Friday, July 27, 2007

The longest books I have ever red: "Yoga Dipika" - The light that shines on and on.

Everybody reads books. That is true. But there is something about them, a secret, which doesn't reveal to everyone. Most people think, that once you buy a book, start a book, you got to finish it, and that one is over. You start another one. But what if a book has more to read, that you can manage in a year, ten years, or more? Exists a whole species of tricky books, which, for some reason, take hours of your precious time, day after day, year after year. BEWARE!!! I will share with you some of those which I, personally, consider the most dangerous.

The very first one - the magical converter of lifetimes - I wanted to present to you, is "The Light on Yoga" by B.K.S. Iyengar. Probably the most famous yoga text book in the world.



My first encounter with that book was about eight years ago. My yoga master (guru) Marcin Hawryszko presented the book to me, since I was his best pupil, and he came to persuade me, to take off his shoulders some of the responsibility for handling some classes. I looked inside the book - what I've seen got struck me completely amazed and enchanted:




























And so I thought: "Gosh! I wanna do like that guy!" Then like a spell - be extremely careful, the magic was very strong - I was displaced to a completely different land, and my life have changed for good. I begun to read the book. But it didn't contain to much of a stories, most of all some decent pictures and instructions. Once I've started to read the pictures of practices (asanas) and instructions how to do them - I have had to change almost all of my life habits to adjust to them. Still, after almost eight years of daily reading, day by day, few hours a day I came to reach, more or less, the middle of the book. And the further you get, the more difficult starts to be the reading. But I do learn form the tortoise... And I slowly advance. My ambition to read it all has got to be fed completely - before I die... Amen.