Synopses & Reviews
Live in accordance with nature and your soulOur ancestors adhered to the daily, seasonal, and yearly rhythms of nature by necessity, but modern life overrides these cycles, compromising womens health and happiness. In this book, Sara Avant Stover shows how simple, natural, and refreshingly accessible practices can minimize stress and put us back in sync with our own cycles and those of nature. When we honor springs seedlings, summers vibrancy, falls harvest, and winters quietude, we harmonize our inner and outer worlds. Saras recommendations nurture the body, invigorate the mind, and lift the spirit. Illustrated yin and yang yoga sequences, one-day season-specific retreats, enticing recipes, and innovative self-reflection techniques make it easy to reconnect with the essential.
Review
Heartfelt and rich with personal stories, this book presents practical wisdom for women of all ages who are seeking to live a healthier, happier life.”
— Yoga Journal
Filled with health-promoting delight, pleasure, and truth. Just lovely.”
Christiane Northrup, MD, author of Womens Bodies, Womens Wisdom
In The Way of the Happy Woman, Sara Avant Stover offers hundreds of baby steps simple yet deceptively profound toward living a happier, healthier, more balanced life. Even a few of these, practiced regularly, could be transformational. Highly recommended!”
Timothy McCall, MD, medical editor of Yoga Journal and author of Yoga as Medicine
Rest in the nest of this beautiFULL book, and allow it to soak in and beam its wisdom to you. Your way is that of the happy woman, and these words will awaken, inspire, and deeply support you on your way-finding.”
SARK, artist, creative fountain, and author of Glad No Matter What
This lovely, born-of-experience book is a primer on how to live in accord with the energies of the natural world. Clear and thoughtful, it will help you remember that even amid the demands of work, school, family, and incessant email, youre still a goddess.”
Susan Piver, author of The Wisdom of a Broken Heart and The Hard Questions
Synopsis
The Way of the Happy Woman playfully prescribes how to honor each season of the year with wholesome foods, yoga, meditation, and reflections. When we listen to and follow our biorhythms, health and happiness follow. After introductory chapters that explore womens health and lifestyle needs, the book provides specific information and suggestions for each season of the year. Each of these sections includes clear and specific ways to nurture your body, soothe your soul, and invigorate your mind. Yoga teacher and retreat leader Sara Avant Stover presents suggestions for yoga sequences, meditations, affirmations, journaling exercises, and healthy meals and recipes for each season. This thorough and engaging book reveals that the key to a womans health and happiness resides in the ancient, and nearly forgotten, knowledge of how to live in accordance with daily, seasonal, and yearly rhythms.
Women need this wisdom now more than ever. Natural nurturers, women instinctually care for others and think that paying too much attention to their own needs is selfish.” Over time this approach to life can take a heavy toll, leaving women depleted and defeated and not knowing why. But it doesnt have to be this way. It is possible and even easy for women to take their health and happiness into their own hands, simply by remembering who we truly are. Women dont have to stop helping others to fulfill their own needs and desires. Women are deeply intuitive and intimately connected to the rhythms and cycles of nature, and The Way of the Happy Woman will help them reconnect to that aspect of their body and mind.
From now on, rather than letting seasons be a picturesque backdrop to day-to-day routines, they become the portal to each womans evolution. Each season offers tremendous opportunities for self-discovery and healing, as well as for letting go and leaving behind those patterns that no longer serve you. Springtime is a time of renewal and discovery; summer, celebration and creativity; autumn, harvesting and reorganizing, and winter, deep rest and contemplation. On a larger scale, each season represents a stage in our own creative process, or in our entire life journey. In the spring we are born, in the summer we come into our full fruition, in autumn we take stock and assess after our rapid growth, and in the winter we rest and dissolve back into our the stillness of seedlings.
Readers will learn to prepare ceremonious and simple healthful foods according to ayurvedic wisdom for spring, summer, fall, and winter. These recipes will help align the body with natures rhythms for optimum energy, rest, and radiant health. Yoga postures and contemplations will further help to synchronize readers inner and outer worlds.
Women are ready for a powerful shift, a shift toward self-nurture and an empowered, happy life. The Way of the Happy Woman is an owners manual for the radiant mind, body, and spirit every woman craves.
About the Author
Sara Avant Stover is an inspirational speaker, teacher, mentor, and the founder and director of The Way of the Happy Woman.® After a health scare in her early twenties, Sara moved to Thailand, where she embarked on an extensive healing and spiritual odyssey throughout Asia and served as one of the pioneer Western yoga teachers in that part of the world. She now lives in Boulder, Colorado, and continues to teach around the world.