Reflections from my Second 300-Hour YTT: Part II

A few weeks ago I graduated from my second 300-hour training, this time with Jonah Kest and Become A Yogi. Here are some insights:

Practice with an empty cup, because surrendering to the process is the only way yoga can do its work. It doesn’t matter how many hours of training you’ve done, or how long you’ve practiced, it matters how you show up on a daily basis.

Asana builds the cup, pranayama fills it, meditation drinks it, enlightenment is when the cup dissolves.

Knowledge lives in the mind; knowing lives in the spirit. True wisdom (prajñā) arrives when we admit we know nothing, because the deepest knowing has always been known.

Start with the body, then the senses, then the breath, then the mind, then ask yourself, “what witnesses all of this?”

Somewhere between the sweat and the silence, I started noticing how much of my practice is still built on preference - wanting yoga to sound like my language and move at my rhythm. Real growth begins when the practice stops catering to our comfort.

There were moments I caught myself thinking, “the f*ck is going on?” right in the middle of core work or fast vinyasa transitions. But those moments at the edge are where the ego burns off. Staying with it became its own form of devotion.

Core work will never replace Japa, but maybe they can go well together. Discipline is a form of devotion after all.

We bow to the seat of the teacher not because they’re perfect, but because surrendering keeps us open. Lineage is important, but the world is open-source now, so the strongest lineage is all of them combined into one. Go learn from as many as you can.

Katonah Yoga is home base for me, but Vinyasa was my first language. It feels good to speak it again with a new vocabulary. Every teacher and every style is a doorway (or seven doorways) back to the same source.