Yoga Memoir

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.

"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.

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.

Forty, chronically single, and up an extra 20 pounds, TV news producer Stephanie Krikorian fell victim to the Great Recession, finding herself suddenly unemployed. One unwanted pregnancy away from being a Lifetime Original Movie, Stephanie had to reinvent herself...and fast. So, to keep her head above water, she started ghostwriting self-help and diet books for a variety of well-known experts. However, she didn't just write each book she took on, she lived it - chanting, journaling, reflecting, reframing - whatever it took to get deep into the heart of each project.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Sanskrit, yoga means to “yoke.” To yoke mind and body, movement and breath, light and dark, the good and the bad. This larger idea of “yoke” is what Jessamyn Stanley calls the yoga of the everyday—a yoga that is not just about perfecting your downward dog but about applying the hard lessons learned on the mat to the even harder daily project of living. In a series of deeply honest, funny autobiographical essays, Jessamyn explores everything from imposter syndrome to cannabis to why it’s a full-time job loving yourself, all through the lens of yoke.

Donna has it all - a generous husband, two healthy kids, a Jersey Shore home - but believes something is missing. When she signs up for yoga teacher training, her carefully cultivated life begins to crumble. Her husband is having an affair. Dangerous childhood secrets resurface. Her mother dies suddenly. And she doesn’t even like yoga...yet. As Donna reels and heals, she discovers love, rescues dogs, and confronts yet another crisis of faith when her new fiancé falls ill.

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.

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.

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.

In the fugue of deep meditation, Jaya Devi tumbles outdoors into a muggy south Florida dawn. Sliding on a pair of orange flip-flops, she cuts across a dirt path skirting the ashram lawn. She glances down as a fat black snake slithers up her bare leg, wrapping itself tight. Astonished, she pauses, exemplifying the yogi’s art of non-reaction, breathing and assessing. Here, we enter into the wild wisdom-experience of a modern yogi who uses each moment as fuel for personal transformation.

Quando il mondo si è fermato, a inizio 2020, le frontiere hanno iniziato a chiudersi e gli aerei sono scomparsi dai cieli come le navi dai mari, Darinka si è trovata di fronte a un bivio: tornare a casa o trovarne una nuova. Lei ha scelto Bali. Per la prima volta costretta a restare ferma, inizia un’esperienza introspettiva in cui corsi di yoga e di meditazione, sedute mistiche con sciamani, guaritori e cerchi di sorellanza sono i nuovi mezzi di trasporto verso la radice dei propri tormenti interiori.

Has anyone ever asked you what the best days of your life were? When asked this, I closed my eyes and went back in my own past. And I thought of the days when life's most complex choices had a simple solution of Akkad Bakkad Bambey Bo, of the seasons when rains were celebrated by making paper boats, and of the times when waiting at the railway crossing meant counting the bogies of the train passing by. When I opened my eyes, it seems Like it Happened Yesterday! I look back, and it becomes a journey full of adventure.

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.

Kay Hutchison had a successful career, a beautiful home, and a loving husband until the day she woke up and said, "I'm leaving." Why on Earth did she walk away from it all and turn to a host of weird and wonderful treatments in search of answers to a question she couldn't even articulate? Part memoir, part guide, this is Kay's journey of self discovery as she faces up to her darkest moments via homeopathy, astrology, silent retreats, and reiki, whilst also dabbling in past-life regression, sonic therapy, shamanic retreats, and many more along the way. 

Rotten Minerva lays out a new framework for being “spiritual” while existing in this crazy material reality. In it, author Kelli Hastings sets forth her personal ideology of life with the help of movie quotes, scientific references, and citations to religious scriptures—all interspersed with hilarious stories of her own misadventures on the spiritual path.