by Kara-Leah Grant, author of Forty Days of Yoga & The No-More-Excuses Guide to Yoga (coming soon)
It’s been 18 months since I published Forty Days of Yoga and over a thousand people have now bought the book in print or electronic versions.
The message I consistently hear is that:
Thank you so much for opening my world and showing me that a daily yoga practice doesn’t mean crazy postures on my mat for 90 minutes and failing if I miss a day. Thank you for helping me find a calm, peacefulness during my practice that is allowing me to be a better mom. Thank you for everything! ~ Andi Tipple
There’s no doubt about it – Forty Days of Yoga is the best home yoga practice book you can buy and here’s why.
1. The book isn’t just something you read but something you do. It’s process, not just information.
There’s worksheets all the way through the book designed to get you thinking deeply about whats really going on when you don’t practice. As you fill in the worksheets as you start to become conscious of your patterns and that awareness creates space for a shift in your psyche.
This is deliberate. I knew many of us buy books which we read, hoping to get something from or hoping to change an aspect of ourselves or our lives but those books just go back on the shelf and nothing shifts. These are often excellent books and there may even be suggestions of things to do… but so often, we just don’t do the suggestion.
I deliberately embedded the worksheets all the way through the book and made them easily do-able. That way, people could work on a process rather than just imbibing information. This is so important!
This book is an excellent tool to support a regular home practice. Even as a yoga teacher, I found committing to yoga every single day, without fail, difficult. The worksheets, which enable you to examine your motivations and blocks, free-up the headspace. For me, it allowed for an effortless transition to daily practice – not just asana – but living yoga, daily. Highly recommended for any yoga practitioner. ~ Kathryn, Goodreads Review
2. I identified the key obstacles to a home yoga practice and dismantled them one by one.
I knew that the reasons why people don’t practice as home when the want to has nothing to do with willpower or discipline. Blaming either of these two aspects of being is slamming the door on our potential to practice.
Instead, I picked apart the various beliefs and ideas that we have which stop us getting on our mat every single day. Beliefs like:
- Yoga is solely comprised of physical postures.
- It doesn’t count unless it’s 90 minutes on the mat.
- I need a secluded peaceful place to practice.
- I have to get up at 5:30am to practice every day.
Demolishing those beliefs opens up the field of possibility so we can choose yoga that’s suitable for our lifestyles and stage of life. That means sometimes we might practice postures, but we’re also open to meditation, pranayama, chanting, Karma Yoga and the yoga of relationship and intimacy. It also means that we realise grabbing ten minutes in the kitchen while the kids play around our feet is good enough.
Giving people permission to practice what they can, how they can, when they can meant that people were far more likely to practice every day and in doing that, discover more space arising for their yoga.
I have plenty of yoga posture books and yet was still struggling to start a home practice.. Kara-Leah’s book hit the mark with insights to barriers, methods to start a home practice and ways to maintain it. It is the only book I have found to explore this concept and make it achievable for all its readers. ~ Jude, Amazon Review
3. I showed people how to identify their own personal obstacles and create strategies to deal with them.
We all have different reasons for avoiding daily practice – beliefs, ideas, circumstances, fears, stresses – but what defines us is how we respond to those obstacles.
Those who practice daily don’t have less obstacles – they make smarter choices about how to deal with their obstacles. This is the work-around, solution-seeking mind. And this is what I attempt to cultivate right through the book. I want people to stop giving up at the first hurdle.
This is based on the concept that if you want something badly enough you’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen. The assumption I’m making is that you want a home yoga practice because you bought the book. Right? And if that is true… then here’s how to make it happen. Because you want it right?
That means when people identify that they have no-where to practice yoga at home, instead of giving up and telling people they’d love to practice but have no space… they switch into solution-seeking mind and find creative workarounds. The first step is to ask yourself is:
Is my idea really true?
Is it really true that you have no space to practice at home? Right now I’m living in a tiny apartment and the only two spaces for practice are meditating on my bed or rolling my mat out in the kitchen. Yeah – there’s no space, but there’s enough space.
This shift in the psyche from accepting or believing that things are getting in the way to always believing there’s a creative solution is a key aspect of why Forty Days of Yoga works so well. I teach you how to think in a way that supports your home yoga practice.
This book is unique… It makes you conscious how many excuses you make, fooling yourself, not to practise yoga. Also, a detailed explanation is given how our brain works and prevents us from practising. Once you understand how to handle it, the daily Yoga practice is like the daily routine of brushing your teeth … easy! ~ Diana, Amazon Review
4. Throughout the book I nourish, nurture and encourage people.
This is the hand-holding and cheerleading that we often need to embark on a new journey. We need someone who believes in us 100%. Someone that’s got our backs and will give us that little extra push, helping us confront our fears and doubts as needed.
This is the tone I’ve adopted throughout the book because I know how hard it can be to practice at home and what a difference it makes to have someone in your corner. This aspect of the book works so well that I also created a closed Facebook support group for anyone who buys the book.
I check in regularly on the group, but it’s mostly about a community of people who share their daily yoga journey and support each other through the difficult days. There’s some amazing sharing that goes on in this group and I feel humbled just reading through the posts.
Reading this was like sitting down and having a 100 page conversation with both a close friend and therapist. Kara-Leah is very insightful. ~ Ashley Lynn, Amazon Review
5. I emphasize the importance of finding your inner teacher and connecting to your own source of power.
So often we look outside of ourselves for instruction or ideas on how we’re meant to be living our lives. This happens in yoga too – we want someone to tell us what to do and we don’t trust that we know what to do. But you do. Your body/mind knows exactly what you need in any given moment – you just need to get out of your own way.
I knew that for people to establish and maintain a home yoga practice they needed to connect to this deeper part of themselves and learn to trust their intuition. I wanted to empower people, rather than provide them something else to lean on.
I have learned by choosing home practice and not following DVDs that your body tells you which asanas to practice. ~ Chris Lee, Amazon Review
6. There isn’t a single instruction on how to do asana or even meditation.
Key element. This book is not about the what. It’s about the how. There’s hundreds of excellent books out there that will teach you how to do postures. Generally, people know how to do basic yoga postures or they can easily find out. What they don’t know is how to deal with the obstacles of the mind and the resistance to practice as it comes up.
This is the yoga of Yoga. And this is probably the number one reason why Forty Days of Yoga is the best home yoga practice book you can buy. It takes you on a process of yoga just through reading it.
For those of you (like me) who pretty much only know yoga at the studio… welcome to a whole new world! Forty Days of Yoga taught me ideas about integrating yoga into daily life that I had never considered, and helped me redefine what my practice really means. ~ Carrie, Amazon Review
There’s some 17 reviews on Amazon now, and the book is sitting at a solid five stars. There’s no doubt it works.
In recognition of many of the other great home yoga practice books out there, I’ve also started a list of the Best Home Yoga Practice Books over at Goodreads. You can check it out here and add to it or vote for your favourite home yoga practice books.
If you’re ready for a regular home yoga practice, Forty Days of Yoga is the book for you.
Below are details on how to buy, or you can check out the full sales page here.
Spiral Bound Paperbook Book $NZ42
Your purchase of the Spiral-Bound Paperback Book is mailed out from New Zealand. Unfortunately, because we’re at the bottom of the world, that costs a lot. Shipping costs are:
- New Zealand $NZ2
- Australia $NZ7, or Buy here for Free Shipping (Not spiral-bound or signed)
- Rest of the World $NZ17 or Buy here for No Shipping (Not spiral-bound or signed)
I mail out within the week, via airmail.
Multi-Format Electronic Package $NZ19
Your purchase of the Multi-Format Electronic Package includes a zipped folder with the following:
- 180 page PDF version
- ePub version
- Kindle version
- A print-friendly PDF of the Worksheets, blank for you to fill in your answers (the worksheets inside the PDF, ePub & Kindle have some examples on them).
I’ve including the bonus PDF of Blank Worksheets so you can easily print them off and write in them as you read the book. Plus the worksheets are images in the ePub and Kindle version, which means you can’t scale up the font size. On smaller devices, they can be difficult to read.
Print + Electronic Combo Deal $NZ52
Your purchase of the Print + Electronic Combo Deal includes both of the above products:
- 180 page PDF version
- ePub version
- Kindle version
- A print-friendly PDF of the Worksheets, blank for you to fill in your answers (the worksheets inside the PDF, ePub & Kindle have some examples on them).
- One spiral-bound paper book book + shipping costs (see above for details)
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