The name
People often ask me where the name comes from. There is no single answer, which is part of why I kept it. Four threads run through it, and they were not all there when I received it.
Aghora is the spiritual name my first teacher gave me in 2016, after a series of yogic rites of passage: long hours of daily practice over several years, all night sittings, a seven day water fast, and a few other things that belong to the room they happened in. You do not choose a name like this, and at first it does not feel like yours. It took me years to grow into it.
I still use my birth name in everyday life, and I have since distanced myself from that teacher (why I left Agama). The name is a different matter. Its frequency and its meaning have stayed close to my heart the whole way through, and if anything they have grown clearer with distance.
In Sanskrit, a-ghora means "not terrible," "not dreadful." Ghora is the fearsome, the dark, whatever you flinch from. Aghora is the state where that flinch has dissolved, because nothing has been left outside.
It is also one of the five faces of Shiva, the southern face, associated with fire and with dissolution. I find it telling that the face which burns everything down is the one called gentle. Whatever the fire takes was never you to begin with.
The Aghoris, the sect that carries the name, took the teaching all the way. They practice where others refuse to go, cremation grounds included, on the principle that if everything is Shiva then nothing is impure and nothing deserves fear. I have not sat on a cremation ground myself, but I relate deeply to that way of walking: fearless, willing to break a taboo when the taboo stands between you and Truth, willing to go into the darkest places because God is there too. I have never been drawn to the tidy, conventional version of the spiritual path. The razor's edge has always felt more honest to me.
In the Tantra of Kashmir, the tradition I trained in, the word has one more layer. The scriptures describe three kinds of shakti at work in a human life: the ghoratari, which pull us down, the ghora, which keep us where we are, and the aghora, which draw us toward what we already are. Aghora is the current that rises.
Say the name out loud and you can hear agora in Portuguese, ahora in Spanish. Both mean now.
I did not plan that, and I could not have planned it better. In Human Design, Gate 20 is the gate of the Now, and it is one of the prominent energies in my own bodygraph. In the Gene Keys it runs from Superficiality through Self-Assurance to Presence. It is also the energy the collective is being asked to step into from 2027 onward, as I wrote in 2027 & The End of the Expert: a shift away from borrowed authority and toward direct, present knowing. The meditation app I am building is called Aghora Now for exactly this reason. Whatever I share, whether it is breath, stillness, or the contemplation of your own design, is meant to bring you back here.
In ancient Greece, the agora was the open square where the city gathered to trade, to argue, to listen, and to be seen. The word comes from a verb meaning "to gather."
Yoga was never meant to be practiced alone forever. Presence deepens in company, and a teacher is only someone who sits with you while you find your own ground. The sessions, the writing, the app, the students who come through my door in Uccle: this is the square. You are welcome in it.