Hold onto your seats. Because this memoir by Anne Clendening, Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass, is a “Pow Pow Pow Pow Experience.” It will grab you, spin you, and pull you up and down until it lands you into your center of gravity.
Anne Clendening is a yoga teacher and creative nonfiction writer living in LA. I first met her years ago when she subbed some of my yoga classes and I found her to be captivating, fragile, and enthusiastically raw. These qualities also describe her writing style.
Anne Clendening Discusses Fear in Bent
In one of the many juicy and insightful quotes from Bent, Anne says, “Fear is a bastard. Fear is an attention whore. I want to ask fear if it has mommy issues because that is the only reason I am thinking why it needs attention so bad. I want fear to get Parkinson’s, then maybe fear will know how it feels to be on the run from something it doesn’t understand.”
In Bent, Anne takes us on a journey of her experience growing up in Los Angeles, her struggles with alcohol, becoming a yogi, and her diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease. Her written interpretation of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras is interwoven in her story. These sections were powerful in their originality, while staying truthful to the Sutras themselves. I have read the Sutras many times throughout my life, and Anne definitely brought a rich freshness to this ancient text.
I feel that yoga is almost a second character in the book. Anne describes her relationship with yoga from her first introduction to the practice to how it is saving her life now. Anyone suffering from emotional or physical challenges will be inspired. Reading this book will definitely transform you and that is a “Girl Scout Promise.”
As I write this, I’m on the second read of Bent. I am totally convinced that if Anne were older, Jim Morrison would have written the song “LA Woman” just for her.
Dale Nieli MSW, C-IAYT, CHT has a powerful gift for helping people discover sources of pain and stress, whether the source is physical, emotional, or spiritual. She is a compassionate transformational guide for people when they are in crisis points in their lives. Dale is skilled at facilitation with people at all stages of recovery, from those who are beginning their own path to those deepening their long-term sobriety. Her work allows people to release patterns of long-held tension that become lodged in the body, holding them back and often leading to symptoms such as fatigue, sleeplessness, and anxiety. Dale helps people remove these barriers to health in order to experience increased energy, enjoy sound sleep, and to feel peaceful, more at ease, and even full of joy.
In her work one-on-one and in groups, Dale uses her intuitive skills to help people integrate body, mind, and spirit in order to actualize their full potential. Some of the interconnected techniques she uses include the therapeutic application of yoga, trauma release work, somatic experiencing, vagus nerve regulation, psychoneuroenergetics, sound healing, user-friendly mindfulness meditation, aromatherapy, hypnotherapy and affirmations, pressure points and hands-on healing, breath training, therapeutic movement, energy work, intuitive healing, and mind-body fitness.