Welcome! Mind Yoga is a space for transformative philosophy—a practice-oriented approach to thinking, being, and healing. Drawing from global traditions, especially Yoga, Buddhism, and Vedanta and pairing them with the therapeutic insights of Western philosophy, this publication explores how we can use philosophical and spiritual practices to transform our inner lives.

Here, “yoga” means what it originally did: a discipline of transformation we willingly take on to move toward clarity, meaning and freedom.

You'll find cross-cultural reflections on suffering and healing, joy and stillness, ethics and mysticism, devotion and contemplation—tools for navigating life.

I’m Matthew. My background is in Eastern spiritual traditions and traditional medicine, but my mind and life have also been shaped by Western thinkers—Stoics, existentialists, phenomenologists, Jewish mystics, and more. Mind Yoga is where all of these meet. It is non-dogmatic, broad-roaming, and awake to the global crises we are facing. 

“Empty is that philosopher’s argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out sicknesses of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out the suffering of the soul.”

-Epicurus (340-270 BCE, quoted by Martha Nussbaum in The Therapy of Desire)

Why subscribe?

The Buddha said that we should seek, in whatever we do, to benefit both ourselves and others. I write this substack to help both myself and others achieve more tranquility and human flourishing in the challenging circus of life.

If you enjoy this substack, get value from it, and believe in paying people for their work, please consider a paid a subscription to support my work here.

Subscribers get full access to the newsletter and website, including the full archive.

Join the conversation

Be part of a community of people exploring what it is to be human (and what we can do about it).

Who Am I?

I have been obsessed with the question of how to avoid living the “life of quiet desperation” most adults seem to live since I was 12 years old. After years of experimentation with different lifestyles as a teenager I became a Forest Monk in the Thai Buddhist tradition at 21, and was a monastic for three years.

Since then I have continued to explore, experimenting with observant Jewish practice, Advaita Vedanta, Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and Western Esoteric traditions while all along the way reading philosophy and science. The philosophical teachings of the Buddha, Hellenic (particularly Stoic) philosophers, and the rogue genius Baruch Spinoza have been consistent conversation partners for me and still are.

I taught meditation for 15 years, and have worked as a Yoga teacher, Ayurvedic counsellor, Chinese medical acupuncturist, teacher, community leader and education director, journalist, writer of creative nonfiction and ghostwriter.

I have written extensively for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and have been published in Arc Magazine, Philosophy Now, Lions Roar, Ricochet, the Forward, Religion Dispatches, and elsewhere.

If you’d like to support this project, please upgrade to a paid subscription:

Memento mori, memento vivere-

Matthew

To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.