Customer Reviews

Yoga Indian Classical Dance

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Roxanne creates this book by combining her experiences living in India, learning classical dance and yoga. Her style of writing is exquisite and authentic. I grew up in Hyderabad speaking Telugu language. Reading about her experiences from Hyderabad, I felt like I'm back home. I met Dr. Nataraja Rama Krishna, great dance teacher few times. Teachers like him and others expect nothing but the best from their students.

Roxanne incorporates some of the dance movements and hand gestures in the yoga exercises she recommends. It clearly shows, how classical dance and yoga are inter related. Any dance teacher would benefit greatly from reading this book.

This book is beautifully packaged, and Ms. Gupta links Yoga asanas and classical Indian dance, something so obvious, and yet the dance masters fail to do this to any extent in the present-day Indian classical dance training. The Yoga portion of the book consists of basic gentle yoga asanas, with photos of the author doing the asanas, good especially for beginners, but a video to accompany the book would have made it more complete and easier to follow (though, as photos go, it's as good as it can get without a video). It's a memoir and a journey of the author's first trip to India and how she, as an American, got interested in the East. It is full of hundreds of photos, large and small, of the author who shares her earthly and sometimes not-so-earthly experiences in words and pictures, making it a book on yoga, a biography and an introduction to Indian classical dance.

Inspiring and scholarly, The Yogini's Mirror reflects undiscovered worlds inside the reader, moving the reader into a realm where anything is possible. Sincerity and Grace are humbly conveyed through personal experience and practical methods. This book is a way to easy yoga, accessible and full of joyous enlightenment.

This is on par with "Autobiography of a Yogi" by Paramahansa Yoganand, "The Ochre Robe" by Aghehananda Bharati, and Gurdjeff's "Meetings with Remarkable Men." Not only does the book describe the author's experiences, it provides a how-to manual for those interested in pursuing a spritual path.

Yoga and the classical dance traditions of India, with their hand gestures and postures, have been blended for centuries: A Yoga of Indian Classical Music will appeal to a wide audience from religious students to those interested in yoga and dance movements aside from spirituality: it provides a survey of yoga dance traditions by a Western woman accepted and trained by Indian masters. Unique and outstanding.

A Yoga of Indian Classical Dance § The Yogini's Mirror

By Roxanne Kamayani Gupta, Ph.D.

This book is a major work, documenting exquisitely a Western view of the Hindu traditions of Yoga and Classical Dance and their amazing and visceral connections. Rarely has the blend of beauty, knowledge and insight been so unified to teach and inspire. The pictures and the text in the final chapter, The Yoga of the Elements are worth the price of admission alone.

The Library Journal, in its splendid review of this work, suggested that it belongs in every college campus library under many and various headings. I couldn't agree more.

The book sings with the energy and the authenticity of the author's passion for knowledge and her practice and experience of it.

My hat is off! Bravo.

Ed Gans, Gh.a.

This book is a wonderful multifaceted combination of exercise instruction, artistic photography and the author's narrative of her experiences with Indian culture. I recommend this book for anyone interested in accessing and better understanding India's living traditions.