Finding My Balance

Author: Mariel Hemingway
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9780743264327
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
Stardom, thanks to Woody Allen and his film Manhattan, came at an early age...but so did the problems of a broken and dysfunctional family. Yet in a life so out of kilter, Mariel Hemingway summoned the strength and inner resolve that enabled her to find -- and to keep -- her balance. In Finding My Balance, actress Mariel Hemingway uses the lessons and practices of yoga as a starting point for her own personal reflections and larger-than-life family story. The result is a searingly honest memoir that is as deeply moving as it is helpfully prescriptive. Mariel turned to yoga and its meditative practice in an effort to maintain her center when her life threatened to spin out of control. Having experienced family tragedy, sudden stardom, and the continuing challenges of a full and demanding life, Mariel learned through practice how to find her balance in emotionally disorienting situations. Throughout the book, Mariel uses her yoga training as a starting point for each chapter, carefully describing a particular position, then letting her mind wander into thoughts of the past and of her tumultuous life. As each chapter begins with instruction, so does the book end with exercises organized in a sequence that can be followed by anyone who wants to practice them. As a special bonus for this edition, Mariel has added a section that describes the basics of her own "In Balance Philosophy," calming words of advice for people in search of their own emotional center.

Yin, Yang, Yogini

Author: Kathryn E. Livingston
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 149766862X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
Yoga’s restorative power is revealed in this “uplifting” memoir about finding “an oasis of peace in the midst of crises large and small” (Publishers Weekly). At the age of fifty, author, parenting expert, and Huffington Post blogger Kathryn E. Livingston thought everything in her life would click into place. Instead, she felt like she was falling apart. She was consumed by panic and anxiety, neglecting her body, always expecting the worst. Until her discovery of yoga helped her find peace. This is a memoir about two transformative years in Kathryn’s life, an account of her relationship with a compassionate teacher who taught her to trust herself and the universe, even while facing the death of her parents, her children leaving home for college, and breast cancer. It’s about recognizing the mind-body connection and finding the way back to mental and physical health. The story of how yoga weaves its magic throughout a woman’s life, yoga aficionados and beginners alike, as well as anyone who has ever faced tragedy head on, will benefit from Kathryn’s journey. Above all, Yin, Yang, Yogini is a memoir about reinvention, with yoga as the backdrop for change—a blueprint for evolving in midlife and in midstride, learning to let go of the past, and living with trust in the present moment.

Poser

Author: Claire Dederer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408822040
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Book Description
Witty and heartfelt, clear-sighted and irreverent, Poser is the book that sane, sensible and intelligent mothers around the world have been waiting for

Yoga for Life

Author: Colleen Saidman Yee
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476776784
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
From a rebellious young woman with a dangerous heroin habit to a globe-trotting fashion model to “First Lady of Yoga” (The New York Times), Colleen Saidman Yee tells the remarkable story of how she found herself through the healing power of yoga—and then inspired others to do the same. I’ve learned how to extract the beauty of an ordinary day. I’ve learned that the best high exists in the joy—or the sadness—of the present moment. Yoga allows me to surf the ripples and sit with the mud, while catching glimpses of the clarity of my home at the bottom of the lake: my true self. The very first time Saidman Yee took a yoga class, she left feeling inexplicably different—something inside had shifted. She felt alive—so alive that yoga became the center of her life, helping her come to terms with her insecurities and find her true identity and voice. From learning to cope with a frightening seizure disorder to navigating marriages and divorces to becoming a mother, finding the right life partner, and grieving a beloved parent, Saidman Yee has been through it all—and has found that yoga holds the answers to life’s greatest challenges. Approachable, sympathetic, funny, and candid, Saidman Yee shares personal anecdotes along with her compassionate insights and practical instructions for applying yoga to everyday issues and anxieties. Specific yoga sequences accompany each chapter and address everything from hormonal mood swings to detoxing, depression, stress, and increased confidence and energy. Step-by-step instructions and photographs demonstrate her signature flow of poses so you can follow them effortlessly. Yoga for Life offers techniques to bring awareness to every part of your physical and spiritual being, allowing you to feel truly alive and to embody the peace of the present moment.

Yoga Bitch

Author: Suzanne Morrison
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307717453
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
What happens when a coffee-drinking, cigarette-smoking, steak-eating twenty-five-year-old atheist decides it is time to get in touch with her spiritual side? Not what you’d expect . . . When Suzanne Morrison decides to travel to Bali for a two-month yoga retreat, she wants nothing more than to be transformed from a twenty-five-year-old with a crippling fear of death into her enchanting yoga teacher, Indra—a woman who seems to have found it all: love, self, and God. But things don’t go quite as expected. Once in Bali, she finds that her beloved yoga teacher and all of her yogamates wake up every morning to drink a large, steaming mug . . . of their own urine. Sugar is a mortal sin. Spirits inhabit kitchen appliances. And the more she tries to find her higher self, the more she faces her cynical, egomaniacal, cigarette-, wine-, and chocolate-craving lower self. Yoga Bitch chronicles Suzanne’s hilarious adventures and misadventures as an aspiring yogi who might be just a bit too skeptical to drink the Kool-Aid. But along the way she discovers that no spiritual effort is wasted; even if her yoga retreat doesn’t turn her into the gorgeously calm, wise believer she hopes it will, it does plant seeds that continue to blossom in surprising ways over the next decade of her life.

Waking

Author: Matthew Sanford
Publisher: Rodale Books
ISBN: 1605298735
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
Matthew Sanford's inspirational story about the car accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down is a superbly written memoir of healing and journey—from near death to triumphant life. Matt Sanford's life and body were irrevocably changed at age 13 on a snowy Iowa road. On that day, his family's car skidded off an overpass, killing Matt's father and sister and left him paralyzed from the chest down, confining him to a wheelchair. His mother and brother escaped from the accident unharmed but were left to pick up the pieces of their decimated family. This pivotal event set Matt on a lifelong journey, from his intensive care experiences at the Mayo Clinic to becoming a paralyzed yoga teacher and founder of a nonprofit organization. Forced to explore what it truly means to live in a body, he emerges with an entirely new view of being a "whole" person. By turns agonizingly personal, philosophical, and heartbreakingly honest, this groundbreaking memoir takes you inside the body, heart, and mind of a boy whose world has been shattered. Follow Sanford's journey as he rebuilds from the ground up, searching for "healing stories" to help him reconnect his mind and his body. To do so, he must reject much of what traditional medicine tells him and instead turn to yoga as a centerpiece of his daily practice. He finds not only a better life but also meaning and purpose in the mysterious distance that we all experience between mind and body. In Waking, Sanford delivers a powerful message about the endurance of the human spirit and of the body that houses it.

Out Came the Sun

Author: Mariel Hemingway
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1941393756
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
A moving, compelling memoir about growing up and escaping the tragic legacy of mental illness, suicide, addiction, and depression in one of America’s most famous families: the Hemingways. She opens her eyes. The room is dark. She hears yelling, smashed plates, and wishes it was all a terrible dream. But it isn’t. This is what it was like growing up as a Hemingway. In this deeply moving, searingly honest new memoir, actress and mental health icon Mariel Hemingway shares in candid detail the story of her troubled childhood in a famous family haunted by depression, alcoholism, illness, and suicide. Born just a few months after her grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, shot himself, it was Mariel’s mission as a girl to escape the desperate cycles of severe mental health issues that had plagued generations of her family. Surrounded by a family tortured by alcoholism (both parents), depression (her sister Margaux), suicide (her grandfather and four other members of her family), schizophrenia (her sister Muffet), and cancer (mother), it was all the young Mariel could do to keep her head. In a compassionate voice she reveals her painful struggle to stay sane as the youngest child in her family, and how she coped with the chaos by becoming OCD and obsessive about her food, schedule, and organization. The twisted legacy of her family has never quite let go of Mariel, but now in this memoir she opens up about her claustrophobic marriage, her acting career, and turning to spiritual healers and charlatans for solace. Ultimately Mariel has written a story of triumph about learning to overcome her family’s demons and developing love and deep compassion for them. At last, in this memoir she can finally tell the true story of the tragedies and troubles of the Hemingway family, and she delivers a book that beckons comparisons to Mary Karr and Jeanette Walls.

Finding More on the Mat

Author: Michelle Berman Marchildon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780984875504
Category : Yoga
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"Finding More on the Mat" is a modern-day yoga fairy tale laced with humor and the kind of honest transparency that is inspiring to people both on and off the mat. Michelle shows that the practice is more than the funny postures you see; it's a chance to hold ourselves in the belief that we can be more, not less, at any age, with any circumstances in our lives.

Bad Yogi

Author: Alice Williams
Publisher: Affirm Press
ISBN: 1925870367
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
'No matter how much I'd like to be a yoga glamazon, they are not my tribe. My tribe are aqua crew-cut goddesses who smell like samosas. My tribe are neurotic corporate banshees with white knuckles on Goldman Sachs water bottles. My tribe are seven different lineages that all lead to the same destination.' When Alice Williams gets 'phased out' of her dream job, all the demons she usually silences with food start to get too loud to ignore. Unemployed and depressed, she makes the ultimate middle-class, white-girl life change: she signs up to become a yoga teacher. Bad Yogi is the 'healing' memoir for people who hate healing memoirs, a delightful peek at the life-changing truth that lies behind all the gurus and jargon.

Overcoming Trauma through Yoga

Author: David Emerson
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1583945334
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
Survivors of trauma—whether abuse, accidents, or war—can end up profoundly wounded, betrayed by their bodies that failed to get them to safety and that are a source of pain. In order to fully heal from trauma, a connection must be made with oneself, including one’s body. The trauma-sensitive yoga described in this book moves beyond traditional talk therapies that focus on the mind, by bringing the body actively into the healing process. This allows trauma survivors to cultivate a more positive relationship to their body through gentle breath, mindfulness, and movement practices. Overcoming Trauma through Yoga is a book for survivors, clinicians, and yoga instructors who are interested in mind/body healing. It introduces trauma-sensitive yoga, a modified approach to yoga developed in collaboration between yoga teachers and clinicians at the Trauma Center at Justice Resource Institute, led by yoga teacher David Emerson, along with medical doctor Bessel van der Kolk. The book begins with an in-depth description of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including a description of how trauma is held in the body and the need for body-based treatment. It offers a brief history of yoga, describes various styles of yoga commonly found in Western practice, and identifies four key themes of trauma-sensitive yoga. Chair-based exercises are described that can be incorporated into individual or group therapy, targeting specific treatment goals, and modifications are offered for mat-based yoga classes. Each exercise includes trauma-sensitive language to introduce the practice, as well as photographs to illustrate the poses. The practices have been offered to a wide range of individuals and groups, including men and women, teens, returning veterans, and others. Rounded out by valuable quotes and case stories, the book presents mindfulness, breathing, and yoga exercises that can be used by home practitioners, yoga teachers, and therapists as a way to cultivate awareness, tolerance, and an increased acceptance of the self.