At some point, every serious practitioner must ask whether yoga, as they practice it, is truly enough. Is the path we return to actually meeting the deeper needs we carry? Are the experiences we cultivate on the mat—or on the cushion—reaching us in the transformative way we once believed they would?
Is practice genuinely changing us at the level of our being, or is it simply helping us manage symptoms more gracefully?
And ultimately: is the way we are engaging the practice enough to bring about the transformation we seek?
The tradition has answers. Woven through the same ancient teachings that gave us postures, breath practices, and meditation techniques, there runs a vital — and oddly missing — second thread. Almost entirely overlooked in the modern world, it is the contemplative thread that was intended to be integral to asana, pranayama and meditation practices. If you know where to look, you can find these teachings clearly described as essential. Without these contemplative foundations woven into practice, even the most dedicated asana or meditation discipline cannot fully deliver the deeper promises yoga speaks to—the outcomes that matter most to all of us.
Only through these teachings—outlined in the ten yamas and ten niyamas of the Tantric Haṭha tradition—does yoga begin to create the kind of transformation it has always promised: not just on the mat, not just within the body, but in the quiet moments beyond practice—in our relationships, our worldview, and the way we relate to ourselves and others.
Only with these contemplative threads can we hope to engage neuroplasticity to truly change who we are and how we move through the world.
The Gap No One Talks About
Most of us came to yoga through the body. We learned to breathe, move, and perhaps even be still. We’ve all felt that shift—the moment the nervous system softens and the mind, even briefly, grows quiet. In those moments, we touch something real: a sense of clarity, spaciousness, and perhaps most profoundly, a feeling of coming home to ourselves.
And because of that, we keep returning.
Many of us also carried, somewhere beneath the dedication, a version of the same hope: that if we went far enough — if the practice became refined enough, if we reached some sufficiently advanced state — everything would finally resolve. In our early years it might have been the body we leveraged: if the postures became extraordinary enough, if we could put our feet on our head in a backbend handstand, the deeper problems would follow. Later, for many, the same logic migrated into meditation: if we could reach Nirvikalpa Samadhi — the seventh heaven of meditative absorption, where the seeds of karma are said to be wiped clean — we would arrive beyond fear, beyond anger, beyond the repetitive patterns that have followed us our entire lives. It is understandable. It is also, the tradition quietly insists, a fundamental misunderstanding of how transformation actually works.
Yet for all the gifts these practices offer, if we are truly honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge that something still persists. The same relational patterns emerge again and again. The same stories—about who we are, what we deserve, what is possible for us—continue running quietly beneath the surface.
Our reactions to others, our self-doubt, our inner criticism may soften for a time, but they often remain woven into the fabric of our experience.
Not always. But enough to matter.
You are in Śavāsana, the breath growing more and more subtle, the pull toward the present moment total, and then it happens — a complete suspension of breath, a complete suspension of anywhere but here. It is one of the most extraordinary gifts practice offers, and one of the things that keeps serious practitioners returning to practice, year after year. And yet. Even after having visited these depths of being hundreds of times, moments after our practice ends the phone rings, a familiar voice of a family member speaks, and a familiar reaction arises. Our exalted experience evaporates instantly and we experience being swept up in the ancient pattern. It is as if your śavāsana never happened.
This is a symptom of practicing with only part of what the tradition actually suggested as "the practice.” The physical and meditative practices are real, necessary and precious. But they were never meant to carry the full force of the transformation potential of practice.
What the Ancient Teachings Actually Say
The Tantric Hatha tradition — outlined in various texts including, the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā and Gheraṇḍa Saṁhitā, as well as the broader current of practice that most modern yoga ultimately draws from — does not describe a path built on posture and breath alone. It describes a path with a contemplative core that runs all the way through it.
Where Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras offer five yamas and five niyamas as ethical preconditions — gates you had to pass through before practice could even begin — the Tantric tradition offers ten of each, and places them not before the physical practices but woven into the practice itself. This is not a minor distinction. It reflects a fundamentally different understanding of how human beings actually change.
The Tantric teaching recognizes what neuroscience confirms: that experience alone, however profound, rarely rewires the deeper patterns of the mind. You can regulate your nervous system completely, enter states of extraordinary stillness, and still walk out of meditation and react to your life exactly as you did before. The exalted experience is not the mechanism of transformation. Contemplation is.
The Three Roots of Suffering — and What Actually Addresses Them
The tradition identifies three fundamental sources of human confinement, called mālas. Understanding them changes everything about how we approach practice.
The first is the deep-seated tendency to experience ourselves as a reflection of our circumstances. When things go well, we feel great. When they don't, we don't. The outer world is the constant measure of our inner state. It is worth understanding that this is not simply a psychological habit — it is neurological. The brain is wired, at its most primitive level, to monitor and identify with external circumstances as a survival mechanism. It works around the clock to keep us safe by keeping us identified with what is happening outside of us. This is not a character flaw. It is biology. And it means that the pull toward being our circumstances is not something we can simply decide our way out of — it requires a specific and sustained counter-practice. Asana, prāṇāyāma, and meditation work here — they create the pause, the inner reference point, the lived recognition that something in us exists prior to and independent of whatever is happening around us. This is real and important work. But it addresses only the first layer.
The second mala is the momentum of our patterning — the loops of thought, feeling, and reaction that repeat themselves across years and decades regardless of how much we practice. Science has helped us understand the mechanics of what the tradition identified long ago: on average we repeat the same thoughts thousands of times each day, loops grounded not in the present moment but in the accumulated weight of past experience. Each of our loops are shaped by our particular history, our particular wounds, particular associations. And they persist not because we lack discipline or sincerity, but because the memory arises, and if our association to that memory is unchanged, the loop is unchanged. This is the precise point the tradition addresses and that most modern practice misses entirely.
The tradition is unambiguous here: these loops cannot be broken by dismissing them, nor as a result of a collection of exalted experiences. The common meditation refrain to simply "return attention to the object" of practice — breath, mantra, chakra — when the mind wanders is valuable, but incomplete. Every time we redirect without inquiry, we do not simply fail to resolve the loop — we actively miss the opportunity to change our relationship to it. The redirection is not a neutral act. It is, in that moment, a closed door. Contemplation is the specific mechanism that interrupts the loop, examines its roots, and creates the conditions for a genuinely new response. This is where the specific yamas and niyamas of the tantric hatha tradition — forgiveness, compassion, humility, discernment, and non-hypocrisy — as deeply nuanced paths of self-inquiry do their most essential work. Instead of how the yoga sutra puts forth the yamas and niyamas as virtues to be performed, we find them presented as mirrors through which we begin to disentangle ourselves from unconscious patterns. This is the practice of leveraging contemplation to reveal where we are still gripping, still looping, still identified with a story that no longer serves us, while facilitating changes in the brain that create the shifts to free ourselves of our emotional, mental, and behavioral patterns.
The third and deepest mala is the hardened sense of being a separate self — the persistent feeling of isolation, of distinctness, of being fundamentally apart from the whole. This is the root from which the other two grow, and it is the one we can influence but never directly dismantle. What the tradition teaches is that sustained practice — somatic, contemplative, and meditative together — slowly softens the outer covering around this deeper identity, the way husks soften around a seed. The dissolution, when it comes, comes as grace. But the ground must be prepared.
Why This Matters Now
We are practicing in a moment of extraordinary complexity. The demands on attention, on resilience, on the capacity to remain coherent amid relentless change, have never been higher. And yet many practitioners are working with a version of yoga that was, somewhere along the way, quietly stripped of its most critical elements. The yoga that remained was powerful enough to keep us coming back. But not complete enough to touch the deeper parts of ourselves.
The contemplative practices of the Tantric tradition are not esoteric additions for advanced students. They are the missing layer that makes everything else work more fully. They are what allows the clarity found in practice to reach the places in us that postures and breath cannot access alone — the relational wounds, the repetitive patterns, the deep and quiet suffering of believing we are more separate and more limited than we actually are.
An Invitation
This is why I found myself turning toward the contemplative teachings of Tantra Yoga—particularly the yamas and niyamas preserved within the Tantric tradition and often absent from modern presentations of classical yoga.
It is also why I felt called to teach an approach to practice grounded in the conviction that yoga’s promise is real—and that fulfilling it requires engaging the fullness of what the tradition offers.
That means bringing the body, breath, and mind into practice as an integrated whole. It means using specific contemplations as tools for reshaping the brain and facilitating real, lasting transformation. And it means being willing to ask, with honesty and humility, where our practice has truly met us—and where it has not.
This is exactly where real transformation lives.
