Tag: books
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Why I Appreciate Solo Travel
Last summer, I was walking my dog in Kitsilano when I stopped short. What a surprise! An assortment of travel books lay on a grassy boulevard, neatly arranged around a tree. It was exhilarating just to see the place names. Two weeks later, guess what. A new batch of travel…
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Yoga Books: A Confession about What I Read (and Don’t Read)
“Could you recommend a yoga book?” a new student, Margot, recently asked. She wanted a basic book to refresh her memory on poses and their names. I immediately recommended my very first yoga book, Yoga: The Iyengar Way, by Silva, Mira, and Shyam Mehta. As a beginner, I liked the…
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Why Learn Yoga Pose Names?
“The Sanskrit words all sound alike,” I once heard a yoga student say. “I’m just not motivated to learn pose names.” She was otherwise a keen student. Although she took up yoga later in life, she’d done other types of movement work and had strong body awareness and self discipline.…
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Trouble Getting Started? Make It Doable
In May, walking past a Little Free Library in Kitsilano, a book title caught my eye: 3 Minutes to a Pain-Free Life. That very day, I was finalizing a blog post on chronic pain. What a coincidence. The book was “like new” and I couldn’t resist taking it. Written by…
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Seeing versus seeking
Writing a memoir is much trickier than it seems. It can come across as indulgent, fake, or just plain boring. If the theme is obviously philosophical or spiritual, there’s even greater risk of grating on the reader. So I kept my expectations in check when Ray Brooks approached me about copyediting his…
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The Inner Game of Yoga
I don’t play golf, but I recently read W Timothy Gallwey‘s The Inner Game of Golf (1981). A few years ago, I read his classic The Inner Game of Tennis (1974), a favorite among top coaches including Steve Kerr and Pete Carroll. I don’t play tennis either, but I’m interested in Gallwey’s…
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How to eat an almond croissant
One winter afternoon in Vancouver, I sat at a cafe, drinking tea and writing in my notebook. Occasionally I’d open the novel I was reading, check my iPhone, or gaze out the window. After a while, my friend arrived. Amid our conversation, I noticed a grey-haired man seated nearby with an espresso and an almond croissant.…
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Four months left in 2015: What will you do with it?
“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.” If Carl Jung is right (and he probably is), I haven’t been a blogger lately. I had high hopes to post frequently in August. After all, I had a few weeks’ break from yoga teaching. (In contrast, last summer in Pune I was immersed and extra alert…
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Reading list: India
In late February, I got the green light to go to Pune in August. (Among Iyengar yogis, “going to Pune” means going to study at the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute.) Five months to prepare. To me, this meant buying Lonely Planet India, finding an apartment in Pune, booking flights, getting vaccinations, avoiding…
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Reading, doing yoga, and other “essential” activities
Last month I found myself at YVR, awaiting a flight, oddly without anything to read. I skimmed the magazines and books, noting the jacked-up Canadian prices. Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club, which I recognized from a review, caught my eye. Flipping through the book, I saw a…
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Where’s your psoas? Your sacrum? Your big-toe mound?
If a yoga teacher refers to your psoas, do you know what she’s talking about? The Iyengar method of teaching yoga is precise and detailed. Instructions are conveyed visually (through demos) and verbally (through words). Teachers sometimes discuss whether specific anatomical terms should be used. Is it better to say…
Yoga Spy 