Hark The Herald Yogis Sing

Books To Gift Your Favorite Yogi

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me Ten Kirtans playing, Nine Swamis singing, Eight Yoginis posing, Seven Tantrics teasing, Six Gurus gabbing, Five Pundits preaching, Four scholars scolding, Three tickets to the Kumbh Mela, Two asana mats, and a statue of Ganesh in a pear tree.

And in the stocking, there were…ten tomes on Yoga.

I asked 10 senior Yoga teachers for their favorite Yoga books to gift to another yogi. This list should really be in a mandala, a circle, because they are all good in different ways.

1. Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. This is a timeless beloved classic. Yogananda felt “the Lord is calling me to America” and was on the first passenger boat from India to the United States after World War I ended. He landed near Boston in 1920 and taught Kriya Yoga in the US for the next 30 years. This is his life story, first published in 1946.

This book has served as an introduction to Yoga for many Americans (and other yogis from around the world). Halfway through reading, take a friend and visit Lake Shrine, a garden temple created by Yogananda, near where Sunset Boulevard meets the Pacific Ocean. In San Diego County, stop by the Self Realization Fellowship temple in Encinitas or go surfing at Swami’s, a great spot just offshore of the sanctuary.

2. The Heart of Yoga: Developing a Personal Practice by T. K. V. Desikachar. A unique character in modern Yoga, Desikachar is one of the sons of Krishnamacharya, who is credited with being the father of modern Yoga. At first, Desikachar did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps and studied civil engineering. He returned to become a student of his father in the 1960s.

Desikachar speaks from the heart with tenderness as well as an engineer’s careful attention to details and individuality. He always comes back to the attitude that Yoga can be adapted to the needs of each individual – real Yoga is the one that fits your needs. He is known for not pushing anyone to do something they were not able or ready to do and feels we can begin Yoga with whatever aspect we are most interested in – asana, meditation or pranayama. “There are no prescriptions regarding where and how our practice should begin,” he writes.

3. Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace and Ultimate Freedom by B. K. S. Iyengar. Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar is one of the foremost Yoga teachers today and is said to be among the 100 most influential people in the world (according to Time Magazine). He started out humbly, with a difficult childhood, suffering from malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid fever and malnutrition. His father died when he was nine and at the age of fifteen, he went to live with his brother-in-law, Krishnamacharya, in Mysore. There he studied asana and the rest is history.

He has been teaching Yoga worldwide since the 1950s and this is his fifth book by my count. His others include Light on Yoga, Light on Pranayama and Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

In Light on Life, Iyengar writes about his seventy-year journey with Yoga and speaks to the reader in a friendly voice softened by years. In “Universal Soul (Purusha)” he writes, “I have purposely avoided until now using the usual translation for the non-physical reality, as its mention usually stops people thinking for themselves. In Sanskrit, the word is Purusha.” Asides like that make me love this book, for when yogis stop thinking for themselves, it’s not pretty.

4. Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness by Erich Schiffmann. Full of descriptions of how to do postures, breathing and meditation tips, Moving into Stillness is a cherished part of many teachers’ collections. Erich writes with common sense and guides you in how to gradually build your own practice. He speaks simply and directly from his many years of exploration.

While in high school, Erich read Autobiography of a Yogi and work by J. Krishnamurti and started practicing meditation. He studied with Desikachar in Madras, India and nearly died from hepatitis. Although he studied with many of the famous names in Yoga, Erich learned years ago to trust his inner teacher and approach Yoga as inner listening that emerges from the truth of your being.

5. Dancing the Body of Light by Orit Sen-Gupta and Dona Holleman. The subtitle of this book is “The Future of Yoga” and the authors update the classic concepts and link the yogic notions of the subtle body with modern sciences with sections on the asanas, bandhas, pranayama and savasana.

Orit and Donna have charged right into the complex tangle of theories in the ancient tradition of Yoga and have dared to stage a renewal. They believe that each generation’s students must make the ancient tradition come alive in their own bodies and minds and state the truth afresh.

6. The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy by Cyndi Dale. This beautiful book is full of interesting illustrations of the chakras – the magnetically-charged areas of the subtle body correlating to the solar plexus, sex organs, throat and head. Cyndi, who has written many books on the chakras and chakra healing, integrates views from Yoga anatomy with Chinese medicine and maps from her own explorations.

At first, I was amazed this book existed. For thirty years, I have been lamenting the lack of a great book on the subtle anatomy. There are so many good anatomy books – why not something wise and beautiful on the subtle body? Tami Simon, the brilliant and brave founder of Sounds True, and Jennifer Coffee, the editor, poured love and what must have been years of time into producing this stunning book in partnership with Cyndi. As so often happens these days, small groups of yoginis (women) get together and manifest their Shakti into something creative and magical, to the benefit of the world.

Subtle Body is a treat: a coffee-table book, printed on quality paper to carry the many color illustrations. Buy one for yourself and one to give away.

7. Vital Yoga: A Sourcebook for Students and Teachers by Meta Chaya Hirschl. This book won a Gold Award from the 2010 Living Now Book Awards and is written with beautiful clarity. I prefer to read it slowly, a paragraph at a time, as if I am hearing Meta speak it in class – although I’ve never met her.

The inside cover is a chart of the historical timeline of yogic philosophies, from Vedic times, through Patanjali, to the Tantras and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika – that I have seen referred to by Yoga teachers around the US and in England.

Meta worked as a manufacturing supervisor for the Miller Brewing Company, keeping an eye on the beer-in-the-making, then went into software and wrote code. She lived several lifetimes with a hefty batch of physical health problems before finding Yoga and her pragmatism shows. This is another coffee-table book, beautifully illustrated on semi-glossy paper like an art book.

8. Sinister Yogis by David Gordon White. This wild book is enormously entertaining and blow-your-socks-off surprising. Dr. White is a professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and, based on his reading of medieval Sanskrit texts, he tells stories about how the Yogi character in ancient and some parts of modern India is, basically, something like Darth Vader – likely to take command of your body and order you around. The drawings of yogis meditating in graveyards have been around for decades, but White presents the Tantric texts describing the actual practices of these dark-side yogis, which included cannibalism and re-animating the dead. Modern vampires have nothing on the ancient yogis.

There is a whole literature in Sanskrit on lusty yogis and desperate housewives and White is a great storyteller, weaving these tales of kings, conniving queens, talking parrots and body-switching; the Deva is in the details. Much of the book deals with the way the word Yoga is used in the Mahabharata, the epic story which contains the Bhagavad Gita as just one chapter. Sinister Yogis is a good read and the stories provide a balance to yogic sanctimony, for we are all human. As we see around us in modern times, yogis can abuse their power as much as anyone.

9. Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice by Ganga White. This book comes with an introduction by Sting, who writes, “This book offers a flexible perspective,” which is definitely something you want in a book on Yoga. Ganga has amazing credentials; he is the only person I know who began studying Yoga with a Zoroastrian high priest, and has been teaching Yoga since 1967, when he opened the original Center for Yoga on Sunset Boulevard in LA.

There was Ganga, teaching right in the heart of the city in the late 1960s and beyond, and does he have stories to tell! Instead of name-dropping, I’ll let you imagine all the great characters he met and the teachers with whom he studied. Let’s just say, if you like reading People magazine while standing in line at the supermarket, that celebrity-curious part of your brain will find maha-ananda, much joy. Ganga’s foundation hosted many Yoga teachers on their first visits to Los Angeles, including BKS Iyengar in 1976. That other part of your brain, the one that engages in viveka (discernment), will have a good sweaty class, for Ganga takes on the big dharma issues of our time, such as, “What right do we have, as Westerners, to Americanize Yoga? Are we degenerating the purity and authenticity of the teachings? And is there any way to know what was taught and practiced in the past?” Ganga has been in this conversation for longer than most of us have been alive and it’s fascinating to read how his inquiry has progressed.

In the late 1960s, Ganga mentioned in a class one day that he considered Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras to be the foundation of hatha yoga. A few days later, a Swami called him and angrily informed him that “Patanjali was not at all an advocate of physical yoga – Patanjali’s mention of asana and pranayama (posture and breathing) only referred to sitting quietly and stilling the breath for meditation; spending time and energy to cultivate the body leads to attachment, body consciousness and will detract one from the true spiritual path!” Whew. Order the book from whitelotus.org and Ganga will sign it and mail it.

10. The Dalai Lama’s Secret Temple: Tantric Wall Paintings from Tibet by Ian A. Baker (Author), Thomas Laird (Author, Photographer), Dalai Lama XIV (Introduction), Dalai Lama (Author). This is a true gift, an artbook weighing three and a half pounds with 150 photographs of remarkable paintings from the Dalai Lama’s private meditation temple in Lukhang, the Sistine Chapel of Tibet. The murals depict yogis doing what look like all sorts of Hatha Yoga and Tantric practices, pranayama, asana, and mudras, with fire coming out of their heads. The Dalai Lama writes that just the sight of these paintings may open the viewers’ minds to spiritual truths.