The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

The Yoga Sutras contain the foundational wisdom of yoga. The Sutras are a collection of 196 Sanskrit aphorisms compiled by the sage Patanjali in India between 500 BCE and 400 CE. Sri Satchidananda’s commentary helps modern readers understand this ancient wisdom. I was introduced to Yoga Sutras during my teacher training and they stay with me every day as a source of both challenge and comfort.

Living Your Yoga

Living Your Yoga: Finding the Spiritual in Everyday Life by Judith Lasater takes inspiration from Yoga Sutras and Bhagavad Gita to help make yoga a living and breathing part of our daily lives. With both insight and humor, she illustrates how to apply the wisdom of yoga to daily challenges of work, parenting, or your car breaking down. I really enjoyed this short read as a good introduction to what the ancient principles of yoga mean in our busy 21st century lives.

Life of a Yogi

Sri Dharma Mittra is a legend. He arrived in New York from his native Brazil in the 1960s where he studied with his guru Yogi Gupta. in 1975, he founded the Dharma Yoga Center and revolutionized the discipline of yoga in the U.S. Life of a Yogi is a hands-on manual for a yoga-filled life well lived for teachers and students alike, I consult it regularly to find inspiration and deepen my own practice.

Bhagavad Gita

Bhagavad Gita, or The Song of God, is a 700-verse Hindu scripture dating back to the 2nd century BCE. It is a part of a much larger epic Mahabharata narrating the struggle between the Kaurava and Pandava families. The Gita features dialogues between Pandava prince Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna as Arjuna hesitates before a major battle. Much more than a story, the Gita explains core tenets of yoga and is a must-read for a serious student.

The Essential Rumi

Rumi, or Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, was a 13th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic. He was born in Balkh, present-day Afghanistan, but lived most of his life in Konya, now Turkey. His poems are infused with deep spirituality and timeless universality of human experience. The Essential Rumi is a superb collection of Rumi’s poems masterfully re-told by Coleman Barks. I keep coming back to this book, every time finding a quote that captures just what I’m feeling.

Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wisława Szymborska

Wisława Szymborska is my favorite Polish poet and a Nobel Laureate in Literature in 1996. I read her work primarily in Polish and can appreciate that quality translation is really, really tough. Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak (the latter an amazing Polish poet in his own right) did an amazing job here! This collection gathers Szymborska’s moving and life-affirming poems from 1940s until her death in 2012. If you speak Polish, you may also enjoy another - bilingual - collection: Nothing Twice/Nic Dwa Razy.

The American Primitive by Mary Oliver

The American Primitive is Mary Oliver’s homage to nature, our profound connection to it, beauty of fleeting moments, and the uniqueness of our individual experience. This collection contains fifty poems, which are true gems testifying to the author’s power of observation, metaphor, and expression. Mary Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1983 and this delightful collection certainty shows why the recognition was well deserved.

E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems

This collection spans the long literary career of E.E. Cummings and contains all his published poetry. Among the most famous 20th century craftsmen of English language, Cummings stands out with his unique free-form style, characteristic lower-case spelling, vivid imagery, and unique insights on the human condition. Modern, unexpected, simultaneously simple and complex, these poems challenge and surprise every time. My personal favorite: i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) beautifully sung by a legendary guitarist Michael Hedges.

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

This is not a book about yoga per se but about a key ingredient of developing a home (or studio) practice: establishing a habit. Whether we practice yoga for 15 minutes or several hours a day, it only works if we make a commitment to this daily routine. This New York Times bestseller explores how we can change our lives by changing our habits - and that applies to yoga as much as to any other area of life.

One Zentangle a Day by Beckah Krahula

Zentangle is an easy, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns called tangles. You create tangles with combinations of repeated dots, lines, simple curves, etc. The full title of this book is A 6-Week Course in Creative Drawing for Relaxation, Inspiration, and Fun - and indeed that is what it delivers. Zentangle is a great way to find your inner artist and unleash your creativity!

Ayurveda Cookbook

Ayurveda is a traditional Indian holistic science of well-being, exploring how we can better balance the energies of our body type through what we eat. Ayur means life in Sanskrit and Veda means knowledge or science. This cookbook, co-authored by a famous DC-based chef Rupen Rao, provided wonderful Indian vegetarian recipes that inspired me to try new things (bitter gourd anyone?) to enrich my yogic lifestyle.

Mindfulness in the Garden

Simply written and beautifully illustrated little book! This pocket-sized inspiration is great to take with you to the garden, offering simple mindfulness verses (gathas) to connect with nature and be in the present moment. Perfect moving meditation for yogis and gardeners everywhere - cultivate the seeds of your mindfulness!

Midnight’s Children

Rushdie is a master of language and this book - winner of the Booker Prize in 1981 - is among his finest. Filled with unforgettable characters and set against the background of India’s modern history, the novel tells the story of Saleem Sinai who was born with telepathic powers at the exact moment when India became independent. The tribulations of the violent partition of the British India up to the Emergency of Indira Gandhi’s rule compress the country’s difficult history into one-of-a-kind narrative.

Interpreter of Maladies

What an exquisite collection of short stories! I love Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing and this book has been my introduction to her work. Straddling two worlds - India and the U.S. - she lends her equally complex characters and stories authenticity and depth. Lahiri became the first Indian American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for this collection.

A Fine Balance

This is one of those books where the characters become like family and their everyday triumphs and trials feel intimately real and personal. Set during the time of India’s infamous State of Emergency in an unnamed city by the sea, the novel weaves together the lives of a special set of characters: a widow, a student, and two tailors who escaped violence in their native village. Rohinton Mistry masterfully explores the themes of endurance, friendship, loss, and daily struggle for dignity, hope, and survival.

The Inheritance of Loss

In this beautifully written book that won the Man Booker Prize in 2006, Kiran Desai plucks a dramatic moment in history - the Gorkha uprising in Darjeeling - from what feels like timeless existence at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas for an embittered judge and his granddaughter. Half the globe away the son of the judge’s cook strives make a living in New York. Insightful and moving!

Clear Light of Day

Anita Desai is Kiran Desai’s equally brilliant mother. Set in Old Delhi, the book traces complex relationships among four siblings struggling with the family’s past. A New York Times review of this book - a Booker Prize Finalist - captures its essence really well: “A rich, Chekhovian novel by one of the most gifted of contemporary Indian writers.”

Siddhartha

This classic novel by Herman Hesse - although written in 1922 Germany - was my introduction to Eastern philosophy and its quest for inner peace and enlightenment. It traces the spiritual journey of Siddhartha, a wealthy Indian Brahmin who casts off a life of privilege and comfort to find true self and knowledge within.

The Royal Ghosts

This collection of stories set in Kathmandu features a unique collection of characters against the backdrop of the violent Maoist insurgency in Nepal. Samrat Upadhyay is the first Nepali-born fiction writer to be published in the United States and The Royal Ghosts won the 2007 Asian American Literary Award. He currently teaches at Indiana University Bloomington.

God of Small Things

This stunning debut novel by Arundhati Roy made a great impression on me. Set in Kerala, the book tells the story of fraternal twins Rahel and Esthappen forever changed by one fateful day in 1969. This is a story of loss, forbidden love, lush South Indian setting, and the unexpected significance of small things. Deservedly, it won Booker Prize in 1997.