Yoga School Dropout: A Hilarious, Hapless and Desperate Quest for Mystic Indians and Tantric Bliss

As soon as I finished this book I went to yoga class! I hadn't been in about 2 months but I felt I couldn't wait to get back. So much joy in being back on my mat!

Yes, I love yoga!

I thought the book was OK; I have never wanted to go to India and still don't. I am not looking for spiritual enlightenment. I am seeking a quieter mind and a fit body (to the degree that a 56 year old with scoliosis and disc deterioration can be fit - bring on the pensioner's yoga!)

Lucy Edge is looking for spiritual enlightenment, yoga bliss and a man to love. She has been doing yoga for awhile, has gone on some yoga retreats but really feels a need to make some big changes from her high stress, seemingly meaningless ad agency job and her lonely life as a single woman. She books a flight to Bombay with a list of Ashrams to visit.

And she takes us along on her often funny and difficult explorations of yoga in India.

I found myself interested in some of the theory of yoga; the "yamas" (5 disciplines that govern the way we behave towards other people) and the 5 "niyamas" (the practices that help us to create a disciplined mind and body). She was learning about these things from someone she called the "Swoony Swami", she often had her mind on men. No judgment on my part, just so we understand that. This was at the Sivananda Ashram.

The two weirdest Ashram's she went to were "Amma's Ashram' (the Hugging Mother) and the Ashram (if you could call it that) of a guru called Osho, also known as 'the sex guru'. He was the guru who was set up in Oregon for awhile until he got deported for immigration violations. He was the one with all the Rolls Royce cars. I did most of my laughing in this book reading about Osho's compound.

One of my favorite characters was Swami Vijayananda, an 89 year old man that Lucy ends up talking to while visiting the ashram of Shri Shri Ma Anandamayee and having a dip in the Ganges. My favorite question that Lucy asks of herself is, "How could I achieve my dream of becoming a serene and poised Yoga Goddess if I had a knackered neck?" I have asked that same question myself and hearing Lucy ask it made me laugh.

OK, another yoga principle that interested me was "duhkka" (suffering) and the 5 kleshas (obstacles) that cause it, and the 5 states of the mental plane - I could really relate to "mudham" (the second state - the official state of the blues). And this, from "Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo's yoga",

"Aim of the Integral Yoga: It is not merely to rise out of the ordinary ignorant world-consciousness into the divine consciousness, but to bring the supramental power of that divine consciousness down into the ignorance of mind, life and body, to transform them, to manifest the Divine here and create a divine life in Matter."

Lucy doesn't understand this, but I like it and feel that I have an understanding of it. Course if I studied it more I could find out I know nothing about it.

So in the end Lucy finds herself by not trying to be something she isn't. I don't think she gives up yoga but she goes back to England and I think goes back to advertising. Life isn't so bad being what you are.