Yoga beyond traditions
When I sat down with Ty Landrum, I thought we would talk about Ashtanga, alignment, and maybe a bit of yoga philosophy.
Instead, we went straight into the messy center of things: sorrow, heartbreak, masks, power, God, tradition, social media, and what it really means to use the body as a doorway into the soul.
This is my reflection after that conversation.
From Ashtanga to yoga as beyond
Ty is known by many as an Ashtanga teacher. For years he was deeply rooted in that lineage, teaching and practicing within it with full dedication.
What I did not fully grasp before this talk is how much he sees yoga as research.
We both remembered the old name of the institute in Mysore: Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute. That word, “research,” is not just branding. For Ty, yoga is an experiment, an investigation into something that is not obvious.
Not a checklist, not “do these poses, get this result,” but:
staying open to the unknown
discovering something new every time you practice
letting the body reveal what the mind cannot reach
He comes from academic philosophy, with a PhD and years of studying existential questions in books. But he said that yoga offered something philosophy could not: a more direct way to explore questions like “Who am I?” and “What is my true nature?” without hiding behind concepts.
The body as a research lab for the soul.
Losing ourselves, then finding yoga
One part of our exchange hit very close to home for me.
Ty described how many of us move from childhood, where life is mostly felt and spontaneous, into adulthood, where we start living in our heads. We get hurt, we protect ourselves, we climb out of the body and into concepts, roles, identities.
We stop feeling what we actually feel. We start feeling what we think we should feel.
Eventually something cracks. Even if our life looks good on paper, we feel brittle inside. Disconnected. Like strangers to our own heart.
That is often when people find yoga. Not as a trend, but as a lifeline.
In that light, yoga is not first about flexibility or strength. It is about becoming receptive again. Learning to listen, from the inside out. Letting the body and emotional world speak after years of being silenced in the name of success, productivity, or spiritual image.
The power of sorrow
One of the most powerful parts of this conversation was about sorrow.
In modern culture, sorrow is often pathologized or medicated away. It gets thrown into the same basket as depression and treated only as a problem to fix.
Ty made a clear distinction:
Depression: often comes with doubts about meaning, belonging, and worth.
Sorrow: the natural expression of a broken heart, of frustrated desire, of life not matching the story we wrote for it.
He is not against biochemical help when needed. But he pointed out how quickly we try to bypass sorrow rather than sit with it and learn from it.
If you think about it, most of us would not wish for our children to be spared heartbreak forever. Not because we are cruel, but because we sense that heartbreak matures the soul. It teaches something that no book, no technique, no motivational quote can.
Sorrow, when we stay with it, ripens us.
We also talked about creativity. There is a deep link between discomfort and creation, between feeling out of place and needing to express something. Creativity often appears when we realize there is a gap between our inner reality and the world as it is.
The creative act requires vulnerability. A willingness to remove masks. A readiness to feel. In that sense, sorrow is not an enemy of yoga or art. It is often the doorway.
Taking off the masks
I shared my own story: corporate advertising, good salary, good title, yet completely lost inside.
Yoga gave me a path back home. But even in the yoga world I saw the same patterns I had seen in the corporate one:
roles to play
images to protect
teachers frozen inside their own persona
students trying to become an image on a poster
Ty described how we create a new prison for ourselves even when we change field. We move from “successful professional” to “authentic yoga teacher,” but if we never question the role itself, we are just switching costumes.
The advanced work is not changing costume. It is learning how to put the costume down.
For him, yoga is self-inquiry. Not in a purely intellectual way, but as a living relationship with the question “Who am I?” that remains open. Not a fixed answer. Not a brand.
That openness is scary. It demands that we keep taking off the mask again and again.
Guru vs mentor
We also entered the delicate territory of gurus, mentors, and power abuses in yoga.
Ty has mentors, but no guru. I had a guru phase. I know the seduction of handing over our power and hoping someone else will give us final answers.
We talked about:
how easily spiritual relationships can repeat the emotional patterns of teenage love
how many abuses arise when a teacher is treated as the one who “completes” us
how naturally we project our own longing onto a person and give them more power than any human being should hold
Ty’s vision of a healthy relationship is much closer to mature mentorship: mutual, vulnerable on both sides, human. Not an all-knowing authority, but a person slightly further along a path, walking beside you.
Yoga, for him, is about growing into self-reliance, not dependency.
About God
When I asked Ty if he believes in God, he replied with a quote from Alan Watts:
If you believe in God, I do not.
If you do not believe in God, then I do.
For him, spirituality is less about belief and more about intimacy. The heart opening onto something infinite, incomprehensible, powerful. Call it God, universe, higher power. The name is secondary.
The point is not to sign a theological contract. The point is to stay honest with the experience of mystery and treat it with respect.
No sanskrit no yoga?
This part will be controversial for many.
Ty thinks it is actually good that yoga came to the West stripped of most of its doctrine and taught, in many places, without Sanskrit or chanting.
Not because he rejects the roots, but because:
people are hungry for connection, not more dogma
rituals can easily become a performance that distracts from honest inner work
removing some ritual layers can make it easier for people to drop into the experience itself
It is less about being faithful to an external tradition and more about being faithful to what yoga is supposed to do inside you.
That does not mean philosophy and tradition are useless. It means they should support, not replace, your direct experience.
From Ashtanga to Black Lotus
Ty did not leave Ashtanga because it was “wrong.” He loved it for around fifteen years. It shaped him deeply.
He described the shift more like this: Ashtanga had taken him as far as it could in the form he had learned it, and then something new began to emerge through his own practice, especially during the pandemic.
Black Lotus Yoga is that new expression.
Some key points that stayed with me:
It is built to be practiced Mysore-style, with space for exploration and self-pacing.
There are six series, each with three variants: white, gray, and black, ranging from more accessible to more demanding.
Within a series, you can adapt: one day more “white,” another day a bit more “black,” depending on energy, body, season of life.
The system is meant to keep evolving in response to real bodies and real practitioners, not freeze into a final dogma.
The name is powerful too. The white lotus is a symbol of transcending the mud and becoming pure. The black lotus, in Ty’s vision, draws darkness up from the mud, spreads it on its petals, and shows it to the world.
Not escaping sorrow, but holding sorrow and light together. Showing both.
What is advanced?
In modern yoga, “advanced” almost always points to:
deeper backbends
more extreme arm balances
more dramatic contortion
Ty and I questioned that.
He offered another definition that I keep coming back to: an advanced yogi is someone who can listen deeply to the inner movements of the heart and allow those movements to express themselves spontaneously, without being constantly filtered by external expectations.
Of course, some bodies are very athletic. Some people will always be able to do impressive things. That is not a problem by itself.
The problem begins when:
the pose becomes more important than the person
detachment is used to avoid emotional risk
spiritual concepts are used as armor against feeling
Maturity in yoga is not the total elimination of attachment. It is the ability to love, to attach, to take emotional risks, and still hold it all lightly enough that the fear of heartbreak does not control your life.
Not escaping sorrow, but holding sorrow and light together. Showing both.
Social media and performance
We closed by talking about social media, showing off, and the fine line between expression and performance.
Ty’s advice was simple:
use it sparingly
use it honestly
do not waste your life inside it
For me, this intersects directly with my own work around “being seen” online. You can use performance consciously as a hook, but if you live for the hook, you slowly disappear from your own life.
Yoga, again, becomes the place where you take the mask off. Then, if you decide to go on camera, you do it from that place. Not to prove, not to impress, but to share something true.
Watch the conversation
This article is my side of the story, filtered through my own history with Ashtanga, advertising, photography, and the long journey of trying to be honest with myself.
If these themes resonate with you - sorrow, creativity, tradition, gurus, social media, Black Lotus Yoga, what it really means to be “advanced” - I think you will appreciate hearing Ty’s voice directly.
If you watch it, I would love to hear what stays with you.
Which part of the conversation reflects your own experience with yoga, and where do you feel invited to evolve next?
