When you take a yoga teacher training, one of the things that of course you learn is all about the poses.

How to do the poses.

How to do them well in your own body.

How to teach the poses.

What chakras each pose activates.

How to put the poses together in sequences for various purposes.

All about the yamas and niyamas, which actually none of my students have ever asked me about.

Sometimes you read the yoga sutras.

And of course, you read a lot of books about yoga and you are asked to do a home practice.

Pranayama, or breathing exercises.

The names of the poses in Sanskrit and English. Being that I had taught primarily in a Catholic church and sometimes in other schools and businesses, I generally used the English words so as not to intimidate anybody or make yoga sound foreign or inaccessible.

For all the learning that we do about the history of yoga, how to do the poses and how to teach the poses, nobody really talks all that much about how yoga actually works.

This is what I hope to discuss in this book.

I believe that when you understand what the yoga practice is doing you have the opportunity to take your practice to a whole new level, no matter what kind of yoga you happen to be practicing, whether it is Iyengar, Astanga, yin yoga, kundalini yoga, vinyasa yoga, Anusara yoga, what have you.

Understanding on a deeper level I felt would help the average yoga practitioner learn even more about themselves and in so doing inform not just your yoga practice but also your entire life.