Yoga in life

"Yoga in life: the daily practice of an enlightened life" by Donna Farhi is a book that teaches you how to do yoga, but forget about a manual with positions and indications on asanas, how to do them, and how long to keep them.

Yoga in life is a book that explains what is behind yoga, but forget a text on the theory, with the list of precepts and quotes from other Indian texts.

This book is a guide that allows you to bring yoga into life, useful both for those who start practicing asanas, and for those who are already ahead, as well as useful for those who want to better understand the philosophy behind yoga, without however, approaching it in a too dogmatic way through concepts that are often far from our everyday life.

Yoga is included in the list of ayurvedic practices that bring wellness and health on all levels: physical, mental and spiritual.

In the West yoga is practiced mainly for two reasons: one of the reasons comes from wanting to find physical well-being, fluency and elasticity; the other reason, instead, concerns those who practice yoga moved by the search for a deeper spirituality and in connection with the whole.

Yoga in fact means "union" and, brought into life, this is the purpose that it sets itself: to unite the levels of the human being (physical, mental and spiritual), to unite the inside with the outside, what happens in one's heart with what is reflected from us to the outside, and to unite our little world to a wider and extended world with which we are perpetually connected, even without wanting it and even when we don't want it.

Also read Karma Yoga, beyond the results >>

The daily practice of an enlightened life

According to the author, practicing yoga on a physical level leads to a parallel with the inner and outer practice of yoga philosophy. Yoga, to be complete, to be what it was conceived and transmitted for, must involve the body, but also the spirit.

And the book teaches how to do it . Starting from some theoretical assumptions derived from the Vedas, the author takes the reader by the hand and leads him to experience yoga as a philosophical practice .

And it does so without rigid absolutisms, but with a humanity and a warmth similar to those who lead a child to explore the world during the first steps .

This book is human, deeply human. It teaches patience and compassion, traces a path from which many paths branch out, but which all lead to a single place: to experience yoga in its truest meaning.

There are no asanas, there are no Sanskrit citations (except for some concepts that cannot be translated differently), there are no programs or tables to follow, nor difficult concepts.

There are not even promises of sanctity or alleged nirvana: there is the warm affability of an author who has been practicing and teaching yoga for years, and who knows that it is a path in which one stumbles, a woman who aspires to improve herself, that he makes mistakes and that every time he feels compassion for himself, for his mistakes, and draws from it an important and valid teaching in Western everyday life.

The lighting of which the title of the book speaks is not an asceticism towards high peaks of sanctity and detachment: enlightenment is a bundle of light that illuminates what we are inside, what we feel, our difficulties, to embrace with kindness, and our potential, to be cultivated with care.

Reading is smooth. Simple language. The essential and profound contents, but exposed with lightness and joy, within everyone's reach, with examples and ideas taken from the author's long experience.

Hard not to find yourself in this book if you practice yoga or are interested in doing it. Difficult not to appreciate the book even if you do not practice yoga and do not intend to do it (but .... who knows).