McLeod Ganj sits on a ridge in the foothills of the Himalayas, in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. It is a small town, a few thousand people, reached by a narrow road that climbs for hours out of the plains. It is also the home, in exile, of the Dalai Lama, and of much of what remains of the Tibetan monastic tradition outside of Tibet itself.
I was eighteen years old when I arrived there in the summer of 2013. I was not a meditator. I was not a yogi. I was a kid who had been getting into enough trouble at home that my parents had handed me a service-trip pamphlet and told me to choose somewhere far away. I had wanted to learn to surf in Australia. They said no. The next thing in the pamphlet that caught my eye was a service trip in the Himalayas. I applied, and I went.
The first half of the trip was physical work — building a kitchen for a school in a remote village called Bala, hours from anywhere. The second half was in McLeod Ganj itself, teaching English to Tibetan refugees who had crossed the border on foot. In the mornings, before service, we did yoga. We sat in on talks by Geshe monks — Tibetan Buddhist scholars who had spent twenty-five and thirty years in formal study and practice. And one morning, late in the trip, we were brought to a silent monastery for a guided sitting meditation that lasted about ninety minutes.
I had no framework for what happened in that room. I was a high school athlete — football, basketball, lacrosse, all at a competitive level — and the inside of my own attention was a place I had never spent any time. I had no language for stillness. I had no relationship to silence. But for whatever reason, on that particular morning, in that particular room, something in me met something that had been waiting. The stillness was not empty. It was full. It was the most alive I had ever felt.
I came home from India different, and also exactly the same. This is the part of the story I want to tell honestly. The transformation was not immediate. It was not a clean break. I returned to high school, then to college, and for several years I lived a life that did not look much like the one that meditation had pointed toward. The shift was slow, and steady, and uneven. The people closest to me began to notice it before I did. What I understand now, with more time, is that practice is rarely a single arrival. It is a long quiet pull, and the work is to keep listening to it even when you are pulling against it.
In 2018 I completed my first yoga teacher training. Someone there recommended I read Paramhansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi. I tried. I was not ready. The book sat on a shelf for years.
In the summer of 2025, a close friend told me that the practitioners he respected most were the ones who had stopped sampling traditions and chosen one to dig a deep well in. I took the advice seriously. For six months I read almost nothing but Yogananda — his books, his lessons, his commentaries, his lectures. I began the formal correspondence course of lessons offered by the Self-Realization Fellowship, the organization Yogananda founded in Los Angeles in 1920 to bring these teachings to the West. And in early 2026 I enrolled in the meditation teacher training offered by the Ananda community in Grass Valley, California — a community founded by Swami Kriyananda, a direct disciple of Yogananda, to carry the lineage forward in the form of a living sangha.
I received my certification on April 11, 2026. My direct teachers in that training were Nayaswami Gyandev and Nayaswami Diksha, to whom I owe the foundation of everything I now teach. They were patient with a student who arrived already convinced he understood, and they were generous with a tradition I am only beginning to be worthy of.
A word about the tradition itself, for readers who are new to it.
Kriya Yoga is an old practice — older, by most accounts, than the postural yoga that has become familiar in the West. It is not a sequence of physical poses. It is an inner technique, a way of working directly with the breath and the attention to settle the nervous system into a state that the texts call stillness and that the body simply recognizes as home. Yogananda is the teacher who, in 1920, brought this practice to America. He spent the next thirty-two years here. The lineage of teachers behind him reaches back through his own guru, Sri Yukteswar, and his guru's guru, Lahiri Mahasaya, and beyond them into a tradition older than written record.
The central technique I teach, and the one that closes most of the meditations I lead, is called Hong-Sau. It is a practice of watching the breath while silently repeating the syllables Hong on the inhale and Sau on the exhale. The technique is simple enough to teach in a sentence. It is also, in my experience, inexhaustible. I have been practicing it daily for some time now, and I am still at the beginning of it.
This is what I bring to the work I do with clients. The yoga, the breathwork, the somatic practices, the nutrition, the strength training, the work with biometric data — all of it lives, for me, inside the contemplative frame. The body is the instrument. The nervous system is the door. The practice is what is on the other side.
Yogananda's own instruction to his students was that the teachings be passed forward, simply and faithfully, without distortion. I am one of many people, in many countries, attempting to do that. I do not consider myself a master of this practice. I consider myself a student of it who has been given permission, by my own teachers, to teach what I have been taught. That is the chain. That is the lineage. And that is the soil the rest of this practice grows out of.