I still remember the first time I heard Kelly Morris speak. It was at Wanderlust's Speakeasy, and this teaching—raw, unfiltered, and profoundly challenging—would become my introduction to the woman who would later become my spiritual teacher, advisor, and friend.
What Kelly delivered that day wasn't your typical yoga conference talk. There were no platitudes about finding your inner peace or loving yourself exactly as you are. Instead, she offered something far more valuable: the truth about what yoga actually is, and why most of us are getting it completely wrong.
"I hate to break it to you," Kelly said to the room, "but if you're not meditating, you are not practicing yoga. You're practicing what one of my lamas calls Indian calisthenics."
This hit me like a punch to the gut. Here I was, someone who considered themselves a dedicated practitioner, being told that my entire understanding of yoga was fundamentally flawed.
Kelly comes from the lineage of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and in that tradition, yoga was created for one specific purpose: to create the circumstances within yourself that allow you to reach enlightenment. Not to get better abs. Not to reduce stress. Not even to feel more peaceful—though those might be pleasant side effects.
The goal is enlightenment.
"What makes you think that human being is your final evolutionary stage?" Kelly asked. "As if being a human being is so great."
She painted a picture I'd never considered: if we evolved from amoeba to ape to human, why would the process stop here? What comes next? Bodhisattva? Angel? And what drives this evolution forward?
The answer, according to Kelly and the lineage she represents, is love.
Not the bumper sticker kind. Not the "put it on a t-shirt" kind. Real, operational, lived love that compels you to act for the benefit of others—even at great personal cost.
She spoke of her teachers who entered three-year silent retreats. Three years of solitary meditation, no talking, no music, no reading, nothing but practice. Why would anyone do this? Because their hearts had opened wide enough to see the suffering of all beings, and they became "fed up" with allowing it to continue.
One of the most challenging aspects of Kelly's teaching is her unflinching presentation of karma. Not karma as some mystical force, but as a simple, inviolate law:
Every bad thing you experience comes from making someone else feel that way in the past. Every good feeling you have means you made someone feel good in the past.
Want love? Give it first. Want respect? Extend it to others. Want money? "Give it away," Kelly said, to audible discomfort in the room.
She addressed our skepticism head-on: "Does working create money? No. Plenty of people work and don't make money. Plenty of people don't work and have lots of money. We call them trustafarians, and you resent the shit out of them because you're ignorant and you don't realize that the reason they have money in this lifetime is because they were extraordinarily generous in a previous one."
Bitter pill? Absolutely. But it reframes everything.
Kelly pointed to our obsession with the first personal pronoun as the root of our suffering. "I, me, mine"—three words associated with a high risk of heart disease, she noted.
The alternative? "You. What can I do for you? How can I help you? How can I make your life better?"
This isn't about becoming a doormat. Kelly was explicit about that. It's about understanding, with wisdom, that the entire world arises from your own mind. If you want to change your world, you must change yourself. And the fastest way to do that is to stop obsessing about your own happiness and start working toward others'.
"The total amount of happiness in your world has come from you trying, wanting, wishing, praying that others could be happy," Kelly shared, quoting Master Shantideva. "The total amount of unhappiness in your world has come from you trying, wishing, praying, working so hard to make yourself happy."
In a room full of "spiritual" people, Kelly asked who was angry. Two hands went up.
"Really?" she pressed. "You don't get angry? Come on. You all look so serious. You look angry right now."
She called out what she termed "New Age fundamentalism"—the tendency to repress negative emotions because we've been taught they're "bad." But repression doesn't make anger disappear; it just pushes it underground until it erupts in destructive ways.
The yogic path, according to Kelly, isn't about pretending to be holy. It's about starting exactly where you are, looking honestly at your mind, and doing the deep psychological work necessary to transform.
"You come face to face with the biggest demon you'll ever meet, which is who? You," she said. "As Rumi said, if you haven't met the devil, just take a look in the mirror. Because that's where he is."
Perhaps the most practical instruction Kelly gave that day was about how to approach our practice:
Stop making it about yourself.
Get on your mat and dedicate your practice to someone who's suffering. Start with someone you love—that's easier. Eventually work toward neutral people, and finally toward people you actively dislike or hate. Why? Because all the hateful people in your world are arising from your own heart.
"Your concern for them should completely eclipse your self-concern," Kelly instructed. "Why do we want to get rid of self-concern? Because it's the number one cause of suffering."
This was revolutionary to me. I'd always thought of my yoga practice as self-care, as something I did for myself. Kelly was saying that this very orientation—making it about me—was keeping me trapped in the cycle of suffering I was trying to escape.
Kelly didn't sugarcoat the difficulty of this path. "The spiritual path is dangerous and hard," she said. But waiting for some perfect moment to begin—when you're at the right weight, in the right relationship, making the right amount of money—is futile.
"You're waiting for this imaginary configuration of events that is never going to happen. Why? Because you're in samsara. It doesn't get better here. Everything fails here. It is built to fall apart."
The only way out is through dedicated practice: 30 to 40 minutes of real meditation daily, not daydreaming or thinking about breakfast. Ethics must be impeccable—not lying, not stealing, not cheating. And you need a teacher from a lineage that has actually brought thousands of people to enlightenment.
"If you're in a meditation lineage that has not brought thousands of people to enlightenment, you need to ask yourself: what the fuck are you doing in that lineage? Are you going to be their guinea pig?"
The traditional approach, Kelly explained, is to find someone you consider to be a realized being, "put your head on their feet, and sob to them. Say, 'Please, please, please help me. I'm making a colossal mess of it all. Please show me how to do it.'"
When you can humble yourself enough to admit you don't know what you're doing, "many worlds will open to you that you didn't even know existed."
Looking back, I understand why this first encounter with Kelly's teaching was so transformative. It demanded that I stop playing spiritual dress-up and get serious about the actual work.
It asked me to examine my motivations: Was I practicing to feel better about myself, or to genuinely transform for the benefit of all beings? Was I using yoga as another form of self-improvement, or was I willing to let it destroy and rebuild me completely?
Kelly's voice that day—sometimes fierce, sometimes tender, always honest—cut through years of spiritual bypassing and showed me what real practice looks like. Not comfortable. Not always pretty. But authentic, powerful, and genuinely transformative.
Kelly ended that talk with a simple question: "Are you in?"
She was asking if we were willing to practice together, as a community, supporting each other toward enlightenment. The Buddha, she reminded us, said the next Buddha wouldn't be a single person but the Sangha—the community of practitioners working together.
That day at Wanderlust, I said yes. I didn't fully understand what I was committing to, but I knew I'd heard something true, something worth pursuing.
Years later, having had the privilege of studying with Kelly directly, I can say that this first teaching contained everything I would need to know. The rest has been about putting it into practice—imperfectly, slowly, but with genuine dedication.
As Kelly would say: "You have to become the change you wish to see in the world. Not tomorrow, not when everything is perfect. Now."
The practice isn't about what you look like in a pose or how many Sanskrit terms you know. It's about what's happening in your heart and mind. It's about whether you're willing to do the hard, unglamorous work of transforming yourself so you can genuinely help others.
That's yoga. Everything else is just exercise.
Namaste.
