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After studying yoga in India and traveling all over the world with traditional Vedantic masters, Steve Ross returned to his hometown of Los Angeles with a broadened point of view of what yoga could be. He was surprised to find that yoga classes at home were missing the humor, joy, and celebration that fueled his Eastern studies. Instead of expanding and enhancing the joy of being, Western yoga classes focused obsessively on correcting body positions and developing a picture-perfect physique. Determined to keep his yoga practice true to cultivating bliss and inner radiance, Ross started his own yoga studio and has created a yoga movement in Los Angeles that is, to put it simply, revolutionary. Ross lives and teaches according to his belief that the secret to yoga is not obsessing over whether your feet are parallel or whether you can bend as far as the person on your left can, but about transcending the serious and allowing joy into your life, your body, your mind, and hopefully your yoga practice itself. It's about lightening up. In Happy Yoga, Ross reveals that everyone is inherently happy, but that our true self is shadowed and concealed by the layers of worry that, through habit, become our daily thoughts. In each chapter, he examines one of our seven greatest human fears -- depression, ill health, loss of love, career failure, war, death, and emotional stasis -- and uses yoga wisdom to explain how to strip away these worries to reach your core of calm radiant joy. By sharing his system of yoga postures, diet, meditation, music, supplements, and philosophy, Ross has effected profound physical and mental changes in both his life and the lives of his students. Ross's power is that he goes back to the source -- five thousand years of ancient yogic wisdom -- and decodes the abstract Eastern ideas for a Western audience. Happy Yoga is not just a set of movements and facts to consume, it is a way of shifting your awareness to bring the spirit of yoga into each movement, each meal, each relationship, each thought, and each breath. With love and joyful abandon, Ross offers us a new way to practice and live yoga. The result is profound calm, a dramatic release of anxiety and pain, and the realization that there really is nothing to worry about.… (more)
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What set this book apart from other yoga books for me was the inclusion of modifications for yoga poses that can either be done in bed (yes, in bed! Like immediately after waking up in the morning or right before settling in to sleep for the night) or in your chair at your desk while at work. Ross' ideas of doing a little bit of yoga everyday wherever you are really embodies the idea that yoga is more than just going to a class to get a flatter stomach (although yoga can certainly do that to) but that yoga is about enjoying life and accepting who you are and the unique abilities your body has.
Happy Yoga is one of the first books I read about yoga (I must admit, I was drawn in by the colourful cover and yes, I know what they say about judging a book by its cover but this book truly delivers) and is one that I return to and re-read often. This book is well worth buying and adding to your personal library whether yoga is something you already do everyday or if it's something you would like to incorporate into your life more frequently.