Yoga Song is available in paperback and audiobook and is a deeply autobiographical meditation on yoga as an integrated practice of breath, embodiment, community, and spiritual attention. Written in a lyrical, anecdotal style, the book invites readers to encounter yoga not as exercise alone, but as an inward discipline layered with emotional, communal, and contemplative meaning.
Gregory A. Ormson is a writer, teacher, and longtime yoga practitioner whose work approaches yoga as a lived, integrative discipline rather than a fitness modality. His practice has unfolded across decades and landscapes, shaped by injury, travel, fatherhood, and sustained inquiry into breath, attention, and embodied memory. Drawing on study in India, experience within diverse teaching and learning communities, and a lifelong engagement with writing and music, he explores yoga as a practice of listening, restraint, and ethical presence. His work emphasizes yoga’s capacity to hold grief, history, and joy within the same attentive body.
The Song of Yoga moves through five interwoven currents
Breath and Embodiment
Breath is the thread that binds movement to awareness and physical life to spiritual experience. In Yoga Song, breath is not technique but presence, the doorway through which ordinary life becomes attentive and alive.
Earthly Truths
Illness, grief, death, recovery, and vulnerability move quietly through the book as teachers rather than obstacles. These lived realities become thresholds for spiritual awakening rather than interruptions of it.
Community
Yoga is shown not as a solitary pursuit but as a shared field of encouragement and witness. Community appears in many forms, from studio practice to biker circles, revealing how shared breath becomes shared endurance.
The Integration of Passions
Rather than dividing life into compartments, Yoga Song weaves together Ormson’s identities as biker, musician, writer, and yogi into a unified narrative of practice. Attention becomes the common language between road, drum, page, and mat.
Yoga and Motorcycling
Through his long-running program “Yoga and Leather,” taught at Superstition Harley-Davidson since 2017, Ormson brings breath, balance, and mindfulness into motorcycle culture. Yoga becomes a practice not only for flexibility and calm, but for rider safety, longevity, and presence on the road.
The Book
Yoga Song (Rochak Press, 2022; Lantern Audio, 2023) unfolds through twenty-three short vignettes that move between class, road, memory, injury, recovery, and stillness. The book traces yoga as a lived discipline shaped not by perfection but by repetition, return, and the slow education of breath.
One of its central threads is savasana as a gateway. Drawing on past experiences with death and the body’s fragility, Ormson explores stillness as a teacher of mortality, gratitude, and spiritual attentiveness. Elsewhere, the book follows yoga as healing and redemption, beginning with physical therapy in Hawaii and widening into emotional and spiritual repair. Throughout, breath remains the governing rhythm, a steady movement of compression and expansion that mirrors the deeper tides of human life.
At its heart, Yoga Song is not a manual but a witness. It offers yoga as a way of listening, a way of returning, and a way of learning how to be at ease within effort and uncertainty.
GREGORY ORMSON'S Notes, Articles, Blogs, Vlogs Gregory Ormson writes from the ecotone, the vibrant intersections of landscape, spirituality, and physical presence. His essays and poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies, and print magazines. Author of *Yoga Song* and other works, Ormson blends lyrical observation with grounded reflection drawn from his Midwestern roots and global travels. He lives in Arizona and Wisconsin, seeking stillness where stories emerge like bears. 