Yoga for Your Spiritual Muscles: A Complete Yoga Program to Strengthen Body and Spirit

by Rachel Schaeffer

Book Overview

Spiritual muscles are the life-enhancing inner qualities that make up our spiritual being. This complete yoga program includes postures, breathing exercises, and relaxation techniques to strengthen twelve inner qualities: awareness, acceptance, focus, flexibility, balance, confidence, peace, strength, compassion, energy, playfulness, and connectedness. The book's premise is simple: Developing a more flexible spine can make us more flexible in solving...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0835607631
• ISBN13: 9780835607636
• Release Date: June 1998
• Publisher: Quest Books (IL)
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 8.6" x 11.0"

Customer Reviews

Best Yoga book I have ever reviewed

This is by far the best yoga book I have ever encountered. The content, design, photography and overall feel of the book are superb. This book exemplifies everything yoga is and will be a tremendous asset to anyone wanting to start or go deeper into the path of yoga.

This book is simply outstanding

I am a former endurance athlete struggling with weight gain and back pain. I was given this book by a concerned friend. I thumbed through it, admired the exceptional quality, and placed it on my coffee table. When I could not even go for a long walk without pain, I started using the book, first choosing postures to address my spine. The benefits have been essentially immediate. It is well organized, light-hearted, and has proved to be a wonderful gift, indeed.

A must-have book for beginners and advanced yoga students!

Yoga is becoming very popular these days, and yet there aren't very many books out there that present yoga as clearly or beautifully as Yoga for Your Spiritual Muscles. The message of this book is that yoga can help you develop not only your physical self but your inner self as well. I really like how the author lists specific inner qualities (like Peace, Compassion, Awareness, and 12 other "spiritual muscles") that you can develop and then provides complete chapters with postures, breathing exercises and meditations designed to enhance each "spiritual muscles".

The operative word here is practical...

Rachel. Schaeffer has embraced, with considerable aplomb, an ancient subject often relegated to the "new age" bin. To the immediate benefit of those of us who are not card carrying politically correct, Ms. Schaeffer neither preaches nor patronizes- the operative word here is practical. The lovely presentation belies a simple, straightforward manual for effecting positive change in your life, period. This is the dog-eared keeper that gets sent to a brother, sister, or friend, maybe even a parent, in a fit of good will....

This is the best book I've ever seen on yoga! Beautiful too!

The idea behind this book is very different from the other yoga books I've read and seen. While it provides clear instruction in the postures and breathing techniques, everything is organized into chapters that focus on developing what the author calls "Spiritual Muscles." These Spritual Muscles are personal qualities that we all have and can develop using yoga. Another nice thing about the book is that you can start at almost any chapter. I started with the Confidence chapter and have been doing it for about a week. I'm kind of surprised to say that doing the postures in this one chapter has actually made me feel more confident in general. I just feel like I am more able to take on the challenges that come my way, in my everyday life. So I think that the author hit upon a unique and useful way to organize yoga. I recommend this book to anyone out there. I've been doing yoga for about five years and have taken classes and used other books and like this book best. I think that a total beginner could make good use of it, and I also believe that more experienced people will get something out of it too.