Recommended Reads

My Dad

My Dad is a head-teacher and he LOVES his job. The joy, ambition and patience he has for what he does is a constant inspiration. He has taught me to persevere, to believe in my abilities, to be calm in the face of upset and the beauty of finding a space to ones own.

This just about sums up his favorite past time... 

“In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.

(Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.)”
― Thomas à Kempis

The Forces With You!

One of the books my Dad wrote with my Aunty way back when.
This was always my favorite,  it explains (to kids) how forces such as gravity, friction, elasticity, and inertia and agents of force such as leverage and balance affect our lives.

The Forces With You, Tom Johnston and Sarah Pooley, 1987

Stories

"I still think the same way I thought as a child. I still worry. I'm still frightened... Nothing changes." "I've always had a deep respect for children and how they solve complex problems by themselves...through shrewdness, fantasy and just plain strength. They want to survive. THEY WANT TO SURVIVE."

 - Maurice Sendak

Interview by Andrew Romano and Ramin Seetodeh from BlankOnBlank.org
2009. Sendak's home in Connecticut
Read the Newsweek article
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek...

I love the internets and i love eavesdropping....

Workshop

I spent my Sunday in a beautiful (cool!!) studio in South London yesterday for yoga a workshop with Peter Blackaby . It was brilliant. 6 hours flew by and it has sparked so many interesting ideas about my own practice and the way I teach. If you ever get the chance to go to one of his classes/workshops then take it! I also highly recommend his book Intelligent Yoga, it's been a favorite of mine for some time now.  

"...Drop people into their bodies and encourage them to be honest with themselves about what they feel.

All yoga postures are there to help us notice how we are as we act and we can use the practice to change from working/feeling/responding from our own histories to creating new, more helpful patterns, which ultimately gives you choice."

 

Be Awesome!

 

I just pre-ordered this book, mostly because I LOVE Hadley's writing for The Guardian, but also because of the AWESOME title.

Here's what it's about...

‘Being single is often awesome. You can leave a party when you want to, whether that be 9pm or 9am; you don't have to live in fear of ever hearing yourself described as “my better half”; and you can spend all day lying on the sofa in your pajamas watching “Murder She Wrote” and eating peanut butter straight out of the jar’

Covering topics vital for any modern woman to consider (from ‘How to read women’s magazines without wanting to grow a penis’ to ‘Beyond the armpit: a guide to being a modern day feminist’), ‘Be Awesome’ tackles body image, sex, dating and feminism head on.

With an attitude that is unfalteringly funny, smart and surprisingly heartwarming, Hadley Freeman is a voice of sanity that every woman should hear.

And you can listen to a little snippet here.

Can't wait to read it...

Recommended Read

If you desire expert advice and information about London's wellbeing hotspots then the lovely Sally Lovett of Stretching The City has just released a book with Vespertine Press. I highly recommend taking a peek!

"It's a beautifully designed, hand-bag sized guide to London's healthiest and holistic places - including vegetarian, raw & vegan eateries, the very best yoga and meditation centres and fun places to work up a sweat. All the places featured in the book are drop-in with no hefty membership fees and each review is accompanied with stunning photography. There's also a 'Words of Wellbeing' section at the back which includes contributions from leading London experts in nutrition, fitness, yoga, meditation and holistic therapies."

You can see more and buy the book here: www.wellbeing-london.com and for more tips follow on twitter here: @Wellbeing_LDN 

 

Recommended Read

Intelligent Yoga: Re-educating Mind and Body by Peter Blackaby

Having been to a brilliant workshop with Chloe Fremantle and Peter Blackaby a little while ago I knew this would be a must read when I saw it and it really is! 

This book is a thoughtful, interesting and thoroughly researched interpretation of Yoga with a focus on the enquiry you should be having with your body and your practice. 

I read a review on Amazon since buying the book that described it perfectly, so i'm going to borrow... 'Blackaby has unpicked movement without fracturing it and teaches intelligent practice in the context of the known, the surmised and the lived, suggesting an approach to yoga that is rational, disciplined and fulsomely human and humane.'

Go read : )

The Sky. The Ground.

from here

: )

"It seemed to me now that a lot of people were invested in defining yoga as one particular thing. But for me, to experience yoga was to encounter its very slipperiness. This was the beauty of it. With so many overlaps and falsehoods, yoga's most defining characteristic was not its legitimacy but the very uncertainty of its paternity. Yoga was something we assimilated into our contradictory, multilayered world, something that was never wholly Indian, never one particular anything. "

-- Elizabeth Kadetsky, First There Is A Mountain

"...with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again..."

-- Lewis Hyde, The Gift.

Currently Reading...

First There is a Mountain - A Yoga Romance by Elizabeth Kadetsky.
I'll let you know how it goes...in the mean time here is a picture of the Author making shapes...

(image source)

The Human Body

“Two hearts could provide enough energy to drive a truck around the world in two years.”

The Human Body: What it is and how it works. from here via here

A book for you: Tantra Song

In the 17th century, long before Malevich, Arp and Rothko Tantric devotees in Rajasthan, India, used tempera, gouache and watercolor to create beautiful, highly concise drawings to mediate on… 

I have to admit i haven't been bowled over by the poems and writings in the book, but the images are exquisitely printed and well worth a look.

Tantra Song -Tantric Painting from Rajasthan

How Old is That Pose?

I recently finished reading Mark Singleton's brilliant book Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. 

It is a well argued, balanced view of the modern history of Yoga Asana and presents challenges on alot of what i've been taught in the past that really made me think. Much like a good recipe book i think this might be something i will be dipping in and out of for some time to come. What i found most appealing is the author does not impose a conclusion as to the rightness or wrongness of how you, I or others interpret the recipe for Yoga. The feeling i was left with is that Yoga (as commonly taught) has as much to do with ancient Indian spirituality and practice as my dad's dahl has to do with Indian traditional food - I still love it though - and loving it with the discipline of knowledge that cultures blend, invent and coalesce traditions is a welcome head clearing freedom! Well worth a read if you want to know more about why we practise the way we do, but if you don't here is an article by Mark Singleton from Yoga Journal that will give you a little taster...

Yoga's Greater Truth

A scholar embarks on a quest to trace the roots of his yoga practice back to their source. What he finds confounds and unsettles him, and, ultimately, provides him with a glimpse of yoga's greater truth.

By Mark Singleton.

The pale winter sunlight shone from the high windows of the Cambridge University library onto a dark leather book cover. In the hall full of silent scholars, I opened it and leafed through picture after picture of men and women in familiar postures. Here was Warrior Pose; there was Downward Dog. On this page the standing balance Utthita Padangusthasana; on the next pages Headstand, Handstand, Supta Virasana, and more—everything you might expect to find in a manual of yoga asana. But this was no yoga book. It was a text describing an early 20th-century Danish system of dynamic exercise called Primitive Gymnastics. Standing in front of my yoga students that evening, I reflected on my discovery. What did it mean that many of the poses I was teaching were identical to those developed by a Scandinavian gymnastics teacher less than a century ago? This gymnast had not been to India and had never received any teaching in asana. And yet his system, with its five-count format, its abdominal "locks," and its dynamic jumps in and out of those oh-so-familiar postures, looked uncannily like the vinyasa yoga system I knew so well.

Time passed, and my curiosity nagged at me, leading me to do further research. I learned that the Danish system was an offshoot of a 19th-century Scandinavian gymnastics tradition that had revolutionized the way Europeans exercised. Systems based on the Scandinavian model sprang up throughout Europe and became the basis for physical training in armies, navies, and many schools. These systems also found their way to India. In the 1920s, according to a survey taken by the Indian YMCA, Primitive Gymnastics was one of the most popular forms of exercise in the whole subcontinent, second only to the original Swedish gymnastics developed by P.H. Ling. That's when I became seriously confused...

to read more click here

Recommended Read

Judith Lasater's Relax and Renew: Restful Yoga for Stressful Times  Is a great place to start if you are interested in incorporating restoratives into your yoga practice in a balanced way. Reading this you might be inspired to include just one or two restorative postures in your daily practice. Or you may choose to devote one entire practice each week to restoratives...i certainly do!

Yoga for Americans: Indra Devi

Recommended Read

Fun and informative. The postures are geared towards winding down before bedtime and its definitely worth a read if you are interested in teaching yoga to your toddler.

Recommended Read

Yoga: The Art of Adjusting. Brian Cooper

Beautifully presented, with clear instructions and great photos. The book follows the Astanga Vinyasa primary sequence, but this teaching manual is aimed at teachers and students of Hatha Yoga, so don't be put of if you are not on the Astanga path...