Finding Personal Peace: Twenty-Eight Yoga Classes for a Balanced Life

by Melissa J. Chaney

You are going to uncover your true potential and strength within by reading Finding Personal Peace Twenty-eight Yoga Classes for a Balanced Life. The intention of this book is to deepen the yoga experience, understanding, and enjoyment for the integration of the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well being of everyone interested in deepening their home practice. Go ahead, try it on! Contact me and let me know how much more peace you have in your life in 28 days. Namaste'.

64 pages, Paperback

First published May 29, 2013

About the author

Melissa Jane Chaney, M.S., R.Y.T., is a registered yoga teacher and certified in Contemplative Hatha Yoga, Prenatal, Senior, and AyurYoga 1 & 2. Melissa is also a practitioner of yoga in personal life. She integrates universal principles of balance in daily living in her teaching by incorporating her B.A. in Behavioral Sciences coupled with her M.S. in Organizational Leadership with her certified training in Yoga and Ayurveda. She has taught for Kaiser Permanente, Regis College, Colorado Athletic Club, Thornton Senior Center, Lady Fitness, Yoga Connection, Morey Neighborhood Center, Odyssey Charter School, PranaYoga and Ayurveda Mandala, Auraria Healthy Moves, Balance Point Studios, Metro Wastewater Reclamation District, and is one of the original founders of Denver’s Jaya Yoga Center.

Reviews

[Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

*** I won this book for free in a GoodReads giveaway.

Finding Personal Peace by Melissa Chaney gets a solid 2/5 stars. I want to praise this book for being some new form of discovered enlightenment, but I can't. The reason I can't rate this book 5 stars, 4 stars, or even 3 stars is because frankly, I didn't understand it. Maybe my poor experience with this results from trying to follow an accelerated yoga manual while having absolutely no beforehand knowledge whatsoever. The problem with this book is that if you are the ignorant layman, such as I am, you have no idea what the book is talking about 90% of the time.

The book is formatted in 28 chapters that cover complete yoga routines for each day. An example, Chapter 10, goes like this:
* opening prayers
* cat/cow, vidalasana
* cat/cow, vidalasana, with all three bandhas; jalandhara, uddiyana, mula bandha
* plank, caturanga dandasana
* downward dog, adho mukha svanasana
* pigeon, eka pada rajakapotasana

et cetera, et cetera.

Now if you are familiar with yoga, maybe this will have some sort of meaning to you. I can truthfully say that it means nothing to me. What this book needs for the layman to understand is a glossary or an appendix! Unfortunately, this book suffers by lacking all forms of clarification. Every time I came across a new foreign word--I repeat: 90% of the book for me--I had to stop the yoga process and google it. Something that would have been helpful is if this book had pictures of the poses. If there were pictures at least the reader would have an example of what to try and do. This book lacks educational instruction while simply telling you to just do it.

Now as I implied before, I'm probably not the targeted audience for this book. It may be unfair how I criticize it for what it's not and miss the mark completely on what it is. I wouldn't have entered this giveaway had I known that it wasn't intended for beginners. It might be really insightful to someone who knows the ropes; however, the problem is that I don't know the ropes and unfortunately have to judge this book accordingly.

[Christel · Rating 1 out of 5]

I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads. Thanks for allowing me the opportunity to review this. I feel the book's description is very misleading. This is a book only for experienced yoga people who know all the poses and breathing routines. The classes are a specific set of text only sequences with names like The River or Longevity. Telling me to do the reverse swan dive followed by downward facing dog in one class but another sequence in another class and so on makes no sense to me. Why? I don't understand why one routine does something different from another. Even people knowing all the moves will have to take her word for it on getting something out of this that is different for each class. She doesn't explain how she developed each of these routines and how the flow works to do one thing versus another. For me, without any documentation on the whys and hows, this is useless.