Deeper Days

In a world full of war and unrest and everyone voicing their discontent as loud as they can while just trying to keep up with the impossibly fast pace, being able to stop and take a breath is more important than ever to help keep us from completely losing our mind. 

Deeper Days is a lovingly crafted book to get you moving through the world with love, to help you take a moment to breathe, and find stillness in daily reflection. It guides you along your yogic path to realizing your divine potential. It’s a guide to yoga, but not in the way you might think: no downward-facing dogs or pigeon poses here. Instead, the book takes you back to what yoga is really about: yes, physical postures but also the mental and spiritual practices—including meditation—that will help you find inner peace.

Structured around the eight limbs of yoga as described in Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras, Deeper Days provides a set of 365 short messages for daily reflections for women. Each comes with a phrase at the end—a mantra of sorts— that summarizes the core message of the day and that you can use throughout the day as a reminder of what to focus on.

But you don’t have to complete yoga teacher training or be an adherent of Hinduism or Zen Buddhism or any other philosophy to find value in Deeper Days: this daily reflection book is also a practical guide to how you can incorporate the concepts it describes into your daily life so that you can find inner calm amidst chaos. You can see it as a travel guide for your journey around the Sun, helping you find your personal path leading you to your magnificent heart. 

In yoga instructor training, the concept of understanding union with reality usually features in the classes—becoming one with the Self. If you are a long-time student of yoga, you would have heard this message too. Styles of teaching may have changed over time, branches of practice have certainly become branded, even sensationalized, through media and marketing, but yoga’s essence remains the same: oneness.  

Patañjali was a sage in ancient India who has been credited with a number of Sanskrit works. Born 200 years BCE, and passing in 150 BCE, the works considered to be his greatest are the Yoga Sutras which are contained in a classical yoga text. 

Patañjali said: 

“Yoga is the settling of the mind into silence.  

When the mind has settled, 

we are established in our essential nature, 

which is unbounded Consciousness. 

Our essential nature is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind.”

How beautiful and refreshing is that? 

What a divine river is yoga—not even a sense of ego on the riverbanks—only pure clarity that flows its soulful current between the heart and the brain, the hands and feet, that blurs the lines between where the skin ends and spirit continues, then wraps around mountains and rolls through cities and swirls among all the living.

Patañjali explains there are eight limbs of yoga—eight modes—which can be done separately but are done together to attain moksha… emancipation (meaning to come into your own truthful space and recognize your essence).