YOGA FOR EXERCISE. This curated collection by Zubin Shroff, director of the Bay Area studio, Piedmont Yoga, presents insights from some of today's most influential yoga teachers, and raises important questions about the significance of yoga in modern life today. Through personal interviews and Shroff's large format portraits, this book encourages discussion about the diversity and potential of yoga across many disciplines - from health, rehabilitation, art, recovery, healing traditions, and even social activism. Conversations with Modern Yogis is a visual and informative volume for all who are interested in the modern evolution of the timeless tradition of yoga.

Embrace Yoga's Roots: Courageous Ways to Deepen Your Yoga Practice explores the yogic traditions of the past, bringing them alive today, and preserving them for the future by examining what separates us, reflecting on our part, taking action for equity, and moving toward liberation together. The teaching format of this book offers tools, resources, and a framework for deep personal inquiry as readers explore: Separation: How colonization, cultural appropriation, and oppression results in trauma for yogis and separation from yoga traditions. Reflection: Understanding the causes of separation and our individual roles either supporting separation (knowingly or not) versus creating unity and equity in yoga. Reconnection: Exploring specific and concrete skills and solutions for living and practicing yoga as unity. Liberation: Integrate a more honorable and ethical practice in your life supporting personal growth by following the ancient teachings.

The first yoga text to outline a step-by-step sequence for developing a complete practice according to viniyoga--yoga adapted to the needs of the individual. • A contemporary classic by a world-renowned teacher. • This new edition adds thirty-two poems by Krishnamacharya that capture the essence of his teachings. Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who lived to be over 100 years old, was one of the greatest yogis of the modern era. Elements of Krishnamacharya's teaching have become well known around the world through the work of B. K. S. Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, and Indra Devi, who all studied with Krishnamacharya. Krishnamacharya's son T. K. V. Desikachar lived and studied with his father all his life and now teaches the full spectrum of Krishnamacharya's yoga. Desikachar has based his method on Krishnamacharya's fundamental concept of viniyoga, which maintains that practices must be continually adapted to the individual's changing needs to achieve the maximum therapeutic value. In The Heart of Yoga Desikachar offers a distillation of his father's system as well as his own practical approach, which he describes as "a program for the spine at every level--physical, mental, and spiritual." This is the first yoga text to outline a step-by-step sequence for developing a complete practice according to the age-old principles of yoga. Desikachar discusses all the elements of yoga--poses and counterposes, conscious breathing, meditation, and philosophy--and shows how the yoga student may develop a practice tailored to his or her current state of health, age, occupation, and lifestyle. This is a revised edition of The Heart of Yoga.

NEW YORK TIMES, USA TODAY, and PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BESTSELLER “Full of valuable insights to guide you.”—WILL SMITH “Thoughtful and life-affirming . . . a must-read.”—TONY ROBBINS “This book will put you back in charge of your own life.”—TOM BRADY A new perspective on the overused and misunderstood concept of “karma” that offers the key to happiness and enlightenment, from the world-renowned spiritual master Sadhguru. What is karma? Most people understand karma as a balance sheet of good and bad deeds, virtues and sins. The mechanism that decrees that we cannot evade the consequences of our own actions. In reality, karma has nothing to do with reward and punishment. Karma simply means action: your action, your responsibility. It isn’t some external system of crime and punishment, but an internal cycle generated by you. Accumulation of karma is determined only by your intention and the way you respond to what is happening to you. Over time, it’s possible to become ensnared by your own unconscious patterns of behavior. In Karma, Sadhguru seeks to put you back in the driver’s seat, turning you from a terror-struck passenger to a confident driver navigating the course of your own destiny. By living consciously and fully inhabiting each moment, you can free yourself from the cycle. Karma is an exploration and a manual, restoring our understanding of karma to its original potential for freedom and empowerment instead of a source of entanglement. Through Sadhguru’s teachings, you will learn how to live intelligently and joyfully in a challenging world.

A succinct, approachable guide to the origins, development, key texts, concepts, and practices of yoga. Yoga is practiced by many millions of people worldwide and is celebrated for its mental, physical, and spiritual benefits. And yet, as Daniel Simpson reveals in The Truth of Yoga, much of what is said about yoga is misleading. For example, the word “yoga” does not always mean union. In fact, in perhaps the discipline’s most famous text—the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali—its aim is described as separation: isolating consciousness from everything else. And yoga is not five thousand years old, as is commonly claimed; the earliest evidence of practice dates back about twenty-five hundred years. (Yoga may well be older, but no one can prove it.) The Truth of Yoga is a clear, concise, and accessible handbook for the lay reader that draws upon abundant recent scholarship. It outlines these new findings with practitioners in mind, highlighting ways to keep traditions alive in the twenty-first century.

"Sit Down, Be Quiet" is a rallying call for men to step in and start taking control of their health and mental well-being. Through practising yoga - working inside as well as out - and adopting a mindful approach to the everyday, you can take the first steps to a healthier, happier life in the here and now, including: Basic yoga poses to get started - Meditation techniques and breathing practices - How to lead a calmer, more compassonate life by practising modern mindfulness - Stories, photos and inspiration from men who teach yoga all around the world.

"In Peace Love Yoga, Jain analyses growing spiritual industries and their coherence with neoliberal capitalism. "Personal growth," "self-care," and "transformation" are just some of the generative tropes in the narrative of these industries. Jain illuminates the power dynamics underlying what she calls neoliberal spirituality, illustrating how spiritual commodities are rooted in concerns about deviancy, not only in the form of low productivity but also forms of social deviancy. Jain, however, does not just offer one more voice bemoaning the commodification of spirituality as a numbing device through which consumers ignore the problems of neoliberal capitalism or as the corruption or loss of "authentic" religious forms. Instead, she asks what we should make of subversive spiritual discourses that call on adherents to think beyond the individual and even out into the environment, claims to counter the problems of unbridled capitalism with charitable giving or "conscious capitalism," challenges to the imperialism behind the appropriation and commodification of products from yoga to mindfulness, calls for women's empowerment, and efforts to greenwash commodities, making them more environmentally "friendly" or "sustainable." Rather than a mode through which consumers ignore, escape, or are numbed to the problems of neoliberal capitalism, many spiritual commodities, corporations, and entrepreneurs, Jain suggests, do actually acknowledge those problems and, in fact, subvert them; but they subvert them through mere gestures. From provocative taglines printed across t-shirts or packaging to calls for "conscious capitalism," commodification serves as a strategy through which subversion itself is contained"--

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 (asana) 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 asana 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. Drawing on a wealth of rare documents from archives in India, the UK and the USA, as well as interviews with the few remaining, now very elderly figures in the 1930s Mysore asana revival, Yoga Body turns the conventional wisdom about yoga on its head.

People often equate yoga with Eastern religion, but Brooke Boon sees it as an exercise style that Christians can use to generate patience, strength, and deeper worship. Author and yoga instructor Brooke Boon combines her passion for Christianity with her commitment to health to introduce yoga as a physical and spiritual discipline that strengthens the body and the soul. Clear explanations and photographs make yoga accessible for any reader, and Brooke offers customized routines for readers struggling with specific issues, such as weight loss and anxiety. Through it all Brooke uses scriptural references to help reinforce the idea that by taking care of our bodies we can also take care of our faith.

How do we co-create safer yoga and spiritual communities? Through dogged investigative work, careful listening to survivor stories of assault and abuse, and close analysis of the cultic mechanisms at play in the sphere of Pattabhi Jois’s Ashtanga community, Matthew Remski’s Practice and All Is Coming offers a sober view into a collective and intergenerational trauma. It also offers a clear pathway forward into enhanced critical thinking, student empowerment, self-and-other care, and community resilience. Concluding with practical tools for a world rocked by abuse revelations, Practice and All Is Coming opens a window on the possibility of healing— and even re-enchantment. While Mathew Remski is the courageous, insightful, and compassionate author of this informative, challenging, and thought-provoking book, this book is clearly a group effort. Equal parts theory, training manual, expose, and memoir, Practice and All is Coming ... is a foray into the difficult topics of personal agency, spirituality authority, and cult dynamics. In addition to his clearly articulated understanding of the problems inherent in many spiritual schools, Mathew provides hope for healing the confusion and anguish that arise in the heart of sincere practitioners when they are betrayed by the revered powers in which they have placed their trust. If you practice or teach yoga, please consider this book an essential companion on your path. Christina Sell, author of Yoga From the Inside Out, My Body is a Temple, and A Deeper Yoga.