The best fun books that convey yoga’s deep teachings

This little memoir (some 200 postcard-size pages) packs so much yoga punch.

Clendenin goes through a lot of bad stuff—a lifelong drinking problem, the death of a relative, a life-altering medical diagnosis—but she relays it all in such a fun, girlfriendy way you can’t help but cheer her on.

Her saving grace is the yoga teacher training she begins as the book does, which carries her through the awful life events. My favorite is the way she summarizes and modernizes the four parts of the classic—and very obtuse—Yoga Sutras (e.g., one take: “don’t let that nasty ego tell you who you aren’t”).

You’ve got to love someone who calls out those who think American yoga is a skinny white woman’s practice.

Stanley is a funny, deeply honest, large-bodied, gay Black woman who knows yoga is great for everyone—in fact, her prior book is Every Body Yoga. I love the way she weaves yoga’s philosophy and practices into this short and readable memoir of her life.

And I especially adore how she grasps yoga’s real purpose, which isn’t to pretzel up in funny poses but to slow down and calm the mind. Or, as she puts it: “Honestly, you really only need to know one pose and it’s called sitting the fuck down.”

How can you not want to recommend this book to, well, everyone?

This spunky yoga memoir came out more than a decade ago (the same time as my first women’s yoga novel), and it remains my all-time favorite fun yoga read.

When 25-year-old, death-obsessed, cigarette-smoking Morrison follows her beloved yoga teacher on a Bali retreat, she’s too cynical to believe everything she’s learning. Still, she gives it her best shot (even while occasionally feeling called to wine, brownies, and “the prana of the Prada”).

When Morrison finally stops trying to reach her unattainable ideal of enlightenment, she comes to understand that self-acceptance is a key yoga aim. If you haven’t read this laugh-out-loud book, do so now!

I loved Bechdel’s amazing graphic memoir Fun Home, so I had high expectations for this book about her lifetime love affair with exercise and, eventually, yoga—and she doesn’t disappoint.

The captions to some 200 pages of her fantastic cartoon drawings are honest to a fault, covering repressed emotions, relationship difficulties, and the fear she doesn’t deserve the good things in life.

In more recent years (time-bound events like Trump’s ride down the escalator appear in background scenes), Bechdel strives to forge coherent meaning from her life history and her infatuation with Jack Kerouac and other deceased spiritual authors. 

Most yoga memoirs and novels are written by women, so I was intrigued when I first stumbled on this book by a hard-charging CEO who picks up his family and moves to Bali.

While there, Feder takes up yoga, meditation, and painting. Like any good yoga memoirist, he details all the ways the sabbatical transforms him, his relationship with his kids and, upon returning to the U.S., his work life. But he’s also honest about how the mind tries to sabotage his efforts at every turn.

I very much enjoyed this book and think it’s especially valuable for men looking to take a similar inward spiritual journey (even if, like the protagonists of my yoga novels, they never leave home).