Yoga Bitch ~ Review

Title: Yoga Bitch; One Woman's Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment
Author: Suzanne Morrison
Source: Library

Goodreads Summary:

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.


My thoughts:

I apparently have the same sense of humor as a 5 year old - and Suzanne Morrison at 25 years old.  I laughed my way through a lot of this book, to the point of tears, crying and hyperventilation.

Part of the humor for me was fart jokes, and fart stories. I have no idea why they have so much power over me; my husband only has to say the word to make me laugh. And this book talks frequently about passing gas. It makes sense. If you say yoga, people say fart. I have heard it happen in class, I am sure we all have heard it. I have even read articles on Do You Yoga that address it. I manage to be mature in class, so that I do not embarrass anyone, and pride myself on being yogic. Just like Suzanne in the book - she fights laughter, does laugh, and later tries to understand and relate to a fart, when the unthinkable happens and she lets one go in class herself. She tried to be detached, but later says , "I want to die. And I can't stop laughing. I'm in strait-jacket territory." I of course was laughing my head off reading all this.

This is not the only thing that made me laugh - Morrison so perfectly describes all the phases one goes through when practicing yoga, and the other personalities that show up in classes as well, that I recognized these same type personalities in my own classes. Many of these characterizations struck a chord with me, and some of them made me giggle and nod my head in agreement.

On a more serious note, Yoga Bitch is also about one woman's search for something more, something beyond her and beyond this world. Something like God. Morrison searched for enlightenment from her mat, covered in sweat, sore and stretched out, looking for God. Within Buddhism, within Christianity, from anywhere that seemed to prove that there is something greater out there. Her beliefs come and go, and she can't seem to find just the right fit, until someone says something to her at the end of the book that describes her search and herself dead on.

It is easy to identify with Morrison.  We have all been there in one way or another. She seems approachable, and makes yoga seem approachable as well. She is my new hero.

This book is written in honestly and with humor, and I think this is a book that could be enjoyed by anyone. (Unless they don't like fart jokes)