BPY February Book Club
Mark your calendars for February 27th at 4 pm to join Heather for our first book club! Grab a copy of Stephen Cope’s The Wisdom of Yoga and get reading!
We are excited to make this book our first book club offering! For modern spiritual seekers and yoga students alike, here is an irreverent yet profound guide to the most sophisticated teachings of the yoga wisdom tradition– Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. These teachings are now brought to contemporary life by celebrated author, psychotherapist, and leading American yoga instructor, Stephen Cope in his book The Wisdom of Yoga. Stephen is a senior Kripalu yoga teacher, who is currently a Senior Scholar in Residence at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts. 
While many Americans still think of yoga as an invigorating series of twisting postures and breathing exercises, these physical practices are but a small fraction of an ancient yogic science. For more than three thousand years, yoga sages systematically explored the essential questions of our human existence: What causes suffering? How can we be free of suffering and be happy? What would it be like to function at the maximum potential of our minds, bodies, and spirits? They were scientists of our internal world.
These human discoveries were brilliantly captured in a short–but famously difficult–treatise called the Yoga Sutras. Composed of 196 sutras (sutra means “thread” in sanskrit), this revered text lays out the entire path of inner development in remarkable detail–ranging from practices that build character and mental acuity to the highest form of spiritual realization. As just stated, for the first time reader, the Yoga Sutras can be an incredibly difficult text to tackle without guidance. While the text has been translated from Sanskrit many times and has had many scholars try to interpret the words, the material is challenging and difficult to put into context of everyday living.
In Stephen Cope’s The Wisdom of Yoga, he unlocks the teachings of the Yoga Sutras by cleverly showing them at work in the lives of a group of friends and fellow yoga students who are confronting the realities of modern life – careers plunders, relationships pitfalls, and dysfunctional family dynamics. Interweaving their daily dilemmas with insights from modern psychology, neuroscience, religion, and philosophy, Cope shows the relevance and practicality of this ancient work today. You can pick up a copy of Stephen Cope’s book in the studio or online.
The book club will meet on February 27th at 4 pm and be led by Balanced Planet Yoga’s Heather Martin. This class will be a Karma Class, which means it is a donation based class. We will be collecting donations for the Covenant House in Atlantic City. This organization is on the front lines combating teen homelessness through outreach programs and shelters.
