“To practice is to pay attention to your whole life: your thoughts, your bodily sensations, and your speech and other actions…each moment of your life is a moment of potential practice.”

~ Judith Hanson Lasater ~

Living Your Yoga, Finding the Spiritual in Everyday Life by Judith Hanson Lasater is one of my all time favorite books on yoga.  It changed my life. This easy to read inspirational book was lent to me by my favorite yoga teacher Angela back in 2008.  

I was a hot mess in 2008.  At twenty-six years old, I was waiting tables at Kerbey Lane Cafe and started Nursing School.  If I wasn’t studying, I was drinking.  Maker’s Mark whiskey on the rocks with a splash of water was my drink of choice.  One black out night, I’m told, I face planted on a sidewalk downtown while attempting to mount my bike.  I recall only waking intermittently while having my forehead sutured in the Emergency Department.  My inner punk rocker wrote a song about it called 7 lives, click the link to check it out.  My childhood dreams of choreographing and performing dance were never going to be realized.  The demise of a long term relationship, the stress of school, and the questioning of a career path in Nursing sent me spiraling out of control.  The words to me by my father echoed through my mind, “I’ll never amount to anything.”  I found solace in Angela’s Hatha yoga class.

“To get lost is to learn the way.”

~ Swahili Proverb ~

One day after class, shy, intimidated me mustered up the confidence to ask Angela for private lessons.  At the time, a seemingly small action was a bound of courage.  My depression was crippling.  A wave of relief washed over me when she accepted my request.  I was in such emotional turmoil during the first session that we barely practiced any poses.  She sent me home with the assignment to stare at myself in the mirror, look directly into my eyes, and repeat three times over, “I deeply and truly love and accept myself” and with that she handed me a copy of Judith Lasater's’ Living Your Yoga.

This book so profoundly changed my way of perceiving the practice of yoga.  For years, I knew yoga was helping me to feel calm and collected on the mat.  I enjoyed the sense of peace that radiates after an hour class.  However, I struggled, as I believe many do, with how to incorporate that sense of peace into my daily life.  Judith showed me how.  Her unabashed revelations of personal trials and tribulations as a young adult woman, spouse, mother, and even yoga teacher helped me feel comfortable in my own skin.  

“Whether we seek something called spirituality, holiness, or enlightenment, the route to it is through our humanness, complete with our strengths and our weaknesses, our successes and our failures.  You might say that we use ourselves to discover ourselves.”

~ JHL ~

Her book is divided into three parts:  1) Yoga within Yourself 2) Yoga and Relationships and 3) Yoga in the World.  At the end of each chapter she provides practice suggestions and mantras to help the reader incorporate the yoga concepts she explores, such as Discipline, Faith and Courage into one’s daily life as well as into one’s asana practice.  The mantras, or short phrases, are important tools that we can use at any time to bring our scattered mind to attention and intention.  Below are a few of the many that resonated with me.  

Mantras for Daily Living

• Life is practice.  Practice is life. 
  

• I give myself fully to each moment.
  

• I am perfect just as I am.
  

• Control is the greatest illusion.
  

• I choose the life that I have right now.
  
  

Practice Suggestions

• “Rather than approaching your yoga practice from an attitude of no pain, no gain, how about no pain, no pain?”
  

• “Cultivate gratitude.  Write a list of all the things about your life or about someone you love for which you are grateful.” 
  

• “Remind yourself about how much courage it takes just to live in today’s world.  Spend a quiet moment in active appreciation of your courage.”
  
  

Judith Lasater is co-founder of the Iyengar Yoga Institute in San Francisco and of the popular Yoga Journal magazine.  She has a Ph.D. in East-West psychology and is also a physical therapist. She has written nine books and continues to teach online and offers workshops across the country.  Notably, she trained with BKS Iyengar who is credited for bringing yoga from India to the West.  Yoga in America today would not be what is it without him.  

Watch this short informative video about teacher BKS Iyengar

https://www.pbs.org/video/religion-and-ethics-newsweekly-bks-iyengar/

Find out more about Judith at judithhansonlasater.com

“It is our dedication to living with open hearts and our commitment to the day-to-day details of our lives that will transform us.  When we are open to the present moment, we shine forth.  At these times, we are not on a spiritual path: we are the spiritual path.”

~ JHL ~

In her book, Judith Lasater references author Scott Peck’s opening sentence of The Road Less Traveled:  A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth, “Life is difficult.”  In reading those three words, she confides the comfort and relief felt from such profound validation.  Life is hard.  She succeeds in providing her reader that same sense of camaraderie and support.  Whether you practice yoga or not, In Living Your Yoga: Finding the Spiritual in Everyday Life is a resource that can be trusted to help make this crazy world seem a little more manageable.  Looking back, I’m so thankful to have had Angela generously share it  with me, and I’m happy to be able to share it with you.  May every moment be fresh! Namaste my friends.