Yoga, Bitch

This weekend I plowed through Suzanne Morrison’s Yoga Bitch and I’m stuck in a mixed response. First, the back cover logline: “What happens when a coffee-drinking, cigarette-smoking, steak-eating twenty-five-year-old atheist decides it is time to get in touch with her spiritual side? Not what you’d expect…”

Anyone who knows me is not going to be surprised that I picked this up. That said, I can’t put my finger on exactly what I was expecting but this wasn’t it. Don’t get me wrong, I think she nailed some of the yoga “pesonalities” but on the whole it just rang a bit false with me. How can it be false when it’s a memoir, you ask? I think that given enough time and space it’s pretty easy to armchair quarterback any of our decisions- especially those made when we’re young, hopeful and more than a little naive. The novel was a bit of that and while it seems to have been written as a response to Eat, Pray, Love it still has a fair amount of that thing where, hey, wouldn’t it be great if EVERYONE could spend two months in Indonesia doing yoga?

I suppose a chunk of my response is also prompted by the vast difference of my yoga experience to Morrison’s. While I got to yoga at around the same time, I came from an utterly different point of view which makes me think I should maybe write about THAT experience. While there’s plenty about yoga to prompt cynicism (you can ask @melissarocks, I’m not immune) there’s also a side that prompts no expectations and therefore no disappointment.

Looking at that paragraph makes me think I could write an entire SERIES of yoga posts about this.