Your Body, Your Yoga

Learn alignment cues that are skillful, safe and best suited to you

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About the book

Your Body, Your Yoga

Yoga is big business today. This ancient spiritual teaching has been transformed into a modern physical practice focused on health and happiness rather than the ancient goal of spiritual liberation. Along with this focus on the physical has arisen a desire by yoga teachers and students to learn more about the body and to understand how yoga works. Unfortunately, virtually all anatomical training and books being offered to the yoga community focus solely on a muscular view. This limited perspective prevents a full understanding of how yoga works and, as a consequence, limits the effectiveness of the practice, and can even promote trying too hard, going too far in the physical practice, creating injury and pathology.

Your Body, Your Yoga has been written to broaden the understanding of what causes our limitations to movement, and to highlight the unique structure of the body that each student has. Human variation is a critically important realization for all therapeutic interventions, whether in a yoga classroom or in a doctor's office. Every body is different and this difference makes all the difference in how one should practice his or her yoga.

Unfortunately, most yoga training regarding anatomy and asana practice is based upon the unrecognized assumption that everyone is the same and we can all do every posture if we just try hard enough and long enough with proper attention to alignment. This has created an aesthetic focus in yoga practice that is unwarranted and unskillful. This book will help to educate teachers and students that an aesthetic approach to yoga is unproductive and often dangerous. However, a functional approach, based upon both an understood intention and a knowledge of how the body (your body!) works, is far more likely to lead to optimal health.

About the author

Bernie Clark loves learning about and then sharing the things that fascinate him. As a child, he enjoyed studying the world and how it works, and as a teen, he loved thinking about the mind and the soul. The seemingly contradictory interests in science and spirituality continued to shape his philosophy of life well into his adult years. With one foot in the commercial world of space and computer technologies and another in the realm of meditation and yoga, he sought bridges between Eastern and Western maps of reality. These maps and bridges are described in his teachings and writings with the hope that others who share his fascinations will be able to enjoy what he has learned, without having to go through the labor of detailed research.

Bernie has a degree in science and spent 30 years as a senior executive in the high-tech/space industry. He embarked upon meditation in the 1970s and began teaching yoga in the 1990s. He conducts yoga teacher trainings several times a year in Vancouver, Canada. To stay informed of Bernie’s activities, visit his website, www.YinYoga.com, where you can subscribe to his Yinsights newsletter.

Other books by Bernie Clark:

  • Your Spine, Your Yoga: Developing Stability and Mobility for your spine
  • Your Upper Body, Your Yoga: Including Volume 5: Asymmetries and Proportions of the Whole Bod
  • The Complete Guide to Yin Yoga: The Philosophy & Practice of Yin Yoga — Second Edition
  • Shiva Dancing at King Arthur’s Court: Exploring Yoga Stories & Western Myths
  • YinSights: A Journey into the Philosophy & Practice of Yin Yoga

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