YOUR YOGA BODYMAP FOR VITALITY
Jenny Beeken
In this very distinctive guide, Jenny Beeken places the emphasis firmly on the body-joint by joint and limb by limb. Readers get to understand their bodies better, whether they are involved in sport or dealing with illness. From this understanding, good postures come naturally. Comprehensive, easy-to-follow instructions, clear line drawings and 'stop-action' photographs ensure success in practising the asanas. All students, from complete beginners to the more knowledgeable, will gain special insights from this novel, body-aware, approach. YOUR YOGA BODYMAP is a passport to vitality.
JENNY BEEKEN After discovering yoga, Jenny Beeken studied in India with Sri B. K. S. Iyengar and subsequently with Angela Farmer and Victor van Kooten. She has been teaching in Britain, the U.S.A. and Ireland for twenty-five years, and has run courses in Greece, Turkey, France and Spain. She lives in Petersfield, under the English South Downs, with her teenage daughter, and is Founder and Principal of the Heart Yoga School. This is her second book.
ISBN 0-9545389-1-9 · November 2003 · 246mm x 186mm · 160 pages · fully-illustrated paperback £15.99 $ 18.95
READ A REVIEW OF THIS BOOK
Jenny Beeken is a world-renowned yoga teacher and founder-principal of the Yoga of the Heart School, which trains yoga teachers. After her trip to India for courses with Sri B K S Iyengar, Jenny began her own Iyengar classes in the UK, full of energy and inspiration to teach the amazing power of the body on the mind and the spirit. this book is a detailed and easy-to-follow manual, connecting postures to the joints and parts of the body they serve, creating higher body awareness and the vitality it brings. It can serve well both the complete beginner as well as the more knowledgeable, with its 'stop-action' photos and illustrations making postures easy to understand and form. Jenny's approach is very practical, as it teaches the most relevant postures in detail, while also enriching us with advice on how we can better use our bodies in everyday circumstances to increase health, healing and our natural energy levels.
Verity Willcocks in ODYSSEY REVIEW
This is a beautifully-written and presented book. Jenny takes a small range of postures and deals with them in great depth. Each posture is designed to be done at different levels according to ability and to feel how the areas of the body change and move in the process. 'It is the journey of the postures and the movement you get in doing them, not the final pose, that is important', she says. Such joy to find older people in the lovely illustrations too - instead of all young lithe bodies. Each section connects the postures to the joints and the parts of the body they serve with simple explanations and pictures of how the body works. Neither is philosophy neglected. Jenny links it all together, culminating in a final chapter on the body's subtle energy systems. Highly recommended.
Yoga Scotland, May 2005
Yoga for Healing
Review by Prasanna Probyn
in Lifestyle, Entertainment section of www.pages4women.com
Today's women's fashions cruelly zoom in on the midriff like never before. Many a sweaty hour is spent in the gym or on the exercise circuit pummelling that bulge into submission with that dangerous denim hipster in mind. Just when you can't take it anymore, what is more liberating than to be told that tightening your stomach and holding it all in is not the secret of that lean look.
Before you think this book is a quick fix solution, let me warn you that Jenny Beeken is anything but simplicity. What you get is spiritual treatment for the body, soul and mind. This holistic yoga guide expects the reader to assume responsibility and concentrate totally throughout the routines. We are encouraged to bring awareness to the parts we are working, so lusting after a hot latte half way through the motions is not going to do it. We are asked to become aware of the way we carry ourselves, sit, and undertake our work. We form habits around the way we work, says Jenny. Awareness means shedding old habits and renewing yourself. This leads to better energy flow, awakening and healing the body.
Each chapter in Yoga Body Map deals with different sections of the body, examining the problem areas, the causes, and the benefits of the yoga in these areas. For instance, holding in one's pelvic area, and thereby ones sexuality, leaves one vulnerable to sciatica, osteoarthritis and lower-back problem.
Most western exercise routines suggest tightening and strengthening the muscles. In Yoga, it is the skeleton that is strengthened with the muscles moving fluidly around them. So returning to the blubber around our waists, Jenny says that it is the stretching and lengthening of the spine that shapes the muscles to fit in neatly around us without that beer-gut effect. With the added bonus, it addresses your period, menopausal or prostate problems if you are a man.
An excellent book for a skeletal de-tox. With a newly-awakened body, you might just begin to look beyond those revealing trousers.