Suzan Colón - Yoga Mind : Journey Beyond the Physical, 30 Days to Enhance Your Practice and Revolutionize Your Life from the Inside Out

Advanced praise for Yoga Mind by Suzan Coln

Most books on yoga explain how to achieve peace through teaching about body postures. Although Yoga Mind includes physical techniques, this book does much more. Through her engaging, accessible style, Suzan Coln explains the principles and attitudes that lead to true inner transformation by sharing practices that anyone can dono matter what age you are or what shape your body is in. I highly recommend this book.

James Baraz, author of Awakening Joy and cofounder of Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Woodacre, CA

What a refreshing read! It is the yoga that we practice off the mat and in our hearts and minds that can truly transform ourselves and our world. Suzan Coln has written the yoga book that the world most needs right now.

Jo Sgammato, New York Times bestselling author

Id read anything Suzan Coln writesher words are always full of heart, soul, and smarts. Now she takes that talent to the topic of Yoga, organizing our way to centeredness, steadiness, easefulness, mindfulness, and balance from the inside out. Who couldnt use more of that every day?

Julie Morgenstern, New York Times bestselling author of Organizing from the Inside Out and the forthcoming Time to Parent

Yoga Mind gets to the heart of yoga by exploring practical and accessible ways anyone can bring yoga into their life, even if they cant do a single pose. Its wonderful to have a resource that exposes these powerful tools and shows us how to implement them in order to bring more peace and ease into our everyday life.

Jivana Heyman, founder of Accessible Yoga

What a refreshing and empowering book. Suzans embodiment of yoga through her book gives readers permission to make peace with ourselves and our bodies through this practice. Thank you for this inspiring read.

Dianne Bondy, yoga educator and creator of the Yoga for All movement

Suzan Coln is a wise, sensitive, and irresistibly sane guide who shares the true meaning and deeper gifts of yoga and friendship. Reading this beautiful offering of a book and working with the practices described here will change your life. A balm for anyone who is struggling to live better and more truly.

Jessica Berger Gross, author of Estranged and enLIGHTened

Yoga Mind takes us on a deep and delightful thirty day (and lifetime) journey on how yoga can benefit our day-to-day lives. There is practical wisdom on each page, delivered with such wit that I found myself laughing out loud while reading on the subway. The format of the book is ingenious: It is a personal story of dealing with tragedy, mixed with specific day-by-day lesson plans for spiritual growth, and one of the most concise and clear summaries of the yogic path that you will find anywhere. You will savor this book for a long, long time.

Swami Asokananda, President, Integral Yoga Institute of New York City

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To Mom, Dad, and Nathan, with all my heart.

And to you, dear reader, divine light. May your life be peaceful, easeful, useful, and filled with lasting happiness.

You cant stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

Sri Swami Satchidananda

O kay, you can come in now.

I looked up at Francescos sister, her face pale and thin with worry, and I tried to set my own expression into something normal. I wasnt sure what, exactly, normal might be, under the circumstances.

A few weeks earlier, my friend Francesco Clark had taken a joyful dive into a pool and broken his neck. Hed gone from being an able-bodied person to being a quadriplegic in less than a breath. Somehow hed survived the shattering of his vertebrae and nearly drowning, then being transported by medical helicopter to a trauma centera lifesaving measure that also carried the risk of splintered bones severing more spinal nerves with even the slightest movement. As doctors raced Fran into surgery to stabilize his spine and relieve the pressure in his neck that was slowly suffocating him, they called his parents so he could say good-bye in case he didnt live through the seven-hour operation. His mother, on vacation with his father and sister in Florida, told Fran he would be all right, hung up the phone, and collapsed.

But Francesco did survive the operation, and the trauma, both physical and emotional, that came with his accident. By surviving, he created a new plane of relativity: the blessings within a curse. Now, after weeks in the ICU, he was well enough to receive visitors other than a priest and next of kin.

I not only wanted to see him; after his near-death experiences I felt a desperate need to see my friend in the flesh, to see for myself that he was truly alive. But now it felt as though I couldnt move from the hospital waiting room chair. I knew hed be changed; he would likely be in a wheelchair. But how else had this grave situation affected him? I was afraid of how different hed be compared to the last time Id seen him.

Francesco and I met in 2001 while working at Mademoiselle magazine, where he was the assistant to the entertainment editor, Geri Richter Campbell. I was an editor-at-large, writing cover stories on celebrities. Geri had hired Fran straight out of college and spent the days leading up to his start date bragging about her new model-handsome assistant who spoke three languages. After he began working with us, Geri and I both proudly announced that we had a new best friend/little brother. Fran was a combination of well-traveled worldliness and wide-eyed-kid excitement. He could be sophisticated one minute and goofy the next, witty and clever while entirely unjaded. Everyone at the magazine predicted that hed be running a major empire before he was thirty and yet would remain a total sweetheart. When Mademoiselle folded a month after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Geri, Fran, and I all pinky-swore that wed stay in touch. Then, like everyone else, we got really busy.

Catch-up dates were planned and rescheduled endlessly. (This was before Facebook, where keeping in touch wouldve meant liking one anothers posts.) Somehow a whole year went by. Then one afternoon I got a frantic call from Geri telling me Fran had nearly died. The details spilled out of her in a trembling ramblehe dove into a pool, it was dark, it was the shallow end, he couldnt see, he broke his neck, hes paralyzedand I sank to the floor as I wept, thinking, Why didnt I try harder to see him?

Id learned when I was a child that life could pull a devastating vanishing act. During one of their nightly calls, my nana told my mother shed see us that coming weekend as usual, signed off with love, and quietly had an aneurysm. One minute there, the next minute gone. The lesson was buried in my marrow. As I grew up, my feelings toward people close to me careened between intense gratitude for having them and numb terror over losing them. I resolved that I would see Francesco as soon as the hospital would allow it.

Now that I was finally able to see him, I couldnt move, and the mild scent of hospital antiseptic was trapped in my held breath. What scared me was not imagining the physical changes Fran would have undergone after this catastrophic accident, but that he , his essence and core, might have been broken as well.