Yoga School Dropout. Lucy Edge [Paperback]

Lucy Edge (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2006

This is a sharply funny travelogue from a fantastic new writer. Lucy Edge tells the story of her personal quest for serenity and yogic flexibility through the ashrams and gurus of India. After over a decade spent working and drinking too much in the world of advertising, Lucy decided she had to leave town for an altogether more spiritual and, well, meaningful way of life - And whilst she was at it, she could acquire a newly lithe and supple body. Would she come home looking like Christy Turlington and pick up some Buddhist serenity on the way? Or did something much funnier, interesting and complicated happen? Did she fall in love - with a place and its people? A divine comedy of the Western obsession with life's deeper meaning, a yogic experiment and a love letter to India, this is an entertaining book from a wonderful new travel writer.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"* 'An emotional journey' - Yoga Magazine * 'A quirky travelogue... Edge strikes a nicely satirical note and the characters she meets along the way make perfect fodder for gentle fun-poking' - Easy Living"

About the Author

Lucy Edge has worked in advertising for fifteen years, on the board of leading agencies, and has won awards for her creative campaigns with The Famous Grouse, Lloyds, Marks & Spencer and the Green Giant. She lives in London but also spends a lot of time in strange positions in India.

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Ebury; New edition edition (April 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0091899230
• ISBN-13: 978-0091899233
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #654,674 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars the shallow romp of a spiritual tourist, November 28, 2010

By 

aruna (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Yoga School Dropout (Paperback)

This book is about the adventures of Lucy Edge, a spiritual tourist, in India. That means I am automatically biased against it, since I have little patience with spiritual tourists-- those shallow people who go ashram hopping, expecting "Enlightenment" to come like a bolt from the sky any minute, chatting about chakras and Kundalini the way they'd chat about the latest style of handbags, and really all they want is to get laid or get drunk. Yes, I'm a bit of a snob, and very protective of India's spirituality, which ever since the Beatles "discovered" it has been manipulated by ever more Westerners to fit into their own shallow world-view and expectations. But I was curious, willing to enter the mind of one of them, to give the author a chance, to see what is being read these days, and so I read this book.

The first chapters confirmed my prejudices. The book is written in a chick-litty, Bridget Jones style, kind of a "romp through ashrams", breezily taking note of all the most amusing incidents and characters she meets along the way. That's not hard to do; you'll see a lot of very amusing things in India, and if your funny bone is in the right place you'll laugh at life instead of getting annoyed. Lucy laughs at herself a lot too, about her eyeing up men, including swamis, for their bed-or-husband-potential, her dreams of becoming a Yoga Goddess, and so on. Lucy has a naturally light writing style which flows, and it makes for good page-turning reading. After a while, though it gets tedious, childish, and no longer funny. Her immaturity comes out particularly when she is asked to write a nativity play for a Christmas celebration, and decides to write a spoof. I suppose this is because she, like many people attracted to Indian spirituality, rejects Christianity and so writing a real, deep, moving, beautiful story of the birth of Christ would be beyond her; it's just not cool, and her intended readership might groan.

Instead, I groaned, and so would anyone with an ounce of sensitivity who might have picked up this book hoping for some genuine depth. I think most serious readers would have abandoned the book at this point.

I certainly was ready to give up too, but I persevered, and I'm glad I did. In the second half of the book the tone changes somewhat. She stops throwing hundreds and thousands of pounds at self-appointed gurus (Warning! If Yoga is made into a business it's not Yoga!) and actually visits some places of authentic credentials; she gets a bit deeper into the practice of Yoga beyond the pretzel-poses, and it turns out that she is, after all, serious about her own growth and going further. I was happy to see that she dropped her "this is all such a hilarious lark" attitude and seemed inclined to learn what India truly has to offer.

She still draws some very wrong conclusions. Yes, in meditation the mind does want to return to its source as a cow lured into its stall by grass. But that stage comes only after hours and hours and years and yearsand decades and decades of intensive, dogged, and one-pointed driving it there: in other words, effort. Only spiritual tourists believe that no effort is required. In fact, getting the mind to drop its old habits, to turn inwards instead of outwards, is the hardest thing a human will ever do; it takes complete dedication and the greatest passion; you must want it with all your being, you must make that effort sincerely and consistently, over years, through bad times and good, come what may. You won't find steadiness in meditation overnight. That is for lazy spiritual tourists.

Lucy would have us believe that after only one meditation session she experienced her true Self, the ultimate goal, Enlightenment. Frankly, I don't believe her. She may have had a glimpse of the Self, a tiny foretaste of what could be; many beginners do, as encouragement to go further. If she had reached the goal she would not have come to the conclusion she did: that she had merely been spiritual shopping and had found nothing of value because in the end all she wanted was an ordinary life and ordinary contentment. Nothing is ordinary after experiencing that. Ordinary contentment is not enough. You will hunger and thirst for only THAT. Your life might be ordinary on the outside, but extraordinary on the inside; you are ready for any lemons life might throw at you, because you have THAT; yet you don't talk about it to anyone. You could not experience that and leave the next day to keep an appointment with Marilyn Monroe-cum-Dolly Parton, as Lucy did. You certainly could not go back and write a book about a hilarious romp through the spiritual tourist sites of India, because you would see spiritual tourisn for what it is: a shallow and futile exercize. Spiritual maturity can only come when you have chosen your path, be it Christianity, Advaita, Bhakti or whatever, and follow it to the best of your ability. You cannot go back, only forward.

One more note: I have been going to Lucy's "Ashram of the Year" regularly for the last 35 years, for periods lasting weeks or months, slept in several of their rooms,, and not once have I been offered a one-inch-thick mattress. Though in my early days I also rented huts where I slept on a blanket on bare stone; and it was as nothing.

It's disappointing that such a distorted picture of India's spirituality is put out there and gobbled up by gullible readers. Spiritual tourists do not, cannot, have their fingers on the pulse of India's spirituality. My tip: if you're serious about spiritual growth, avoid books with cartoon pictures of ladies with handbags and high heels on the cover. The trivialisation of a potent wisdom could not be more blatant. There are real books out there; look for them instead.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More In-Lightening than any asana book, July 10, 2006

By 

Kristi Lees - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Yoga School Dropout (Paperback)

I have just finished reading this delightful book, `Yoga School Drop Out' by Lucy Edge. I happened upon it `accidentally' (we all know there is no such thing as an accident) at the library when I was looking for something entirely different. I did not manage to find what I was looking for; I did however find exactly what I needed!

Lucy sets out on a Spiritual Quest to India determined to return home a Yoga Goddess. Things do not quite flow as Lucy anticipated and it looked as if she was destined never to return home as the Yoga Goddess she had envisioned. She did, however, gain more inner wisdom and insight than she could have imagined when she first set out.

Along the way it was the "ordinary" people she met, not the yoga she did, or the gurus she listened to, that held the most lessons. Here are a few pearls that were shared along the way:

On Asana: "Today asana has been made into a `photograph,' ... there is no difference between this and gymnastics ... But asana is not a performance, asana is what happens in the posture and afterwards"

On Change: "Change occurs only when we become what we truly are, not when we are trying to be something we are not. Change can't happen when we are trying to escape our true nature"

On Travel: "Unfortunately, when you travel, you take yourself with you"

On Yoga: "... the reason I found them so inspiring was because their yoga practice stretched way beyond their mat. They saw yoga as a state of mind, an attitude to life, and the world as their school. Yoga was, for all of them, `a harmonious way of living', not a one-off physical goal - they knew all they had to do was look within"

On Practice: "It was an unremarkable thing - Pranayama, meditation and perhaps a few simple sun salutations. It was practiced informally, not in a big class on the instructions of a big name teacher, but at home - quietly without fuss"

On Enlightenment: "Enlightenment was not a trophy to be lifted high in one triumphant moment, it was about seeing clearly, and choosing wisely in daily life"

All round just a great book! Thanks for the deLightful and inspiring read Lucy :-)

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Superficial, June 5, 2011

By 

Derek - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Yoga School Dropout (Kindle Edition)

I tried. Really, I tried to get through this book. Maybe the next chapter would engage me but it never really happened. Yoga is something I hold very dear to my heart and this book really has nothing to do with it. This made me consider not going to an Ashram in India. If it's full of these people, I will pass.