Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

commenting on their relative merits and limitations as they might apply to different bodies, physical conditions, or stages of learning. Despite the newly discovered insights he might share in any instance, the consistency of his response is that it is definitely based in his immediate investigation as it builds upon his lifelong experience. Attentive students learn that this process, not the particular answer to any particular question, is the lesson.
    That lesson is generously and repeatedly shared, along with splashes of Ganga’s wit and stories, throughout this synthesis of his life’s work. After providing a holistic overview of yoga traditions,
Yoga Beyond Belief
shares a wide range of functional principles, practical skills, and realistic attitudes that will empower you to evolve your own yoga practice. It encourages processes of self-discovery that will truly free and deepen your practice and your life and, so, enrich our world.
    The introductory chapter, “Standing On the Shoulders of the Past,” inspires an evolutionary perspective for contemporary yoga practitioners. This perspective is strengthened in the next chapters of the book through a comprehensive survey of various yoga forms in “The Many Yogas” and through a detailed analysis of the origins, history, and psycho-physical-spiritual principles in “Hatha—The Yoga of Sun and Moon.”
    In the book’s central chapters, the practical insights of an evolutionary perspective are applied to specific aspects of Hatha yoga practice. “Finding the Ah Ha! in Hatha—Principles, Hints, and Insights into Yoga Practice” deals directly with many of the overarching questions, internal techniques, and attitudes yogis grapple with in developing a sustaining and dynamic personal practice. A practical context for pursuing a lifetime yoga practice is strengthened with more applications of concrete insights and experiential observations in “The Internal Alchemy of Hatha Yoga” and in “Useful Styles and Modes of Practice.” Together, the contents, experiments, instructions, recommendations, and insights offered in these central chapters can liberate yoga students to learn from their own yoga practice and become their own yoga teachers. Practical considerations become particularly focused in “Injury, Pain, and Healing,” where insights for healing and for learning from injury are offered from the author’s experience.
    The last group of chapters returns to a deeper exploration of philosophical contexts of yoga traditions in relation to contemporary practice. Yogic mappings of the subtle body are considered from an evolutionary perspective in “The Chakras—The Play of Matter and Energy.” Then the nature of daily life itself is explored as a personal path of unfolding enlightenment in “Meditation Is Your Life”; in this chapter he shows that the real essence of meditation is free from obligatory, routine practices and techniques. Finally, “Spirituality, Enlightenment, and the Miraculous” reconnects the practical with the philosophical and rejoins the personal with the planetary as the evolutionary potential of the human spirit is reoriented to a liberating navigation of inquiry and insight. This final chapter challenges established definitions of enlightenment and presents a new, accessible vision of spirituality for modern times.
    Attentive readers will learn how to apply insights offered here to their own experiences. Yoga students of all levels, from beginner to teacher, will learn to form and answer questions about their own practice through their own inquiry. As a result, this book offers yogis the most important benefits of yoga.
Yoga Beyond Belief
offers approaches to yoga that open possibilities for deep and liberating transformations of the self. It can certainly help guide all readers to an awakening of insight, free of archaic dependencies and romantic beliefs, and ready to meet the accelerating challenges of the twenty-first century.
    Dr. Mark Schlenz is a professor of creative writing and environmental studies at UC-Santa Barbara and a certified yoga teacher
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Y oga’s growing popularity in the West raises many questions. For example, is yoga becoming “Americanized” and does that Americanization degenerate the purity or authenticity of the teachings? If yoga is being changed in the West, what right do we have to make these modifications? These concerns also raise deeper questions: What is the nature of tradition and