness. In this way, the relative qualities of the breath and the mind are non-separable; one affects the other, and vice versa. While this might seem like a fairly banal observation – even basic from the perspective of those who have been practicing yoga for even a short time – it is nonetheless quite remarkable just how minimally acknowledged this connection between breath and mind is in the modern world. The breath, for most people, is just something the body does, and it tends to be largely ignored (unless one struggles with a respiratory condition like asthma). Even within some meditation communities, the breath is, at best, a supplemental practice – an adjunct to the ‘real’ work of harnessing the mind through visualization, mantra, or contemplative study.

Various texts from the yoga tradition describe the relationship between the mind and the breath. In many descriptions of yogic practice, breathwork (prāṇāyāma) is depicted as a necessary limb (aṅga) of the practitioner’s ‘body of sādhana.’ While in the modern postural yoga class, there is an emphasis on aligning the breath systematically with bodily postures (āsana), in many texts we find prāṇāyāma outlined as an independent practice from posture. In the famous eight-limbed (aṣṭāṅga) yoga of Patañjali, āsana precedes prāṇāyāma in the order of limbs. While there are of course countless interpretations of how the eight limbs would have been (or should be) practiced – with some arguing for a sequential process while others argue for a simultaneous one – in some instances it is clear that āsana comes before prāṇāyāma because it is a more ‘gross’ (or sthūla) practice.

If we bracket out the yamas and niyamas (the first two limbs of ethical commitments and observances) for the sake of this consideration, it is easy to see how the remaining limbs map a trajectory from gross to subtle. I like to refer to this process as the “logic of prāṇa.” When our attention is externalized outward toward the world, our breath can easily become contracted in accordance with the hardening tendencies of a frenetic and increasingly agitated world. The breath carries and expresses the stress, anxiety, and other dispositions that constitute the psychological suffering of modern life. In this way, the breath becomes, for lack of a better term, ‘grossified.’ As we turn our attention toward the interior landscape, with the right scaffolding of knowledge and the appropriate techniques, our breath can become increasingly more subtle. In turn, our mind becomes more expansive, because the subtlety of breath and the luminosity of mind are two sides of the same yogic coin. As the mind becomes stilled – or is made more ‘sattvik’ – through a meditative process that embraces breathwork, this luminous mind becomes like a mirror capable of reflecting back to us what the yoga tradition calls the true Self, or puruṣa.

The reader might easily counter that, in the face of so many local and global challenges, stress and anxiety are understandable – and in some instances even necessary – responses to the age that we’re living in. After all, how could the ravages of war or the compounding extinctions of various species be related to in any other way than with rage, grief, or anxiety? While responding to this important question is beyond the scope of our reflections here, it is important, I think, to point out that the interiorizing process of sādhana does not have to mean a turning away from the world. It is quite the opposite. Much like eight hours of sleep is a necessary ‘turning away’ from the world to recharge our physical, emotional, and energetic batteries, similarly turning toward the subtle through practices of prāṇāyāma and meditation is an arguably necessary precondition for showing up in the world with wisdom, clarity, and an illuminated conviction. Anchoring ourselves in the subtle is therefore the strongest foundation for skillfulness in life.

Prāṇa, while often problematically translated simply as ‘breath,’ is better understood as the force of life itself – what French philosopher Henri Bergson referred to as the élan vital. It is the vital energy that animates and enlivens all beings. While it is present in literally everything, according to the Tantric tradition, it is constrained by the degree to which we are contracted by limiting beliefs, modes of identification, and contingent attitudes toward life. The process of sādhana, or contemplative practice, is one that first understands that there are possibilities of life that reflect a more intimate and expansive relationship with prāṇa. With this understanding in tow as a source of intellectual alignment and inspiration, the practitioner (or sādhaka) then employs those techniques that assist her in making these possibilities manifest.

The yogic techniques of prāṇāyāma and meditation thus become effective tools not only to embody the philosophy of yoga but also to deeply pursue a path of ‘subtlization’ that, according to the tradition, may eventually culminate in jīvanmukta – liberation in this lifetime.

If you are interested in joining us for an 8-week sādhana exploring the philosophy and practices of prāṇa and prāṇāyāma, go here for more information. The sādhana begins on Tuesday, January 21st, 2025 but anyone who joins after the start date will have immediate and ongoing access to all recordings available. While the offering is live, you can also engage with the offering as an on-demand experience. To learn about the full annual curriculum of Sādhana School, go here. To learn about our Yoga Teacher Training (YTT) program, go here.

The impulse to pursue yogic truth cannot be easily explained by the values of modern life. It arises from an event beyond linguistic utterances, as an inner attunement that emerges often spontaneously from within.

The tradition of yoga speaks about this event as a moment of grace, a descent of the śakti (the power of reality itself), called śaktipāta. Depending on the yoga tradition, śaktipāta is considered either to be the result of positive karma produced through spiritual practices, or it is the result of a completely spontaneous intervention of the divine outside worldly sequences of causation. Whatever the doctrine one appeals to, the outcome is the same: as a result of this event, one’s life becomes forever transformed. One has become turned toward a horizon of spiritual fulfillment and intoxicated with a devotion to the spiritual path as the most meaningful project one can pursue in this lifetime. Whatever one’s feelings are toward the doctrinal context surrounding this concept, simply by virtue of having this concept available, many of us can use it to name a time, a moment, or an event wherein something shifted for us and turned our attention toward something deeper.

Śaktipāta has become an institutionalized practice for some yoga communities, wherein seekers attend, for example, śaktipāta intensives as a way to experience a transformative download of awakening energy from an authorized teacher. However, in the teachings of Abhinavagupta, we find a more mystical explanation of this process. According to this view, in order for anyone to be in a place where one would decide to enroll in a śaktipāta intensive, grace would have already ‘descended.’ This cosmic download, this ‘turning toward’ or ‘upward shift’ has already taken place if one has already become a deep spiritual seeker. Without grace having already influenced our existential priorities in some deep albeit perhaps subtle way, we wouldn’t be compelled to seek out spiritual instruction in the first place. And so if you have taken an interest in reading autobiographical spiritual accounts like this one, chances are you have already been visited by an experience that the tradition would refer to as a “descent” of the śakti.

When we hear a term like “grace,” we tend to project ideas onto it that lead us to imagine these experiences as necessarily characterized by that ubiquitous New Age phrase ‘love and light’; we imagine ‘grace’ must mean that someone has encountered a pervasive certainty that, for example, “God exists,” or that we will have encountered some glimpse of transcendent luminosity that never leaves us. I think this is a rather confused understanding that narrowly defines the concept of grace. Perhaps the very translation of “grace” is partly to blame here, pointing out how slippery it can be to use terms that are already loaded with assumptions – ones that, at least in the case of ‘grace,’ harkens to a Judeo-Christian theology and its various interpretations. There are many ways we can challenge this view and push back against a translation that misrepresents what the yoga tradition is speaking about. In my experience, the experience of grace showed up in a moment of extreme loss, what one might appropriately call a ‘dark night of the soul.’

When I was around 15 years old, I lost my faith in the Christian God that I had been raised to believe in my entire life. I had a friend named Heather who was a kind of mentor to me, who was about fifteen years my senior. I had become enamored with her during our time together performing in the local community theatres of Puget Sound in Western Washington. Heather knew so much about the world, and in my youth and innocent curiosity, I looked up to her. She had a wisdom and worldliness that I longed for in myself. She was one of those early childhood influences who represented something that I aspired to be.

On an average day, during one of our many phone calls, we got onto the topic of Ancient Egypt, something I knew little to nothing about. Through our conversation, I learned about a completely different culture and its unique worldview. To this day, I can’t remember exactly what it was she said to me about Egypt that changed my life. All I know is that by the end of the conversation, my faith that God existed had vanished. After I hung up the phone, I looked up at a painting I had in my room of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and — as Jesus himself did in a moment expressed through this image — I wept. The child who would flee home to his mother in tears because the neighbor kids didn’t believe God knew how many hairs were on their head — that child and his precious and vulnerable love for God died that day.

The anchor and foundation of my entire identity dissolved over the course of a phone call. In the place of that unwavering belief entered a great void, a void that was simultaneously heart-broken and yet simultaneously saturated with longing. For several hours, I was engulfed in nothingness, without a buoy to cling to in my newfound ocean of absence. My identity was as if emptied of all content, and what remained was a centerless mourning and a desperate desire to reverse what had been done — to unsee what I had seen. But even as I reached into that void to draw belief back to myself, I recognized quickly how losing my faith in God was a radically complete kind of loss, one that offered no substitute or silver lining. What was once there was simply and irreversibly gone. No glimmer of hope glistened in that existential darkness.

It would be many years before I allowed the word “God” to symbolize anything about what I was seeking, but the emptiness left by God’s absence became the condition of a profound opening that motivated a lifetime of spiritual exploration. For myself, I now understand how true it is that sometimes you have to lose your entire orientation before you can discover a path of fulfilment rising up out of the rubble. One has to encounter the void of meaninglessness before one can begin to discover what the mood of meaning actually is.

Now I see this moment as an event of unspeakable grace; nestled in the heart of a random teaching about Egypt was a profound force of transformation that completely eradicated my sense of self. In some accounts of experience, this might be interpreted as a kind of violence, but in reality it was one of the greatest gifts I have ever been given. It pulled out the weeds of a limited awareness so that seeds of a new imagination could grow.

I feel no tension in calling this an experience of śaktipāta. After having studied the philosophical perspectives about reality that ground an understanding of grace’s function, I retroactively recognize the significant role this event played in shaping the trajectory of my life afterward. But this was my own experience, of course, and I don’t assume that grace will show up similarly for others. I share this experience not as a paradigmatic example of grace but as an utterly individual one.

In a culture that loves institutions and organizations, oftentimes these universal experiences are enfolded in doctrine and even proffered as the exclusive material of particular traditions. But the experience of śaktipāta can not be monopolized by any spiritual or contemplative tradition. No spiritual institution has privileged access to śaktipāta. It is a function of reality itself, and it shows up for each one of us in ways that are uniquely our own. But while grace can be uniquely experienced outside any tradition or doctrine, different traditions offer fruitful languages and vocabularies through which we can come into contact with the universal function being referred to by yoga traditions. As we explore the work of different philosophers and spiritual thinkers, we begin to grasp the altogether universal possibility of coming into contact with the bewildering power of grace.

It is taught within Tantric traditions that śaktipāta is an experience facilitated by a guru or teacher. Where this truth runs into confusion, in my view, is when there is an assumption about what counts as a qualified teacher. In the experience I’ve shared, Heather was not a spiritual guru. She was not a teacher of Tantric yoga or indeed any spiritual path, traditionally conceived. But within this experience, she performed the role of a guru — not because of any intrinsic quality or achievement on her part, but because I related to her as such.

Due to my perception of her, and because of the power this perception allowed her, she was contingently capable of facilitating one of the most significant spiritual experiences of my life. While there are many teachers who are incredibly gifted and perhaps even have access to intuitive faculties not available to others, no teacher wields an intrinsic power to facilitate grace. Insofar as we can experience grace in the wake of someone’s unique intervention, the source of that transformation exceeds the abilities of any individual teacher. As one of the insightful adages of the yoga tradition goes, “grace is an accident, and spiritual practice makes us accident-prone.” The more that we refine our knowledge about reality and about the possibilities of contemplative experience, through study and practice, we skirt the shores of our existential possibility and become more prone to stumble into the river of grace.

This capacity that anyone potentially wields to serve in the function of a guru highlights what is referred to in the yoga tradition as the guru tattva – the “guru principle.” A fundamental feature of reality – particularly as it is described in the Tantric traditions – is revealed through its capacity to teach us something radically true about ourselves. This revealing, or teaching function of reality shows up in a moment, in a relationship, or through an individual who formally inhabits the role of a teacher. Reality is ready and willing to teach us something about ourselves at any given moment, and we miss these manifold opportunities in the degree to which we are turned away from that possibility.

A homeless person shows up on the street, and we walk past without reflection. A war breaks out in a remote part of the world, and we persist within the comfortable stories that distract us from paying attention. We get in a fight with our partner, and instead of listening so as to learn, we react from our own embedded prejudices and assumptions. Moments of grace land in our lap every day, and without the faculty of receptivity and a without a refinement of our spiritual vocabulary, it is easy to let them slip away.

This is one justification for deep study. After having studied and practiced, and after having absorbed ideas about the unique mechanisms of consciousness, in retrospect we are able to trace the auspicious hand of grace in our life. Because grace is as natural as a dew drop, and as universal as being awake. When we take the time to cultivate a yogic vision, we can witness it operating everywhere.

This work is part of a project to build a new community of yoga practitioners and teachers grounded in the deeper teachings of yoga. It is happening over at Embodied Philosophy’s Sādhana School. If you’re interested in learning more about the curriculum and schedule, go here.

I began writing this tribute to my beloved, wildly unique friend, Jae Hentz, almost immediately following his shocking death in 2021, just over a month after his 38th birthday. I posted it on Facebook, but Jae’s memory deserves more than the rapid disappearance of an infinite scroll. If even just a few people who stumble across this ode, read it, and get a taste of Jae’s magnanimous spirit, the effort will have been beyond worth it.

I met Jae when I was seven years old on the hardwood floors of the Kitsap County Country Western Line Dance Club. We were both wearing cowboy boots and bolos – which would be a funnier image if recent fashion trends didn’t in retrospect make us look like visionaries (perhaps we weren’t nerds after all; we were just ahead of the style curve by 30 years). I remember being intimidated by Jae’s assertiveness. Even at seven, he carried himself with an air of confidence that seemingly sought no approval from anyone. He knew how to draw people into his orbit and, once you were there, make you feel like it was a much more fun place to be than where you were previously. At that time, he went by his given name, Jesse, and Jesse (like Jae) expressed himself most fully and freely on a dance floor – whether in cowboy boots or high heels, whether to country music or house.

I lost track of Jae during our adolescent years, with the exception of one important moment during my freshman year of college. During those days, gay.com was where you went to meet other gay people. It was one of the only sources of connection we had, long before the days of apps and dating sites. I somehow ran into Jae on that site, and over chat we discussed our respective stories of coming out and accepting ourselves as gay. Meeting someone from my childhood who was also now openly gay was a significant moment for me, helping me weave together periods of my life in a way that made the earlier periods of confusion and closetedness feel more seen and heard. While that gay.com conversation between 18-year-olds ultimately revealed that we were in very different places in our lives, it is a moment I look back to as one of those serendipitous encounters that proves Jae and I were supposed to be friends, that we are part of the same soul tribe.

After I graduated from college and moved back to Seattle, I got a job waiting tables at Elephant & Castle Restaurant downtown. Unbeknownst to me, Jae was working there. Discovering this was, I think, for both of us a turning point, as it just seemed too fated to be random. Soon after we started working together, Jae and I made the observation (or perhaps remembered) that we were born on the same day: February 26th, 1983. We were also, it turned out, born in the same hospital in Bremerton, Washington. After realizing this, there was rarely a new friend who came into our orbit who was not fully debriefed on our unique friend fact (yes, there have been a few loving eye rolls as friends heard our origin story for the 3rd, 4th or 7th time). To make the fact more interesting, we also playfully added that we happened to be twins separated at birth, the un-claimed offspring of Whitney Houston – a claim all the more fun given its many levels of absurdity.

That was the beginning of several years when fun was the local currency, and we had a lot of it. I can confidently say it was one of the most fun and outrageous periods of my life, thanks to Jae being one of its central characters. Because, as anyone knows who has had the pleasure of being around Jae, he brought energy and laughter with him wherever he went. He easily attracted others to him because of the joy he had the capacity to exude and draw out of others. He was not always an easy person, and we certainly had our share of juicy fights, but no one can deny the energy that he brought into a room and the light that shined from him, especially when he was on a dance floor.

As everyone knows, Jae loved EDM and house music. It might even be said it was his spiritual practice and dancing to it was almost certainly his therapy. He treated the DJs he loved like cosmic messengers and honored what they offered like sacred gifts. The message, of course, was to get down. The gift was to let go and merge with the music, never forgetting in the process to “pas de bouree’, pas de bouree’, kick-ball-change, and turn!”

In those years, I wasn’t informed enough to notice the signs of mental illness, nor to know how to help someone as outwardly self-assured and independent as Jae. And anyway, I had my own pain I was grappling with and my own tendencies to self medicate; I was in no place to help. And whatever the early signs, Jae always managed to ultimately keep it together and to get his full dose of dancing in the process. Our support for each other at that time then was in the form of non-judgment and presence, which we weren’t always successful at offering (me perhaps more so than him) but which supported our ability to remain close friends despite our differences.

In recent years, life got heavier and more difficult for Jae to carry. As his resilience waned, his health issues became more severe and he spent several moments in the hospital close to death. As a result of one such experience towards the end of last year, Jae’s vision was strongly diminished, making it nearly impossible for him to work in the service industry as he had done for most of his life. It was yet another cinderblock tied to the feet of someone already struggling to stay afloat. From my perspective, tragedy after tragedy, loss after loss in his personal life led to a burden too great for even the strongest of individuals to manage – and Jae was certainly strong in many ways.

After a period of some silence between us, we connected a couple times towards the beginning of this year. He was seeming much better after the last hospitalization, undergoing treatment, and we were re-committing to being more present again in each other’s lives, talking and catching up more on the phone. It was clear, however, that the impact of COVID-related circumstances had taken a toll on him, for reasons not least of which being that it took away the social connection and physical proximity that so many of us need to survive. It took away his work. And, of course, it also took away the dance floor – one of his greatest sources of happiness, expression and fulfillment.And then last week he called me, twice, and I was too busy to pick up. I hadn’t called him back, too swept up in the busy preoccupations of blah, blah, blah. Acknowledging this was the first aching burden on my heart when I heard of Jae’s passing. I know that it is taking too much responsibility to imagine that all he needed was for someone to pick up the phone, a friend to show up for him, but currently I can’t kick the regret that I didn’t answer and will perhaps always live with the sadness that I missed one last chance to hear his voice and his laughter.

Even though he was obviously not my biological twin, I think from the moment we created that shared mythology of our birth, an energetic link was forged, or perhaps it was always already there. So when I found out that Jae had passed away yesterday, I had a panic attack. It felt like a piece of me had died. Maybe this is always the case when we lose a close friend who has made an impact on our lives. But, whether fantasy or reality, I choose to believe that that link is still there, that Jae can hear me as I spend this day devoted to him and his memory, and that this link will carry on into the next lifetime, when the conditions and circumstances of life will be more supportive of his soul’s ability to thrive.

So, Jae, I love you and will miss you so much. I will miss the dancing and reciting the ridiculous lyrics of your unpublished and extremely gay EDM album (“mentholatum, chapstick, burt’s bees, and lip gloss and WALK... and WALK...”). I will miss seeing the sparkle that accompanies you when you walk into a room and observing the excitement you stir up in those around you. I will miss calling you on our birthday and arguing over whose birthday it actually is, and I will miss giving each other shit when one of us forgets to make that annual call. Most of all, I will miss your company and the delightfully unusual friendship that we shared.

I hope that, wherever you are, you are dancing to the best house DJ that the cosmic nightclub has to offer. I hope that that heavenly nightclub looks and sounds a bit like Sunday nights at Re-Bar – “Flammable” –, the weekly ritual that you once loved so much. I will learn from your passing that the busyness of life is never an excuse not to pick up the phone, but I will take comfort knowing that our conversations are not over, merely changing channels to something more subtle and intuitive. I will look for you in music and think of you every time I hear a sick new house track. I will try and celebrate your life by never under-appreciating the joys of good company, nor the reality of how fleeting those moments can turn out to be.

And, of course, I will always see you anytime Whitney Houston is playing.

Rest in peace, my beautiful friend. You will always live on in our hearts and in the great memories that you shared with so many.

In recent decades, there has been a global reckoning with the history and politics of yoga. On the one hand, the historical platitudes once pervasively taught in yoga teacher trainings – for example, that yoga is five thousand years old – has given way to the apparently disappointing and deflationary fact that postural yoga is much younger indeed. The fallout from Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body has led at least one well-respected yoga teacher to claim that Singleton should issue a public apology for the arguments he made in his book – namely, that modern postural yoga is largely an innovation of the last hundred years or so. Modern postural yoga, so Singleton’s argument goes, is not completely rooted in Indian history, but rather partly derives from a form of Swedish gymnastics that had been popular at the time of Krishnamacharya and his famous students, Pattabhi Jois and B.K.S. Iyengar. For those who saw their yoga practice as continuous with an ancient past, this historical detail was – in some instances – experienced as a kind of violence. Singleton, for his part, has responded to the various critiques and ad hominem attacks that circulated around his book with an introduction to the Serbian edition of Yoga Body that carefully points out the various ways his detractors have misunderstood his arguments.

The research behind Yoga Body and that of contemporary scholars who have taken up the historical and philological study of yoga has pierced through a kind of pervasive mythology about yoga’s origins – a mythology that, it turns out, was incredibly central to the relationship many practitioners had to their yoga practice. In the place of a mythologized history that emphasized the continuity between modern practice and an ancient past was replaced with a seemingly sober historical account of how modern postural yoga is – just that – modern. Instead of an emphasis placed on continuity, the emphasis was placed on the discontinuity between modern yoga and what came before it. In turn, the perception of a radical disjunction between the present and the past was used to characterize the practices of modern postural yoga as largely inauthentic chimeras of colonization.

As the historical record was being realigned, the guru/śiṣya (teacher/disciple) model of transmission was being overthrown in the wake of evidence that many high-profile spiritual teachers had engaged in various forms of abuse. It turned out that some of the Indian gurus who played such a foundational role in the dissemination of modern yogic teachings used their positions of power in ways that were deeply troubling. Sexual abuse, manipulation and exploitation were revealed to be pervasively present throughout many spiritual communities, and silenced or ignored through the exoticization of the so-called “East.” How those who survived these systemic abuses choose to interpret what happened lives somewhere on the explanatory spectrum between innocuous cultural differences, intentional exploitation, and full-fledged sexual assault. The historical record of modern yoga is being re-written as a result of this knowledge. The emperors of modern yoga’s history have been broadly overthrown. Whether or not these teachers will experience any kind of narrative comeback is unlikely, while the communities they engendered choose to either insularly ignore the accusations or rationalize them as the incomprehensible methods of what is sometimes called the ‘crazy wisdom’ teacher.

A third locus of historical reckoning that is worth mentioning enters under the banner of ‘trauma-informed yoga.’ Somewhat connected to the reckoning around abusive teachers, trauma-informed perspectives suggest broad-ranging implications regarding pedagogical styles, uses of language, and a general orientation of teaching that takes into consideration what may be upsetting – or ‘triggering’ – to a broad range of possible students. To simplify the primary impulse in a way that some may disagree with, trauma-informed yoga wants yoga to be safe for as inclusive a range of students as possible. Along with this increased attention to pedagogical styles that may be considered harmful comes a picture of yoga deeply informed by psychological principles and emerging cultural norms surrounding mental health. Following a historical period of reckless attachment to various dogmas and doctrines about yoga, this newfound inclusive respect for the lived experience of diverse practitioners is surely a mark of progress.

These forms of socio-political and historical reckoning amount to a kind of maturation – perhaps even an ‘awakening’ – with regards to what we are doing when we are practicing yoga. In a sense, the modern yoga world has entered adolescence, a period during which we begin to see that our parents are not divinely perfect, but human; they have flaws, and perhaps have treated us in ways that feel unforgivable. A mark of maturity includes thinking critically about our childhood assumptions and practices, and sometimes coming to terms with paradigms of injustice that we may discover we’ve been unintentionally participating in. As we grow up, we learn to distance ourselves from authority figures who operate in ways that reside outside our newfound ethical framework. And when we lose a faith that we recognize was always blind, we adopt the seemingly mature dispositions of skepticism and cynicism.

However, in our maturation process, I think we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We have mistaken the cultural and organizational mechanisms that disseminated the teachings of yoga with yoga itself; and as our faith has been broken by new historical narratives, acknowledgments of abuse, and mis-informed teaching, we have become stuck in an adolescent preoccupation with dismantling the artifices of our prior delusion. Stuck in a cycle of deconstruction, we lack a theoretical foundation on the basis of which we might build something new that is nonetheless grounded in the profound wisdom of yoga’s ancient past. If childhood is partly characterized by living in a playful fantasy that helps us cope with the violence we largely had no means as yet to escape from, then adolescence might be said to be similarly characterized by an inverse phantasmagoria that posits an ideal state of things on a horizon of futurity that is perpetually out of reach. The loss of innocence and the accompanying recognition that the world and its people are deeply flawed motivates a desire to recover what was lost. But in the process of picking up the pieces of a world broken in our imagination, we can easily get lost in a vision of brokenness, ever-deferring the building of something new to a future moment when every broken piece has been reconciled.

While unquestioned adherence to doctrines about yoga is to be dissolved, we must similarly relinquish dogmas of cynicism. While cynicism might feel like a responsible attitude in the face of widespread disinformation and disillusionment, it is ultimately a contingent existential mood that is limited in its breadth of creative vitality. If it is the aim of deconstructive enterprises to come to terms with unfortunate and uncomfortable truths, then the deconstructive project is incomplete if it fails to direct its interpretive apparatus to the conditions of its own thinking.

This deconstructive attitude is one that falls on the sword of one important contradiction. If it is true, as many deconstructionists claim, that there is no objective truth — and that all truth is culturally contingent — then the truth that there is no objective truth can not itself be objective. If everything is contingent, then the idea that everything is contingent must also be contingent. According to its own logic, if there is no foundation of meaning outside language or culture, then there is no discursive position by means of which one can establish an absolute truth regarding this contingency of things. That is, if language and its cultural expressions are merely an epiphenomenal faculty of human illusion, then there is no ground on which to definitively determine whether or not the idea that there is only human contingency is not itself an illusion.

This tradition of thinking, while useful in helping us think about the ways in which we’ve built a world on the basis of assumptions that have broad-ranging ethical implications, ultimately fails us in silently evoking a metaphysics of anti-metaphysics — a meaning defined by the lack of absolute meaning. To claim that there is no truth or meaning, one has to stand on a ground that is continuous enough to retain the consistency of such a claim. And if one can construct a sense of meaningfulness around a notion that nothing holds any meaning at all, then one has already assumed a foundation of meaning through the meaning assumed by its negation. For the claim that there is no ultimate meaning to function at all, it must be meaningful to the person or persons laying claim to it. And so, in the end, the cynic who adopts the claim that there is no meaning to anything ultimately animates the same impulse that humans have arguably always been impelled by. Human beings rely on meaning as spontaneously as they create meaning, because meaning is a foundational assumption and activity of life — including for those who’s sense of meaning denies the very ground from which it derives any sense at all.

Knowledge systems are like windows, giving us a view of the world that is circumscribed by the framing produced through its conceptual architecture. Within the framework of a single knowledge system, there are plenty of angles from which to position ourselves. We can sit to the left, center, or right of a given window, and construct for ourselves a slightly different view of the outer terrain. But if we extrapolate from one system of knowledge an assumption about the entirety of things, then we are as if assuming that this window is the only one in the house. And if outside this window we only see a beautiful valley with flowers and tall grass, we may understand something real about the earth, but we may never realize that there are mountains, oceans, and forests to discover. And if we become comfortable with our situatedness — our circumscribed view through the window —, a certain existential mood arises. And if we start to feel safe and secure in our vision of things, when other visions are suggested or made available to us, instead of wonder we may experience stress, agitation, and sometimes rage.

In many instances, the ideas we take the most for granted are those in most need of questioning, because so much individual and collective health hinges on the degree to which we are socialized by these assumptions and subconsciously enact the world in accordance with them. The fundamental axiom on which we base a newfound process of affirmation is simple: that life is a great adventure of spirit that, when related to in a more holistic way, has the capacity to nourish and transform nearly every aspect of our lives, and the lives of those around us. This is truly the work of taking yoga “off the mat” – not as the simplistic (albeit important) injunction to “be ethically yogic” in the world, but to embrace even the most seemingly “un-yogic” of life experiences and attitudes as seeds of discovery and self-illumination. In the final analysis, we may discover this disposition as an altogether holistic one, in the sense that every object, every thought, every experience – every crisis, even –, is ripe with the possibility of being harnessed in the service of a great unfolding that ultimately serves the most meaningful and fulfilling opportunity of any human lifetime. This isn’t a commitment that bypasses the challenges of the world, but rather one that recognizes that our ability to cope and respond to those challenges must come from a deeper wellspring of wisdom and understanding. This affirmative attitude of practice that embraces the paradoxical expressions of life is the fertile ground for a new kind of relationship with yoga is one that is animated by a spirit of wonder.

To take up our place in the lineage of visionary yogins and yoginīs, and to pursue the path of wonder, requires an unshakable curiosity and profound courage. Going against the grain of socialization has historically meant that the yoga tradition was a marginal enterprise that very few would feel inspired to seriously pursue. The recent surge of yoga practice and its widespread accessibility in the popular form of modern postural yoga has meant that, with few exceptions, yoga has been shorn of its deepest teachings and domesticated by a cultural status quo that doesn’t accept the metaphysical teachings of yoga. The yoga tradition has been anaesthetized of its spiritual content in order to make it palatable to a capitalist world with no higher values than that of consumption and productivity.

If a modern yoga teacher makes the decision to become intimate with the subtle practices and esoteric wisdom teachings of yoga, and then aim to teach these perspectives alongside her modern postural teaching practice, that teacher may likely lose students. The ones who came to yoga simply to sweat profusely and alleviate some surface-level tension and stress along the way may decide this class no longer works for them. After all, not everyone is ready to plumb the depths of this deep adventure, and being a subtle yoga teacher means continuing to honour the diversity of ways that individuals are situated in their lives.

But if we boil down our teaching to the common denominator of maximal reach and accessibility, then the deeper teachings of yoga will always lose. Our culture is simply not set up to welcome this paradigm – at least not yet. But if gradually, one by one, every yoga teacher who feels called to teach from a foundation of wisdom begins to shift the meaning of their offerings in alignment with yoga’s deeper truth, then eventually this movement of subtle yoga will have a reverberating effect on the entire modern yoga community. What was once marginal will start to be more widely known, and the students who left a yoga class for lack of enough sweat will eventually be replaced by students who yearn for the kinds of insight and benefits that a yogic path to the Self can offer.

Much of this work to build a new community of yoga practitioners and teachers grounded in the deeper teachings of yoga is happening over at Embodied Philosophy’s Sādhana School. If you’re interested in learning more about the curriculum and schedule, go here.

NOTE: This was an email sent out to students of Embodied Philosophy’s Sādhana School. If you are interested in learning more about Sādhana School and perhaps joining nearly 100 students (as of this post), you can find more information here. Its never too late to enroll.

Dear Sādhaka,

The Sādhana School (SS) has been a dream in the making for a long time, and yet it was only through interactions with our students at Embodied Philosophy (EP) that we really started to focus on what we want Embodied Philosophy’s core mission moving forward to be about…

We want it to be about building a “kula” – a unique (albeit ancient) style of contemplative community that is bound not by doctrine or ideology but by a shared commitment to practice and study. This contrasts somewhat with the still-existing expression of EP as a kind of media site and course archive. While this archive is still quite valuable, it has somewhat lacked a facilitative component that many of our students have said would be helpful if not necessary to help them develop their contemplative knowledge and practice. After all, when there’s an ocean of options and no one pointing in a specific direction, we are as if thrust into the ocean without a raft on which to travel.

We want it to be about progressively and sequentially moving through the many traditions, philosophies, practices and perspectives of yoga “broadly conceived” – in many cases by anchoring our process in the study of new translations of sacred yogic texts (in addition to the many that are already-published). In the first year of SS, we’re pursuing this adventure through three 8-week sādhanas and a virtual 7-day retreat. But as those of who attended the Yoga Canon seminar (free on YouTube) discovered, to even begin to scratch the surface of complexity and nuance will take many years, and it is our hope that SS will continue to be a place where that study continues to unfold for a growing community of deep practitioners devoted to the discovery of knowledge and wisdom.

We want it to be where you can access a scaffolding of knowledge by means of which you are able to more easily organize and make sense of your own spiritual intuitions and experiences. As I’ve heard time and time again from students, “I have felt or experienced this thing you’re talking about, and now I have a word for it!” Words can be limiting, but they can also be empowering. And to discover the various vocabularies and languages of the yoga tradition is indeed an incredibly rich and transformative process.

And of course it wouldn’t be “Sādhana School” if it wasn’t about sādhana. Sādhana is like many fascinating Sanskrit words. The various meanings of it, taken together, offer us a way of describing what it is we’re doing when we practice in alignment with the spiritual technologies of yoga – those that help us to embody its principles and perspectives in our daily lives.

According to Apte’s Sanskrit dictionary, sādhana at once means “accomplishing” or “effecting”, which isn’t hard to wrap our heads around, since we easily recognize that the practice and study of yoga “accomplishes” something for us, and creates “effects” in our lives that many who practice this way become profoundly grateful for.

In the same dictionary, sādhana also means “conjuring up”, as in conjuring a spirit. We can think of this in two ways. At one level, when we engage in sādhana, we are conjuring up that aspect of ourselves that has become hidden and occluded by the distorted opinions, contracted forms of knowledge, and other forms of ignorance that bind our souls to limited expressions of life. These forces constrain our prāṇa (our life force) and enforce on us a vision of ourselves as a self-enclosed, autonomous and limited individual separate from everything else. Through sādhana, we conjure up our own spirit, and as that spirit becomes increasingly central to our identity, we discover many small and not so small shifts take place in our lives.

The second way we can think about this “conjuring up” will be familiar to those of you who took the recent sādhana on the Matsyendrasaṁhitā. There we learned that in the Śākta tradition especially, the practice of bhāvanā is one in which we bring into being – we “manifest” – a deity. This deity is not some Judeo-Christian “big God” that rules judgmentally like a monarch over all of existence. This deity is instead an aspect of our essential nature that we are calling into being. At least this is the non-dual Tantrik view that is central principle of our investigations with regards to this particular meaning of sādhana.

Lastly, Apte also offers us the translation of sādhana as “performing”. This to me is incredibly fascinating, and I’m still pondering its significance and what its implications might be for us. In our modern industrial cultural context, “performing” is simplistically conceived as a kind of entertainment. It doesn’t necessarily have, in most instances, any sort of perceived spiritual value. But when we turn to rasa theory and aesthetics later in the first year of our curriculum, we will begin to get a glimpse of the ontological significance of performance, and the corresponding ways in which the arts are uniquely central to the yogic path. Perhaps performance is categorized as “entertainment” in our culture because we have lost a deeper philosophical understanding of the purposes of the imagination, and the role that theatre, music, poetry, and others play in creating the conditions for the emergence of a fundamentally extra-ordinary sort of experience.

When we engage in sādhana, we begin to perform our lives in ways that continuously remember and reflect this process of integrating knowledge and experience. This kind of “performance” isn’t some kind of ostentatiously contrived persona that we develop to communicate to lowly non-spiritual underlings just how far we’ve come – and how much better than them we are spiritually. In fact, those who do adopt spirituality in this way, as a surface-level virtue-signaling about what someone’s perceived spiritual achievements are, those are, in my view, individuals who are actually signaling a shallowness of sādhana. As the New Age California types like to say, they haven’t “done the work”.

The integrated process of knowledge and practice that we’re engaging in Sādhana School is one that softens us, it humbles us (in a healthy way), it refines our understanding, it deepens the orbit of our perception, and it ultimately cultivates a radical flexibility of mind and heart that has the potential to serve every department of life, every occupation, and every relationship.

When we are authentically coming from that subtle space produced through the performance of sādhana, we may still have some of our prejudices towards stupidity or small-mindedness. We’ll probably still get pissed off sometimes and get in reactive, unhelpful spats with our loved ones. We’ll still make many, many mistakes. But alongside the lingering experiences of these contracted saṁskāras (imprints of experience), we begin to discover and operate in the world in alignment with a new set of “wisdom saṁskāras”.

These imprints of subtle wisdom introduce what one of my teachers calls the “ledge of freedom.” At the edge of any reactivity or negative self-talk, we begin to discover the felt sense of another way to engage. This way is perhaps slower, more responsive, more curious, and more attuned to this deep intuition that all of this is a great cosmic dance – that even while there are many hideous displays of ignorance and hatred in the world that we should be vigilant about and rightly want to resolve, hiding alongside (or behind or within) our reactions to what is shocking and sad in the world is the perpetual presence of a paradoxical perfection. And by making our relationship with THAT the most preciously important of our relationships comes a deep source of empowerment that provides clarity and insight about how you are uniquely situated to be an agent of contemplative change in this lifetime.

In this perspective, we find something that couldn’t be further from the old caricature of the navel-gazing, self-involved yogi or meditator, who turns away from the world in their addiction to some escapist spectacle of “enlightenment”. The process of sādhana, as we understand it, is a process that takes us more deeply into the world, not away from it.

Because the world, as the Tantrikas perceived it, is and has always been a continuous outpouring of divine creativity, by aligning ever more deeply with that source of dynamic creativity through our practice and intellectual refinement, we discover commitments and faculties within ourselves that can begin to build a world brick by brick that is saturated with wisdom, clarity, and connection.

At least according to the Śaiva-Śākta tradition, there is nothing that is not that dynamic reality. And even while we continue to navigate its various uncomfortable expressions in our daily lives, it is nonetheless always whispering forth its profound beauty…

…If we only had ears to hear it.

I think we discover from our sādhana the individual ways (unique to our personal lives) how to listen to that subtle sound, and to begin living in and from this beauty.

And for some (and hopefully the majority of us) that sonic and somatic shift toward beauty can make all the difference in the world.

Again, I am absolutely delighted to begin this journey with all of you. Thank you for placing your trust in us to offer what I hope will turn out to be something you’ve been looking for at this point in your life. No single curriculum of study and practice, especially ones focused on spiritual inquiry, should ever advertise itself as the only one you’ll ever need. There’s a negligence in that kind of aggrandizement. My more modest hope for you is that Sādhana School becomes a spoke on the wheel of that great living adventure born of your spiritual intuition and curiosity. And, as the proverbial “they” say, with every spoke, the wheel gets stronger.

In deep appreciation,

Jacob Kyle
Director of Embodied Philosophy