Yoga Beyond Fitness: Getting More Than Exercise from an Ancient Spiritual Practice

Yoga props, videos, designer clothing, weight-loss programs — author Tom Pilarzyk believes that something essential has been lost as the 5,000-year-old spiritual practice has morphed into a $3 billion pop culture phenomenon. This book argues persuasively for a return to yoga's roots: maintaining daily intention, welcoming difficulties that test resolve, keeping the heart open, making positive shifts when feeling victimized or exhausted, and remembering to breathe deeply and witness the spontaneous play of activity all around. Yoga Beyond Fitness offers a bridge to yogas serious meaning for the millions who practice it for fitness but want more. It provides an accessible overview of yoga's diverse teachings and teachers and is full of colorful stories of ordinary people whose lives have been bettered by embracing yoga's underlying promise. The book even includes fun tests that help peg readers' practicing preferences and a study guide and a listing of national yoga centers to help expand the reader's experience.

Yoga instructor Tom Pilarzyk explores yoga as a social phenomenon and assesses its widespread popularity in America, detailing the history of yoga since its arrival here in the mid-seventies. He describes how yoga first emerged as a spiritual path and how it has since been subsumed by popular culture to become more of a fitness craze and even a form of complementary health practice or stress reduction. With $3 billion spent annually on classes, products, and services, yoga has become an unusual blend of ancient spiritual path from India and American commercialism, argues Pilarzyk. He asks, Is America's yoga subculture in crisis? Is yoga morphing into something totally different? His goal is to help us restore the transformative center at the heart of yoga by showing how to bring greater intention, open-heartedness, and peace into our practice both on and off the mat.

Yoga instructor Pilarzyk explores yoga as a social phenomenon and assesses its widespread popularity in America. He details the history of yoga since its arrival here in the mid-1970s as a spiritual path to its current place as part of commercialized popular culture.

Yoga props, videos, designer clothing--yoga instructor Pilarzyk believes that something essential has been lost as the 5,000-year-old spiritual practice has morphed into a pop culture phenomenon. This book argues persuasively for a return to yoga's roots: maintaining daily intention, keeping the heart open, and remembering to breathe deeply.