Books about yoga that we are loving this Fall
I’ll always be a nerd, deep down to my bones. When the sun starts setting at 3:45 pm, I’m a lot happier if I’ve good some books to keep my mind engaged (otherwise, I’m just going to try to go to bed by 7).
If you’re looking for some yog-ish reading, these are the titles topping my shelf lately:
Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance, by Jessamyn Stanley
At just under 200 pages, this book is real, funny, and irreverent (if salty language offends you, give it a miss). It’s almost like meeting a friend for coffee, except that friend suddenly drops a truth-bomb you have to sit with for a few days, like: “we get mad at ourselves when we don’t perform the way we think we should, and we get mad at the people we love when they don’t perform the roles we’ve written for them.” Or, “Standing up tall when someone is trying to shrink you is a yoga posture. Protecting your loved ones is a yoga posture. Finding the breath in these moments inspires you to action and confirms your faith. Sometimes finding your breath can be the difference between seeing someone else’s point of view and punching them in the face.”
Yoga and the Body: The Future of Modern Yoga in the Studio and Beyond, by Edward Clark and Laurie A. Greene
Also under 200 pages, but with much smaller typeface, this is a more academic deep dive into the question of where yoga goes from here. What does it mean to embody a yoga practice? What is the relationship between yoga and art, yoga and creativity, yoga and cognition. This book wants readers to engage with big questions that don’t have easy answers. Despite the density of ideas, the prose is readable (and re-readable). If Yoke is coffee with your friend, Yoga and the Body is like going to a coffee shop and listening to your super smart friends talk about a topic that they are super passionate about—and they really want to invite you in. What is the role of credentialling in yoga? How to we reconcile yoga and critical inquiry? What do we mean when we use the words we use?
Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, by Mark Singleton.
Published in 2010, this book provides really important historical context for the practice of postural yoga. If you’re a history buff, this is a great text. If you’ve wondered ever about “lineage” and what that means, or how history and cross-continental and cross-linguistic transmission impact something like the practice of yoga (in America, in 2025) this is a great book. That said, this book does not have “meeting friends at a coffee shop vibes.” It has assigned reading vibes. Good assigned reading! But would totally be teaching it in my Yoga 101 class.