Self-Awakening Yoga

Don Stapleton, Ph.D., has taught yoga worldwide since 1976 and was a teacher and director of the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health for 19 years. His extensive training includes Kripalu, Iyengar, Ashtanga, Siddha Samadhi, and Oki-do styles of yoga. After 30 years of extensive yoga training, an accident left him with a severe injury to the spine. Faced with the challenge of physical recovery, Stapleton drew upon his knowledge of yoga to create a series of exercises that allowed him to recover freedom of movement, release emotional blockages, and unleash his spiritual and physical potential. He currently lives with his wife and son in Costa Rica, where he is co-founder and co-director of the Nosara Yoga Institute and the director of Interdisciplinary Yoga Teacher Training(r).

Self-Awakening Yoga takes yoga back to its roots as a creative learning process and an expansion of consciousness, not just a technique for health and fitness. It provides simple techniques that enhance the free flow of prana to promote physical and emotional healing, self-discovery, and spiritual evolution. Self-Awakening Yoga includes over 100 exercises and meditations for a self-structured practice and teaches how to release the body's inefficient, painful patterns and to access unknown potentials through kinesthetic inquiries. Self Awakening Yoga includes a 60-minute audio CD of four guided meditation exercises.

Self-Awakening Yoga has more than 100 exercises--from focusing on the breath to accessing primal sound--show how to unlock the wisdom and power of prana to engage the body's healing powers. His simple exercises and meditations focus on natural movements that encourage body awareness. Readers learn how to listen to what the body is saying before engaging in any specific yoga postures.

Contents

Acknowledgments
Prologue: Your Body as Earthen Vessel

Part One - The Origins of Self-Awakening Yoga

Chapter 1.  The Path to the Teacher Within
Chapter 2.  "Who Am I?": Self Awakening Yoga Methodology
Chapter 3.  Initiating Your Self-Awakening Journey: Using the Inquiries

Chapter 4.  Realeasing into the Embrace of Gravity, Growing into the Light
Chapter 5.  Rooted in the Earth, Open to the Heavens
Chapter 6.  Restoring Natural Alignment by Balancing the Cervical and Lumbar Curves
Chapter 7.  Recharging the Body's "Energy Battery" in the Belly
Chapter 8.  Releasing into Movement from the Center of Being
Chapter 9.  Opening the Hip Joints for Seated Postures and Simple Spinal Twists
Chapter 10.  Hugging the Planet Earth: Opening from the Belly into Front-Extension Postures
Chapter 11.  Lifting onto All Fours: Balancing Stability with Mobility in Cross-Lateral Movement
Chapter 12.  Containing the Paradox of Polar Opposites: Individuation through Bilateral Movement
Chapter 13.  Making the Hero's Journey: Traveling the Time Spiral on the Spinal Twist to Arrive Now in Seated Forward Bend
Chapter 14.  The Miraculous Journey to Standing in Now, the Open Moment
Chapter 15.  The Practice of Flowing with Life's Unfolding Mystery