Archive for June, 2011

The Secret Power of Yoga by Nischala Joy Devi

by on Saturday, June 4th, 2011

The Secret Power of Yoga book takes the reader to the heart and spirit of Yoga by offering a commentary on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras that emanates from an intuitive, feminine heart centered approach.

Unlocking the secrets of this sacred text, The Secret Power of Yoga views consciousness as residing not only in the mind, but re-establishes the ancient wisdom that recognizes the essential role of the heart.

Where most of the standard translations advise people on what “not to do,” this book offers insight into what “to do”. The Sanskrit term ahimsa usually translated in the negative as “non-harming,” is interpreted here in the positive as “reverence for all life”.

Also unique to this accessible version of the Yoga Sutras is that each sutra includes practices and meditations designed to help the reader integrate each sacred jewel. The Secret Power of Yoga, explores and honors the unique significance women have in empowering their own, as well as others, spiritual realization.

Yoga Body by Mark Singleton

by on Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

My sense of it: instead of being a book about yoga, as if ‘yoga’ is a thing out there that can be defined and understood, Yoga Body is a history and exploration of how humans have thought about, and constructed stories about, whatever it is they have called ‘yoga,’ specifically during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Yoga being a human creation, this makes a lot of sense. Backed up by thirty pages of notes and bibliographies, Singleton describes the trajectory of hatha yoga, from the semi-scary, no-caste, wondering, naked, holy-man thing, soundly rejected by educated Hindus and Western scholars of the time, to the medicalized, secularized, physical culture (as in body building and cultivation) that yoga has become, familiar to us in the yoga classes of today.

Yoga is so prevalent in the modern world–practiced by pop stars, taught in schools, and offered in yoga centers, health clubs, and even shopping malls–that we take its presence, and its meaning, for granted. But how did the current yoga boom happen? And is it really rooted in ancient Indian practices, as many of its adherents claim?

In this groundbreaking book, Mark Singleton calls into question many commonly held beliefs about the nature and origins of postural yoga (?sana) and suggests a radically new way of understanding the meaning of yoga as it is practiced by millions of people across the world today. Singleton shows that, contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence in the Indian tradition for the kind of health and fitness-oriented ?sana practice that dominates the global yoga scene of the twenty-first century. Singleton’s surprising–and surely controversial–thesis is that yoga as it is popularly practiced today owes a greater debt to modern Indian nationalism and, even more surprisingly, to the spiritual aspirations of European bodybuilding and early 20th-century women’s gymnastic movements of Europe and America, than it does to any ancient Indian yoga tradition. This discovery enables Singleton to explain, as no one has done before, how the most prevalent forms of postural yoga, like Ashtanga, Bikram and “Hatha” yoga, came to be the hugely popular phenomena they are today.