A thoughtful and often delightful book about pursuing serenity through yoga and spiritual exercises.
A series of guided meditations, reflections, and journaling exercises, aimed at helping yoga practitioners look deep within themselves and discover inner peace.
Yoga teacher Mosca (Cultivate Contentment, 2009) offers a short but in-depth guide to the spiritual side of yoga practice. In each short section, she introduces five restraints, or “Yamas,” and five observances, or “Niyamas.” The restraints—“Non-Harming,” “Truthfulness,” “Non-Stealing,” “Moderation,” and “Non-Attachment”—are framed as ideals for the reader to strive for, but Mosca emphasizes that yoga isn’t about self-punishment: “There is no harsh criticism of anyone for wrongdoing; there is only loving opposition to wrong deeds.” The Niyamas to strive toward, she says, are “Purity,” “Contentment,” “Discipline,” “Self-Study,” and “Surrender to God.” Each Yama and Niyama comes with a guided meditation, encouraging readers to develop a relaxed state of body and mind. There’s also a list of affirmations in each section, which may help ground readers. The book is clearly organized and simply crafted to allow readers to return to each lesson and repeat journal entries as needed. One feature of Mosca’s writing is that she explores each concept on a physical level, as well as a mental and spiritual one. For example, the concept of “Shaucha,” or purity, is connected to the cleanliness of one’s body and environment. It then goes on to discuss conscious eating, fasting, and cleansing, along with freeing one’s mind of turbulent emotions and other distractions. Another important observation deals with “Santosha,” or contentment—described as a “willingness to accept whatever fate may bring with balance, gratitude and joy.” The ideal, as the author explains, is to achieve unwavering serenity throughout life’s ups and downs, but one of the book’s most positive aspects is its emphasis on process, rather than on achieving an end goal.
A thoughtful and often delightful book about pursuing serenity through yoga and spiritual exercises.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9679567-7-0
Page Count: 47
Publisher: Sedona Spirit Yoga Publications
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
