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List Price: $29.95 | | Publisher: Hyperion
Salesrank: 170328
Released: October 9, 2002 |
| Our Price: $3.84 |
| Used Price: $0.67 |
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| Media: Hardcover |
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Editorial Review:
ccording to a recent Time magazine cover story, 15 million Americans include some form of yoga in their fitness regimes-nearly twice as many as five years ago. This healing art balances the mind with the body, incorporating physical strength with mental fitness to reach a place of deep, lasting peace, harmony, and happiness. Christy Turlington discovered yoga at the age of 18 and has been a serious practitioner for 15 years. Lavishly illustrated and suited for practitioners of all levels, Living Yoga explores the eight tenets of yoga, including the various postures. Christy shows readers how to meditate and how to plan one's home according to vastu principles, and provides the names of yoga schools across the country. The book also includes beautiful photos of Christy in positions from basic to advanced. She discusses how to incorporate yoga into your everyday life-no matter how busy you are-and how yoga has made her own life more peaceful through stressful times and events.
Living Yoga: Creating A Life Practice Reviews:
Beautiful Introduction to the Yoga Life Style 
2008-01-20 - Christy Turlington's "Living Yoga" offers the reader a wonderful tour of applying all aspects of yoga to a life. It is an excellent introduction for people curious or serious about pursuing a yogic life. This is not a book that focuses on only the physical aspect of yoga, which accounts for some of the negative reviews. The book includes a few photographs of Christy executing some of yoga's more challenging poses with perfect alignment throughout the book, with information about the benefits that the poses bestow on its practitioner.
Christy informs the reader that the physical (hatha) practice of yoga is only one of yoga's eight dimensions, which include: yama, niyama, asana (where hatha is applied), pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, and samadhi. Christy gives a brief overview of several mainstream approaches to hatha yoga, encompassing: Ashtanga, Iyengar, Kundalini, Bikram, Siddha, Kripalu, and Integral yoga. She encourages readers to explore all approaches to see what types feel most authentic to them. I disagreed with her perspective that the mirrors in a Bikram classroom indicate an obsession with the physical aspect of yoga. In today's climate, when so many yoga teachers receive yoga certification in mass numbers with minimum experience of practice, I feel safer in studios with mirrors, where I can check my alignment. She also identifies the emphasis of four main paths to yoga: Karma (selfless behavior) yoga, Bhakti (devotion) yoga, Jnana (knowledge) yoga, and Raja (meditation) yoga. She also provides an introduction to ayurvedic (eating system based on doshas) and vastu (organizing the home to maximize sacred space).
Christy includes many personal examples of how elements of yoga practice helped her during different challenges in her life. Similar to Christy's experience, I was raised Catholic but stopped practicing my faith because of several doubts that I need to explore. Yoga helped me quiet my mind and enabled me to objectively explore several religious traditions during a trying time of life. I particularly appreciated her prayer section (Dhyna chapter), where she describes a variety or practices of devotion, not limiting them to the Hindu prayers. Yoga is a philosophy that all religious believers should be able to embrace, but since it was heavily influenced by the Hindu faith of the areas in which it originated, many yoga devotees write only from a Hindu perspective, which might dissuade adherents of other faiths from exploring yoga. She includes inspirational quotes from spiritual masters of many faiths and describes poetically describes her experiences making pilgrimages to India, to honor their acknowledgement of the Divine.
However, her vocabulary for non-Hindu practices is not as developed as her description for Hindu practices. For example a collection of beads used for prayers is generically called a "chaplet," not a rosary. A rosary describes one particular set of prayers said in the Catholic faith that induces a meditative state of mind (offered "as roses "to Mary). The Catholic faith uses chaplets for other types of prayers, and Sikhs would not consider their simarani to be a rosary, but instead a chaplet. Additionally, Christy names the Catholic sacraments incorrectly - "extreme unction" being a term that went obsolete at the Second Vatican Council (the correct name is "anointing of the sick"). The sacrament of penance also has been referred to as "the "sacrament of reconciliation" since the Second Vatican Council and it is odd that she never received the sacrament, because it's usually started one's first Holy Communion and recommended at least once a year for practicing Catholics, but maybe her RCIA instruction for confirmation was poor.
This was a beautiful book in prose and pictures of Christy's attraction to and beginning pursuit to a yoga life style. I think people who criticized it for being too basic, misunderstood the intent of the book, and if they are looking for more than introductory information the should consult the "Heart of Yoga" by T.K.V. Desikachar or "Practice for Liberating the Body and Soul" by Sharon Gannon and David Life. I hope that she write another book soon of how her yoga life evolved after her marriage, new job commitments, and her children's birth.
Quite Inaccurate 
2007-10-23 - This is indeed an interesting book on yoga. Although, I will have to say that the writer intends to tell more about her life story and history of yoga rather than how to perform the asana's. The history of yoga and the timeline is quite accurate, but I dont understand how and why the author tries to detach the yog-sutras from Hinduism. As a matter of fact, couple of times the author has acknowledged that Yog sutras were written during vedic civilization. Yoga at its every essence and breath is an integral part of Hinduism. Certainly, in todays world performing yoga wont make a non-hindu a hindu.. and it never did. Author's insistence on a Catholic follower is unnecessary and distracting. Overall, its a nice autobiography with vedic background. I would read it only once in my life.
I love this book
2007-10-08 - Thank you Christy for writing this. It is heartful to know that you are willing to share yourself in this way. I admire your perseverance in finding yourself out there, steeped in the material world. I like the personal tone you write with for finding your path, it gives me strength. Thank you for being real and being yourself.
Life Is A River
2007-06-08 - I love the journey Christy Turlington takes you on in this book...it is very educational and inspiring to see how Christy transformed her life and has taken the spiritual path in the midst of all the things going on in her life...I feel compelled to stay the course I am on in my Yoga experience....she is a beautiful woman inside and out and I feel blessed to have found this beautifully put together book...the photos are amazing..
Thank You
Not what I expected 
2005-12-07 - The title of the book may be misleading. Although there is some good information about yoga in general the book is mostly a personal story of Christy's life. It's not that her life isn't interesting, it's just a little distracting when you think the book is supposed to be about yoga. There are nice pictures of Christy modeling certain yoga asanas spread out throughout the book. The yoga information presented is also helpful and easy to understand. The book in general is nice but I don't think I would recommend it to anyone I know. It is not enough of a yoga book nor enough of a biography book.
