12/30/2025
Three end of year gifts for anyone following me here on my yoga page:
1. "Gentle Consistency" two words that have been very helpful to me this year.
2. Related to #1, here are two YouTube links for you to Maharishi Yoga Asanas pranayama, and meditation. The first one explains a bit more, and the second one is a bit more time efficient. What I like about this set of asanas is that I think I can do these until I'm 100 years old. I have done these most days since this past spring. For the meditation portion, either repeat a one word simple mantra preferably a word with no meaning preferably one given to you by a teacher that you never share with anyone, or count your breaths 1 to 10, or meditate however you'd like.
Full instruction:
https://www.youtube.com/live/D0saZMKHopc?feature=shared
Shorter practice, about 30 min asana, 5 min pranayama, 20 min meditation:
https://www.youtube.com/live/6UqeEOqhFlE?feature=shared
3. Lastly, one of my favorite yoga teachers shared these words today, you might enjoy them.
GHOST IN THE MACHINE
An Untempered Journal of Philosophical Rants
#16 of Too Many
The dream of the modern age is to remake the body into a machine—an organic complex of impulses and reflexes that can be diagramed, rewired and
remotely controlled. Philosophers have been clearing ground for this program since the seventeenth century, when Descartes declared apartheid between the body and the soul, and began dissecting bodies like they were crystallized rocks.
Thanks to new advancements in biotechnology, the mechanization program is now being implemented at glorious speed. Bodies have become the fertile soil out which new medical equipment grows. Using that equipment, we can grow and support life without the slightest regard for the soul.
The state is being reimagined as a centralized nervous system whose primary function is to coordinate the consumption and productivity of all of the bodies who are linked into its network. To be a citizen, on this model, is to be part of the machine. The bio monitor, the wearable screen, the implanted chip, the engineered gene, think what you will about the benefits of these late modern inventions, they all belong to the same rapidly advancing and dehumanizing regime.
The promises of the program are appealing. When the machine is perfected we will all be free. There will be no more turmoil, no more dereliction, no more vagaries of the rebellious spirit. Those recalcitrant aspects of our nature will be dissolved into a perfect solution of biological engineering and machine rationality.
Soon enough, even the perishable, organic structure of the body will no longer detain us. Our minds will be digitized, uploaded to the cloud, and protected by an impenetrable firewall, beyond which we can pleasure ourselves politely for all eternity.
Yoga, as an old contemplative art, is a form of meaningful resistance to the machine. In yoga we explore the body not as a complex of parts, but as a nexus of interconnecting forces that weave us into our surroundings. We feel our bodies not as closed shells of protective material that isolate our organs from the world, but as porous layers of sensation that open the world to our experience.
In yoga, we rediscover our bodies as organs of direct perception. We learn to use them to touch the world, not with our flesh, but with our spirits, in an apotheosis of real intimacy. In yoga, we rediscover our bodies as the conduits through which our souls engage reality. Through these bodies, we learn to feel the world as one magnificent whole, one living, breathing organism to which we all belong. And in sensing that same organism, we feel something sacred, something vital, something that has been taken from us by the machine—a tangible ground for human community.
This is why yoga is essential to modern life, as a soulful corrective to the leveling force of modernity. Yoga invites us to experience our bodies as they are, not as iterations of a soulless object, extending dumbly in time and space, but as soulful reflections of the eternal dimension of being. In yoga we realize this simple truth: The body is the soul, turned inside out.
Through these bodies, an entire world opens up, an enchanted world of warmth and brilliance, a world of love and generosity, a world of beauty and brilliance, of purpose and dignity, a world of limits, bound by birth and death, a world worth protecting with an organic, womb-born, mother-nurtured, and unapologetically human heart.
with love,
Ty Landrum
❤️
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