The Living Philosophy of Practice
Sādhanā in Motion: the philosophy of returning to the body, the breath, and embodied sense of belonging: The discipline of returning to the same place until it becomes yours.
Analogue means done by hand
Repetition. Materials. Time that isn’t optimised.
A candle lit at the same hour. The mat unrolled before the thinking starts. Breath counted rather than tracked. A mantra sung badly, on purpose, until it stops being performance.
Ritual is the oldest technology we have for changing states — older than every tool currently competing for your attention, and considerably better at it. Sādhanā is that technology practised with commitment: the same thing, done again and again, until it becomes somewhere you can return to.
Yoga as a Path of Return –
Two paths: Two labs:
The “Yoga” practice — Rooted in sādhanā. 1:1, small groups, immersions. Mostly in person, Some online.
The “Punk” work — Prayerformance, land-based ritual, ink. Song, Zines, Shows, records, collaborations.
Same position, different media.
Real Yoga is born from sādhanā: that disciplined, simple, and profound spiritual practice. Here, each session is an invitation to return to the breath, to conscious movement, and to the silent wisdom of the body, beyond the logic of conditioned mind.
THE ANALOGUE FRAME
Why analogue
We live inside systems designed to fragment attention and then sell it back to us. The body has become a project with metrics: steps, sleep scores, heart rate zones, streaks. Even stillness now arrives with a timer and a notification.
An Analogue Ritual is one that resists this. It’s done by hand, by YOU in real time, with materials that don’t update. It doesn’t produce data. It can’t be optimised, and it doesn’t reward you for consistency — which is precisely why consistency means something profound here.
In practice this looks unremarkable. The mat unrolled at the same hour. A candle lit before anything else happens. Breath counted on the fingers rather than tracked on a wrist. A cup of tea made slowly, from leaves, (because the making is part of it). A song sung badly, deliberately, until it stops being done for validation and becomes a way of anchoring presence.
These look slow. And well, that’s the point. Ritual is the oldest technology we have for changing state, and it works through repetition, not intensity — which is why the ‘slowness’ is a feature and not a compromise.
[ Link: What the research says about ritual and the nervous system → /research ]
YOGA AS ART PRACTICE:
I don’t teach yoga as exercise and I don’t teach it as an add-on.
I teach it as an “internal martial art”. As this is what I’ve come to realize it is.
And I teach it as an art practice: a sustained discipline of attention that happens to use the body as its material.
Artists understand something practitioners often forget — that a practice is not a series of sessions but a long relationship with a material, and that the interesting work happens well past the point where it stopped feeling like a singularity. The studio and the mat run on the same logic. You show up, you work, most of it is unremarkable, yet the (so called) unremarkable part is what makes the rest possible.
This also means I don’t keep the disciplines separate. What follows are not add-ons. They’re the same practice speaking in different registers, and we use the ones the day calls for.
WHAT SĀDHANĀ MEANS:
steady Practice
Sādhanā is usually translated as “spiritual practice,” which makes it sound optional and slightly embarrassing. A better translation is closer to the means. The thing you do, repeatedly, that accomplishes something you cannot accomplish by simply wanting or wishing it.
It has almost nothing to do with how the practice looks and everything to do with whether you return to it. A twelve-minute practice done daily for a year will change you more than a ninety-minute class attended when you feel inspired. Inspiration is not a method. Return is a method.
This is the organising principle of everything I teach. Not intensity — Devotion. Commitment. Sankalpa.
THE FIVE LANGUAGES
Movement:
Āsana grounded in somatic listening. The question in a posture is not am I doing this correctly but what is available here, today, in this body. With that said, I so happened to be trained in lineages that take ethics and alignment seriously — Krishnamacharya, Sivananda, Jivamukti — and I use that precision in service of Where you are at. Postures are adapted to you. Not the other way round.
Breath and stillness:
Prāṇāyāma and meditation, taught as practical nervous-system skill rather than as mystery school. Breath is the one autonomic process you can take manual control of, which makes it the most direct lever available for shifting state. You’ll learn specific techniques for specific conditions and goals. what to do when you’re activated, what to do when you’re flat, what to do at 3am — and why each one works.
Voice // NADA:
Mantra and song as tools of vibration. Sound moves through the body in ways that thought does not; the vagus nerve runs past the vocal apparatus, and humming, dronning, chanting and extended exhalation are among the oldest self-regulation tools we have. You do not need to be able to sing in perfect pitch. It helps if you’re willing to be heard being bad at it.
Plants:
I use Folk herbalism as ordinary, everyday support — teas, tinctures, herbs, and the seasonal rhythms that keep a nervous system steady. This is the herbalism of grandmothers kitchen shelves.
I’ve worked in relationship with plants for more than a decade, in traditions that take them seriously as teachers and as medicine. I hold that work with care, ethics, and a considerable amount of caution about how it’s currently marketed. With that said: Plants play no part in a yoga session. lol! This work is off-the-mat! What I can offer is a grounded practice for people integrating experiences they’ve had elsewhere, and honest conversation for those considering them — including, often, the conversation about why now might not be the time.
Making ART
Drawing, mark, gesture. Not art therapy and not craft — a way of letting the body say what it means to say. A way of allowing for more space. Sometimes a practice ends with ten minutes and a pencil. What comes out is nobody’s business but yours.
METHODOLOGY
What this practice is built from:
Somatics — the body as the site of information rather than the object of instruction. We work from sensation outward. We work with strenghtning intuition.
Classical yoga — The Yogic Philosophies play a big part in what I do too! Without the correct textual frameworks to guide the practice it can fall into the trap of becoming just another mechanical exercise.
Structural – Breath, and postural precision from Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, Jivamulkti, Sivananda Yoga Vedanta, Montanha Encantada. 500+ hours of Yoga Alliance certification, and considerably more hours than that on the floor.
Liberation doula work — accompaniment through thresholds. The holding of ritual space through grief, ending, and becomings, and the understanding that what people need in those passages is presence and skill, not advice.
Folk herbalism — the land as a participant in health rather than optional to it.
All of these traditions converge at the same door: that healing is not a private project, that the body is not separate from the world it lives in, and that the way through things is practice and Applied insight.
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