Be Your Spirit: a guide to health and happiness based on the yoga sutras

Formally educated with a Master’s degree in social work, Randy Niederman uses his experiences in the Western world, combined with Eastern philosophies and teachings, to create a self-help guide that’s at once easy to read and understand and also an individual challenge. Be Your Spirit: A Guide to Health and Happiness Based on the Yoga Sutras is a step-by-step guide for pairing the Eastern teachings with Western psychology and physics.

Too often, I find self-help books either much too repetitive or that they espouse a philosophy I simply can’t understand with few practical applications. This book is neither of those things, and, instead, Niederman takes the time to show us how the Yoga Sutras are actually able to be used in conjunction with Western medicine, specifically for the treatment of anxiety, depression, and addiction.Focusing not on the modern Yoga that we think of, with physical poses and stretches, but instead on an ancient focus on meditation, this guide walks the reader through each step of finding balance and peace.

Beginning with first meeting your spirit, and working your way toward meditation to discover your own path to health and happiness, the author does an excellent job of explaining the neuropsychology that proves to a skeptic like myself that there doesn’t have to be a divide between the cognitive behavioral techniques and the Yoga Sutras and their application.
By helping the reader learn to avoid black and white thinking, worry less, look for a balanced approach in action, work to understand others’ perspectives, contribute positively to the world, trust his own intuition, and live in harmony, Be Your Spirit works as a guide to happiness for readers of all faiths–whatever their backgrounds or beliefs.