You Only Need One Yoga Pose

This photo is from about ten years ago, and yes, there’s my actual, original hair color. And this is me with Erich Schiffmann, still my favorite of all the “big” yoga teachers. He’s the real deal to the core. A gentle bear of a man who is brilliant and funny.

This yoga retreat with him took place in Yellow Springs, OH, now under an hour from where Craig and I live (and I can’t wait to take him there because that town is adorbs).

Okay… enough background stuff…

The whole retreat with him, we listened to dharma talks, meditated, and did downdog and child’s pose.

That was it… downdog and child’s pose over and over and over… it was WONDERFUL.

To focus on those postures alone was enough.

Because with a good teacher, one posture contains the entirety of yoga.

And to really get to know yourself inside one posture? That’s the entirety of yoga.

How much we distract ourselves with newness… even in yoga.

It reminds me of Butoh, actually… taking our time to notice the most micro of details. Going SO SLOWLY that we can’t help but run into our own crap.

And lately, as I listen to Sadhguru on my walks, he is constantly saying the same thing. He mocks American yoga with its obsession with SO MANY POSES.

KNOW ONE POSE, he says, that’s all you need.

As a teacher, I feel the pull to constantly be changing things up, but that comes from how we’re taught that everything is supposed to be endlessly entertaining.

In the meantime, we are turning our spiritual physical practices into yet another mode of consumption. More, more, more.

As we feel like less, less, less.

Nothing will fill an emptiness of that kind.

Slowing down. Paying attention. Limiting our intake.

We can finally truly come into contact with our wounded parts, and then we just might have the patience to sit with them.

Books to Deepen Your Yoga (Plus some bonus, classic yoga videos that still hold up)

Yoga is more than poses, of course. If you read here or have been around me long, I know you get that already, but I think we can still forget it…or lose track of it.

The practice of postures — hatha yoga — is just one form of yoga intended for people who learn through being physical.

It always blows my mind how wise the early creators of yoga systems were about human personality. They understood early on that there are so many different kinds of learning styles and so they accommodated them.

For example, there’s physical yoga but also the yoga of intellectual study, the yoga of devotional practices, and on and on.

The point being that the path was not and is not the destination. The destination is self knowledge that creates connection to the whole (and of course, there are so many ideas of what that “whole” is — whether it be a form of God/Goddess that is transcendent or immanent or just your best self or or or… no two lineages totally agree on this and thus so many lineages).

I am grounded in Kundalini yoga for the most part which is grounded in/from tantra yoga. Tantra is the system that makes the most sense to me on all levels. When I was about 11, I told my mother that I believe we are energy and that when we die, we return to the larger energy. Period. And that’s pretty much tantra in a nutshell. (Though, of course, it’s way more complicated than that.)

The books I’ll share are NOT just from the tantra tradition but lately I find myself getting more and more specialized in that area.

The books I’m sharing range from much easier to digest to more complicated. And yes, the tantra texts/books would be way complicated if that’s your first real deep yoga reading. They aren’t necessarily a great starting point.

I will link to them on Goodreads (and you can find me at Goodreads right here, though I’m mostly sharing fiction).

BOOKS

Anything by Stephen Cope is a great place to start, particularly the first three books on this list. He’s easy to read. His style is conversational and he’s just so… real.

Written in 1996, this is a classic. My first yoga TAPE was with Erich Schiffmann and it too holds. (HERE IT IS on YouTube. This video DEFINED yoga video aesthetics.) He’s a wonderful human (and I’ve been lucky enough to meet him and study a wee bit with him).

Most interpretations of Pantanjali’s Yoga Sutras are by men and wow… you can tell. So this translation with commentary especially for women is a breath of fresh air. It was so needed. Before this book, I was pretty much NO THANKS when it came to these particular sutras.

Sadhguru is a teacher of tantra based yoga. He’s the real deal and his first book has so much to offer. Even if you just skip his personal story stuff at the beginning, there’s so much depth.

Every yogi needs to read the Bhagavad Gita and there is no translation/commentary out there that comes close to this. (I had to link to amazon on that one to find it, but I would read ANYTHING by this man.)

My first Kundalini Yoga TAPE (yep… tape, yet again) was with Gurmukh. She’s a wonderfual wacky wise human and this little book about the chakras is always a good first place to explore these concepts. I still go back to this book now and then. (And again, here she is on YouTube.)

My first actual tantra book on the list is by the great scholar Georg Feuerstein. Seriously, you cannot go wrong when you read him. Except sometimes he can be a bit…dry. But this particular book is a great intro to tantra. Again, ready anything by him, for sure, but have coffee at hand.

There are SO MANY MORE texts but that’s enough for now.

AND please feel free to ask me for books that relate to specific areas you’d like to explore — whether those be physical, emotional, or spiritual, I’m guessing I have some idea where to point you!