16/02/2026
TWO BROKEN KNEES AND A SHATTERED EGO:
MY JOURNEY TO NETI NETI
Perhaps I was always destined to be a heretic. For as long as I can remember, I've felt a mission to improve the world (and since you're in the world, that includes you), and I've never been afraid of delivering hard truths, even if they were blunt and jarring. Not to be unkind, you understand, but because these cold truths were "for your own good"—and chances are, no one else would be honest with you.
In my youth, this manifested as arrogance and self-righteousness—a mask to hide deep insecurities. I struggled desperately to admit when I was wrong. I did not feel at ease with myself, which, in the beginning, at least drove me tirelessly on a path of self-improvement.
In 2003, in my first career as a Product Designer, I went to my first yoga class in Montpellier, Cheltenham. Initially, I thought it a splendid way to meet a girl who was open to the more spiritual side of life—I was already reading Wayne Dyer and Neale Donald Walsch, looking for meaning and 'spiritual' answers. It turned out to be an Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga class—not that I knew any different. I was instantly hooked.
Two years later, due to a chronic health condition, I quit my job and travelled solo to Nepal and India for four months in search of answers. I know, I’m such a cliché! The following year, I attended a teacher training course in Thailand and began my second career as a yoga teacher.
For a long time, I wasn't taken by the philosophical side of yoga. Like so many of my Ashtanga peers, I was a pushy pose chaser. That was, until injury literally (and figuratively) brought me to my knees. At first, it was a torn meniscus. The message should have been clear, but I didn’t listen. Eventually, it would take both knees breaking before my ego broke with them. In the years that followed, my practice and my personality changed dramatically.
In 2011, I was accepted to train with Richard Freeman in Boulder, CO. I had finally found my principal teacher; it was like coming home. From here on in, Richard (as well as the late Michael Stone) would become my core teachers. Gone were the endless, military-style asana workouts, replaced instead with a rich interlinking of philosophy, subtlety, and subversive humour. From Richard, I developed a deep love of philosophy, and it was in Boulder that I first encountered the teaching of neti neti.
By 2016, I had opened a yoga studio with my (soon-to-be) wife and authored a book about the Enneagram with my mother. After the ego breakdown I’d encountered with my knees—which would eventually require surgery to fix—I’d probably begun to believe I had reached some kind of awakened state.
However, it was two other events that year that would shift my paradigms again. The UK voted in a referendum to leave the EU (Brexit), and across the pond, Donald Trump was elected President. Both events sent seismic shockwaves of disbelief and hysteria throughout the mainstream liberal order—and yogaland!!
Up until this point, like most people, I had never really been interested in world history, politics, or culture. But the reaction I witnessed towards those ‘deplorables’ (as Hillary Clinton called them), or the ‘gammon’ (a pejorative for typically older, white, right-wing men who are pro-Brexit), by both the media and the yoga community made me sit up and take notice. Something was profoundly wrong.
I’d voted to remain in the EU, mainly because I was ignorant of the argument to leave. However, the growing calls for the UK parliament to overturn a democratic vote, combined with the claim that Trump's presidency was illegitimate and his supporters were racist sexists who needed re-educating, rang alarm bells that I couldn't ignore. Suddenly, both polite society and yoga spaces had become unwelcome places for anyone who dared to dissent from the prescribed narrative. Critical thinking and polite discourse had been sacrificed at the altar of an ideology I hadn't yet fully understood.
Internally, I wrestled with myself. What was I missing? Was it me? Was I a ‘bad yogi’ for not buying the propaganda and falling in line behind other members of the yoga community? As I looked closer, wider cracks started to appear. Glancing under the hood revealed what my instincts had been screaming at me: brainwashing and manipulation of the truth were occurring on a massive scale, and all my liberal-minded friends and almost the entire yoga world were under the spell. My ego-dismantling knee injury, combined with my understanding of the human personality through my work with the Enneagram, and my own proclivity towards being highly ‘disagreeable,’ had immunised me.
Thus, my journey as a yoga heretic had begun.
Not satisfied with the prescribed explanation for the Brexit and Trump phenomena—that it was due to uneducated, bigoted, far-right fascists—I applied myself to learning about those off-limit subjects. The truth was far more complicated. I watched videos, read books, and listened to podcasts, sharing my findings in an effort to provoke others to awaken.
In 2019, I shared an Oxford Union address by Tommy Robinson—I’d been told he was a far-right, racist thug by the media—to initiate an open dialogue on a taboo individual. Instead, by all but a few more discerning friends, I was called ‘far-right,’ ‘racist,’ ‘nazi-apologist,’ ‘fascist,’ then unfriended and blocked. Rather than listen open-mindedly to an alternative narrative that challenged their entire worldview, the cognitive dissonance was too much for them to bear.
Time and time again, I witnessed supposedly senior yogis resort to ad hominem attacks, strawman arguments, and blatant denial of objective reality as they clung to their precious beliefs about themselves and the world. They were the ‘good guys,’ the righteous, the morally superior, and unless you agreed, you were one of the bad 'uns—stupid, bigoted, backwards, and evil.
By the time Covid lockdowns were enforced in 2020, and an untested, so-called vaccine was mandated by authoritarian governments upon a terrified global population as a requirement for their freedom, I had been fully red-pilled. With people locked in their homes and living online, wave after wave of social contagions infected new-age, spiritual, and yoga spaces. Conform or be cast out was the message, and most people obeyed.
We didn’t comply. We abstained from virtue-signal posting black squares and had long-term students of our yoga studio accuse us of racism and cancel their memberships. Signal that you’re an ally, post support for the ‘next thing,’ and don't, whatever you do, dare to stray from the collective moral order. Each new mind virus reinforced the need for courageous truthtellers to stand firm, practice discernment, and not be swept into ignorance by a tsunami of groupthink, social pressure, and media propaganda. It was more evident than ever that genuine practice would reveal the underlying truth, but superficial and performative practice would only reinforce the bypassing.
And so here we are. Living in a post-truth world where we are told what to believe by corrupt institutions, a complicit legacy media, and legions of zombie do-gooders.
The antidote? Neti Neti—the ancient tradition of self-inquiry through negation.
A User's Guide to Reality in the Age of Derangement
