I just finished reading Neal Pollack’s funny new book Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude. This is a great book if you’ve been in the yoga world for some time. If you haven’t, you likely just won’t get it. Pollack pokes fun at the hype and yet shows a deep reverence for the deeper philosophical underpinnings of yoga. His descriptions of farting in a yoga class are hilarious.

Is yoga a physical exercise? or preparation for meditation? or a profound spiritual practice? or a tool for subtle energetic re-charging? Really, I find it to be all these and more. When confronted with the choice of yoga hype and popularity where it is being taught in gyms on on the street, and on the other hand yoga as a secret world that you have to study for years to truly understand and to do anything less is to be a poser… I will say this is a fool’s choice. I will take the middle ground and choose again. Yoga is for everyone, how ever they come to it, whatever they get out of it. Yoga is. And I hope it is for you too.