Research notes
Yoga
Research on where American yoga actually comes from — the styles, the people who carried them across, and one interpretation traced all the way down, because it’s the one I trained in. Plus a history of Yoga Tree, the iconic studio I came up in, and my own practice alongside it.
American Yoga Interpretations
A field guide from Vivekananda's 1893 address in Chicago to the present: every major style, its founder, how it reached America, and who holds it now. Four root systems account for nearly everything on a studio schedule.
TwoThe Baptiste Interpretation
The interpretation I did my teacher training in, taken apart. Six root traditions graded by evidence, three corrections to the official story, the 40 Days themes with their primary sources restored, and a reading list.
ThreeWhat Came From Where
Two charts. A family tree of every influence feeding the Baptiste line with the evidence marked on each line, and a pose-by-pose comparison of Sivananda, Bikram and Ashtanga against the Journey Into Power sequence.
FourBroad, Then Deep
Eleven years of practice and one of teaching, class by class. Four years sampling a hundred-odd teachers across a dozen San Francisco studios, then one method: Baptiste teacher training in 2025, and now assisting and teaching at the studio I trained in.
FiveThe Tree
Yoga Tree San Francisco, 1999 to 2020. A nightclub owner opened a studio on Stanyan Street and built it into the largest multi-location studio in the city, with 143 instructors on a single roster — Jason Crandell, Annie Carpenter, Janet Stone, Rusty Wells. Then a bankruptcy court in Delaware closed all of it in thirty-three days.
SixThe Craze Cycle
Pilates grew faster than anything else in American fitness between 2019 and 2024. Yoga grew more, in absolute numbers, and is still the larger of the two. Six ways of running a boom compared — Barry's, Orangetheory, CrossFit, Hyrox, calisthenics, running — plus the one that had no rooms at all, the brands that fell, and why the courts ruled that nobody can own a method of moving a body.
SevenAsana, in Parts
Sanskrit asana names are compounds, not labels — adho (downward) + mukha (face) + svana (dog) + asana. A lexicon of 175 words, 108 poses composed from them rather than spelled by hand, the sandhi rules that fuse them, and a builder that makes a valid name from any words you pick.
EightBuild a Sequence
A planning tool for teachers. Pick from 108 poses, set breaths rather than minutes, mark which ones get both sides, and get a running clock, a figure strip you can read at a glance, and a page that prints. The whole sequence lives in the link — no account, nothing stored anywhere.
Sources are cited on each page. Where a claim rests only on an organization's own account, it says so — and where something widely repeated turned out to be wrong, it says that too.