Yoga School Dropout

I picked this up after reading "Eat, Pray, Love", looking for another travel story fix.  Once again it's the story of a woman who decides to leave behind her day job, after realising that her new obsession with yoga is incompatible with her career in advertising.  She travels to India to visit various yoga retreats, some luxurious, some basic and try to "find herself".  She's also a woman obsessed with finding a man.  I think this is why I found the book a little bit irritating, because I know that once upon a time I viewed every single man I met as a potential husband.  Luckily I don't do this anymore, but probably because I haven't met quite as many single men lately!

It's fascinating in part because it shows the less spiritual side of the yoga / ashram world, the yoga devotees whose real goal is for the perfect yoga body (and why not?), the ashram infighting, the luxury world of the tantric retreat (surely she'll find a husband here?) and she even finds a place that makes her consider hanging up her travelling yoga mat and becoming a permanent member of a community.

It's very interesting - so why aren't I recommending it?  Well it's a bit disjointed, I found it hard to follow and to be honest a lot of the places she visited just didn't come alive for me.  She admits in her journey she jumps from being the spiritual devotee to drunkenly dancing on tables - and this book veers around in the same way.  It's occasionally funny, thought provoking, but not enough for me to recommend it.  But it is searingly honest, from her embarrassing thoughts about the hot young yoga guys to her own inability to find that perfect moment of meditational bliss, and for this I really admire her.

Don’t get me wrong, some of these are excellent, but I couldn’t, in good conscience give them a Pearl Recommendation.  Sometimes they were just beaten to the punch, or I couldn’t decide a clear winner, other times they had a lot right, but I felt they just weren’t there.  I don’t really want to give bad reviews, but anything I felt was really best avoided you’ll find in the Jellyfish section.