The Eight Human Talents

Madonna, Cindy Crawford, and David Duchovny have been her students, and now you too can experience the gifts of well-known L.A.-based yoga teacher Gurmukh. In The Eight Human Talents, she shares the spiritual wisdom and exercises of the Kundalini approach, which emphasizes the roles of the eight chakras, or energy centers, in healing and self-fulfillment. A particularly subtle and reflective discipline, Kundalini yoga combines meditation, breathing exercises, and simple poses that focus on awakening and embracing the fundamental qualities of the chakras, which Gurmukh calls talents: acceptance, creativity, commitment, compassion, truth, intuition, boundlessness, and radiance. Through attentive Kundalini practice, Gurmukh says, common personal issues such as relationship troubles, money anxieties, addiction, depression, and sexual insecurities can be overcome, which in turn enables a healthy and happy lifestyle. "Use your yoga practice to feel your emotions on a physical level," Gurmukh advises, "then as you experience them, you can move past them and become victorious over them."

In eight chapters that address each talent, Gurmukh offers personal anecdotes from her years as the proverbial student of life as well as her experience as a teacher, instructive quotes from her guru, Yogi Bhajan, and meditative exercises and stretches (aided by ink drawings) that teach awareness of the chakras and how to nurture the positive talents and stifle the negative "shadow emotions" (i.e., resentment, guilt, anger, greed, denial, and so on). Such techniques as the Exercise to Release Fear, the Anti-Worry Exercise, the Meditation to Heal Depression, and the Meditation to Realize Your Own Greatness require only concentration and no more than 10 minutes, but when done regularly, Gurmukh promises, the reward is self-confidence, wholeness, and increased vitality. Less a stretch-by-stretch manual to a yoga workout and more a self-improvement how-to that will limber you up in more ways than one, The Eight Human Talents is a valuable resource for those whose interest in yoga includes achieving physical as well as spiritual and emotional fitness. --Rebecca Wright