Yoga Bitch: One Woman's Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment
Suzanne Morrison
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0307717445
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
What happens when a coffee-drinking, cigarette-smoking, steak-eating twenty-five-year-old atheist decides it is time to get in touch with her spiritual side? Not what you’d expect…
When Suzanne Morrison decides to travel to Bali for a two-month yoga retreat, she wants nothing more than to be transformed from a twenty-five-year-old with a crippling fear of death into her enchanting yoga teacher, Indra—a woman who seems to have found it all: love, self, and God.
But things don’t go quite as expected. Once in Bali, she finds that her beloved yoga teacher and all of her yogamates wake up every morning to drink a large, steaming mug…of their own urine. Sugar is a mortal sin. Spirits inhabit kitchen appliances. And the more she tries to find her higher self, the more she faces her cynical, egomaniacal, cigarette-, wine-, and chocolate-craving lower self.
Yoga Bitch chronicles Suzanne’s hilarious adventures and misadventures as an aspiring yogi who might be just a bit too skeptical to drink the Kool-Aid. But along the way she discovers that no spiritual effort is wasted; even if her yoga retreat doesn’t turn her into the gorgeously calm, wise believer she hopes it will, it does plant seeds that continue to blossom in surprising ways over the next decade of her life.
suzannemorrison.blogspot.com
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deep breath and exhaled. “And that is different from gender clarity, I assume?” She nodded vigorously. “Oh, it’s amazing! Basically they help you learn how to express your sexuality and gender to yourself and the opposite sex. So, we were doing this exercise. You stand face to face and take turns.” She stood and pulled me up so that we faced each other, green vines hanging between us. “I was paired with a man I thought was so attractive, oh, Suzanne! He was so big and tall!” Her hands rested on
practice back to Seattle I would get lynched by the Nice Police. Good thing I’m headed to New York. Being detached means recognizing our emotions as what they are: clouds, sunbursts, weather. They pass. So rather than feed on my anger or sadness, rolling about in it like a pig in its own filth, I see that it is weather, and know that in time it will pass. This clarity I’ve had since my kundalini breakthrough isn’t an emotional state. I don’t see it as weather so much as a whole new sky. Today,
gynecological shower experience and marveling at this curious, unfamiliar feeling of liberation from myself. I sipped my tea and looked at my body. The flowers were canary yellow, magenta, pink and creamy white, and they cast revolving shadows on my belly—smudges and blobs like Rorschach blots. The tea was perfectly spicy, and I imagined it cleaning my insides. When all that was left in the mug were chunks of ginger and cinnamon sticks, I dumped these remnants into the bathwater and leaned over
lying. It was mortifying. I wanted to die. I still want to die. But I’m trying to work with it. I’m trying to be detached from the fart. Farts and emotions are like weather. They pass. But, oh. Cringe. Later It’s raining. I’ve been meditating on the bed, trying not to think about certain things. Trying not to relive certain moments when I could’ve been more repressed. I don’t know. I don’t want to be repressed. Oh, goddamn it to hell. Repression is something I like in a GI tract. I
class of woman. And that class of woman—middle class, upper middle class—likes to shop. She gets a spiritual hit off of shopping. So, in this yoga, she gets two spiritual practices in one. An astonishing commercial success story! Create a need? No need. The need is an eternal one. It’s been filled by countless religions, and they’ve often asked us for money in exchange for our serenity. But yoga’s got them all beat, and they don’t even try to hide it. They put those boutiques right out front. I