Yoga props, videos, designer clothing, weight-loss programs -- author Tom Pilarzyk believes that something essential has been lost as the 5,000-year-old spiritual practice has morphed into a ＄3 billion pop culture phenomenon. This book argues persuasively for a return to yoga's roots: maintaining daily intention, welcoming difficulties that test resolve, keeping the heart open, making positive shifts when feeling victimized or exhausted, and remembering to breathe deeply and witness the spontaneous play of activity all around. Yoga Beyond Fitness offers a bridge to yoga's serious meaning for the millions who practice it for fitness but want more. It provides an accessible overview of yoga's diverse teachings and teachers and is full of colorful stories of ordinary people whose lives have been bettered by embracing yoga's underlying promise. The book even includes fun tests that help peg readers' practicing preferences and a study guide and a listing of national yoga centers to help expand the reader's experience.


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. 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, YogaChicago Magazine, M Magazine, and Synchronicity Magazine. It 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.