You do the yoga of our time.
You practice it, you love it, you may even teach it,
but you can’t really say what it is and what it isn’t.
No one, not even the most renowned teachers,
has ever been able to.
Now we all can.
What Is(n’t) Hatha Yoga is not another book about how to do yoga. It’s not about practicing yoga. It’s about knowing what hatha yoga is, and about taking part in its further evolution.
We can and will keep practicing different hathayogic styles, but for us to realize our full potentials and for hatha yoga to realize its full potential – two different ways of saying the same thing – we must also know and be able to explain what we are doing and seeking in a broadly accessible way. Yet the Yoga Sutras don’t explain hatha yoga. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika doesn’t even explain what hatha yoga is. What Is(n’t) Hatha Yoga does, and it does so on multiple levels, including one that we can all understand.
There are fundamentals in this book, but nothing “fundamentalist.” You may find what some call “New Age spirituality” or “Eastern philosophy” or even “Western philosophy,” “politics,” and “science,” but mainly what you’ll find is the common-level truth about what it is that you’re doing, and what is being done to you, when you’re “doing yoga.”
Scott Smith Miller is the director of Western Yoga College, and has written two other books on yoga – A Prelude to Radical Yogic Discourse and Yogic Love. He has had the good fortune of studying yoga with the world’s most distinguished teachers, and you can find out more about him and his background at his WYC bio page.
