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Angela Jamison

@angelazjamison

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Ashtanga practitioner for 26 years. Certified by Sharath Jois in 2017. @ashtanga.yoga.ann.arbor

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🥰🇲🇽🐯🇲🇽🥰

The ashtanga in Mexico is maravillosa. Thank you so much, everyone, for this serious and sweaty August, full of connection, recognition, sweetness, and strong practice.

Thank you everyone who came to class. It is the greatest joy to meet you. Thank you for trusting me in our practice together.

Thank you to the traditional ashtanga teachers from around Mexico, for your loving welcome and the time together. You are doing such good work, and I treasure our connection @angieashtanga @zai.gom @ashtangatete @mauriciovictorica @stephbenatar @toni.sin.joyas @ashtanganugget Thank you @dhawi.v.pienta for assisting mysore practice in Guadalajara and Chapala.

I adore you all ✨🐅✨

Planning to log out of IG again soon, in order to be fully present at my shala at home, in Ann Arbor. Will continue on Substack, writing Insideowl and co-editing Tiger Tracks.

See you in Mysore, India, come January 🫶 taken in Around The World by @angelazjamison

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2 months ago

✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

🦋🪔🌸Estuvo hermoso 🌸🪔🦋

Thank you everyone in Argentina and Chile.

My favorite teaching trip yet (in 15 years of this stuff), offering meaningful new friendships, synchronicities beyond reason, and recognition of the horror of war and envorionmental destruction—even as we don’t cease from celebrating the delights of the senses, true friendship, and brilliant art 🥰

The ashtanga-Shakti across the continent is fully of age: smooth vintages that intoxicate you while drawing you inside your alma. Spirits that take decades to distill, passing from heart to heart, and shala to shala🫰✨

Ashtanga is settling into an era beyond symbols and shibboleths, beyond insiders and outsiders, far far beyond leaders and followers. There is so much love. Thanks everyone, for looping me in.

Alas, it’s already been said that I’ll be back…🫶 taken in EARTH by @angelazjamison

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6 months ago

The Imaginal is not for the naive.

No, it’s a world that requires you to lose your innocence FIRST, before gaining entry at all.

Imagination is brain-bound. The Imaginal is jail-broken: thought forms alight in the social and cosmic orders, with minds of their own….

Gods want to be fed. Greece knew this, and later Rome, while India knew very early and never forgot. Access to the Imaginal begins with a breadcrumb, and proceeds over years to a feast.

For the first 15 years of our shala, I could fit the entire thing on my back. A midsize Ganapati, a candle, a cash bag, incense. The shala wasn’t things: it was method. It was people. It was my labor. Fifteen years like that. Minimalism and discipline and great, easy happiness 🪔

But that changed yesterday…. 🐘

*Continued at insideowl.substack.com*

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I’m gonna log off for a month, starting tomorrow. Time to go deep with my crew here at home. Jumping out of the attentional trash compactor of IG is required to access subtler levels of practice. Try it and tell me I’m wrong 🥰 I really really like my friends (talking to you) so no shade, and see you later 😘 taken in Gokulam, Mysore by @angelazjamison

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10 months ago

Split me open; I’m a tender coconut. We all are. The year opened with the machete of sudden death; closed with a sweet mineral recovery cocktail decanted by none other than nature and time.

Now Sharathji is a tree. A VERY different species from his grandfather. Sharathji is my favorite Sacred Fig, which anchors the Saturn 🪐[yes, Lord of Hard Knocks] temple in Gokulam. This exact tree shows up on this page with 🐍🐍 in Jan 2024, and a 🦋in Dec 2017.

Saturn’s Sacred Fig has a new haircut. Its great arms destroyed, its shade shorn down. So the trunk can grow even more dense, deep, and high. Look at the tender shoots sprouting right from the knife slice, straight starward arrows rooted into something extremely powerful. Soft launches into life itself, clustered together without doubt or manufactured duality.

I had 11 long seasons here with Sharathji, one quick month, and now the present November. This one is my very most loved among all the other most loved times.

This November is tender, wildly alive, a hivemind discarding dualities and growing unaccountably fast. The love factor is irrepressible, even awkward. There’s such evolutionary force inside us that goodwill leaks out despite efforts to remain cool.

Practice feels INCREDIBLE, spiritually and subtly. I’m 26 years older than when I started. No matter that psoas elasticity and joint mobility are on regression arcs. What’s sublime is a spinal, pranic, effervescence that is auto-poetic across generations and languages and grudges and grief. Most every heart here is part of it. These are souls who self-selected into this scene and chose to rebuild in the fallout from Feb.

Pranic economy watchers: THIS IS THE PLACE.

If your mind is wrinkled up in separation now or your heart is sad, may I recommend a strong quaff from the carafe of community? The right things are again happening, when people of wholesome intent come together.

There’s no hiding that we are putting the hardest year ever to an end. In 25 years in the scene, I’ve never witnessed such poor judgement. In myself included. We’ll be recovering from our bad calls for a generation. And now, we know how. We sprout 🌱

[Continued at insideowl] by @angelazjamison

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a year ago

I’m going to write about this coming month in Mysuru at insideowl.substack.com and insideowl.com 🐯🪔✨ taken in Mysore, Karnataka by @angelazjamison

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a year ago

I adore this rug that @angieashtanga lent me this week @puntoyoga A 2010-era KPJ classic with Sharathji sewn in later. It is soft and full of practice. Beginning to become great.

From another moment in the normal ashtanga storm cycle. Remember AYRI + ashtanga.com? KPJAYI + EZ Board? Grandparents of SYC + IG. Turn, turn, turn.

It’s thrilling in Mexico. I finish pouring myself out each day, full of emptiness. Satisfecha. Thank you all. It is everything to see you shining — and to know your names.

For 2 days we focused on Sutras 1.30-32. Obstacles are universal! If we attach to them, we suffer a storm of false identity. The trick is to put the mind in a point. Later, the stabilized mind has a shot at discernment.

So what are we gonna do?? With the manipulation, lies, elitism, end games, cruel words, bullying, delusion, doubt, uncertainty? With this storm of reactive grief? Not calling ANYONE out here. Not a single one of us. Mind itself contains these tendencies. It is no shame; it is human.

I shall let the weather pass. It is seasonal in ashtanga. I’ve weathered four festivals of our lineage’s wrathful aspect, and each has been a boon for sadhana. It’s strong. Clarifying. I thrive in weirdness. Many do.

Patañjali’s great tech. But without method, mind creates more duality:

We imagine there are sides. We take one, repressing intelligent questions. We rack up hours of screen time = hopeless Vata derangement.

Then, we will be manipulated by opportunistic leaders who want to « own » us. We will project our darkness onto strangers and distrust them, making ourselves lonely. We will suffer! Me included. No shame in it. This is the human condition without good method.

Let’s go home, yeah? Embrace someone and be held already? Steady the breath and the wildness of fixated mind. Be friends with the weirdness.

I choose to ionize with sincere students and, soon, get my soul to the source. Mysore is the potent seedbed of this wild worldly lineage, regardless of the storm cycle. See many of you for the cry we still need in November.

The next same old thing is coming. The storm’s sweat and tears just water new seeds 💟💟💟💟💟💟💟💟 by @angelazjamison

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a year ago

Hi. Not sure how it’s been going in IG world, but here’s a six-month hug redux. Starting yesterday, back to Nov 10.

Intent of the year: be sweet to each other. Ernesto said it to John the night Sharathji died. Next morning I passed it on to the group in Charlottesville. In a hall heavy-scented with stargazer lilies, sacramental chai, and the salt of a million tears. Let us be sweet to each other.

Half a year already. I’ve mostly taught at the Michigan shala. Trips also to NYC, SLC, MT, Paris, Amsterdam, Italy. A connection tour.

Sharathji’s death creates a void of structure and authority. A power vacuum. Another way to say this is freedom. Sometimes it may be more than we can handle.

It’s normal to respond with despair. Chaos. Opportunism. Intrigue. Fighting. Rejection. Escape. More trauma.

But what about choosing sweetness, treasuring, trust, reconciliation, vulnerability, creativity, discipline, passion. We have the freedom.

I feel…. Love is all that matters. Not in a fake stupid way. In a discerning way. Love is a warm blanket; love is a knife to cut away delusion.

I predict that this year’s feelings will leave long term traces. The flash of our shock will be a fixative for how we feel for years to come.

Now is a fertile time between paradigms.
There need be no new structure yet. It’s not correct. We need a year. For now we are halfway through replenishing the soil.

🤍🕯️✨ by @angelazjamison

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a year ago

Yoga resolves apparent opposites, teaching the truth of the principle that « like increases like. » However! Yoga can also generate duality where we need possibility and freedom. « Pratipaksha Bhavanam. » Cultivate the opposite.

I’ve been remorseful about the comedy emerging from my heart. When I’m asked for words on who Sharathji was, I voice mischief and dad jokes. It feels inadequate.

But I’m coming to see this as a duality he brought forth in me as a deliberate thing. I arrived in Mysore with a decade of practice in my cells, on the foundation of a rural farm kid’s instinctive lone-wolf discipline. My primary emotion: reverence for Yoga. My primary thought: that I’d never adequately pay my respects there. Good intentions, but what they looked like was SELF-seriousness. Humorlessness. Grinding refusal to bring my whole playful carefree truth to the mat.

Now I see how Sharath summoned the dork in me. Saw it under my reverence, self-abnegation and loyalty. His physical humor, mischief and dad jokes were a step towards our true nature….

Continued at insideowl.com by @angelazjamison

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2 years ago

With my dear friend @harmonyslaterofficial 💛🌟💛 by @angelazjamison

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2 years ago

🐅♾️🤍📿…. 👻 by @angelazjamison

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2 years ago

From 2007-2020 I shared a journal online. Most people found the writing dense and allusional, not really their thing. Totally normal response 😍 It was literally just the sound of the voice in my head. I am very internal by nature, but loved this project, especially the way its frequency brought a few treasured connections into my life.

In 2020 this voice in my head went quiet. I moved to the woods. Deeply listening to the trees and native plants took over. It was joyful to have almost no inner monologue at all. It seems the previous 15 years of serious sitting practice (Shingon + Vipassana) also played a role in that stilling. All that training probably just caught up with the cerebral cortex circuitry.

So insideowl died, I thought. I was really sad about it. The experiences of flow and connection had meant a lot. The silence was great but at times I also felt blocked. Energetically, in my voice.

It started wanting to squeak back in South America in August. The old bird was talking to me again, commenting on Rolf Naujokat’s memory, the priests of Pichiemu (Chile), the dancers of Tucuman (Argentina). The block on moving that voice into the world started to actually hurt.

My teacher’s passing rippled though the adhesions - and the avoidance - in me. Relationally, spiritually, emotionally, creatively. Maybe you felt this also?

One manifestation of this rippling is that insideowl.com is back. The old tinyletter notification system is defunct, and I decided not to import those addresses to the new subscription service. So the little bird is starting over. If anyone wants to subscribe, the new distro is at insideowl.substack.com/subscribe

The first new post is my memory of my teacher’s very good death. Crying as I write 😭🤍 by @angelazjamison

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2 years ago

How to begin this day, the 7th since his passing.

He had 15 epic years. Burning bright and fast for this world. And before that, for me, another 8, from the day in LA that he made me feel seen and safe and corrected my ut pluthi with a tap on the left shoulder and a « don’t cheat. »

Oh the meaning that crystallizes for us in his little mundane utterances.

My left arm ached the first week. I’d held his left hand for the first minutes he was in the liminal, and so much peace flowed into me. Radical sad okayness. He was just fine, a magnificent soul steady on the scene. His tone (ultra-aware, gentle, matter-of-fact) vibrated my heart for a week so I could be there for others.

And now, today, I feel the softer parts of me returning. The human level heartache that woke me covered in tears. AND!! The trickster he always was, especially the day of his very good death. Oh the stories we still have to share with this community….

I thought my heart was hidden, that somehow you my community did not know. Cards close to the chest. My altar is a strange Michigan reinterpretation of a puja room, a converted closet that no one but me can enter. Or so I thought.

But maybe I was as transparent to my community, and I was to him. Maybe the nourishment of being seen comes from you also. He was and will remain light on my path. Though in this moment a part of me almost questions the sunrise, as if Sun himself may be a trickster today.

Even so the next steps are obvious and easy. The track is laid before me, simple as before. Heart is stronger than ever. Somehow. He has put an energy in to us, into the spine and the mind, and right now I know he continues to visit some of you, in his trickster way.

So, that is clear. But today I will allow the emotions to have their say. They must be moved through and given back to Earth.

I’ll stick around instagram a little while but then will deactivate as usual so my mind and fingertips can do more subtle work in the classroom. Mysore style is an art and I’ll give myself to that over all, the best that I can.

Love this community so much. Each of you 🤍 by @angelazjamison

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2 years ago