The Wisdom of Yoga: A Seeker's Guide to Extraordinary Living

by Stephen Cope. Bantam Dell; www.randomhouse.com.

By Erica Rodefer

There have been many attempts to shed light on the Yoga Sutra, but most of them have failed to bring Patanjali's work into a modern context. The 2,000-year-old compilation of yogic philosophy and history requires deep study for any serious student. Even Stephen Cope, a psychotherapist and senior Kripalu Yoga teacher, admits that it sat on his nightstand collecting dust for years.

Cope wrote three unpublished manuscripts and pored over the Yoga Sutra for 15 years, working out how to make its elusive messages more digestible for his students and peers. The result is The Wisdom of Yoga, which demystifies and delivers Patanjali's aphorisms in a way that today's yogis will find easy to understand. The book examines the lives of five composite characters in conversational prose that reads more like a novel than an academic work. Each character possesses a negative behavior pattern or a mental illness that Cope tries to resolve using a piece of yogic wisdom. For example, one woman buries her woes in food when she feels helpless. Drawing from the Yoga Sutra, Cope explains that the feeling of powerlessness, not the indulgence in cake, is the source of the overeater's suffering.

His efforts at simplification occasionally go too far, as when he likens the complicated psychology behind destructive patterns to the cat-and-mouse game in a Warner Bros. cartoon. Still, Cope does an excellent job of bringing the Yoga Sutra to a wider audience.

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