The cover image and title caught my eye at once, and when I read the subtitle of this book, One Woman’s Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment, I thought to myself, now that’s my kind of spirituality book.
First, I’ll say you won’t have to be into yoga to enjoy the ride of this read. Out of the blocks we learn that this memoir is uniquely set up as a back and forth between author Suzanne Morrison’s diaries while at a yoga retreat in Bali, and her current commentary looking back at that time several years later.
She goes to this retreat in her 20s; being well past that age, at first in reading her diaries I thought I would be also past resonating with she was chewing on, struggling with and feeling. Instead, it made me think back to what I was doing in my 20s to understand myself and life, where I have come and where I am on my own journey today.
With well-written wit and humor, we ride her ups and downs, even epiphanies, including a hard-to-swallow cure to Bali belly and much more, and a “physical-spiritual experience” that “made it all clear: the division of mind and body was a false one. And if this division was false, then what about the division between me and the rest of the world?”
Like all of us who’d love to find enlightenment in a month or less, she wanted to come home from this retreat having her life figured out. But she left Bali “neither transformed or enlightened;”she felt “exhausted and disillusioned.” Yet eight years later, she writes, “I can see that I was changed.” She had “planted a few seeds that would sprout in their own time, whether I asked them to or not.”
Yoga Bitch is about everyone’s journey to finding “love, self and God,” and how what they said at the end of each yoga class is true for us all: “Om bolo sad-Guru maharaj ji ki.” We are all on our own path to learn how to “bow to the guru of our own heart and soul.”
This book is part of Suzanne Morrison’s story as a seeker. And as the love of her life says, “Last I checked, being on the hunt for something real counted as living.” I look forward to more of her adventures on that hunt.
She is a writer, and the solo performer in the one-woman show—you guessed it-Yoga Bitch.
