Unenlightened

When you first start practicing yoga, you just have questions about how to arrange yourself in this pose and where your foot goes in that one. After a while—after you get the hang of things—you have deeper questions. Like, is this stuff going to make me enlightened or merely sore tomorrow morning? Is this actually a spiritual path . . . or just a way for my teacher to pay off the mortgage? And speaking of my teacher—was that her, drinking beer at the pub last night? Aren’t yoga teachers supposed to be serious and lead pure lives? Completely and utterly unenlightened, Ricardo das Neves is the perfect yoga teacher to answer all those questions, plus a few more you'll think of next week. Thoroughly illustrated to keep the interest of even the most distracted audience, Unenlightened proves, once and for all, that yoga and humor can go nicely together and that to dispel a few enduring myths about practicing yoga, or about yoga teachers, all you need to have is a healthy dose of smart-aleck irreverence.

So you’ve been doing yoga for how long now? And admit it: you have questions beyond the poses and pose sequences you’ve seen in yoga books (yawn), biographies of gurus and sages (double yawn), and yoga philosophy (triple yawn). You have real questions.Questions like, how much flexibility do I need to be enlightened? And how long does it take to get there—the flexibility, that is, because that’s easier to show off to my family than enlightenment? Your teacher is telling you to breathe deeply and to turn off your mind chatter,but all you can think is, how can she remember the sequence of poses that you do on the right side and then on the left side? Or how come some teachers adjust you all the time and others never at all? Do they ever get the hots for their students? Do they have vices? Are they always this mellow or can they actually get mad and drop an F-bomb or two? If you’ve ever wanted to know the answers to these and other questions that you dare not ask,you’ve come to the right place. Armed with two decades of experience with yoga, Ricardo das Neves is ready to spill the beans on what things look like from his side of the yoga mat. But warning: read this book, and you might find yourself giggling in class at the most inconvenient times.

Ricardo das Neves is a yoga teacher, screenwriter and novelist who's been a spiritual seeker since age 5 and a smart aleck since before that. A graduate of the University of Washington’s screenwriting program, he has written seven screenplays and five novels with his own quirky brand of spiritual humor. When he’s not waxing bendy and philosophical, he’s filling up his writings with all the profound, funny, and profoundly funny things he wishes he’d remember to say in class.He lives in Seattle and feels fairly certain that he wouldn’t write as much if he lived someplace with significantly better weather.