Living Yoga: Creating a Life Practice

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.

Supermodel Turlington, whose angelic face has graced the pages of Vogue, Elle and other fashion glossies since the 1980s, has lately been lending her image to a more profound pursuit: yoga. The 33-year-old has been practicing yoga for 15 years, has her own yoga clothing line, is a Yoga Journal contributing editor, and-with the publication of this book-becomes the first mainstream celebrity to write a book about yoga and how it's affected her life. There's a lot to digest here, between the historical and technical explanations about yoga and Eastern philosophy and the anecdotal asides from Turlington's life, but the book's clean, Zen-like layout and simple prose help make it accessible. Turlington's aim is to help students who may be overwhelmed by the unlimited information available on yoga and to emphasize reasons to practice that go beyond getting a nice butt. She attempts to understand yoga's universal spiritual appeal, examining the basics of Hinduism (Turlington is a practicing Catholic), and draws parallels between chanting and saying the rosary. She shares a bit of personal information about her modeling career, her father's death from lung cancer and her relationship with her sisters, and includes the obligatory photographs of her scantily clad self doing salamba sirsasana (headstand) and bakasana (crow pose). The combination of serious yoga talk with memoir-like reminiscences make for an engrossing and inspiring overview of yoga.
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