Jeff Krasno - Wanderlust : a Modern Yogis Guide to Discovering Your Best Self

What do a meditating congressman from Ohio, a free-range farmer from Virginia, a yoga instructor from New Jersey, and a vegan DJ from LA have in common?

As I sit in my Brooklyn office on a crisp fall day in 2013, the answer is Wanderlust. I scrawl my to-do list: Track down Congressman Ryan, Joel Salatin, Seane Corn, Moby. I am programming next summers festivals.

Five years earlier, in 2008, my best friend, Sean, and I embarked on the first of many bumpy trips in the name of yoga. My wife, Schuyler, was leading a yoga retreat to Costa Rica and we tagged along. It was here, deep in the rain forest of the Osa Peninsula, practicing yoga, eating from the garden, surfing, dancing, and drinking with friends, that we envisioned the worlds largest yoga retreat.

If you are reading this, you likely have an incurable case of wanderlust. I do. The dictionary describes wanderlust as an innate desire to travel. This yearning to explore and understand the world beats restlessly in our hearts. Far-flung adventures are the passionate fancy of many a daydream, and, sometimes, they happen.

Inextricably connected to this craving is the longing to know and actualize our true and best self. Alongside our physical exploration, we are also spiritual seekerssearching for a happy, enlightened, and purpose-driven life. Our geographic pilgrimage is mirrored by an inner journey.

The intention of this book is to provide guidance along your trek. We chose Wanderlusts principal image, a compass, with a clear purpose. Wanderlust is a base camp for ideas and practices from master teachers, provocative thinkers, mind/body experts, cutting-edge artists, and conscious business leaders that set the coordinates for your journey. And the hope is for you to discover gems of wisdom and inspiration to help navigate lifes challenges and cultivate your own best selfto find your true north.

The lens for our journey is yoga: asana, meditation, breath, and philosophy. It is dedicated, daily practice that will keep you on course.

We also see Wanderlust as a bridge connecting yoga, the practice, with yoga, the lifestyle. Are you happiest in nature, eating healthy food and listening to great music? Do you seek a good life that is also good for those around you and for the Earth? If so, even if you cannot hold a handstand, you may already be a yogi. It is this wider definition of yoga that creates the possibility for Tim, Joel, Seane, and Moby to gel seamlessly, as our sherpas, under one tent. Wanderlust provides a broader way to understand yoganot just as something you do in class, but an overarching principle for living.

Lastly, yoga literally means union (to yoke)union with your higher self. Baked into the core of the practice is self-actualizationrealizing your capacity for limitless transformation in the service of this best self.

This book guides you from the simplest of daily practices to techniques for manifesting yourself as a leader in the world. But it just scratches the surface. I have often described Wanderlust as a gateway drug for yoga. We hook you and hope you dive deeper. Like the festival, this book is an invitation to take a sip. The artists, scholars, and teachers that contribute to Wanderlust are the true experts. If something in this book sparks your interest, pursue it. The voyage is life long. This book gets you just out of the harbor. You must scull ahead.

I hope this book lives in your life. Its a cookbook with recipes for living. And like a cookbook, a source of inspiration and experimentation. A pinch more of this. A dash more of that. Just dont let it languish on your coffee table; better to spill coffee on it. Some days, a tablespoon of tadasana will be enough. Other days, you will want to pull all the ingredients off the shelf and start from scratch with everything youve got.

It is said that the hardest part of any journey is taking the first step.

Take a deep breath. Step forward.

This is the threshold. To plow through life, seeking pleasures, avoiding pain, rejecting dissonance, reveling in success, and cursing the vicissitudes of fortune. Or to pursue a life of inquiry, simultaneously nonattached and deeply immersed. To experience yourself as both the center of the universe and a dust mote on the filament of history. To choose to have a practicea daily discipline of yoking your heart to your mind, your mind to your breath, your breath to your body, your body to the earth and the rest of humanityis to pass this threshold into the examined, mindful life.

The exact way in which you engage in that yoking (in Sanskrit, the yoga) will change. Should change. The course of your relationships, your career, and your health will inevitably shift; the only constant is change. Likewise, your asana practice and other mind/body pursuits will, should shape-shift over a lifetime.

Passion, depression, contentment, injury, exaltation, loss. Will you engage or will you deflect? Will you be immersed or consumed? Like anything substantial, to live a mindful life isnt easy. It takes attention and skill. It takes beginning where you are, as you are now, yoking this larger intention to the present moment. It takes practice.

Lets begin.

Sit tall

Place hands mindfully open or at heart center

Close your eyes

The focus of this moment is resonance: OM. Like the ringing of a bell. Like an elliptical sound that begins and ends in full silence.

While OM is often written with just two letters, it is said to be made of four sounds: A, U, M, and the silence afterward. Together these sounds invoke a sense of wholeness, and of cycles. When we sing OM, we touch each part of our mouths palate, from the front behind the teeth to the top peak, the inside of our mouth, to the depths of the throat, guttural. The sound moves in a wave this way, with a beginning, middle, and end, and then the after-effect: a feeling of shifted energy in the room, a vibration in the core of our chest.