Customer Reviews

Inspired Lives: The Best of Real Life Yoga from Ascent Magazine

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This book is a collection from one of my favorite yoga magazines-- ascent, based out of Montreal, Canada. It's a large-format book with lots of pictures and illustrations. So like the magazine, it's beautiful. But I would be short selling this amazing book to talk only about the way it looks (I'd happily place it on my coffee table). The articles Inspired Lives features are truly intelligent and inspiring.

Some of my favorites include an interview with activist bell hooks, who takes her buddhist values into her life and work. She talks about love and healing in a very compelling, very real-world manner. Sparrow's "My visit to California" is lyrical and charming, and the comic, "Boy Priest" is delightful.

The thing that is really interesting to me about this book is the breadth and depth of the articles. People from many different traditions-- artists, musicians, nuns, swamis, poets, activists-- talking about the role of spirituality in their lives with an intelligence and sincerity that is refreshing in an age when irony is so often the response to the challenges of living in the world.

I am a long-time reader of ascent magazine, so I was delighted to find this anthology of the best articles from the first six years of publication. ascent has consistently published insightful, practical and intelligent articles about how to live a spiritual life in the world, and the most outstanding of these pieces are compiled here. Over the years, spiritual luminaries such as Tenzin Palmo, Georg Feurstein and Geeta Iyengar have graced the pages of ascent magazine, as well as other cultural figures such as bell hooks, Yann Martel and Arundhati Roy.

Some of my favourite articles are reprinted here, and I find myself revisiting them over and over again. Inspired Lives is a wonderful tool for reflection and a creative action plan for how to live an life of inspiration and compassion.