Going Om: Real-Life Stories on and off the Yoga Mat
Melissa Carroll
Language: English
Pages: 242
ISBN: 1936740869
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Serpent Power: The Secrets of Tantric and Shaktic Yoga
A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga
Layayoga: The Definitive Guide to the Chakras and Kundalini
May I Be Happy: A Memoir of Love, Yoga, and Changing My Mind
through the city like ancient Roman aqueducts. I love the paper-scented independent bookstore and the inky-dark art theater. I love the smorgasbord of yoga studios with their tall, sun-drenched windows and shiny, blond-wood floors. I love the optimistic graffiti and happy, Flax-clad people. But back when I was in college—when I was in the reckoning of woman-daughter-writer—sometimes my anger at Ithaca’s relentless optimism won out over my love for its good heart. And sometimes I wanted to run
in Queens: “I’m calling regarding Michele McKee, who has come back to our facility after running into the street at some point today.” My world cracks into many pieces. It’s a mile to the nearest cell phone reception. The moon is bright and I climb to the hilltop without a flashlight. I reach the ER doctor. To him, I was just a phone number. He doesn’t even know my name. He found my number because another ER doctor recognized our mother. When she got lost six months ago, police brought her to
and elsewhere. Melissa received her MFA from the University of South Florida. She was a National Park Service writer-in-residence in Arizona. Melissa discovered yoga and Reiki in 2006, and quickly realized the profound transformation these paths would have on her life. She currently teaches more than 250 students at the largest weekly yoga class in Florida, assists in the Yoga Loft’s teacher training program, and leads workshops and retreats all over the world. Her classes are mindful, playful,
as yoga and meditation are paths within, writing is a path to better understand ourselves and the world around us. To write is to translate the world. To be a writer or a yogi, we must be observers. We must quietly witness and patiently absorb all the wonder, seeming confusion, and paradoxical beauty that exists. Both writers and yoga students seek to make meaning of this wildly miraculous human experience. I was more interested in the stories of people who can’t touch their toes, who have known
had known had, at one time or another, required me to actually work. But this job’s biggest requirement was rhetoric. Memorizing Core Values like entrepreneurship and diversity, both of which had personal and professional equivalents that we were supposed to embody, one beige day after another. Everyone told me I was crazy when I quit. Everybody told me that you wait to sell a book first, then you quit your day job. And if any of them had read the manuscript I had saved on my laptop at that