YogoLogo doesn't invent anything. It takes ideas that wiser people worked out long ago, translates them into plain language, and arranges them into one framework. This page names where they come from — the traditions, the teachers, the books — so you can see the ground the map is drawn from, and go to the source yourself whenever you want.
Crediting them openly is the whole point. This knowledge belongs to everyone, and no one should need to know Sanskrit, own the right books, or have the right teacher to reach it. Where a tradition has a master, you'll find them named here, with a line on why we reach for them.
The traditions we draw from
Three traditions form the spine of the framework. They were chosen because, in very different tongues, they point the same way: toward a quieter, clearer mind. Each has its own page on this site — these are the voices behind them.
Yoga
The whole structure — the eight limbs, and the idea that yoga is the quieting of the mind's chatter — comes from Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, a short, dense classical text that is the primary source for everything here. For making the physical practice clear and safe, we reach first for B.K.S. Iyengar (Light on Yoga, Light on Pranayama), the teacher who, more than anyone, brought yoga's precision to the modern world. The practical framing also draws on the Bihar School of Yoga (Swami Satyananda Saraswati) and the teaching lineage of Santosh (Yogadarshanam). The older philosophy behind it all — the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Samkhya system of mind and matter — is held at one remove, named as the tradition's inheritance rather than drawn from directly.
Stoicism
The Stoics — Greek and Roman philosophers who taught that a good life comes from living by reason and meeting calmly what we can't control — are met first-hand, in their own words. Marcus Aurelius (Meditations), an emperor writing privately to himself; Epictetus (Discourses, Enchiridion), who was born a slave; and Seneca (Letters). For a modern way in, Donald Robertson (How to Think Like Socrates). The school was founded by Zeno of Citium, with older roots in Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle — named carefully, since they come before the tradition rather than belong to it.
Buddhism
For the Buddhist thread — how attention and awareness are trained — the clearest single guide is Walpola Rahula's What the Buddha Taught. The practice itself draws straight from the Pāli Canon, the earliest record of the Buddha's teaching (the discourses on mindfulness and on the breath). For the craft of meditation: Culadasa (The Mind Illuminated), Larry Rosenberg (Breath by Breath), and Sam Harris (Waking Up); with the teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh, Ajahn Brahm and Joseph Goldstein.
Companion readings
Alongside the three, a few traditions are kept as companions. They add to the picture of the body and its energy without being load-bearing — drawn on with care, and kept honest about what they are.
Ayurveda
India's classical system of medicine and daily rhythm, met through Vasant Lad (Ayurveda: The Science of Self-Healing). Its classical roots — the Charaka and Sushruta Samhitas — are held at one remove, reached through Lad rather than directly.
Traditional Chinese Medicine
A way of reading the body's energy and balance, drawn from Harriet Beinfield & Efrem Korngold (Between Heaven and Earth) and the classical Huangdi Neijing (the Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic). Held honestly as a reading of the body — a way of seeing — not a branch of modern medicine.
Reiki
A Japanese practice of healing touch, drawn from the living Jikiden ("directly taught") lineage — Tadao Yamaguchi (Jikiden Reiki) and Hayashi Chujiro's treatment guide — tracing back to its founder Mikao Usui and to Chiyoko Yamaguchi, who kept the lineage alive. Some of it, by its own tradition, is passed only teacher to student and never written down.
The body and the breath
The physical side of the path — posture and breath — has its own teachers, mostly modern and mostly recognisable. For the body: Leslie Kaminoff (Yoga Anatomy), Jason Crandell, and — for the slow, quiet style of yin — Bernie Clark (The Complete Guide to Yin Yoga) and the lineage of Paul Grilley and Sarah Powers; with Thomas Myers (Anatomy Trains) for how the body's connective tissue links up. For the breath: James Nestor (Breath), Patrick McKeown (The Oxygen Advantage), and Dan Brulé (Just Breathe).
Alongside the books, the framework is grounded in my own years of training and practice — formal yoga and yin teacher trainings, and the hours on the mat and the cushion that turn reading into something lived.
Modern voices, at arm's length
These are thinkers I've found illuminating, named on the pages where their ideas appear — but kept at arm's length. The traditions lead; these modern voices echo them, or sharpen them, or give an old insight a name a twenty-first-century reader will recognise. A few ideas genuinely start with them, and those are credited as theirs: James Clear on identity-based habits and the loop a habit runs in; the hedonic treadmill — the well-documented way we drift back to a settled level of happiness after good news and bad; and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi on flow, the absorption of being lost in a task.
Others are drawn on lightly where they help — Ram Dass on "loving awareness," Kristin Neff on self-compassion, Carol Dweck on mindset, Daniel Kahneman on how we feel a loss more keenly than a gain, William Irvine on wanting what you already have, and Cal Newport on deep work (held at arm's length, since here single-tasking is a practice, not a productivity trick); and, for the reader who suspects all of this is soft, Dan Harris (10% Happier), the news anchor who came to meditation a hard-nosed skeptic and kept his title deliberately modest: a trainable skill, named without a single inflated promise. (Not the Sam Harris above; they share only a surname and a subject.) They illuminate the path; they don't replace the traditions that map it.
An honest note
These traditions don't agree about everything. A Buddhist and a yogi would argue about whether there is a self at all — the Buddhist teaching of no fixed self (Anatta) against yoga's unchanging awareness at the core (Purusha). YogoLogo doesn't paper that over. It draws the practical overlap — the place where they point the same way — and names the real differences where they matter.
That's the discipline behind every page: draw only from these sources, attribute every borrowed idea, and never claim more for the science than a source actually says. Resonance, not proof. The full working list of what each page rests on is kept behind the scenes; this is the short, honest version — the teachers worth thanking, and worth reading yourself.
The path is the goal. Start where you are.