After studying yoga in India and traveling all over the world with
traditional Vedantic masters, Steve Ross returned to his hometown of Los
Angeles with a broadened point of view of what yoga could be. He was
surprised to find that yoga classes at home were missing the humor, joy,
and celebration that fueled his Eastern studies. Instead of expanding
and enhancing the joy of being, Western yoga classes focused obsessively
on correcting body positions and developing a picture-perfect physique.
Determined to keep his yoga practice true to cultivating bliss and inner
radiance, Ross started his own yoga studio and has created a yoga
movement in Los Angeles that is, to put it simply, revolutionary.
Ross lives and teaches according to his belief that the secret to yoga
is not obsessing over whether your feet are parallel or whether you can
bend as far as the person on your left can, but about transcending the
serious and allowing joy into your life, your body, your mind, and
hopefully your yoga practice itself. It's about lightening up.
In Happy Yoga, Ross reveals that everyone is inherently happy, but
that our true self is shadowed and concealed by the layers of worry
that, through habit, become our daily thoughts. In each chapter, he
examines one of our seven greatest human fears -- depression, ill
health, loss of love, career failure, war, death, and emotional stasis
-- and uses yoga wisdom to explain how to strip away these worries to
reach your core of calm radiant joy. By sharing his system of yoga
postures, diet, meditation, music, supplements, and philosophy, Ross has
effected profound physical and mental changes in both his life and the
lives of his students.
Ross's power is that he goes back to the source -- five thousand years
of ancient yogic wisdom -- and decodes the abstract Eastern ideas for a
Western audience. Happy Yoga is not just a set of movements and facts to
consume, it is a way of shifting your awareness to bring the spirit of
yoga into each movement, each meal, each relationship, each thought, and
each breath.
With love and joyful abandon, Ross offers us a new way to practice and
live yoga. The result is profound calm, a dramatic release of anxiety
and pain, and the realization that there really is nothing to worry
about.
