Your Year of Yoga

HOLLY WALCK KOSTURA is a Senior Certified Iyengar Yoga Teacher who taught herself how to practice Yoga at home and has maintained a daily, devoted practice across two decades of life. During her fifteen plus years of teaching Yoga to students at her own center and others around the world she heard them express a sincere desire to have their own personal practice and saw them struggle to develop it into reality. She wrote this book so that all might have the opportunity to experience the sweet nectar of Yoga.

Your Year of Yoga: Learning to Love Practice inspires and empowers its readers to establish and maintain a skillful, personal Yoga practice in their own home. Āsana (postures) and Prāṇāyāma (breathing) are woven into four sections of practice for Beginners. The reader will learn to have a successful and consistent home practice that will support them in the life-long practice of navigating the changing nature of life. Simple modifications and alternatives to the poses are offered for bodies that experience stiffness, knee, hip, low back, neck and shoulder issues and menstruation. Restorative sequences are provided for days when the reader is unable to do an active practice. Teachers of Yoga will use the sequences to progress their beginning level students through the first level of practice. By practicing the modifications given for each pose in the laboratory of their own practice, teachers will learn how to accommodate students with common conditions into their general classes. The bedrock of Yoga is its philosophy. Each section includes a study guide of Yoga philosophy to help the reader learn how to live a Yogic life.

HOLLY WALCK KOSTURA is a Senior Certified Iyengar Yoga Teacher and the Founder and Director of The Iyengar Yoga Center of the Lehigh Valley, the first Iyengar Yoga studio in Northeastern Pennsylvania. It opened in 2004 and continues to welcome and support a community of devoted practitioners. She studies regularly with her mentor, Patricia Walden of Cambridge, MA and other Senior Iyengar Yoga Teachers who were direct students of B.K.S. Iyengar. Holly travels to Pune, India to learn at the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute and has studied directly with B.K.S. Iyengar and Geeta Iyengar in the US, Canada, China and India. Her deep dedication to her own practice inspires and informs her teaching, which is clear, compassionate and steeped in Yoga philosophy. Her Bachelor's Degree in nursing and special interest in anatomy and physiology give her the unique ability to see her students from a place of wholeness. For Holly, Yoga is a path of transformation and absolute freedom that has far-reaching effects beyond the limits of the physical body. It is her intention to share with students how the practice of Yoga reveals the infinite source of health and joy contained within them.