An Untold History of Embodied Philosophy
PART 3: A Return to the Original Mission and Becoming a Teacher
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. This is the final post of a three-part “history” of how Embodied Philosophy evolved over our first ten years. The first two parts focused on my colleagues behind the scenes who helped make it happen – and a few of the lessons I learned from them. Part 3 explores some of my own reflections, experiences, and what Embodied Philosophy looks like today as it prepares for the future.
In the previous two posts about Embodied Philosophy’s 10-year anniversary story, my focus was on highlighting and celebrating the diverse beings I have had the privilege of working with over the years.
If the last few years of Embodied Philosophy’s journey could be summed up in a simple sūtra-like aphorism, it might be this: ‘everything that expands must also contract.’”
In this part, I am sharing my own experience of reckoning and humility, shame and avoidance, and the beginning of a newfound relationship to Embodied Philosophy as a teacher. This is an emotional and vulnerable part of the story for me, and certainly something that I haven’t shared publicly. But my hope is that those who engage in similar ventures – who, like me, lacked the skills and discernment that can only be forged through experimentation, failures, and missteps – will perhaps feel at least slightly comforted, and at most inspired to acknowledge that you are not alone. As one of those old adages goes, the challenges we face can become opportunities when perceived with new eyes – if we can access the resources to respond to them with creativity and an openness to try new things, without attachment to the old things that no longer work as they once did.
In the end, I see this series of challenges not as failures, but as a kind of necessary unraveling – one that can be contextualized philosophically from the Tantrik perspective of an ever-natural expansion and contraction that exists at all levels of life.
The Cracking of the Shell: The Financial Reckoning
The mounting economic pressures post-2021 were initially expansive, but quickly transformed into a new contracted state that I for-too-long avoided acknowledging, and thus delayed decisions that were ultimately necessary.
The explosive success of our initial pandemic-era courses was a disorienting experience, because it rooted in me a rather distorted assumption that things had always been relatively easy, but now they were easier than ever. The experience of seeing how quickly an organization can find itself in an abundant state of resources for re-investment in the platform left me attached to the belief that – even as the new evidence of less than successful courses started to accumulate – we were only just one course away from experiencing the same kind of success we had before. But that turned out to be an ultimately unhelpful delusion.
As anyone who owns a business remembers from the pandemic days, it was extremely easy to access funding from the government through the forgivable Payroll Protection program, and the unforgivable EIDL loan (Economic Injury Disaster Loan). I took advantage of every opportunity to access this funding, and given my experience of seeing just how easy it was to encounter quickly-shifting success, I didn’t pause to reflect on whether or not this was a risky decision. When times were abundant, my instinct was to re-invest and expand, and I didn’t prioritize a “rainy day fund,” because it didn’t seem necessary. Now I know that times of abundance should also be conservatively focused on saving for potentially difficult times ahead – ones that I now realize are inevitable.
And so, when the pandemic loans became available, I started to depend on the EIDL funding too much when things got difficult – using them to offset an increasingly dwindling cashflow. I had started to see that we were beginning to hemorrhage money every month, but instead of making the decision to downsize, I manically shifted our strategy over and over again to try and trigger the circumstances from before – when almost every course put us in the green. In retrospect, I should have carefully analyzed where all the money was going. I should have looked more closely at all of EP’s various banking and credit card statements. But I didn’t, because I was too frightened at the time to face the truth of what was necessary.
The loan funds were slowly drained, because our costs far exceeded our revenue, and I used the extended time these funds allowed to keep my head in the warm and comfortable sands of avoidance. Because to confront the truth of what was necessary was too painful. When you are responsible for supporting the livelihoods of a staff through their payroll, you can get extremely attached to not letting them down. I was honest with the team throughout this period that we were not in a financially good position, but I always ended that honest appraisal with the encouragement that I knew we were going to turn this around. But of course I didn’t know; it was not knowledge, but a faith born of my own limited experience. And as we all know, some faiths can be blind.
So I went from the blissful repose of visionary expansion to the ever-present anxiety of financial survival mode. I started to think that a contraction of the team was necessary, but it broke my heart to imagine going through with it. I let my own shame and guilt get in the way of what should have been a pragmatic business decision that was in the best interest of Embodied Philosophy and my own financial hardship.
Sometimes we need a close friend to reflect back to us that a necessary decision is not a failure, and it is not something to be ashamed about. I cannot express deeply enough how central Irene Barber was to this process – always encouraging me to inhabit a new headspace with regards to what needed to be done (even though it's uncomfortable), while highlighting the beauty behind such a decision and the newfound maturity it expresses and conveys.
As the Buddhist adage makes clear, impermanence is not a failure but a teacher. Holding on too tightly is what creates suffering — not the letting go itself. But letting go requires support, and it was Irene who played the role of a much-needed teacher in this new need for surrender.
The Exodus: Team Contraction & Connected Goodbyes
Irene’s initial 12-week contract turned into a full time employment role. Because Irene is one of my oldest friends – uniquely special to me as the person who inspired me to come out after high school –, she knows me so well, and knows how to reflect back to me an encouragement around certain tough decisions that helps me see it from an “objective standpoint” beyond my shadow dispositions of guilt, grief, and shame. I started to confide in Irene about just how bad the monthly losses were – one month seeing losses of up to $50,000.
Irene initially managed the entire existing team, and she supported many team members to rise to new levels of confidence and leadership for the platform. But she was also giving me the real “tea”, and noted how the team had become a bit bloated – and because of this, less efficient. This lack of efficiency was not due to any fault of the team, but a result of the hodgepodge organizational structure I had created. So at some point in mid-2023, we made one of two rounds of layoffs. The first one reflected a broader editorial decision to discontinue our “somatics track” and re-focus our offerings on the original vision of disseminating yoga philosophy and subtle esoteric practices.
The somatics track at Embodied Philosophy was initially developed to expand beyond my own specialization and initial commitments at a time of abundance. The somatic field is wildly important and popular – and in many instances the somatics courses were more successful than the philosophy ones, making it seem insensible to cut them from our future offerings. But finding a broader inclusive message for EP about how the somatics side and the yoga philosophy side fit together was always a somewhat clunky and abstract exercise that led to a blurred and incoherent message of what our educational process was all about. I am grateful to a conversation I had with one of our teachers at a cafe in Oxford – Daniel Simpson – for pointing out to me that it was difficult to grasp from our website what the flagship offering was. While we have an expansive range of content, he shared how he thought the abundance of content could be leading to confusion about where to start – and as an educational platform, we needed to start refining and focusing our curriculum and vision again.
I chose to return to EP’s initial yoga philosophy mission and let go of the somatics focus, because yoga philosophy is what I know and what inspires me the most as my life’s work, passion, and intellectual project. I can bring more informed knowledge to the development of this curriculum, and because I am so clear about what I see as the need to disseminate esoteric wisdom teachings and practices, this was the most sensible way to focus the attention and vision and get back to the “basics.”
In this first round of layoffs, I met with each of the team members individually and kept my guilt in check while being honest about the facts and how truly sad it was for me to have to make this decision. Because all of the EP employees are deeply compassionate beings, they received the news with grace and understanding, and I am so grateful for what I see as their sensitivity to my humanity and how painful and difficult this was.
Reflecting Back: The Pragmatic Language of Leadership
The Embodied Philosophy project has deeply instilled in me the value of clear, professional, and ultimately pragmatic language. I take more time when I feel upset about something, letting any anger relax into clarity before speaking. The suggestion by my mother in childhood to “think before you speak” always felt somewhat incomprehensible – “what does that even mean?!” But I understand the wisdom of that with the experience of years, and I see how radical honesty can sometimes not be the best policy. If my goal is to connect-with and hopefully empower my employees, I need to start from an understanding of what each team member needs to feel seen, respected, and encouraged. The compassionate approach to leadership, in my view, is one that honors the vulnerabilities and unique emotional needs of every individual. The dry humor you share with one team member can be misunderstood and even experienced as destabilizing and negative to another team member listening in.
The decision to acknowledge and refine my approach to skilful communication I don’t see as “tone policing” myself, nor as “inauthentic.” It is a pragmatic approach to communication that is oriented around what others need to hear to feel supported and safe. Being a leader in this way has made me incredibly committed to pragmatism on so many levels – because wisdom is not a static doctrine but something that should be applied differently in different contexts, while recognizing that every relationship is different. If we cling to our ego, we lose the opportunity to co-create a shared communicative identity that is not anchored to a need for conversion, nor to a self-reinforcing and single-minded narrative that it’s “my way or the highway.” Leading with compassion and connection instead of ego is wildly important to support the contemplative health of a work-place environment. What I might think privately about certain things is irrelevant and impractical to share if such “truths” separate us from each other – or if it ultimately creates an intimidating environment where the creativity of others is silenced, muted, or ignored.
If there is one contemplative truth that has arisen from this experience for me, it is that true leadership is not about clinging to power in a way that makes others overly dependent and minimizes their agency. But neither is it necessarily about a laissez faire levelling of the sometimes necessary importance of structure — and even a responsive but stabilizing hierarchy.
An Experiment in Shared Leadership: “Contemplative Sociocracy”
At one point around 2021, I became obsessed with an organizational structure known as “sociocracy”. This incredibly beautiful organizational formula is built around the principle of validating every voice, and organizing meetings in a way that gives equivalent space to everyone – even establishing a framework for meetings that distributes minutes for others to share in an altogether egalitarian way. Out of my study and interest in this new organizational structure, I adapted the idea into what I referred to as “Contemplative Sociocracy.” For a period of time, we changed our meeting structure and tried to bring this new organizational structure into being.
While the experiment was beautifully interesting, it ultimately turned out to be not a great fit for Embodied Philosophy. Ultimately I was the one who decided to do the experiment, and therefore even the decision to experiment with it in the first place did not arise “sociocratically.” Also, it revealed other interesting truths about human difference. Not everyone wants to work in an environment completely lacking in hierarchy. While some are drawn toward such structures, others find it confusing and prefer the clarity of roles and a consistent distribution of responsibilities. Some feel safer and more confident in roles that don’t require them to share the burden of leadership, preferring to carry out project support functions while leaving the vision and brainstorming to others.
There is a widespread ideology operative today that hierarchy is a kind of “evil” that institutionalizes domination. If everyone is equal, so the thinking goes, then to not have that equality reflected in operations is oppressive and unethical. As with all such simplistic absolutes, non-hierarchical structures make sense in certain contexts and don’t make sense in others. What is perhaps more important is to approach questions of hierarchy or non-hierarchy in a pragmatic way, asking the question: “what is the right kind of structure appropriate to the truth and vision of this context?”
Too often today, we cling to definitive assumptions about what is right and impose these views on others in a gesture of self-righteous fundamentalism. What we’ve been learning culturally, I think, is that such reductive valuations often explain away or ignore the exceptions of human difference that don’t fit neatly into one particular value system or another. Ultimately, I chose to experiment with sociocracy, because I wanted to stop being a bottle neck for decision-making at EP, and I assumed the problem was one of hierarchy. But the team reflected back to me that hierarchy was not necessarily destabilizing, and I could resolve the bottle-neck issues without completely transforming the culture of work without enough inspiration from those involved to bring it into being. At the end of the day, while the idea of an orderly meeting structure seemed elegant, it was ultimately experienced as a kind of lumbering, overly-structured process that felt more stifling than liberating, and turned the spontaneity, openness, and friendliness of EP meetings into stiff, courtroom-like affairs. So one day, we simply gave it up and returned to the more creative and adaptive style that wasn’t really broken in the first place.
While we gave up “Contemplative Sociocracy”, we retained a commitment to the contemplative behind the scenes. Following the breakdown of our staff morale following the pandemic, I felt the pressing need to bring some of the contemplative wisdom to the backend of Embodied Philosophy. In one particularly esoteric experiment, we began every team meeting with a recitation of the Gaṇapati Atharva Śirṣa Upaniṣad. I wanted to bring some contemplative practice into our staff meetings, because if the contemplative commitment doesn’t extend into the workings of the organization, isn’t something fundamentally out of alignment? It was a short-lived commitment, largely surrendered through a conversation with Matt Bramble, in which he pointed out why he thought it was not the best choice for a practice. Because this chant is central to my own sādhana, and because my sādhana expresses my deepest passion and therefore my greatest vulnerability, I was initially quite heartbroken by his critiques. I might have even burst into tears in a Ptown restaurant, much to Matt’s chagrin (I may have had a couple martinis). But ultimately he was right about choosing that particular practice, even if the decision to bring practice into our meetings in general was ultimately a good way of subtilizing our attention — so that we could be more open and spacious at the start of our meetings and conversations. So a specific Sanskrit chant that reflected my own commitments was replaced by a more open-access meditation period that allowed for individual staff members to bring their own practices to the table.
From Collapse to Clarity: Irene Barber & the Path Ahead
Just before Irene came on board, I was in a very vulnerable place as a leader. Misunderstandings and awkward readjustments of orientation – coupled with unskilful and disorienting transitions – had exhausted the team and begun to circulate as a less than enthusiastic attitude toward my leadership. I took this very hard, because I’ve always been easily prone to “rejection dysphoria.” When I start to feel the whispers of distrust, I struggle to avoid spiralling into illusory assumptions based in paranoia.
Being the sole executive can be a lonely place, and I recognize that I was always at my best when I shared that space with others. With Jesse, Matt, and then Irene, I could lean on the wisdom, confidence, and clarity of these strong and capable people, because sharing the burden of executive decision-making has been a necessary way for me to distinguish between my wiser instincts and the contractions stemming from my own insecurities.
With Irene, I found the person who could help carry me through a decision that simply had to be made – which was the devastating truth that I had to let almost the entire team go. This felt like a failure, and the guilt of putting my team into a new state of financial insecurity in a job market that had become increasingly difficult was heartbreaking for me, because I felt responsible for them. But in holding on too long, I was ultimately bypassing my own needs and deepening my own financial hardship, and Irene was the one who helped me re-frame this decision as altogether necessary, as a natural process shared by most businesses, and as ultimately something that – while sad and certainly a loss – was to be celebrated as simply the right thing to do.
The devastating sadness of letting go of the team, and the fear I had about having those difficult conversations, was met with a level of love and understanding from each of them that reveals just how special these people are. They understood the reasons, accepted the truth with grace, and they compassionately reflected their awareness of how difficult this was for me. That experience itself was a teacher, ultimately communicating the truth that a storm may shift the atmosphere, changing the ground beneath our feet, but can ultimately become the fertile soil for something new.
It is always risky to decide to work with a friend who you have literally known since high school, but Irene was truly one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and she decided to stay on with me to help me transition into a new phase of a much more truncated version of Embodied Philosophy. Every colleague has taught me something valuable, but Irene has taught me how to let go, nourished by a vision of what letting go makes possible. Losing the team definitely translated to less ability to execute everything in the same way, but it also provided an opportunity to focus and streamline what Embodied Philosophy has always been about for me. And it also helped me begin stepping into an expanded role as an Embodied Philosophy teacher.
Back to the Heart and Becoming a Teacher
For those of you who have followed Embodied Philosophy for a long time, you might remember that the platform was for many years a place where different teachers taught many live courses. Every month featured a new teacher, and our certificate programs were taught by a variable range of faculty. During this time, I saw myself mostly as a content and course curator, and I prioritized giving other teachers a space to provide their offerings. I didn’t teach for the platform myself until offering a course on “Sāṃkhya Philosophy” in 2019 – and only intermittently after that for the Yoga Philosophy Certificate Program.
As the courses began to perform less well, every new monthly course became a risk that – more often than not – put us in the red. Because I had always been committed to offering teachers compensation that exceeded what a university lecturer would make for a comparable time commitment, our faculty costs gradually became unmanageable and financially unsustainable. Initially, we decided to pause the development of all new courses so we could reign in our expenses, and instead of launching any new courses we re-launched many of the past courses from our Wisdom School library.
But losing the live and online component definitely sapped some of the life and vitality from our offerings, and so if we couldn’t afford to host new teachers so regularly, one reasonable choice was for me to come out of a new kind of closet and teach more regularly for the platform. Perhaps every teacher suffers from a bit of inferiority complex, and I’ve certainly had plenty of that to work with. But that “inner saboteur” that is always there in the background need not be the governing voice. The need for live offerings without the resources to host other teachers thus aligned with a moment when I had started to gather enough confidence to put that inner saboteur in his place.
It was quite natural to prioritize other teachers in the first nine years of Embodied Philosophy, because at the beginning of this project I was still very much in the infancy of my knowledge. While I was a yoga teacher with a passion for philosophy, I hadn’t begun to fully digest the knowledge I was pursuing in a way that made me feel confident about putting myself out there. Over ten years of work during which I have curated and discussed so many contemplative traditions and topics, my work also became an education that expanded and deepened the meditation practice I started during the same time I launched Embodied Philosophy.
In 2015, I received this practice from Paul Muller-Ortega. I was just beginning to discover my passion for Non-Dual Śaiva-Śākta Tantra, which was partly catapulted by reading Tantra Illuminated by Christopher Wallis. At the end of that book, Christopher lists a number of living teachers teaching from this tradition, and naturally I researched every single one of them. But one in particular stood out to me, as I listened to an audio recording on the website for his school, Blue Throat Yoga. While all the teachers I researched had unique gifts, Paul had a clarity and potency that instantly inspired me, and I immediately signed up for a three-day dīkṣā (initiation) weekend in Lenox, Massachusetts.
Meeting and hearing Paul speak at the initiation weekend was an utterly life-defining experience. When asked if I had a teacher or “guru” before Paul, I had always responded with a somewhat suspicious skepticism of the notion of limiting oneself to a single teacher — even as I recognized the importance placed by many on the need for a lineage, or parampara. I had met many teachers, but I never felt like they were “my” teacher. Because I am skeptical by nature and need things to make sense philosophically, many teachers were quickly debunked in my mind for what I perceived to be obscurities or distortions that were out of alignment with a philosophical coherence that I needed to experience in order to feel grounded in the truth of any perspective or practice. Because this had been my experience of teachers up until that point, I assumed there was no such thing for me as “my teacher.” At best, I would say that “I have many teachers, and I learned something different from each of them.” This made sense at the time, because allowing one’s education to be monopolized by one point of view or another can lead to partial knowledge and perhaps even a kind of limited dogmatic understanding.
When I heard Paul speak, I had an experience I had never had before. What he taught made sense to me on a level that resonated with my entire being. This is it, I thought. This is the truth, and I know it in my bones. My encounter with Non-Dual Tantra demonstrated a tradition and philosophical perspective that didn’t require a leap of faith toward something that couldn’t be philosophically clarified. Everything that he transmitted resonated with me and was furthermore consistent and compatible with life in a way that would be a distortion to call “religious”, or even “spiritual”. It is philosophical, practical, but still deeply mystical. It theorizes how reality functions in a way that just feels transparently correct to me.
So I left that initiation weekend in a kind of rapture for study and practice, and was mobilized by a certainty that this teacher and this school of thought held a knowledge that I was deeply inspired to pursue. There was no inauthentic spiritual performance in Paul, no elite posture of “enlightened grandiosity”, but instead the wildly expansive transmission of someone who was in touch with a truth that was undeniably clear to me. I received my meditation practice and started practicing meditation twice a day, every day, with a level of commitment previously inaccessible to me. And because I was so inspired, I longed to have it all, and so I immediately signed up for his foundational course. When that course of study was completed, I signed up for every subsequent course until I was finally initiated as an Acharya (an authorized teacher of meditation) in the summer of 2020.
And yet, even following my initiation as a teacher in this lineage, I still felt that I needed to digest the knowledge more. While the codified processes that were so beautifully developed by Paul and the other advanced acharyas were consistent and reflected the importance of a sustainable and sequential process, it felt inauthentic for me to adopt these scripts and processes. And since receiving a meditation practice in this way was the most precious gift I’d ever received, I knew I needed to be fully grounded in my own understanding before I began offering such life-defining practices to others. Paul had always emphasized that we don’t devote ourselves to him in an act of guru devotion or subservient dependence. He is uniquely interested in empowering teachers, not in accruing acolytes; and he recoils from being called a “guru” – even though many in his kula relate to him as such. Instead of a form of guru-devotion that creates dependency, he revealed his integrity as a teacher in the way he taught us to devote ourselves to a deep and clear understanding of the teachings and practices themselves.
I took this very much to heart, and was honest with myself that there were still some gaps in my understanding that I needed to process before I could land in my own integrity as a teacher. Paul taught us that following the acharya-dīkṣā (the process to become an authorized teacher), an integrating process he refers to as “Acharya Level 2” begins. This is when a teacher becomes dedicated to a particular application of their role in the world – established on the basis of a certain cultivation made possible through a previous trajectory of study and practice. This is the moment when one develops the unique set of commitments that become a life’s work. Not simply a personal decision based on limited egoic interests, this inspired commitment arises from pratibhā – the ever-expressive creativity of reality itself – which organizes, congeals, and manifests itself in and as the mobilizing inspiration of an individual life. Pratibhā is the upsurge of aliveness revealed through deep study and practice, which clarifies how one’s unique contribution can integrate into the fabric of a much-needed contemplative culture.
My “Acharya Level 2” thus took me back to graduate school — this time with a more grounded understanding of the limitations and possibilities of academia. I started studying Sanskrit with Boris Marjonivic in 2020, and quickly realized that Sanskrit is extremely challenging. To develop any kind of proficiency requires commitment, dedication, and a long-view of the path toward even a modicum of skilfulness. I had a motivating reason to develop that set of skills, because I have always been very interested in bringing different philosophical traditions into a more fruitful and clarifying conversation.
I knew enough about the state of Sanskrit study to realize that there are so many incredible texts that are as yet untranslated, and I didn’t want to have to base my understanding solely on the translations of others. Translation always involves interpretation, and academic philologists (those who study history through ancient languages) are often rooted in translation and interpretation models that reflect objectivist commitments and sometimes a subtle performance of cultural bias. By contrast, a certain kind of creativity and contemplative experience is necessary to breathe life into certain texts – especially ones that are uniquely inscribed with deep esoteric knowledge. I wanted to develop my Sanskrit translation skills under the banner of what I’ll call “contemplative philology”, and so I applied to a program at the University of Oxford that I had had my eye on for some time — the MPhil in “Classical Indian Religions.” This is one of the only masters programs that teaches Sanskrit to students who may have come from different academic backgrounds outside the typical funnel of the “Classics.” In Classics education, ancient Greek and Latin are emphasized, and students cultivate the unique skills necessary to grapple with ancient languages that are structurally very different from modern languages. Coming from a philosophy academic background is not entirely unrelated, but it instilled in me skills of precision and argumentation that I feel are a necessary lens for an effective and illuminating interpretation of ancient Sanskrit texts.
Studying Sanskrit at Oxford was (and continues to be) a deeply humbling experience. I went in thinking that it would be a smooth ride given my preparatory years of study and practice, but this was the most challenging thing I have ever done. Stumbling through a translation at the direction of a teacher in front of a group of students (some of whom came into the program with a brilliant background in Sanskrit already) initially took the wind out of my sails. Being called upon randomly to express knowledge of Sanskrit grammar, or to do a translation on the fly without prior preparation, requires one to be okay with being just plain wrong — and sometimes feeling like a complete idiot. A previous student of the program who came to orientation said that she believed this program was the most difficult masters program at Oxford, and while I can’t speak for any other program, her warning certainly rang true for me.
As adults, many of us become increasingly uncomfortable with feeling like beginners. Children have more resilience in the face of being wrong, and it doesn’t so easily bear on their self-esteem or confidence. I’ve never been so scared in a class than when I was in my Sanskrit classes with Victor D’Avella. I would be riddled with anxiety about whether or not I would be called on next, and whether or not I would get a question that was outside my existing knowledge or understanding. While I don’t think fear is an effective motivator for everyone, and – to be fair – I don’t think Victor intended to instil fear in us, he was still a straight-shooting, rigorous, and brilliant Sanskritist who did not feel any apparent need to coddle us or tiptoe around our insecurities about getting it wrong. For some in the program, the intensity of this process and the commitment required didn’t work for them, and an initial cohort of seven students soon reduced to four. But I decided not to run away from the challenge and rest in the recognition that this was uncomfortable because I was learning; and as an adult, I have an opportunity to discover again how to hold space for the uncomfortable process of learning something new. Discomfort can be a motivating driver that reflects the necessary feelings of a shifted understanding, or it can morph into a paralyzing fear. Most of the time, it was the former – even if I was always not entirely sure that I would pass my final exams and graduate.
Thankfully, I did graduate from the program in 2023, and I took a year off before applying to the doctoral program at Oxford under my advisor, Diwakar Acharya. The second year of the MPhil was more focused on writing essays and the final dissertation, and given that writing about philosophy is one of my greatest passions, the end of the two year masters degree culminated in an extremely pleasurable experience of expressing what this educational process had given me.
I have long been curious about the relationship between Abhinavagupta’s aesthetic works and his Tantrik philosophy, and so my dissertation for the masters focused on the relationship between them – with the title “Infinite Poetry: Pratibhā, Rasa, and the Mystical Aesthetics of Abhinavagupta.”
My doctoral research builds on this work, with a closer focus on philosophical arguments of Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta’s pratyabhijñā (recognition) school of philosophy. While studying a philosophy rooted in Kashmir between the 9th and 12th centuries might sound like the kind of scholarly obsession irrelevant to modern life, I am deeply motivated by its ongoing relevance – not only in bringing non-Western thinkers into the broader conversations of philosophy, but also in clarifying a vision of reality that, were it to be more widely known, could provide resources for new and wiser approaches to life, relationships, and politics – resources that might help us get out of this mess of dogmatic ideologies and divisive rhetoric so prevalent today.
My initial impulse to build Embodied Philosophy because of a conviction that wisdom traditions matter – and that we need this knowledge now more than ever – has found its footing in a research project that is the byproduct of trying to make sense of how to clarify and communicate that original intention.
From Initiation to Application: The New Experiment of Sādhana School
My ongoing experience at Oxford has instilled in me what I feel to be a greater rigor and philosophical precision, but it also provided the kind of initiation that I needed to step up and teach.
The first experiment of my new teaching commitment at Embodied Philosophy started with a “5-Day Chakras Challenge” towards the end of my MPhil – which was less of a “challenge” and more just a course. In the summer between the end of the masters and start of the PhD, I taught a 30-Day Sādhana rooted in the teachings and practices of the Matsyendrasaṃhitā. A month later, I taught a 4-week course on one of my favorite texts, the Śiva Sūtras. In all of these courses, I recognized a consistent group of dedicated students — ones who demonstrated an inspired hunger for grounded textual study made accessible to the lives of modern practitioners. Following a survey sent to our students, Irene and I decided that, while not every EP student is ready for such a process, there is a core group of students who are uniquely open to a deeper, and more sustained process of study and practice. It also provides an opportunity to be part of a kula – a community of individuals bound by a shared commitment to the synergy of knowledge and contemplative experience. And so in the Fall of 2024, a newly focused offering called Sādhana School was born.
As many of you may know, when you’re a PhD student, you also generally have to teach. Unlike U.S. universities, however, teaching at Oxford is not required, but optional. So I decided to practice my teaching on the EP platform instead. The choice to begin Sādhana School at the same time I was beginning my PhD research was definitely a choice that reflects my habit of biting off a little more than I can chew, but as it has progressed and stabilized, I recognize how supportive it is to my studies. It also reflects my ongoing commitment to the role of the “scholar-practitioner” – serving as a bridge between often highly technical and somewhat dry scholarship and the community of intellectually curious practitioners who pursue knowledge from an intention to cultivate wisdom.
The first year of Sādhana School has completed three courses of study thus far (1: a survey of Yoga Philosophy; 2: Prāṇa & Prāṇāyāma; and 3: Rasa Theory), with a 7-day online retreat exploring Kuṇḍalinī beginning July 10th. The recent process of sādhana that concluded last week exploring the tradition of rasa theory reflects an important aspect of my PhD research. This tradition of Indian aesthetics has broad-ranging implications for the role of emotions in Tantrik sādhana, and yet this connection has often been neglected both by scholars and practitioners. The Spring sādhana was therefore a rich opportunity to do the work of bringing an otherwise quite scholarly discourse into the lives of seekers and practitioners. The questions that arose from students have provided an opportunity to clarify the connection, understand where explanatory gaps might linger, and begin work on a manuscript that will hopefully bring this important set of considerations and applications to a broader audience.
To teach and facilitate a process for inspired adults is an incredibly rewarding experience. To be in the company of people who are committed to growth, expansion, refinement, and transformation is to be surrounded by kindred spirits. These are not navel-gazing spiritual elitists who are bypassing the world’s problems to live in some spiritual fantasy. These are intensely alive beings for whom the śakti has shifted their lives in ways unique to each of them. That subtle shift toward contemplative meaningfulness has instilled in them a desire to explore knowledge that our popular culture has largely lost the perspectives, tools, and techniques to see and understand. Each and every student in Sādhana School is profoundly open and receptive in a way perhaps only possible in mature adults who have begun to grasp the ultimate point of education – a deeper point often obscured by the trade school model of education wherein one studies what will make the most money. In modern society, education has largely lost the original spirit of the humanities – wherein the focus of education is about a cultivation of wisdom, insight, wonder, creativity, and imagination. The modern humanities, in its understandable desire to assert itself in a secular realm beyond religion, has, in my view, thrown the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater.
I therefore see Sādhana School as an experiment in returning to the original spirit of the humanities. This spirit emphasizes cultivating the health of the human spirit within a vision of reality that finds meaningfulness everywhere. If the modern humanities often recoils from meaning in a deconstructive play of words that often confuses and conceals more than it reveals, then a humanities that prioritizes the spirit doesn’t shy away from acknowledging that life is ultimately an adventure of meaning. Even when skeptics deny that there is any meaning to life, in that very gesture of denying meaning a certain meaning is nonetheless asserted – namely, the “meaning of meaninglessness.” In other words, it is impossible to get outside meaning without invoking meaning in yet another way.
But, importantly for our considerations in Sādhana School, what does such a cynical worldview that denies meaning entail, and what are the effects of clinging to a vision of a meaningless world? A sobering acknowledgment of the failures of many modern religions – and their tendency toward dogma and doctrine – does not and need not imply that life is intrinsically meaningless. Things become meaningful insofar as we infuse them with meaning, and some meanings lead to distress, agitation, and ignorance, while other meanings change the world. Expanding the imagination through contemplative knowledge and embodied experience is uniquely capable of creating the conditions for a renewed enchantment of the world – not in the service of rehashing old mythologies or converting to a particular religion, but in counteracting the effects of a stale materialist dogma that has been useful for certain purposes but utterly deadening for the purposes of contemplative fulfilment.
Looking Forward: A New Era of Embodied Philosophy
As I look back on these ten years of Embodied Philosophy, what I feel most is gratitude. Gratitude for every colleague who poured their heart into this work; for every student who showed up with curiosity, generosity, and courage; for every teacher who trusted us with their wisdom. Gratitude for the failures and the heartbreaks too, because they have been my most uncompromising teachers. They have revealed the contours of my own limitations, the edges of my vision, and the unexpected beauty of starting over — not from nothing, but from the fertile ground that only becomes visible when the storm clears.
Today, Embodied Philosophy is smaller. It is quieter. And yet, it feels truer to its soul than it has in a very long time. We are no longer trying to be everything to everyone. We are no longer racing toward expansion for its own sake. What remains is a focused commitment to what inspired this project in the first place: a space for rigorous study, meaningful practice, and the cultivation of wisdom that speaks to the depth of human experience.
This next chapter will not be defined by endless new offerings or constant innovation for the sake of novelty. Instead, it will be shaped by depth. By integrity. By the slow, steady unfolding of projects that matter — new publications that I hope will contribute something of value to the world, deeper study programs that honor the complexity of the traditions we engage, and collaborations that emerge not from strategic planning but from genuine resonance and shared purpose.
For those of you who have been with us on this journey — whether from the very beginning, or just in recent years — I invite you to stick around. To continue walking this path together. What comes next will not be about growth in numbers, but about growth in understanding, in compassion, and in the capacity to see clearly and act wisely.
If these last ten years have taught me anything, it is that contraction is not the end of the story. It is the pause between breaths, the fertile silence before the next expression of life’s creativity. And so, as we begin this new era of Embodied Philosophy, I strive to step forward with humility, curiosity, and an abiding faith in the power of wisdom traditions to illuminate our way.
Interested in joining Sādhana School?
You can join our 2025–2026 “school year” of contemplative study and practice with 50% off tuition — for the month of June 2025 only.
In celebration of Embodied Philosophy’s 10-Year Anniversary, we’re opening early enrolment for the next season of Sādhana School — our yearlong program for devoted seekers, scholar-practitioners, and those who feel called toward a deeper understanding of the esoteric mechanics of consciousness.
The guiding theme for the year ahead is “Ancient Texts, Living Paths” – a deep inquiry into how contemplative principles are theorized, practiced, and embodied in the modern world through foundational texts of the non-dual Śaiva-Śākta Tantric tradition.
This coming year, you’ll join a committed community for three immersive 8-week sādhanas and a 7-day virtual retreat, weaving together the study of root texts, daily contemplative practice, and guided philosophical reflection. Each seasonal sādhana will be anchored in one of several seminal Sanskrit texts – the Spanda-kārikās (The Vibration Sūtras), Netra Tantra (The Technique of the “Eye”), Yoginī-Hṛdaya (Heart of the Yoginī), and the Parātrīśikā Vivaraṇa of Abhinavagupta.