#yogawriter

ANNOUNCEMENT: Yoga Song on LANTERN AUDIO AUDIOBOOKS coming this month

I’m happy to announce the impending release of YOGA SONG as an audiobook available on LANTERN Audio Audiobooks, Audible, and these distribution networks: Kindle, Apple Books, Bookbeat, Audiobooks.com, Audiobooksnow.com, Downpour.com, Findaway, Google Play, Biblioteha LLC, Baker & Taylor, Follett Libray Services and 10 others, Hoopla, Kindle, Macklin Educational Resources, Overdrive, Kobo, Libro.FM, Nook Audio, Scribd, Odilo

Yoga Song is an instrument of mass inspiration in 21 vignettes and five original songs. While you listen, yoga’s song will fall upon your heart, register in your body, and spark new life in your mind and spirit. I narrate this book with my conviction that breath is yoga’s song, and when you breathe doing yoga, you are singing your yoga song.

Hear Yoga Song on your way to yoga class, while traveling this summer, or when resting in your comfortable place. Listen to an integrative description of Humble Warrior Pose in “Yogi, Heal Thyself,” follow my excavation of Camel Pose in “Making Heroes,” or let the deeply affirming mystery of yoga’s therapy fall upon your ears in “Yoga, A Breathcentric Community.”

Thank you, and please tell your friends about Yoga Song as a LANTERN Audio Audiobook available soon.

The excerpt below is from Yoga Song Chapter 2, “Yoga, A Breathcentric Community.”

“Yoga brings a heightened discernment when yogis are pressed into a crucible of equal but opposite force. This force (hatha) presents us with the task of being at ease while stressed. It is yoga’s therapeutic, and we get it every time we bend, stretch, and breathe.

I glance around the outdoor space where I teach and see the outline of my community becoming new every day.

YOGA SONG review Amazon

The first review of YOGA SONG by Mary is now published on Amazon. Thank you, Mary! If you have read YOGA SONG, please go to Amazon and add your review.

From Chapter 7 “A Child Leads,” in YOGA SONG

A toddler’s openness and enthusiasm mean they don’t distinguish between yoga or weightlifting, and they don’t compartmentalize yoga as either fitness or enlightenment; they simply see it as something adults are doing and they join because it looks fun and natural. The example of children will benefit yogis to do what they do:

1. embody the song this is fun.’

2. practice when they want and quit when they want

3. receive a gift more profound than they can imagine

4. relieve self from the punishing drive for perfection or correctness

5. practice and let yoga flow, allowing it to bloom when the conditions are right

6. learn by copying what others do and enjoy, doing so to the best of our ability

7. forget about evaluation or comparison, rather be fully present to enjoy the moment

More where this came from by going to Amazon or Barnes and Noble to order YOGA songs.

Camel Pose from the Inside

If you view a photo of someone doing a pose called camel, you’ll notice it looks uncomfortable and it is. Along with it, you’ll frequently see a list of physical benefits that happen over time when doing the camel pose.

I’m certain that the combination of the backward-bending camel, alternating with forward bends healed my back. I’m aware, from my own experience, of how camel posture feels and how it works toward physical healing.

The benefits of doing a camel pose are improved breathing, fatigue relief, increased torso, and hip flexibility, strengthened back and glutes, toned thighs, and hips, stimulated endocrine glands, tensed organs in the abdomen, pelvis, and neck, correction of slouching posture, the opening of the respiratory system to better oxygen use.

In my book YOGA SONG (Rochak Press June 2022) I treat camel – and yoga- from the inside out. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 5 where I write what happened to me during a pivotal moment in my practice doing camel in Hawaii. You see, yoga is an inside job, and a lot is going on under the surface and it’s hard to describe. But that’s why I wrote a YOGA SONG. It’s yoga from the inside out in 23 lyric narratives.

Excerpt from YOGA SONG on camel pose from the inside in Chapter 5 “Making Heroes.”

The workshop leader said a deep backbend is a heart-opening pose and reminded us that an emotional reaction to a camel pose is normal because the posture can make us feel vulnerable. Pointing to his heart as the organ which should be at the highest position during camel, he may have even said, ‘lift up your hearts’ when stressing the importance of making one’s heart the highest point.… read more...

OM YOGA MAGAZINE, Yoga, the Sailing Forth

A day after moving into my apartment in Hawaii, I was on the floor with back pain. I had endured many injuries: at 10, I bounced off a trampoline and landed on the ground, a second back injury I endured while weightlifting, and yet again in my 40’s when I fell from a high roof.

In Hawaii, I noticed signs for yoga studios everywhere and I started thinking about claims I had heard regarding yoga and healing for back pain. One day, in a desperate attempt to fix my damaged back and with no background or knowledge of yoga, I decided to try it and hoped to find something to make me strong in my broken places. I feared collapsing in the hot yoga room, but was also confident that if my back held up I would too.

I planned to try yoga for 30 days and then decide if I would continue. I made it through 24 classes that month. My resolve was galvanized and my hope for healing ignited. In my journal entry I wrote, Yoga is the way to go for healing back pain. It’s so simple, why don’t more people do it? But my transformation from injury to healing went beyond my back as yoga steered me into deep waters.

“Sail forth – steer for the deep waters only

Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me”

American poet Walt Whitman in, “Passage to India,” from Leaves of Grass

I continued with yoga and wrote about my experience because I thought my practice in a heated room would also benefit me in other ways.… read more...

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