Manaprana - A Yogi Wellness System

How Rick & Morty taught me to become the protagonist of my own life

Tom Kinniburgh — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 08:22:53 GMT

This week I was inspired by the Scottish International Story Festival. It’s not often I think about storytelling, or consider great storytellers, but I’ve been a voracious (I love this word, look it up!) reader!

I’ve always naturally enjoyed stories and creativity. I think my imagination always ran away with itself and created characters who I thought …

How Strength Trumps Flexibility: A journey to the bottom and back again

Tom Kinniburgh — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 15:18:50 GMT

This week’s essay is all around strength. Strength is card 024, a body card, with yang energy drawing energy from your root chakra. You need internal strength to perform most actions, but we often believe we’re a lot stronger than we are, until we have a catastrophic failure…

Card 024 Strength - Showing the 5x5 workout regime

My Pain Journey

In early 2023,…

Drop In, Dance Out: My Five-Year Love Affair with Ecstatic Dance

Tom Kinniburgh — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 12:45:15 GMT

Me on the decks for Ecstatic Dance

I stumbled into ecstatic dance (ED) around five years ago, right before COVID hit. For the last year, I’ve volunteered at a London dance, EDUK in Hackney Wick. It’s a great dance, with lots of international DJs each coming with their own vibe. What’s the music like? It’s a wild ride across all genres. Slow ambient opene…

Life's three games

Tom Kinniburgh — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 12:49:54 GMT

I loved working as a game designer. Games in all forms captivated me, so it felt natural. Over my career, I've worked on around 150 titles, mainly mobile games both big and small. The best game designers test relentlessly—nothing beats watching people play. Goals that seem obvious to you as a designer often stump most players.

Fun is deeply subjective; i…

The Workshop Game

Tom Kinniburgh — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 09:29:48 GMT

A balancing workshop where you try to flip over without touching the ground.

Most ideas come from books or talks. But real learning happens through action. Yoga encourages this. You don't just read about poses—you do them, guided by a teacher passing down ancient wisdom. The stretches, balances and breaths feel awkward and difficult for years. Yet, perse…

Manaprana: Making Enlightenment Playful

Tom Kinniburgh — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 10:36:43 GMT

Most people think of yoga as stretching on a mat. But it's really a system to reach enlightenment. Patanjali wrote sutras that have been expanded over the years into the formal tradition of Yoga. They teach that anyone can achieve enlightenment through practice. Yet practice is difficult and hard, a lifelong mission.

I learned this after leaving a corpor…