Untamed – by Glennon Doyle
(Buy on AbeBooks) (Buy on Amazon)
I’ve read this book recently and I found it incredibly inspiring, eye and heart-opening and simply full of deep wisdom. Not a typical yoga book, but definitely worth reading on. a path to growth.
Do Your OM Thing – Bending Yoga Tradition To Fit Your Modern Life by Rebecca Pacheco
(Buy on AbeBooks) (Buy on Amazon)
This book is one of my favourite way to introduce my students to the idea of what yoga really is about. It’s very accessible (definitely more accessible than some of the books written but the greatest masters of yoga… but those are really worth the effort too!) and I find myself often going back and re-reading some chapters.
Sometimes an hour-long yoga class is the only chance we get to connect meaningfully with our bodies and our minds during an otherwise hectic week. For a brief moment we’re able to let our worries melt away and feel relaxed, centered, and fully ourselves. Have you ever wondered how it would feel to bring that experience out of the yoga studio and into your everyday life?
In Do Your Om Thing, master yoga teacher and creator of the popular blog OmGal.com Rebecca Pacheco shows us how to do just that. The true practice of yoga, she says, goes deeper than achieving the perfect headstand—it is about bringing awareness and intention to every part of our lives. In her warm, personal, and often hilarious prose, Rebecca translates yogic philosophy for its twenty-first-century devotees, making ancient principles feel accessible, relatable, and genuinely rooted in the world in which we live today.
The Heart of Yoga – Developing Personal Practice by T.K.V. Desikachar
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.