First There is a Mountain: A Yoga Romance [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Kadetsky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2, 2004

First There Is A Mountain is a tale of spiritual longing that brought a young American woman to the yoga institute of the renowned B.K.S. lyengar, the man who introduced yoga to a Western audience. Once there, She became a wayward protegee of this mercurial and demanding teacher, piecing together his life's vision of the ancient Hindu practice and finding her place within yoga as a Western aspirant. In the damp, musty practice rooms as the institute, her exhausted body hanging from ropes or propped up by wooden blocks, she found a spiritual discipline unlike any other. Under lyengar's tutelage Kadetsky learns the "subtle wisdom" of the body, leaving behind a discordant childhood and starvation diets to discover a kind of peace.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While ostensibly a memoir about Kadetsky's growing self-acceptance, which slowly evolves through her yoga practice, this book is actually more a chronicle of the mythic history of yoga and the contradictions of its most worshipped living teacher, the 80-year-old B. K. S. Iyengar. Kadetsky received a Fulbright grant to study creative writing, and her prose can be mesmerizing when she describes the fetid conditions she endures traveling to India to study with Iyengar and his family, or her frustrations trying to perfectly execute yoga asanas, or poses. It's another story, however, when she wades through 14 generations of yogic history: it's challenging to keep Kuvalayananda straight from Krishnamacharya, especially since Indians themselves argue over which stories are legends and which are facts. Iyengar himself is portrayed as a tyrant who berates other teachers for defiling yoga's purity, even though he has done more to break its traditions and promote its Westernization than his rival instructors. Yoga aficionados will likely be fascinated by Kadetsky's spiritual renewal-which helped her overcome both an eating disorder and depression-and how that renewal was achieved through months of brutal practice in India. But other readers may be more surprised by her exposé of what she depicts as the cruelty and hypocrisy pervading the Iyengar empire.
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Review

"...Kadetsky brings a good dose of journalistic skepticism to her own memoir, as well as writerly grace and beauty..." -- Leah Hager Cohen

"...Kadetsky brings her fierce intelligence and savvy style to bear on the most intimate and unmapped of literary territory..." -- Melanie Thernstorm

"...a wonderful book...colorful, honest, smart and wise..." -- Martha Sherrill, author

"...an enthralling account of several journeys..." -- Margot Livesey

"...an intriguing journey into the sometimes magical, sometimes mystifying world of yoga. I loved this book..." -- Maggie Estep

"...seamlessly combines the emotions of a meaningful personal journey with a journalist's rigor and scope---inspiring and educational..." -- Aimee Bender, author

"Like a neon lotus, this book dazzles with its hard-won revelations." -- Rachel Resnick, author

"Like a raga, delicate and beautiful, with an undercurrent that will pull you ferverishly, into a startling world." -- Katherine Russell Rich

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1st edition (January 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316890960
• ISBN-13: 978-0316890960
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #825,115 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New Light on Yoga, January 21, 2005

By 

Malcolm McLean, RYT (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: First There is a Mountain: A Yoga Romance (Hardcover)

First There is a Mountain, by Elizabeth Kandetsky,
Reviewed by Malcolm McLean, RYT

Here is a powerful tale of a yogi's quest for truth - the truth of her own life, revealed in her own body, accessed and then uplifted though yoga. The truth of her guru BKS Iyengar, clouded in legend and rivalries, and here pierced with the eye of a conscientious journalist. She has woven a rich tapestry from the threads of her own life, her yoga practice and experience with Iyengar, and the story of yoga.

Kandetsky paints an intimate and candid portrait of life at the Iyengar school in Pune. She describes the tremendous power of yoga practice in this setting, as it worked on her own life at every level. She does not flinch from showing the tyrannical, often capricious attitudes of Iyengar and his daughter Geeta, and son Prashant. She shines light on the petty rivalries between Iyengar and other great yoga masters, on their roots in nationalism and other struggles for patronage and prestige. She investigates the origins of yoga, and raises sincere doubts about the legends of its antiquity.

From this clarity of unrelenting objectivity combined with the understanding in her own cells, she offers a powerful validation of yoga. Despite the contradictions and falsehoods around yoga, she shows how it meets her needs -- and the different needs in India and the West, as it continues to grow, mutate, and reach millions of people.

Towards the end of the book, she describes her last class with the master -- after she had admitted learning another system - the Ashtanga system of Pattabhi Jois, his lifelong rival. She was challenged to perform the scorned series in front of Iyengar, who nevertheless could not resist, as she went along through the despised "jumpings", teaching it to her as he saw it might be done. She described the experience as a great healing of her own sense of fragmentation, as a child of divorce and family rivalry, knowing that her great teacher still loved her even though she had, as one person put it "danced with another and then told him he liked it."

I remembered the highly criticized error of placing my hand alongside the foot in triangle (Iyengar style) rather than grasping the big toe in Ashtanga class. Or breathing ujjayi in good Asthanga style, to the complaint of an imperious workshop leader, about "this business of breathing like a horse!"

Yoga, like every other human endeavour, shares the human attribute of yawning political divides, insufficiency of otherness.

Though I have never met him, I thought of how BKS Iyengar had cast his light and his attitudes into my life, since 1986, through teachers who learned from him directly, or indirectly. Now, thanks to this lucid and powerful book, I feel privileged to know Iyengar more deeply than I ever thought possible.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not What I Expected, January 28, 2004

By 

David Brunton (Montgomery, Alabama) - See all my reviews

This review is from: First There is a Mountain: A Yoga Romance (Hardcover)

As a practitioner of yoga for about a decade or so, I've learned to separate the life-changing art of practicing yoga from writing ABOUT yoga, the latter of which tends to oscillate between the flaky and the just-plain-stupid. So I have to admit, I was a little skeptical when a yoga-practitioner friend of mine recommended Kadetsky's book. To begin with, I was instantly drawn in by her magnetic prose and lush descriptions of India, but as I read on, I also began to admire the subtle way she navigates between the foibles and sublimities of B.K.S. Iyengar, a man who is perhaps one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic teachers. Her thoughts on the connection between modern yoga and Hindu fundamentalism are well worth the price of admission. For anyone who has ever found their own quest for spirituality caught between the allure of an ancient past and the grittiness of the modern third world, this is a great book. My only complaint is that I didn't see what the subtitle, "A Yoga Romance," had to do with her book, since needless to say, there is no love-interest in this book.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent description of yoga movement, January 28, 2004

By 

"vbhatt456" - See all my reviews

This review is from: First There is a Mountain: A Yoga Romance (Hardcover)

Yoga is known in America and Europe primarily as a method for relaxation technique available to all, but in India this practice is not separated from a relationship of teacher and student. Miss Kadetsky's book is an excellent description of such relationship in the Indian environment. Also, I think everyone who reads this book will learn much about Yoga and its role in India's National History. I hope the author continues to write books about exchange between East and West.