The Shala Daily

This week’s thread is about the signals hiding in plain sight — the ones that ask us to pay closer attention.

Some of you noticed the last week of emails felt off. You were right. I built a system to take the articles and links I am reading, jot down my notes, and get them to you in an organized fashion. It’s part of the digital garden I’m building, and part of my deliberate work to take action on these thoughts when they happen. Its meant to be a substack without giving substack a cut.

They called those social media platforms that use you as the product and keep your stuff locked in walled garden. I hate that. I want an open garden. So, I’ve been working on just making my blog do all of this stuff. We use open source everthing. And, that has kind of meant you’ve been involuntary beta testers. Thanks for that.

As I rebuilt pieces of that system, my original notes kept getting stripped out. You got the scaffolding without the voice. That is fixed now. We’ll see for how long 😂

I’m relucantly proud of all this. ts really my wordpress blog thats powering my open source, self made Mind Body alternative. This system lets me take my thoughts and get them straight to the yoga club community. Heck, now you can even check your bookings. And on my end, its so much easier to take notes on you guys and have them go right into your account notes.  Other teachers can do that, too. This can help is be even more effective.

You have to understand that after I quit social media, I had creative energy to spare (did you see the new movement assistant on the Functional Ashtanga links). I built my little system in order to capture all of the stuff you would overhear at the shala. I wanted to take my little digital garden and make sure it had real use and value, beyond just existing as my second brain. I know that there are people out there who want more of this stuff, the gossipy, real-talk connections between what is happening in the world and what is happening on your mat.

I’ve attempted to use efficacious learning design, too. Every article links back to study guides on ashtanga.tech for spaced repetition learning — philosophy, anatomy, teaching, all of it cross-referenced. Behind the scenes over the last week and a half, we rewrote the entire content pipeline. New AI tagging tools trained to help keep things organized. Every article gets labeled philosophy, practice, culture, science, or yoga professionals. Automated weekly roundups so you can see a through-line. Cleaner formatting. Better scheduling. I actually replace the entire old calendar and booking system on the backend. It may not look like much, but it was rebuilt from scratch. I hope you notice how booking got easier. I have been busy. I hope you love what I built.

Does getting stronger require suffering? Gretchen Reynolds reports that light weights and consistent effort produce the same gains as grinding under heavy bars. The muscle doesn’t care about spectacle. It cares about showing up. Sound familiar? On the mat, tapas isn’t about dramatic effort — it’s about the steady heat that transforms without burning.

What happens when a tech CEO puts down the smartphone? Danny Hogenkamp hosts phone-free parties, runs a Luddite Club, and uses a flip phone after hours. It’s pratyahara in practice — choosing which inputs deserve your attention, and discovering that the world gets richer when you stop scrolling through it.

Three South Asian bronzes left the Smithsonian this month. Not because they were stolen — because the museum decided that questions of provenance demand honest answers. Aparigraha at the institutional level: letting go of what was never truly yours. The objects didn’t lose their beauty. They gained their story back.

Have you ever said a pose name and felt the room shift? Sometimes a Sanskrit translation lands awkwardly in English, carrying history we didn’t intend to invoke. Satya asks us to name that discomfort rather than rush past it. The practice doesn’t need us to have all the answers — just the willingness to ask better questions.

And what about the tools we’re building? OpenClaw puts an AI assistant on your own machine — no cloud, no mystery. It’s a small experiment in agency: shaping the things that shape us, rather than renting them from someone else.

Five different stories, one common frequency: the quiet signal that says look closer. Not louder. Closer. Maybe you can see why I’ve been interested in those topics? Oh yeah, and sorry for the slop.