People often say “what are you doing for Christmas?” and I will reply: “eating, sleeping, relaxing and doing some exercise”. That may sound indulgent or frivolous, but it’s genuinely true. By December I find most people, including me, are feeling worn out and a bit frazzled and taking time out to restore our balance is…
This is a huge book. Huge in size, huge in scope, and huge in terms of the content. My review here will not do justice to all c.650 pages of Yoni Shakti: a woman’s guide to power and freedom through yoga and tantra. Having finished reading it almost a year ago, in my mind it…
The notion that mindfulness and meditation can help someone deal with pain and physical ill-health might, at first, sound unlikely. How can sitting thinking about something (or not thinking about things) reduce your pain? In ‘Mindfulness for Health: relieving pain, reducing stress and restoring wellbeing‘, the two authors (Vidyamala Burch and Danny Penman), both of…
Peter Blackaby‘s book Intelligent Yoga was long-awaited when it was published in late 2012, and here’s my long-awaited review! (Long-awaited by me, maybe not by anyone else!) Intelligent Yoga is a thoroughly enjoyable book to read and is an interesting mix of biology, anatomy, evolutionary theory, neuro-science, humanism, and of course yoga. But at no…
I’ve been getting more interested in mindfulness recently, the ability to be focused in the moment that you’re in right now, and have blogged about the benefits of mindfulness recently. If you too are interested in how you can enjoy each moment more, become more productive in your work and life, then I recommend the…
Some of you may be looking for your first yoga book. Others may be interested in finding out more about certain aspects of yoga and want to add to your yoga book collection. There’s also the small matter of the festive season in a month with its gift-giving element. So, if you’re looking for yoga…
I have just finished reading The Dalai Lama’s cat by David Michie. Although the front cover explicitly says this is a novel, it’s not a novel in the conventional sense, not least because its narrator is a cat, but also because the ‘plot’ is rather light (cat abandoned, cat rescued, cat learns some Buddhist lessons)…
Over the winter new year break I received a pile of books from a friend who was having a clear out. One of them I read straight away: How your mind can heal your body by David Hamilton and I’ve meaning to blog about it for months because it’s very interesting, and has implications for…
A good friend gave me a copy of Haruki Murakami‘s book What I talk about when I talk about running. I have read and enjoyed a few of his novels and short stories and didn’t realise he does a lot of running and is a triathlete – he tries to do at least one marathon…
On a few long train journeys recently I have had the opportunity to read Yoga Body by Mark Singleton which is based on his doctoral thesis. There have been two long book reviews of this in the membership magazine of the British Wheel of Yoga and a follow up response in a subsequent issue. The…
