Home Practice Blues? Buy a Book!
If you’re eager to begin a home practice but unsure what to do, it’s time to get a basic practice book. First Street Yoga has several options to choose from depending on your needs and interests. Here are three favorites.
Yoga: The Iyengar Way, Silva Mehta, Mira Mehta, and Shyam Mehta.
Yoga books tend to come and go. This classic, first published in 1990, remains the basic standby for beginners due to clear, accurate instructions coupled with large, detailed photos. The variety of asanas, from beginning to intermediate, means you won’t grow out of this book for years. Basic sequences offer a course of study for structured students as well as remedial courses for specific problems.
The Woman’s Book of Yoga & Health: A Lifelong Guide to Wellness, Linda Sparrowe and Patricia Walden.
This informative book structures asana instruction around the stages of women’s lives, from puberty to menopause and beyond. It has obvious advantages for women dealing with a variety of problems, but it is also an excellent, easy to use reference for any woman who would like to learn basic asana sequences for maintaining and optimizing health. While it has a more limited menu of poses than Mehta’s book (above), it goes into more detail with variations and options for support. The medical information is interesting and well researched.
Light on Yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar.
Last but not least, Iyengar’s classic, published in 1966, remains the most complete and in-depth reference on asana. Small pictures and terse instruction mean this book is less useful as a how-to for beginning students. More experienced students will appreciate the variety of poses and the brilliant but challenging course of sequences in the back of the book. Light on Yoga’s lengthy introduction remains one of my favorite discussions of the theory behind the practice of asana. After almost twenty years, I still refer to this book frequently for instruction, for sequences and for inspiration.
October 28th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
You can buy these books cheaper online. Should you? Online and big-box retailers are able to purchase and sell books for much lower prices than bookstores or small organizations like yoga studios. If cost is your only consideration when choosing and purchasing books then, of course, go to Amazon. If you benefit from seeing and handling a book, if you appreciate the opportunity to discuss your options with a knowledgeable salesperson, then consider paying a few dollars more to support those services. Make no mistake; bookstores are an endangered species. Are they worth saving?