The 3 best (non-yoga) books to really understand Yoga

Most people assume that to really understand yoga, you need to bury yourself strictly in yoga books. But there are only so many of those you can read before you realise you’re just running into the same ideas over and over again, each one with fancier vocabulary than the last 😬. To grasp what yoga actually is beyond the physical shapes (to go beyond the mind 🧐🧠) you often have to look a long long way outside traditional yoga literature.

I have come to understood yoga, and the convoluted complexities of ancient subcontinent philosophy, far more deeply from real life and from books that have nothing to do with yoga.

It’s a bit like a sports writer penning a brilliant column on a championship boxing match while sat safely on the periphery, having never once stepped into the ring with some brute on the other side ready to tear his head off. It’s easy to criticise a man whose legs have turned to jelly when you’ve never stood under those lights yourself with your life on the line. I feel much the same way about academic yoga commentary. Plenty of people sound profound from a distance, but unless you’ve walked the path and wrestled with your own mind, you’re just another jabroni like the rest of us. Which is precisely why most yoga books bore me to tears. Actually, its death. I was just being nice with tears 🫣.

So some time ago, I started looking entirely outside the yoga bubble. Psychology, philosophy, cosmology, and everything in between, until the ancient yoga philosophy I’d studied for years suddenly started to click.

Based on that exact journey, here are three non-yoga books that everyone, and especially yoga teachers, should read to help navigate the baffling, convoluted and often contradictory world of yoga philosophy and practice. Plus a few picks from Laura.

My Top Three (instagram link)

1 - The Tell-Tale Brain – V.S. Ramachandran

Before you try to quiet the mind, it helps to know what it actually is 🧠. This book shows you how the brain builds reality, empathy and our whole sense of self from the ground up. Its mind blowing 🤯

2 - Astrophysics for People in a Hurry – Neil deGrasse Tyson

A tough read especially for someone like me who gew up on football magazines and didnt read a book until my 30's 😭. But nothing shrinks the ego quite like getting your head around the magnitude of the universe. Read this, and you will never say Namaste for no reason ever again.

3 - The Prophet – Kahlil Gibran

The one I keep going back to. Gibran says more about love, loss and letting go in a few lines of poetry than most "spiritual" books manage in three hundred pages. So much of the Gita and the Yoga Sutras make sense after this.

Laura’s Picks 🙋‍♀️

1 - Letters to a Young Poet – Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke tells a young writer to stop hunting for neat answers and learn to live inside the questions.

2 - Thus Spoke Zarathustra – Friedrich Nietzsche

Not an easy read is an understatement, but it's meant to be a hard read. It takes a hammer to everything you’ve inherited and dares you to work out what you actually believe, rather than what you were handed down 😤

3 - The Order of Time – Carlo Rovelli

A physicist dismantling our assumptions about past, future and permanence. The strange thing is he ends up exactly where the old meditators ended up thousands of years ago, just with no religion attached and a lot of equations.

Here’s the thing though, and it’s the reason I’d recommend these even to someone who never intends to touch yoga philosophy. Yoga, the way I see it, is NOT separate from life. They teach each other. Life teaches you about yoga, and yoga teaches you about life, and after a while you stop being able to tell where one ends and the other starts. So even if you’ve got no interest in anything beyond the physical poses, these books will still do something for you. In unimaginable ways I can’t quite map out for you. But I trust that you’ll feel it.

Namaskar

Zahir

IN-PERSON TRAINING 👇🏽

→ 200h YOGA TEACHER TRAINING

→ ADVANCED 300H TT

🧠 ONLINE LEARNING 👇🏽

Free Courses

💡 Advanced TT,

🧠 Anatomy Blueprint,

😤 Science of Breathing

🧘🏽‍♀️ Teaching & Structuring

☯️ YIN Yoga