Welcome to Ashtanga Dispatch: The Podcast Episode 5 and meet Aliya Weise of Ashtanga San Diego and #ThePeoplesAshtangaYoga.

Aliya is one of those impassioned people who speaks from the heart – straight to the heart. In fact, his essay, The Call To Mysore, featured in the first Ashtanga Dispatch, received more tearful notes of gratitude from readers than any other featured article. Students who had been feeling excluded, disenfranchised, not worthy – the very ones, I suspect, Aliya had hoped to reach.

In this podcast, he does it again. And in under an hour we cover a lot of territory – from Aliya’s ardent stand for any/every student’s ability to be a practitioner of ashtanga yoga, all the way to a controversial online conversation thread had in a closed FB group about Parampara, the traditional teacher-student transmission of teaching, and … well — me.

Spoiler alert: I cried. And get ready, because you might too. But don’t worry, it’s the happy kind.