First There is a Mountain: A Yoga Romance: Amazon.ca: Elizabeth Kadetsky: Books

Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

While ostensibly a memoir about Kadetsky's growing self-acceptance, which slowly evolves through her yoga practice, this book is actually more a chronicle of the mythic history of yoga and the contradictions of its most worshipped living teacher, the 80-year-old B. K. S. Iyengar. Kadetsky received a Fulbright grant to study creative writing, and her prose can be mesmerizing when she describes the fetid conditions she endures traveling to India to study with Iyengar and his family, or her frustrations trying to perfectly execute yoga asanas, or poses. It's another story, however, when she wades through 14 generations of yogic history: it's challenging to keep Kuvalayananda straight from Krishnamacharya, especially since Indians themselves argue over which stories are legends and which are facts. Iyengar himself is portrayed as a tyrant who berates other teachers for defiling yoga's purity, even though he has done more to break its traditions and promote its Westernization than his rival instructors. Yoga aficionados will likely be fascinated by Kadetsky's spiritual renewal-which helped her overcome both an eating disorder and depression-and how that renewal was achieved through months of brutal practice in India. But other readers may be more surprised by her exposé of what she depicts as the cruelty and hypocrisy pervading the Iyengar empire.
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Book Description

In her early 20s, Elizabeth Kadetsky found herself running for hours every day, eating like a bird, and suffering from an excruciating but mysterious pain in her chest. Only in her yoga classes did she find some relief. Through a teacher, she heard about a yoga institute in India where an aging patriarch took in Western students for instruction. She wrote to him and waited years for an invitation to study with the master. FIRST THERE IS A MOUNTAIN is a tale of spiritual longing that brought a young American woman to the yoga institute of the renowned B.K.S. Iyengar, the man who introduced yoga to a Western audience. Once there, she became a wayward protge of this mercurial and demanding teacher, piecing together his life's vision of the ancient Hindu practice and finding her place within yoga as a Western aspirant. In the damp, musty practice rooms at the institute, her exhausted body hanging from ropes or propped up by wooden blocks, she found a spiritual discipline unlike any other. Under Iyengar's tutelage Kadetsky learns the 'subtle wisdom' of the body, leaving behind a discordant childhood and starvation diets to discover a kind of peace. Part personal memoir and part exploration of the vast gulf between body, will, and spirit, FIRST THERE IS A MOUNTAIN is written with grace, reverence, and wisdom.

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First Sentence
In the small Indian city of Pune, in the basement of the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute, was a humid sliver-shaped library where cinder-block walls seemed to radiate sweat. Read the first page

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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover

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3.9 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews)

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2.0 out of 5 stars Some real problems here, July 5 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: First There is a Mountain: A Yoga Romance (Hardcover)

I am surprised that the author teaches journalism (as stated in the bio), because it is a lack of journalistic craft that chiefly makes this book such a mess. The memoir-style musings tend to read more like the entries in one's journal, and are so overly consumed with her SELF that they can be off-putting. This paired with the "journalistic" side aspect of the book, does not effectively work. There is also the question, as some reviewers have raised, that she misrepresented herself to those she interviewed. The book jumps all over the place, from one "focal point" to another, never really unifying all the points-- making for a center that doesn't quite hold, and a manuscript that ends up as a mishmosh of too many different things. Perhaps if she just focused more on the research and the information about the corrupt world of yoga, that would have been enough, and she could possibly have brought in a stronger audience. All the Me and My Problems mumbo jumbo detracts. The subtitle of "A Yoga Romance" also tends to take away rather than add. In the realm of titles-- perhaps the book should have been titled "First There is a Body" because there's so much emphasis on that issue here. It seems to be where the author's focus was from the get-go (and apparently still is, given the back cover photo with the author's strangely wide-open shirt, evoking an image of a ripped bodice). It is perhaps the author's SELF that gets in the way a little too much in the book overall. Which brings me to one point I couldn't get past that she brings up -- if she was eating practically nothing, and then spending hours running every day-- having strong chest pains isn't a "mystery." To say that only yoga could get rid of that mysterious pain is an unbelievably clueless statement. Running for hours and starving-- hello-- the root cause of that pain is not a mystery.

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4.0 out of 5 stars A Path Recalled, April 12 2004

By

Judi Chambers (Southampton, ON) - See all my reviews

This review is from: First There is a Mountain: A Yoga Romance (Hardcover)

I have just finished reading "First There is a Mountain," and having studied yoga 15 years ago I re-experienced many of the feelings and sensations Ms. Kadetsky so eloquently described. I picked up this book from a library shelf entitled "new releases" not realizing that it was telling me that I needed to return to yoga to begin my path again.
The everyday routines described in the Pune ashram so deliberately confer with a yoga practioner's struggles. Yoga is not a "state" which is an acommplished tour de force, it is a discipline that imbues a lifetime. For anyone who has studied yoga, this is a book that will speak to your practice. Read and breath.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Research and Revelation More than a Romance, April 1 2004

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Helen Kitti Smith (Dallas, TEXAS) - See all my reviews

This review is from: First There is a Mountain: A Yoga Romance (Hardcover)

Kadetsky's vast research on the genesis of yoga is coupled with descriptions of her experience in Pune, and travels in India over five months. Both are chronicled with the sharpness of a surgeon's knife in this book.

With incisions that "unzip the viscera" she exposes not only her personal journey towards healing - as a child of divorced parents, the daughter in a mixed-marriage and the rigors of anorexia - to make sense of her own life; but also the exploration towards understanding the heartbeat and inner workings of the brilliant yet challenging experience it is to be at the source of Iyengar yoga in Pune, India.

As yoga is a process of awareness, she opines on the ebb and flow of daily life at RIMYI (the Iyengar Institute), reveals her personal interactions with B.K.S. Iyengar (who alternately takes on the role of father /friend /foe), and writes about the significant players involved in the global diffusion of Iyengar yoga, outside of his children who are the respected teachers Geeta and Prashant Iyengar.

This book described a backdrop within which my own remarkable experiences in Pune can be assessed. Kadetsky's analysis about her relationship to B.K.S.Iyengar and "Iyengar Yoga" reflects the incremental self-awareness she gained while in Pune. That is, by definition, the process for which we study yoga - to become more incisive and aware.

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Most recent customer reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting book but no index
A book like this, a collection of anecdotes and experiences would be well served by an index. The author writes well and has many insights some of them harsh but most quite... Read more

Published on Mar 12 2004

4.0 out of 5 stars In Search of Peace
There is enthusiasm and search for peace of the author, Elizabeth Kadetsky, as she experiences a different yoga and a different culture. Read more

Published on Mar 6 2004