"Any student of yoga will find treasures to cherish within its pages." -Yoga JournalWINNER, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Best Poetry BookWINNER, Bay Area Independent Bookseller's Award for Spiritual BooksEighteenth Anniversary re-issue of this beloved volume, still inspiring thousands of yogis around the world. The transformative paths of yoga and poetry converge in "Yoga Poems: Lines to Unfold By," a landmark volume of poetry by award-winning writer and internationally renown yoga instructor Leza Lowitz. The ancient holistic system of yoga, hugely popular today around the world, helps us to open our hearts, recovering our emotional core and connection to the world through breath, movement, and awareness. Poetry, called the "original breath," seeks to do the same through words, images and sound. Like yoga, the alchemy of poetry awakens the soul, changing the way we see ourselves and the gifts of the universe. Inspired by yoga postures themselves (think of the names of the poses--Tree, Bridge, Eagle, Sun Salutation, Monkey-- to name a few!) these 60 poems range from the whimsical to the philosophical, the personal to the universal, structured around the Eight Limbs of Yoga. "Hatha-Yoga at its best is both precision science and poetry of the heart. Leza Lowitz's inspired poems capture well this dual spirit. I have been enjoying them for their depth and grace." Georg Feuerstein, Ph.D., author, "The Yoga Tradition""I thank Leza for winding down the road of intimately describing her experiences within her yoga practice, extracting the essence of the yoga postures with her keen observation, and communicating them to us through potent poetry." -Rodney Yee"A set of elegant poems inspired by the study and practice of yoga. Lowitz . . . writes here with a Zenlike spareness that lends clarity both to the poems and the reader's appreciation of the yoga experience. YOGA POEMS serves as a window onto a landscape made more vivid by the physical ingenuity and spiritual richness of yoga, and any student of yoga will find treasures to cherish within its pages." -Yoga Journal
Author Biography:
Leza Lowitz, M. A., is the founder, owner and director of Sun and Moon Yoga in Tokyo, and an award winning author of over twenty books in many genres. Lowitz has been sharing yoga, mindfulness and meditation for 25 years. She credits her yoga and meditation practice with deepening her creativity, discipline and compassion. Lowitz leads regular meditation and yoga classes, workshops, and teacher trainings at her popular Tokyo studio and on retreat. She has taught mindfulness and yoga at Google Japan, Rakuten, Merrill-Lynch, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Goldman Sachs, Suntory, Ltd., Imagination, Co., Ltd, Beacon Communications KK, Mindshare Ltd., Unilever Japan, Efficiency Capital Advisors KK, Deutschebank, Citibank, Nestle, Temple University Japan, the American Embassy in Japan, the German Embassy in Japan, the Grand Hyatt Tokyo, the Park Hyatt Tokyo, the Ritz Carlton Tokyo, the Peninsula Hotel of Tokyo, and more. She has shared yoga with adults, kids, stiff-as-a-board salarymen, bored housewives, Academy-Award winning actors and directors, Grammy-award winning musicians, real live Knights, soldiers and ninja, newscasters, famous comedians, complete unknowns, and everyone in between. She considers yoga and writing to be life-saving tonics that offer amazing experiences of self-discovery, love, joy, creativity and community. Lowitz's articles about yoga, mindfulness, self-transformation, and cross-cultural living have appeared in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Yoga Journal, Yoga Journal Japan, Yogini, Yoga International, Elephant Journal, Shambhala Sun, wanderlust.com, Asana, the Manifest-Station, Origin, Mantra, Glomad, Wingspan (ANA airlines in-flight magazine). She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, the California Arts Council, and awards from PEN, and the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and others. Lowitz offers yoga, mindfulness and writing retreats and workshops throughout Japan, the U.S., Bali, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand. She has been an invited speaker at Bali Spirit Festival, YogaFest Yokohama, True Nature, Organic Life Tokyo, Nagoya Yoga Festival, the Sharjah International Book Festival (UAE), the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, the Hong Kong Literary Festival, and the Japan Writer's Conference.
