Happy Yoga

LA's "yoga guru to the stars" offers this practical and easygoing guide to achieving bliss through Yoga - and explains why there really is nothing to worry about.

In this smart, joyful, and humorous book, Steve Ross blows the lid off the notion that excelling at or even participating in the practice of Yoga means suffering both mentally and physically through painful positions and body insecurity. His refreshingly straightforward approach to yoga philosophy and his system of diet and positioning welcomes anyone and everyone to improve their mental and physical state dramatically with Yoga.

Steve Ross starts with the assumption that everyone is inherently happy, but that happiness is shadowed and suffocated by the layers of worry that occupy our daily thoughts. The secret to Yoga is not worrying whether your feet are in parallel position or whether you can bend as far as the skinny model on your left, but rather, stripping the mind of those anxieties to locate the happiness at your core.

Ross encourages the reader to use Yoga, and an intuitive sense of positioning, to refocus attention away from compulsive thinking. The point is to transcend suffering - not endure more of it. The goal is to reach ananda, or bliss.

'Happy Yoga' is organised into 7 clear and thorough chapters, each of which provides diet, Yoga poses, and music suggestions to combat a particular worry. Ross's sense of what concerns us is spot-on, his delivery is hilarious, and his solutions are accessible, right down to his choice of inspirational music.