Yoga Memoir

"How can I help others grow and transform if I haven’t done it myself...?" Cyndi Lee asks in the opening pages of her memoir, May I Be Happy, where she makes a surprising revelation. In spite of her success in physically demanding professions - dancer, choreographer, and yoga teacher - Lee was caught in a lifelong cycle of repetitive self-judgment about her body, which was infecting her closest relationships - including her relationship with herself.

Hell-Bent explores a fascinating, often surreal world at the extremes of American yoga. Benjamin Lorr walked into his first yoga studio on a whim, overweight and curious, and quickly found the yoga reinventing his life. He was studying Bikram Yoga (or “hot yoga”) when a run-in with a master and competitive yoga champion led him into an obsessive subculture—a group of yogis for whom eight hours of practice a day in 110- degree heat was just the beginning.

Examines how Black women elders have managed stress, emphasizing how self-care practices have been present since at least the mid-19th century, with roots in African traditions. How have Black women elders managed stress? In Black Women's Yoga History, Stephanie Y. Evans uses primary sources to answer that question and to show how meditation and yoga from eras of enslavement, segregation, and migration to the Civil Rights, Black Power, and New Age movements have been in existence all along.

Psychotherapist and yoga teacher Sasha Bates demystifies both yoga and psychotherapy, exploring the links between them and showing how each can be transformational. This sits alongside personal stories from members of the Fierce Calm yoga community—people who have experienced all manner of difficulties, whether due to neglect, addiction, abuse, anxiety, depression, stress or any of the other myriad ways in which we all struggle with modern life.

When her mother died, Brown ran as far away from yoga as she could until a running injury left her needing the very thing she was running from. It was there - on the mat - that she processed her grief and found her mother again. As she went deeper into the poses, she discovered she was more like her mother than she thought. Through it all, she found a deeper understanding of the practice, of the breath, and of the life her mother lost too young.

Casey Dancer is the true story of a thirty-nine-year-old part-time stripper, full-time real estate agent, and struggling writer navigating the chaos of love and ambition. Fresh from a tumultuous breakup and newly sober, Kristin finds herself struggling to re-enter the dating scene. When she falls for Lalo, a charming but troubled ex-coke dealer, their steamy affair leads to deep emotional conflict, testing her boundaries and stirring memories of past relationships.

Bei seinen Recherchen in einem Meditationszentrum läuft noch alles bestens, doch dann wird er eingeholt: vom Tod eines Freundes beim Anschlag auf Charlie Hebdo, von unkontrollierbarer Leidenschaft, Trennung und Verzweiflung. Sein Leben kippt, eine bipolare Störung wird diagnostiziert und Carrère verbringt vier quälende Monate in der Psychiatrie, wo er versucht, seinen Geist mit Gedichten an die Leine zu legen. Entlassen und verlassen lernt er auf Leros in einer Gruppe minderjähriger Geflüchteter ganz anders Haltlose kennen, aber findet auch Trost durch Musik und Gespräch.

It was a crime that shocked the country. On March 21, 2011, two young saleswomen were found inside a lululemon athletica store in Bethesda, Maryland, one of the nation's wealthiest suburbs. Jayna Murray, thirty, was dead—stabbed, slashed, and struck more than 300 times. Brittany Norwood, twenty-eight, was alive—tied up on a bathroom floor, her clothing ripped, her face bloodied. This is the full true story of what happened.

An inspirational memoir about how Jennifer Pastiloff's years of waitressing taught her to seek out unexpected beauty, how hearing loss taught her to listen fiercely, how being vulnerable allowed her to find love, and how imperfections can lead to a life full of wild happiness. Centered around the touchstone stories Jen tells in her popular workshops, On Being Human is the story of how a starved person grew into the exuberant woman she was meant to be all along by battling the demons within and winning.

Murder In The Yoga Store is the true story of the brutal killing of a beautiful young woman at a chic Lululemon yoga-wear shop. The grisly murder was committed on a pleasant Friday night in upscale Bethesda, Maryland, a leafy suburb of Washington, D.C. In this riveting narrative by veteran journalist Peter Ross Range, the author for the first time brings together the tale of what really happened in the yoga store murder.

Ten Yoga Students. One yoga instructor. Too many venomous snakes to count. In this humorous and spirited account, Jen relates her experience at a yoga retreat in Costa Rica along with nine other students brave enough to enter the wilds of the Costa Rican Osa Peninsula rainforest. Drunk with heady Costa Rican coffee, decadently pure Costa Rican chocolate and somewhere around eight thousand backbends, life is never dull. You’ll find yourself amazed, amused, salivating and begging, “When can visit the rainforest?” You’ll even chime in, “I’ll perform headstands if I have to!”

The tradition of the Himalayan sages that exists today is an unbroken chain that extends for more than 5,000 years. Undisturbed by the passage of time, this tradition is not concerned with teachings that apply only to a particular era of history or geographical region of the world - its entire emphasis is on the experience of the universal truth of who we are.

Born into the minor aristocracy (as Eugenia Peterson), Devi grew up in the midst of one of the most turbulent times in human history. Forced to flee the Russian Revolution as a teenager, she joined a famous Berlin cabaret troupe, dove into the vibrant prewar spiritualist movement, and, at a time when it was nearly unthinkable for a young European woman to travel alone, followed the charismatic theosophical leader Jiddu Krishnamurti to India.

For years, Jessica struggled with fluctuating weight and bouts of unhappiness. Like many of us, she found comfort in food and craved cigarettes and self-confidence. Then one day Jessica took her first yoga class in Katmandu. She lost 40 pounds and changed her life forever. In enLIGHTened, Jessica shares the core principles of yoga philosophy—not the poses and postures, but the ancient system of ideas that lies behind them, drawn from a 2000-year-old text called the Yoga Sutras.

What do howler monkeys, bats, torrential rain and yoga have in common? In this humorous and sometimes soggy account, Jen tells what it’s like to participate in a hot yoga retreat in the Costa Rica rainforest. In between backbends, intense forward stretches and shooing venomous snakes out of her bungalow, life in the rainforest is never dull. It’s just too bad that the yoga retreat must come to an end because Jen has decided she could spend a lifetime chanting and meditating with the howler monkeys. Come find out what it’s like to enter nirvana on Jen’s awesome Namaste Getaway.

While on her way to a yoga retreat in the Caribbean, Rachel Brathen collapsed in the airport and was rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. When she opened her eyes following the surgery, her boyfriend was at her bedside weeping, and she immediately knew something terrible had happened. She soon discovered that at the same time as her collapse, her best friend was killed in a car crash. Over the next two years, which should have been the happiest time of her life with her engagement and growing career, Rachel experienced trial after trial.

After ditching university, Kara-Leah Grant spent her 20s traveling the world in search of adventure, creativity, and a tribe of like-minded souls. Sex, drugs, yoga, and music festivals were simply part of the fun, until they weren’t. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder after leaping topless onto a moving logging truck in the wilderness of British Columbia, Kara-Leah returns to New Zealand to heal her soul, face her past, and uncover the deep truths of her innermost being. This is her story of healing, recovery and liberation.

In story format, US Marine Corps veteran and yoga teacher Rishi Eric Infanti outlines the parallel of his marine corps experiences and his journey as a yoga teacher. He threads the eight limbs of yoga from Patanjali's Yoga Sutras and his seven-week exposition to Mysore, India, to deepen his understanding and practice of yoga, Ayurveda, and fine art as vehicles for healing.

Sara has invested years dutifully climbing the corporate ladder to become head of public relations at a major financial-services company, but she can’t shake the feeling that she’s not where she belongs. When her latest boss, a wine-guzzling, drama-loving diva, finally drives her to the brink, Sara seeks sanctuary in yoga-teacher training—only to encounter an entirely different assortment of craziness and calamity. Where in the OM Am I? chronicles one woman’s journey from the fast-paced, cutthroat corporate world to the slow-paced world of yoga.

Play It Forward details the remarkable journey of Joan Barnes, founder and former CEO of Gymboree, and how she learned to align her inner life with outward success. Forty years ago Joan Barnes founded a play center in a church basement with $3,000. Determined to enable women to achieve personal and entrepreneurial success, Barnes led Gymboree to become an innovative leader in a new industry: activity-based early childhood development.