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TITLE: Holy Yoga
AUTHOR: Brooke Boon
GENRE: Christian/Yoga
RATING: 3 Stars
I was unsure about this book when I first read the title and reviewing it has been interesting. I would have to say that I am separating my review in two. The Christian part and the Yoga part. To be honest, I am unsure why the author felt the need to write a "christian" yoga book.
In my opinion, yoga is about spirituality and looking into yourself and outwards to the great universe. Yoga has been practiced for many, many years and is said to be wonderful for the "self". So, I am a little unclear why there needs to be a distinction between a regular yoga book and a "holy yoga" book.
From the point of view of this book being about yoga, I thought the book was well done. There are nice descriptions of the poses and some graphics showing us the particular positions (although these are a tad small).
Unfortunately, there is quite a lot of "talking" in the beginning of the book - relating to the association of doing holy yoga - which I found a tad preachy and not particularly necessary.
If you believe that yoga must be associated with religion then I suggest this book is great for you, if you are like me and you believe that yoga is about our inner self - then you may want to consider many of the other yoga books available on the market right now - that are aimed more towards yoga poses and the joy of doing yoga for the self.
3 comments:
Well... being a Christian myself. I would have to agree that I do no think that the two had to combined. I read many books that are not Christian based and that is OK. I don't feel like every book has to have "religion" in it to be good. I think they should have left Yoga as Yoga.
I know Christians who think yoga is a 'new age', spiritually suspect thing. Aligned with spooky spiritualism or the occult somehow; I imagine it's these type of people the author is trying to reassure. (that is a guess - I haven't read this one).
Having recently reviewed a different yoga book, I popped over here because I could not imagine the utility of adding Christianity to yoga. As an atheist I have never considered yoga to be intrinsically tied with any deities, but more awareness of self and internal reflection (not to mention a good stretch).
Adding religion to secular topics seems to be a growing trend in publishing these days. Too bad it actually narrows the audience for books instead of expanding it.
(off topic: I had a really hard time finding the 'post a comment' link here because it's almost the same colour as the background--I don't remember it always being that way)
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