I read this book as it was recommended in ‘The Body Keeps The Score’, which was an excellent introduction to trauma and its treatment. I thought this book might be a similarly clear introduction to the philosophical and spiritual underpinnings of Yoga that are often considered secondary to its physical benefits in Western practice. Unfortunately, it wasn’t anything like that.
The first problem I encountered was the fact that the author is not a good writer. Explanations are extremely long-winded and his style is verbose. I wouldn’t have minded this so much if the ideas were plainly expressed and clearly understandable. I don’t remember ‘The Body Keeps The Score’ being astonishingly well written, but the ideas were pellucid. Nothing is ever very clear because the writing seems more focussed on showing how much the author knows or how great he is. I found myself swimming in a viscous, wordy gloop of yoga and psychotherapy jargon, which was hard to follow and left me with very little sense of understanding.
The text is punctuated with stories from the author’s ‘pilgrim’s progress’, which are all nauseatingly self-congratulatory and usually involve him helping other people to solve their problems and have better lives. This struck me as overly simplistic and egotistical and doesn’t match with my experience of deep seated psychological issues, which I don’t think can really be ‘solved’ in a facile way. Almost all the stories have a cheesy happy ending and are always told so that the author appears in a good light. The other issue I had with these stories is that, although the characters are well known to the author, they are introduced to the reader in such a brief and fragmentary way that it’s hard to connect with them. The author refers back to these stories periodically throughout the text, but I could never remember who’s who because there are too many characters and their stories are never more than a few pages long. Like the mish mash of yoga and psychotherapy, he’s trying to do too much and the result is that nothing is explained clearly.
At heart, the author is an elitist. He is at pains to show how much he knows, how much he has achieved, how important or exceptional the people he works with are and how everything he does or is connected with is the best of its type. A character is never introduced without some reference to an elite education, a high powered job or some other ‘exceptional’ or ‘special’ quality. I think this extends to his choice of Kripalu as a place to spiritually develop. It has to be the best, most beautiful cult with the wisest guru and the most members. He clearly has a desire to be seen as successful, knowledgeable and special in whatever field he enters and this permeated the whole book in an unpleasant way. I suppose the desires to feel different and special are the most fecund ground for cult leaders!
To his credit, and much to my delight, he does eventually acknowledge that the guru ends up disgraced because he has been sleeping with lots of the members - cf. Bikram yoga and probably every other cult in history! I enjoyed the fact that his idol was dethroned, perhaps because the very idea of a guru is abhorrent to me, and it gave the sense that there are no final answers to life’s journey of learning, which was remarkably absent from large swathes of the book. I also liked some of the ideas in the book but, in the main, they were too muddled or mixed up with his insufferable self-regard to save the book and I’m quite sure you could find them expressed more succinctly and clearly elsewhere.
I wouldn’t recommend this book and didn’t think it had many redeeming features apart from the fact that it makes reference to a lot of other interesting writers and ideas. It’s just a shame they were expressed and explained in such a muddled and narcissistic way.
