BIOGRAPHY
I’m Ashton Szabo, co-founder of Alchemy Yoga and Meditation Centers in Bali and the creator of Alchemy Yoga. I teach yoga, meditation, and philosophy at our centers, where much of my work takes shape through the daily experience of practicing, teaching, and building community.
Alchemy Yoga is a substantial part of my life. Creating Alchemy Yoga and helping build our centers has given me a place to bring my understanding into practice, develop the teaching, and keep learning from the people who come to our spaces. The questions I explore in writing are also questions we work with together at our centers.
My teaching brings together movement, meditation, philosophy, mantra, mythology, and contemplative inquiry. I’m interested in how these different ways of learning inform one another: how a physical practice can reveal something we’ve only understood intellectually, or how a teaching can change the way we experience the body.
The tantric traditions are a major influence and focus of my study and teaching. Tantra’s exploration of consciousness continues to shape my understanding of practice and our relationship with the sacred. I enjoy working closely with these teachings while finding language that connects them to recognizable human experience. Serious inquiry, humor, and an honest acknowledgment of our own limitations all belong in that conversation.
Alongside my work at Alchemy Yoga, I’m developing the Amṛta Tantra Project, a growing body of research, translation, writing, and practice materials. It gives sustained attention to the sources behind the teachings and asks what they invite a practitioner to understand, embody, contemplate, and integrate.
Across these different parts of my work, I keep returning to the relationship between understanding and living. What we discover in practice matters in how we listen, how we meet difficulty, and how we care for one another. That is where the teaching continues.
My classes bring together movement, breath, mantra, meditation, mythology and philosophy. We work with the body as a place of inquiry, paying attention to what happens as we move, breathe, meet resistance, and find room for awareness and the choice of how to respond.
At AYMC, I teach through the elements, each offering a different way into practice. Earth invites us to explore stability and support; Water, fluidity and responsiveness; Fire, the capacity to meet intensity and participate fully; Air, spaciousness and movement; and Ether, the stillness and awareness within which experience unfolds. These qualities give us something to feel and investigate in our own bodies and lives.
I like to give people something to explore. That might be a physical challenge, a story from the traditions, or a question that follows you home. There’s room for effort (or ease!), stillness, curiosity, and humor. You don’t need to arrive with a quiet mind or have everything figured out.
Through Alchemy Yoga, I invite you to develop a practice you can inhabit for yourself: to feel more clearly, understand your own patterns, and discover how the teachings become meaningful in your life. What happens on the mat matters in how we listen, relate, and meet the rest of our day.