What the Yogi Told Me

About this book

I came to yoga because putting on my socks was becoming embarrassingly difficult. I stayed because it began changing the way I looked at everything else.At forty-six, I wasn't looking for enlightenment. I wanted to move better, exercise a couple of times a week, and get some use out of a gym membership I had been paying for far more faithfully than I had been attending.Yoga seemed like a practical solution.For a while, that was all it was.Then I met Michael.He was a yoga teacher with a habit of saying things that sounded perfectly ordinary at the time and became considerably less ordinary once I got home.Over the years, our conversations-and the practice itself-made me reconsider questions that had very little to do with flexibility. Why was I always comparing myself with someone else? How much money would ever feel like enough? What was I working for? Why was it so difficult to accept getting older? Why did I sometimes treat the people closest to me worse than complete strangers? And why was I so determined to control things that had never really been under my control?I had expected yoga to make my body more flexible.I had not expected it to make some of my certainties less rigid.What the Yogi Told Me is a humorous, personal account of more than a decade of yoga seen through the eyes of someone who never set out to become spiritual. Drawing on ideas such as ahimsa, aparigraha, santosha, tapas and non-attachment, it explores how an ancient practice can shed unexpected light on very ordinary modern problems: work, money, ambition, anxiety, friendship, marriage, aging and fear.You do not need to practice yoga to read this book. You do not need to believe in anything in particular.You may only need to be willing to look again at a few things you thought you already understood.