ANNOUNCEMENT: Yoga Song on LANTERN AUDIO AUDIOBOOKS coming this month

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. They acted on faith to get here, so I act on faith to teach as the practice of yoga meets them with global and spiritual energy.

   As a teacher, and companion singing my yoga song, I set the route with universal instruction, they meet it with an individual response and follow the road home to themselves. Breath by breath, a universal yoga pilgrimage presses them to question their motives and boldly ask “Why am I here?” When the question arises, yoga’s song takes over and the yogis remember their courage. They stretch into their containers of reform and travel back to the beginning.

   The breathing congregation I teach is a group of motorcyclists and they are like all yogis, ordinary people doing the extraordinary. They tiptoe into newness and sip nectar from an oxygen-rich moment. Their bodies are burdened with the weight of years and stories, yet they hold sacred songs and mysteries. They are royal dancers, humble warriors, cobras, camels, lions, and stony, worn sphinxes.

   The sun is setting as Western light, partially eclipsed by Earth, illumines their faces with golden rays. In savasana, alone, quiet, and on the floor, they play dead to integrate the last breathing moments of the best previous moments and become still as corpses decomposing into the ground.

   Stretching into the extraordinary, they become part of the mystery. Within each pose, willing yogis make a beautiful story of reaching and lifting — failing and persevering – its motor is the rise and fall of the diaphragm in a full breath and its motion is the story of life’s ebb and flow. These yogis are my congregation; I call it a breath-centric community and I deeply affirm their right to ask for fuller breath, richer moments, and wider reaches of spirit.

   I’ve brought them here not through charter or an organizational principle; rather, they are here because they believe something is happening. We are ordinary, but our breath-centric yoga turns us to do the extraordinary and, on some level become the mystery.