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First There Is a Mountain: A Yoga Romance
First There Is a Mountain A Yoga Romance Author:Elizabeth Kadetsky In her early 20s, Elizabeth Kadetsky found herself running for hours every day, eating like a bird, and suffering from an excruciating but mysterious pain in her chest. Only in her yoga classes did she find some relief. Through a teacher, she heard about a yoga institute in India where an aging patriarch took in Western students for instruction.... more » She wrote to him and waited years for an invitation to study with the master. FIRST THERE IS A MOUNTAIN is a tale of spiritual longing that brought a young American woman to the yoga institute of the renowned B.K.S. Iyengar, the man who introduced yoga to a Western audience. Once there, she became a wayward protÈgÈe of this mercurial and demanding teacher, piecing together his life's vision of the ancient Hindu practice and finding her place within yoga as a Western aspirant. In the damp, musty practice rooms at the institute, her exhausted body hanging from ropes or propped up by wooden blocks, she found a spiritual discipline unlike any other. Under Iyengar's tutelage Kadetsky learns the "subtle wisdom" of the body, leaving behind a discordant childhood and starvation diets to discover a kind of peace. Part personal memoir and part exploration of the vast gulf between body, will, and spirit, FIRST THERE IS A MOUNTAIN is written with grace, reverence, and wisdom.« less