Why read The Goddess Pose?

Book cover of The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West

Book description

When the woman who would become Indra Devi was born in Russia in 1899, yoga was virtually unknown outside of India. By the time of her death, in 2002, it was being practiced everywhere, from Brooklyn to Berlin to Ulaanbaatar. In The Goddess Pose, New York Times best-selling author Michelle…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Goddess Pose as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Cyndi Lee

Author

You might recognize the author’s name – she is a regular contributor to the Opinion Page of The New York Times. In this book, she has used her journalistic skills to uncover the layers of Indra Devi, from her birth in Russia to her status in Hollywood as one of the first yoga teachers to the stars. Indra Devi was a longtime devotee of Krishnamurti, and the first-ever woman to convince the great yoga master Krishnamacharya to teach her yoga. I remember knowing about her back in the ’70s when I was a novice yogi/college student in southern California…

From Cyndi's list on The best Buddhist and yoga biographies and memoirs.

Victoria Moran

Author

Confession: I binge-read this one. It's a positively sparkling biography of the woman who wrote two of the first three yoga books I ever read, back when I was a teenager in Kansas City. (Her books were Yoga for Americans and Forever Young, Forever Healthy. The other yoga book in the public library way back then was Yoga, Youth, and Reincarnation, by Jess Stern.) Anyway, the divine Ms. Devi had a life like Forrest Gump's: If anything historic was happening on earth, it happened precisely where she was. She was a liberated woman long before anyone burned their…

From Victoria's list on The best and most recent books about yoga and Ayurveda.