Overwhelmed

I got the books yesterday and I’ve been browsing through and taking a quick glance at them (in Spanish: “hojeándolos y ojeándolos“, two homophones. That’s it for today’s lesson). All of them have instantly become favourites, despite that I haven’t read any of them from cover to cover. They are loaded with lots of useful information and I really recommend them to anyone planning to do a teacher training or just deepening their personal practice.

The ones by the Mohans are excellent textbooks which serve as nice introductions to yoga and its therapeutic applications. The more I read about them and the more I get to know about their work, I can’t help but think that they are being greatly overlooked. The books are packed with graphics and charts and lots of valuable tips and information.

The ones on instructing, assisting and adjusting will undoubtedly prove to be exceptionally useful once I start teaching because there’s lots of practical information in both of them. I like how the information for each pose is presented in “Instructing Hatha Yoga“, especially the kinetic aspects. Despite not being as thorough, “Yoga Posture Adujstments and Assisting” is an excellent complement to the former because its graphics are somewhat clearer, making it easier to understand where to “push and pull” at a glance.

Yoga Journal’s “Yoga as Medicine“, by Dr. McCall, looks promising. First of all, it’s huge yet unbelievably cheap (600 pages for less than 15 bucks!). Secondly, it covers an aspect of Yoga that I find extremely interesting and in a rigorous way. Instead of using an authroritative tone, the author simply explains that Yoga can many times help when Western medicine fails.

Finally, Donna Farhi’s book on the Ethics of teaching yoga is my least favourite. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great one and it’ll be nice to own it in case I find myself in a delicate situation. It’s just that most of what she shares is commonsense and I don’t think I’ll have to face all those problems, either.

Now, I don’t know where to start!