Review: Heal your Body and Mind with Yin Yoga, by Miranda Mattig Kumar

BLURB

This new book by Yin Yoga expert Miranda Kumar helps achieve deep relaxation in an overstimulated world through the power of Yin Yoga.

This simple, well-designed, and fully colour illustrated guidebook is a detailed handbook to practising Yin Yoga relaxation techniques with ease, and its many benefits are provided by comprehensive Yin Yoga illustrations, diagrams and additional interactive online exercise sessions available via our YouTube channel, which can be easily accessed by QR codes through your mobile phone.

Stress, pain, anxiety is all a result of our fast-paced and sometimes impersonal and unforgiving society. If you add a lack of physical activity, recurring ailments like back, hip, or shoulder pain may affect your quality of life. It is important to understand how essential it is to adopt regular movement and activity that helps to reintegrate the mind-body connection. You will then begin to experience the benefit of that integration in your daily life through better sleep and enhanced mood. That is why Yin, a Yoga discipline, can be beneficial to young and old, male, and female alike and is easily accessible to everyone.

Practising Yin Yoga postures which are maintained for several minutes allows the mind to calm and reconnect. You will also discover a particular meditation or creative visualization that works well for you to integrate your mind, body, and spirit. See more at www.yin-yoga.pro

My Review

Thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for organising this tour and to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book.

I’m interested in all sorts of things. I enjoy gentle exercise and I’ve done a tiny amount of Pilates. I have friends who enjoy yoga. I thought it would be interesting to read this book.

I found the anatomy chapters very interesting. They are comprehensive enough to be useful but simple enough for a lay-person to read and understand.

The illustrations used for the anatomy are clear and simple. The illustrations for the positions are quite clear, and the adaptions presented are useful. The written instructions aren’t as clear as I would have liked but they are still understandable. I think a yoga practitioner with some experience would be able to make a lot of use of these positions. The positions are a mix of yoga and Pilates. I’ve definitely seen and done one or two of them.

The writing is very easy to read and quite interesting. The author seems experienced and passionate about yoga and Pilates, and helping people with their physical and mental problems.

I found her qualifications (on her website) as a yoga therapist; she has spent twenty years studying yoga and Pilates in various parts of the world, and has been running her company in Switzerland since 2005. She’s definitely qualified to write this book.

I had some reservations about Miranda Mattig Kumar’s pronouncements on mental health issues since I can’t find any record of her qualifications in mental health care. You can’t apply ’emotional symbolism’ to bones and joints. For example, having scoliosis is not related to not wanting to grow up, and you cannot correct scoliosis with stretching exercises. I looked it up on the NHS website and the Scoliosis UK website.

However, I also understand that there is a lot of philosophy involved with yoga, and that in the association between yoga, Indian medicine, and Chinese medicine, meridians, and chakras, chi and prana, will bring these symbolisms together. The author mixes both Indian philosophy and Chinese philosophy to make Yin Yoga. I’m uncomfortable with that, it feels less cultural appreciation and more cultural appropriation.

As a physical therapy, this book presents a clear set of exercises that help with a variety of conditions. It’s entirely logical that if you’re in pain, you’re likely to feel depressed (been there, done that), and if you do an exercise series that helps loosen some of the tension, then it’ll help you to feel better, and might reduce some of the depression. I’m just uncomfortable with the philosophical aspects that are used to justify some of it.

So, mixed bag. If you’re into yoga and the westernised philosophical underpinnings, then I think this would be a useful addition to a library, for those of us interested in physical therapy it might be interesting to peruse and maybe add some of the stretches and positions to an existing routine.

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About Miranda Kumar:

Miranda Mattig Kumar, best-selling author, and Yin Yoga fitness expert has been writing about Yin Yoga and teaching Yoga techniques for over 14 years from her base in Geneva. She started training as a yoga professional at age 22. She enrolled in a Hatha Yoga training centre in Galicia and obtained her first yoga diploma there. She is the founder of the Swiss Pilates & Yoga Institute and has developed her own techniques to prevent and cure ailments and pathologies. Miranda teaches internationally. Her books have been translated into 6 languages.