An Untold History of Embodied Philosophy
PART 1: Before the Pandemic – the passion, the people, and the lessons learned
In 2015, while I was teaching yoga full time in NYC, I started working on a side project that was soon called Embodied Philosophy – an online learning platform for contemplative traditions, yoga philosophy, and subtle practices. During the entire month of June 2025, we are celebrating our ten-year anniversary through a series of emails that reflect back on what has happened over the first decade of our existence, and what lessons were learned along the way. This is the first of a two-part “history” of how Embodied Philosophy materialized, with a special emphasis on my colleagues behind the scenes who helped make it happen – and a few of the lessons I learned from them.
Because the pandemic hit right in the middle of the last ten years, a history of Embodied Philosophy can be sorted into what happened before the pandemic, and what happened during and afterward. While I began working on this project in 2015, it was only up until the middle of 2016 that I was doing everything largely on my own – even though many important ideas were forged through brainstorming sessions with my then-partner, Jimmy Nataraj (Nataraj Chaitanya), and other close friends.
A history about anything can be told in various ways, but for one rooted in a celebration of how we made it to this 10 year milestone, I wanted to begin the story from when it was more than just me working on Embodied Philosophy. The academics would say that a history should be told as objectively as possible, so perhaps this isn’t quite a history. It is more of a retrospective gesture of gratitude for the people I’ve worked with, and – in keeping with the spirit of Embodied Philosophy, wherein nothing need be excluded from a contemplative life – I’m sharing a few of the very subjective lessons I learned from them, whether in feast or famine.
Before the Team: Dreams, Delusions, and the Awkward Gift of Unskilled Persistence
When you start with a dream and just enough wishful – or slightly delusional – enthusiasm to make it happen, it may come as no surprise that you quickly discover what skills and abilities you lack. For myself, the ins and outs of running a “business” (a word I’ve never been comfortable calling EP) was completely outside my wheelhouse. The necessary skills of hiring people and managing a team, for example, was something that I never really thoughtfully considered, and what I needed to learn was limited to whatever I was trying to do at that moment. It was about three years before I even thought about creating a “business plan” – although a few people did mention that I should; but since it didn’t feel urgent, their good advice was ignored.
Before other people were involved, I made things up as I went along, working on EP in the mornings and evenings when I wasn’t running around teaching yoga. No regular schedule was possible or required, which was great for someone like me who has always struggled with sticking to any discipline in work. Kavitha Chinnaiyan once playfully called me a “perpetual delinquent,” which tracks, given that when I was a yoga teacher in NYC I got fired from Equinox and suspended for six months from Kula Yoga (by Nikki Vilella, no less) – both times for missing a substitute teaching gig at 7am. But… what is time anyway?
The Internship Experiment
When I could no longer follow the whim of my own fancy and had to get slightly more serious, a big initial hurdle was figuring out what kind of help I needed, and who would be the right kind of people to bring onboard. Because there was no revenue in the beginning, I started with the least risky investment – internships. Matty Espino was my first intern, and he was a proverbial godsend. He was hard-working, quick to understand what was needed, and he was proactive in doing what needed to be done without too much direction. I am incredibly grateful that this was my first experience having someone work with me, because Matty definitely set a standard for what was possible.
It wasn’t until later that I realized that hiring someone at an entry-level position is not always the best decision when you are starting out. But Matty did not fit the usual definition of someone at the entry level, because even though he was young, fresh out of college, and idealistic, he was incredibly capable. But when you have a star on your hands, and you don’t recognize the implications for someone of performing an unpaid role, and if you don’t cultivate a path of employment quickly enough, they will inevitably have to move on. And so before I developed the courage to defy my own scarcity mentality, Matty made the natural and understandable decision to pursue an opportunity that had a clear path ahead. And in retrospect, I recognize what contributed to this lack of retaining someone who had the chops: I myself didn’t yet know what that path was going to be at an organizational level.
There was one other intern in those early days, but their time was so brief that I’ll save that story for another day. So the internship approach lasted through two very brief experiments, and the frustrations helped me realize I would need to apply a portion of our very limited budget to a paid part-time contractor. After all, even if an industry has normalized the internship model as a way to get your foot in the door, “free labor” in any form creates a lopsided energetic relationship.
The Shift to Paid Help: Hiring Missteps and Lessons Learned
So I posted a job opportunity through our fledgling email list, circulated it on Facebook, and eventually interviewed a few people. I chose the first person I liked, and paid scant attention to his qualifications. He showed the most passion for the mission of Embodied Philosophy, and at that time, this felt like the most important thing in a staff member. But the flair of an interview did not translate to a fruitful working relationship, admittedly because I simply didn’t know how to manage someone. I was new to the whole delegation thing, and I was easily confused about the boundary between what was doable and what was too much to expect from someone working a limited number of hours. But that confusion can go both ways – overworking someone when they seem like they can do it all, and failing to give someone the right attention when they are underperforming. Eventually, I just had to acknowledge that the dynamic was not a match for what was needed, and the comedic foibles that ensued from this experience taught me about my own limitations as a manager.
With a few short-lived attempts at finding the right people under my belt, I learned that I didn’t know what kind of support I needed nor how to choose the right people to help move EP forward. So if I didn’t have the skills for interviewing strangers who answer a public job posting, then a logical alternative was to start closer to home with people I already trusted and believed in. Out of an implicit sense of my own limitations came the blessing of Rebecca Paul.
Friendship, Flow, and Shared Vision
Rebecca had attended my yoga classes when I taught at goodyoga in Brooklyn, who became a closer friend after she attended an annual retreat that I used to offer in my hometown of Port Orchard, Washington. As our friendship deepened and I spoke with her a lot about my work building Embodied Philosophy, we eventually decided to work together. What a difference a talented friend can make. Rebecca was fully in it from the get-go. She was excited about the work and understood what was needed. Because we were (and still are) such close friends, there was a period when she lived with Jimmy and I in our apartment in Harlem, and so life conversations segued seamlessly into working sessions with a level of convenience that lacked any of the issues that come with hiring someone who you don’t yet know.
Rebecca and I worked alongside each other in a way still unique in the history of Embodied Philosophy, and she shared with me an equivalent level of enthusiasm, vision, and commitment. Because she had a depth of work experience that far exceeded my own – mine being mostly limited to the areas of yoga teaching and waiting tables –, her collaboration taught me the valuable lesson of choosing colleagues who hold skills and knowledge that are necessary but which exceed my own. But perhaps the most important quality she had was that she challenged me. She offered different perspectives and approaches to things that I hadn’t thought about, and through that experience I discovered the importance of sharing agency over the vision and possibilities of Embodied Philosophy with other people – even if, at the time, I still struggled to allow my vision to be shaped by others.
While there are many advantages to working with someone you know so well, and who knows you just as deeply, the boundary between work and friendship can become blurry sometimes. I had not yet learned the lesson of how to support someone by establishing the right energetic container around work, and I had not fully grasped how the intrinsic power dynamic of being someone’s boss can lead to unskillful tendencies in communication. But because she is one of my best friends, and we both are direct and don’t shy away from a good debate, we were able to iron out those kinks, and I gradually learned more about what she needed.
However, despite her significant influence on EP, she was still a part-time contractor, as I hadn’t yet felt that EP had the means to invest in a full-time employee. Naturally, Rebecca couldn’t sustain her livelihood on what I was able to offer her. So at a certain point, it was in her best interest to seek out work that could pay her what she’s worth. Even as we shifted away from working together, she was always a friend who helped support and guide the process of finding her replacement. Because she knew that I wasn’t skilled at interviews and knowing what to look for in potential colleagues, she conducted the interviews that brought Jesse to Embodied Philosophy.
Systems, Scale, and a Sustainable Structure
Jesse Jagtiani was hired when I still wasn’t sure about whether or not to hire a full-time employee, but because Jesse is a powerhouse who perseveres with strength and determination, she asked for what she wanted, gave good arguments for why it was necessary, and thus became Embodied Philosophy’s first full-time employee sometime early in 2018. Jesse had recently completed her doctorate in education at Columbia University Teachers College, and was therefore well-situated to help me transform EP from a humble online platform into a sustainable organization. It was Jesse who first realized that in order for us to grow and give more opportunities to future employees and teachers, we needed to offer more courses. At that time, we had started offering a few online courses, but only about one every three months. In one of our first meetings, Jesse suggested that we start offering a new course every month – an idea that hadn’t even occurred to me. It is odd now to think of how scary it felt initially to risk such growth, but without Jesse expanding on the vision of what was already working, we would never have accomplished what became possible as a result. When we started publishing new courses every month, Embodied Philosophy became my full time job. After slowly letting go of most of the in-person yoga classes I was then still teaching in NYC, in the summer of 2018 I gave up my last weekly yoga class at yogaworks in Soho, and what had been for three years my side hustle and passion project transformed into my life’s work.
The Birth of Tarka: Collaboration and Editorial Vision
With Jesse’s full-time support and collaboration, we established a monthly schedule of new courses, and with the resources this afforded us, in a very short period of time we expanded the team. Being the sole editorial decision-maker for EP was a somewhat lonely process, so I knew that I also needed to work with someone who was a scholar-practitioner of yoga, who had a rigorous knowledge of contemplative traditions and links to the academic community. Through an email exchange with Chris Chapple (a professor at Loyola Marymount University), I was introduced to Stephanie Corigliano, who I tasked with leading the project of creating what was then a monthly online journal called Tarka.
With Stephanie, for the first time I had the opportunity to work with someone who could brainstorm with me editorial themes and ideas anchored in an extensive knowledge of yoga philosophy and its various applications – both socio-politically and across disciplinary boundaries. Stephanie was central to developing many of the ideas that became courses (and later our certificate programs), but perhaps her biggest contribution was in curating many of the articles still available within the vast archive on our website. Through her outreach and curation, she forged connections between EP and many yoga scholars that would become writers, teachers, and contributors to our various offerings. From the beginning and still to this day, Stephanie and I’s meetings are inspirational, thought-provoking, and fun. Because we share a dryness of humor, a passion for what we study, and a compatible vision of what the yoga scholar-practitioner is all about, working with her has been a source of invigoration, scholarly refinement, and laughter.
The Team Expands: From Idea to Infrastructure
Around the same time that Stephanie came on board, Jesse and I decided that we needed to hire a project manager. Through an application and hiring process guided primarily by Jesse, we fell in love with two applicants – Ara Cusack and Molly Hunt. Because we were so enamored with both of them, one job turned into two jobs – with Ara tasked with managing most of the project support responsibilities, and Molly serving as a customer service representative – who also turned our instagram presence from the occasional post into a beautiful daily feed of contemplative art, inspiration, and poetry. Molly is one the most kind-hearted and caring people I have ever worked with, and she brought a warmth to our weekly meetings that was infectious and full of charm.
With a team of five, it felt like we could do anything and everything, and so our weekly team meetings became a mixture of distributing responsibilities for the projects at hand, and throwing my new ideas into the mix regarding what comes next. Ara Cusack had a skill for project management and a capacity that seemed boundless. There was not a thing we put on her plate that she couldn’t accomplish, and her organizational skills were more refined than anyone’s on the team. She developed processes, and transformed our word-of-mouth workflows into training materials that could be used for future employees. While everyone served an equally important function, Ara went above and beyond anything we could have expected or anticipated. But when someone’s abilities seem inexhaustible, it doesn’t mean that they are; and believing that they are can lead to burning someone out when you haven’t checked in with them about how things are feeling more broadly. But at this point of the story, that lesson had yet to be learned…
With a small agile team of this size, it was a fruitful time that seemed conducive to letting my vision of things run wild. There were countless possibilities explored in those meetings that never materialized into what we offered publicly, but I was so intoxicated with the project of building Embodied Philosophy that I never held back when the creative muse inspired me with a new idea.
Looking back, while this allowed us to accomplish a lot for being such a small team, I hadn’t yet understood that there is an important distinction between brainstorming new possibilities and working in a focused way on the details, structures, and workflows of what we had already established. It would be a few years before I learned that a leader’s constant visioning forward can be overwhelming, because blurring the difference between management conversations and future visioning can lead to confusion about what to focus on or what to do next. Because I hadn’t learned the difference at that point, this confusion often went unspoken (and it wasn’t until someone else – who you’ll meet in “part two” – came along that this was brought to my attention). It seems silly now to admit it, but it didn’t occur to me at this time that others were less interested in hearing me go off on yet another tangent about my latest idea than they were in developing a continuity and stable structure of repeatable and predictable work. There is a difference between being the one who carries the vision, and those who are tasked with transforming a rapid flow of new ideas into an actionable sequence of realistic tasks and workflows.
A Time of Abundance, and the Temptation of Growth
Aside from tensions that were slowly building beyond my awareness, this was a time of abundance for the Embodied Philosophy platform. Everything we threw at the wall seemed to stick. With the exception of one course, everything we offered generated enough revenue to allow us to pay the bills, our staff, and sometimes significant payouts to course teachers that has been unmatched ever since.
From this place of relative ease with regards to course performance, we also had resources to invest in the next stage of Embodied Philosophy. From a foundation of monthly online courses, we expanded the educational vision by introducing two new year-long certificate programs – one in Yoga Philosophy and one in MindBody Therapy. Stephanie and I co-directed the Yoga Philosophy Certificate Program, and I brought on board a friend, Scott Lyons, who was responsible for building the curriculum and establishing the faculty of the MindBody Therapy Certificate Program. The first year of these programs we had over 300 students enrol in either one of these programs.
Tarka in Print: An Aesthetic Fulfillment
Beyond the courses and certificate programs, Stephanie and I had a dream to pursue an arm of Embodied Philosophy that would eventually become a publishing house. To that end, we decided to transform Tarka into a physical journal that we initially planned to release quarterly, four times per year. For that, we needed a book designer. One of my long-time acquaintances in New York City was an incredibly talented graphic designer and artist, Ryan LeMere. I had initiated contact with Ryan after I saw a post on Facebook of a launch party he hosted for his journal, Aligned. From the aesthetic of that party to his graphic design and art, everything about Ryan’s aesthetic conveyed to me that this was the kind of designer I wanted to help us elevate and refine the visual identity of the Embodied Philosophy platform. The first time I approached him, he turned me down. Then, after about a year, Ryan reached out to say he was available. We met for coffee in Greenwich Village, and that conversation initiated both an ongoing professional collaboration and one of my life’s great friendships.
We hired him to design our new print version of Tarka Journal, and he helped us develop a visual vocabulary and overall aesthetic both for the journal and for Embodied Philosophy more broadly. The first issue of Tarka, “On Bhakti,” was printed in late 2019, and we were exuberant about how beautiful it turned out to be. As someone who loves books, to this day Tarka Journal is one of the offerings I am most proud of. Our publication of new issues has slowed down in recent years, but it is still a project Stephanie, Ryan, and I are working on – with a new issue, “On Power,” scheduled to be published this year. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
Returning to the timeline of our story, we were planning a launch party in New York City for April of 2020. Everything at Embodied Philosophy was looking good, and the possibilities seemed endless. For five years, while there were plenty of mistakes and opportunities we didn’t pursue, as a whole there was rarely a moment when it didn’t feel like things were moving in a direction of growth and expansion. Because this was – up until that point – the experience I knew and subsequently trusted in, I didn’t imagine nor was I prepared for a time when we would be forced to minimize the platform, instead of broadening and expanding its possible offerings.
2020: A Turning Point and the Precarious Horizon
Then, as we were planning the celebration of Tarka and well into the early months of our new Certificate Programs, a well-known crisis emerged in the form of the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic — as you will know from your own experience — changed everything. Initially, it led to the most successful course we had ever offered, a course on “Trauma First Aid” with Peter Levine, which was understandably a very resonant course at a time of profound collective trauma. But it also overwhelmed our fragile staffing system in a way I didn’t have the foresight to predict or prepare for.
The pandemic thus marks the beginning of what I’ll call the ‘precarious years of Embodied Philosophy’ — spurred by a lifetime-defining health event that created struggles for me and the platform, as it did to billions of people around the world. While this period initially led to the biggest team we’ve ever had (13 full-time or part-time employees and contractors, plus 4 learning navigators) and many exciting accomplishments, I made some poor decisions stemming from a belief that what had worked before, and in the early days of the pandemic, would work in the same way again.
Perhaps it was a wise farmer who once said, “don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” I never understood the meaning of that bit of folk wisdom until – through hindsight of the last five years – I can see that for too long I had been counting way too many unhatched chickens. But some chickens did hatch, and the next half of our story includes more fascinating characters, talented colleagues, and many moments for which I am deeply grateful.
The first five years of Embodied Philosophy were defined by a gradual but sustainable growth made possible by the work of a small but mighty team. The challenges and opportunities of this period were animated by excitement, even while a gradual strain was building for a project that had started to exceed the capacities of those who were working on it. This strain reached a tipping point when it culminated in the mind-bogglingly unexpected course performance of “Trauma First Aid.”
The repercussions of this experience – and the choices that were made afterward – dramatically changed the scale and trajectory of Embodied Philosophy, leading to another five years of wonderful colleagues, unique challenges, and ultimately some very difficult decisions.
But that’s a story to be continued in Part 2…