Cultivating Self-Awareness Through Practice
In this video, Michael Joel Hall explores the concept of self-awareness through the practice of yoga.
Practicing Happiness
Happiness isn’t a mood you wait for—it’s a thing you train, like breathing on purpose when your brain wants drama.
Ashtanga Without the Cultural Scaffolding
Ashtanga as practiced in most Western shalas is a stripped-down version of something larger. The asana sequence got exported. The scaffolding mostly didn’t.
Whose Pain Is This?
This is about compassion as a perceptual shift, not a mood—when the line between your pain and theirs stops behaving.
The Foot You Forgot You Were Standing On
The ankle is the joint the practice is most dishonest about. It looks like a hinge from the outside — up, down, finished. It is not a hinge. It is two joints stacked on each other, sweeping a four-cornered field, and walking only ever asks you to live in one of those corners. Then you…
Screens Aren’t the Villain
Cutting school screen time sounds righteous, until you notice we’re banning the tool instead of teaching kids how not to get played by it.
Free Money Isn’t Free
Those “no essay” scholarships can be a raffle ticket you pay for with your data—so let’s talk about cleaner ways to search.
Why Your Knee Doesn’t Rotate (and Why That’s a Gift)
The knee does rotate, but only when it is bent. When the knee is straight, the joint locks itself against rotation by design — the medial femoral condyle is longer than the lateral, and as the knee approaches full extension it forces the tibia to externally rotate just enough to tighten the cruciate ligaments and…
Head for the Light
This is about aiming your attention toward what’s still here—without lying to yourself about what hurts.
The Lotus Quadrant and the One Beside It
My knee hurts in lotus. I can’t bind in Marichyasana D. Eagle pose feels impossible. Why does my hip pinch in figure-4? Why won’t my top knee come down in seated cross-legged? These are five questions, and they are all asking the same anatomical question. The answer is a 2×2 matrix. 🪷 The Lotus Side,…