Threads of Yoga: A New Approach to Patanjali's Yoga Sutras
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When you stretch out a limb you spotlight the primary condition of your existence, your spatiality. Or: you call your already-present extension to conscious attention.
The limb seems to stretch out into empty space, but it plunges ever deeper into contact, now noticed. You stretch your arm upward, and the internal sensations — muscles relaxing, ligaments lengthening, and circulation finding underused pathways — are all responses to contact. Every movement of the flesh is a dive into space. Reaching up is really plunging your hand into a well of dark sweet water.
- From 5.8 The Beginning of Asana, Threads of Yoga by Matthew Remski
I was lucky to be approached by Matthew Remski, a yogi/ writer/ therapist who's been working on an incredible analysis of the text called Threads of Yoga. His book explores yoga philosophy as a living art which calls for flexibility, accessibility, and hermeneutic bravery.
He also explores the eight limbs against the literature of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, evolutionary biology, and psychohistory.
More feedback on Threads of Yoga from Mark Singleton:
"I don't know of any reading of the yoga sutras as wildly creative, as impassioned and as earnest as this. it engages Patanjali and the reader in an urgent, electrified conversation that weaves philosophy, symbolist poetry, psychoanalysis and cultural history. There's a kind of delight and freshness in this book that is very rare in writing on yoga, and especially rare in writing on the yoga sutras. This is a Patanjali for postmoderns, less a translation than a startlingly relevant report on our current condition, through the prism of this ancient text."
