I am one of those people who likes the idea of yoga but rarely manages more than a session every blue moon. But the blurb on the back of Donna Farhi's Bringing Yoga to Life promised "a practical discipline for everyday living...encouraging and straightforward." And much to my amazement, it has motivated me to spend a few minutes each day on the mat.
What is different about Farhi's approach? It sounds odd, but I responded to her voice — not in some woo-hoo way, but to its clarity and frankness.
Early in the first section, "Coming Home," she writes:
… we may notice that we consistently allow the urgent to override the important... that we have a deeply ingrained habit of giving the most time, energy, and commitment to things that ultimately are not very important...
And with that she had me. Allowing the urgent to override the important is what I do best.
In the book’s third section, “Roadblocks and Distractions,” she takes on sloth, strong emotions, blind spots, assumptions, and self-worth, and makes it clear that yoga practice will reveal much more than your ability to hold a pose. If she had not already acquired credibility in the earlier chapters — through her empathy for the difficulty of practice and her honesty in exposing fallacy in shortcuts — she would have with this:
I am always a bit suspicious of people who walk around spouting angelic proclamations about how wonderful and beautiful and full of light everything is... I'm not talking about the wonderful silence that one feels around a Tibetan monk, who really is that silence. I'm talking about a flamboyant, in-your-face, exhibitionist goodness that should have warning labels on it.
And at the close of the book:
All Yoga practices lead to seeing things as they are... Instead of running away, we can sit still, breathe, and watch.
Nothing easy about it. But Farhi inspired me to begin.
