Yoga Beyond Fitness: Getting More Than Exercise from an Ancient Spiritual Practice

An estimated seventeen million people currently practice yoga and spend roughly three billion dollars annually on classes, products, and services in the United States. On the one hand, yoga’s widespread popularity means that more people are being exposed to the potential benefits yoga has to offer. And yet, yoga has expanded over the decades to become a full-fledged industry of the contemporary marketplace, filled with so many producers, sellers, and consumers that they seem to outnumber the spiritual teachers, healers, devoted adepts, and practitioners. Yoga has become an unusual blend of ancient spiritual path from India and American commercialism, begging the question, “Is yoga merely a fitness industry masquerading as spirituality?” This issue is hotly debated right now at Yoga magazines and studios and centers across the country. Yoga Beyond Fitness captures the story of American yoga practice today, with special attention given to those who treat it with reverence and wish to explore it as a receptacle of transformative power, for which it was originally intended. Yoga instructor Tom Pilarzyk helps us restore the transformative center at the heart of yoga by showing how to bring greater intention, open-heartedness, and peace into our practice both on and off the mat. With personal stories and testimonials from students, teachers, and other professionals, Pilarzyk delivers a meaningful guide for staying true to the heart of yoga. A valuable resource for further practice, the book also includes an extensive listing of national yoga centers and a study guide with discussion questions at the back of the book. For those just discovering yoga or for those who have practiced for a while and feel that there is a deeper meaning readily accessible but not directly evident, this book is both a sober wake-up call about how yoga is being transformed and a hopeful, heartfelt tribute to its highest aspirations.

About the author: Tom Pilarzyk is an administrator at the largest community-based technical college in the Midwest as well as a registered Yoga instructor with a twenty-year commitment to both Yoga and meditation. With a doctorate in the social sciences, he has written scholarly publications on religious movements and strategic management in higher education. His work appears in Sociological Analysis, Religious Studies Review, Review of Religious Research, Humanity and Society, Pacific Sociological Review, Social Compass, Journal of College Admissions, Journal of College Student Retention and Journal of Applied Research in the Community College. Comfortable wearing many professional hats, Tom has been a community and market researcher as well as a staff director for a national medical society. He has penned reports for corporations, associations, educational institutions, and non-profit agencies. Love of Yoga is reflected in his writings for teachers and serious practitioners, appearing in Yoga Therapy in Practice, Yogi Times, Sacred Pathways Magazine, Yoga Chicago Magazine, M Magazine and Synchronicity Magazine. Yoga also feeds his lifelong love of travel, whether it be writing on the Dublin Yoga scene, sampling Parisian Yoga options, or attending retreats stateside in the Appalachians and Rockies. Tom lives in the lakeside community of Shorewood, Wisconsin and teaches Yoga for an agency providing integrative therapies to Milwaukee’s Latino community.