Ashtanga Tech

If your community can't run for two weeks without you, you haven't built a community. You've built a dependency. And you probably think that dependency is your value.

There's a specific move a bad teacher makes, and once you can name it, you can't stop seeing it. They take their own opinion about your body — a guess, a projection, a preference — and they hand it to you as fact.

For years, every single relationship in my shala ran through me. Student to teacher. Student to teacher. Student to teacher. I was the hub, everyone else was a spoke, and if I wasn't there, the wheel fell off.

There's a line between what you feel in a posture and what everyone else thinks you feel. In Ashtanga, that line has been crossed so many times that most practitioners forgot it was ever there.

Most yoga students can't practice without a teacher in the room. Take the teacher away, and the whole thing quietly falls apart. And that's not the students' fault. It's what they were taught.

You will leave your community. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not by choice. But you will leave it. The only real question is whether anything survives after you're gone.

For a few years, I ran a gate. I decided when you were ready. I kept the criteria to myself. And I handed out the good stuff only after you'd earned it. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to see how broken that was.

Here's a sentence that sounds like expertise and usually isn't. Your hips aren't open enough. It has the tone of a measurement. It's an opinion in a lab coat.

You ask a student how a pose feels. They say "good." Their breath is shallow, their jaw is clenched, and two weeks later they stop coming to class. You never see them again.

Apprenticeship is a craft, not a costume. You are learning to see and to act with skill. You are not learning to be a second-rate copy of your teacher.