Get Off The Wheel!

I feel deeply grateful for the opportunity to have begun my yoga therapy studies at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Stockbridge, Massachusetts this summer. It is the largest retreat center in North America and has been a leader in yoga education for more than 50 years thanks to their world-class faculty. It felt like a natural next step after practicing with Kripalu-trained yoga teachers and therapists since 2013 and completing my yoga teacher training with the Pranakriya School of Yoga Healing Arts in 2024.

Although Kripalu and Pranakriya are distinct schools, they are branches of the same yogic lineage, both rooted in the teachings of Swami Kripalu and grounded in the philosophy of Sanatana Dharma, or the “Perennial Wisdom”—the recognition that the world’s wisdom traditions arise from a universal truth that can be experienced directly through various spiritual disciplines.

This poem was inspired in large part by Bill Koff, who has the gift of bringing the history and philosophy of yoga therapy to life with a unique sense of fun and flair. Whenever he stepped to the front of the room, my “inner iPod” played the Bill Nye the Science Guy song: “Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!”

Each morning, he greeted us with rare gems by musicians connected to the Kripalu lineage which sang straight into my soul. One day in particular was a stand out for me, when he invited us not merely to study the history of yoga, but to enter it.

Through a guided meditation written by Richard Faulds, Bill’s voice gently boomed through the microphone guiding us through an embodied history of yoga. It was like my class entered a movie with Bill as the narrator, and together we honored the ones who walked the path before us.

Bill’s teaching helped me appreciate not only how yoga has evolved, but how it will continue to change in this post-modern era. I am curious about the role I will play in that evolution as the previous generation of teachers step back, leaving lineages vulnerable to dissolution, and AI is playing an increasingly bigger role in disrupting business-as-usual. My focus today is to study what I will have the responsibility to carry forward tomorrow (or not). There is an opportunity to look back and re-evaluate where we are and decide how to move forward. At the heart of the matter is how I show up to meet the moment, use what is helpful, and let go of what is not.

The poem that follows is intentionally tongue-in-cheek and affectionately irreverent. “Get off the wheel!” became a classroom catchphrase referring to the original goal of yoga — liberation from samsara, often depicted as a wheel of repeated birth, death, and rebirth. To “get off the wheel” (moksha) is to break free from that cycle and from the suffering and attachment that keep it turning.

The poem’s sarcasm is not directed at Bill, whom I adored, but at some of the grander ideas, contradictions, and occasional absurdities that surround the pursuit of “Enlightenment.”

Beneath the humor are sincere questions about yoga:

How do we honor tradition without becoming trapped by it?

How do we hold the tension between the limits of intellectual understanding and embodied knowing?

At the heart of both Bill’s teaching and this poem is the invitation to look back carefully, discern where you are, and participate consciously in how your yoga evolves (or not 😉).

you go high
and i go low
plumb to the very depths
of my deep dark soul

Reader, Reader
What do you want to know?
Really G-N-O, GNO!
Do you wonder, what, how or why?
Do you light your heart on fire
searching for that something
way up in the sky?

build the heat
watch it burn
strike it up
and make it churn

churn, churn, churn, baby churn
chalana, galana, wallana, ballana,
this is how you turn yourself
into a little baby worm

you get incensed
“this doesn’t make sense!”
that’s the point
that’s how you get
over the fence

anger anger, banger wanger
it’s not a simple act of grace
but something in which
you decide to keep pace

it’s not here nor there
it’s everywhere
The Wheel: on or off?
i decide without a care

truth or dare?
which, when, where?
this is neither here nor there
who, what, how?
have a cow!
play this game
til you feel no shame

heat of tapas, rounds of japas
More Shakti, More Bhakti
stay rooted down
give praise
to burn off the haze
unfazed

i’m not scared
but not i'm ready
i’m in love with The Wheel
and going back to bed-y

Audio reading for subscribers —