Yogalosophy for Inner Strength: 12 Weeks to Heal Your Heart and Embrace Joy

by Mandy Ingber

Overview

"Heartbreak is a universal experience, and self-compassion is vital to healing. In this moment of truth lies the opportunity to find action-oriented ways to love yourself.”

Building on the concepts in her New York Times bestselling book Yogalosophy, Mandy Ingber, fitness and wellness instructor to the stars, now gives us Yogalosophy for Inner Strength—a revolutionary and inspiring self-care program to uplift and strengthen the alignment of mind, body, heart, and spirit during times of adversity like loss, transition, grief, or heartbreak. Yogalosophy for Inner Strength is a twelve-week wellness program, which includes five exercise routines for strength, happiness, and cardiovascular health, as well as meditations, recipes, playlists, and rituals designed to support the healing of the heart and build lasting resilience. In Yogalosophy for Inner Strength, Ingber incorporates anecdotes from her personal journey through loss and trying times, and stories from experts within her inner circle of friends. 

Whether you’re experiencing crisis or simply feeling adrift, Yogalosophy for Inner Strength will help guide and carry you through your transition by providing a path to emotional strength, inner balance, and ultimately, to a greater capacity for true joy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781580055932
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	05/17/2016
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	1,044,949
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Mandy Ingber, The New York Times best-selling author of Yogalosophy: 28 Days to the Ultimate Mind-Body Makeover and creator of the yoga-hybrid DVD Yogalosophy, is a celebrity fitness and wellness expert. Her twenty years of teaching experience have attracted such clients as Jennifer Aniston, Kate Beckinsale, Helen Hunt, Ricki Lake, Jennifer Meyer, and Brooke Shields.

Mandy’s yoga class has been awarded “Best of LA” by Daily Candy, LA Weekly, and Los Angeles Magazine. Mandy is an event headliner for the Boston Red Sox Foundation’s FenwaYoga, People’s A-List Workout, SELF’s Workout in the Park, and more. She has been a spokesperson for Silk Soymilk and is a contributing fitness and wellness advisor for Health, POPSUGAR, SELF, Shape, USA Today and Yahoo! Mandy is a fitness blogger for E! Online and People.com and is featured regularly in Elle, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, O, The Oprah Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and more. Television appearances include Good Morning America, Chelsea Lately, and TODAY, among others. Mandy serves on the advisory board for New Beauty Magazine, Women’s Health, and the Cancer Prevention Clinic at the Margie Petersen Breast Center at Providence Saint John’s Health Center.

Mandy teaches workshops at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies and at independent yoga studios. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. For more, visit MandyIngber.com.

Read an Excerpt

After any type of heartbreak, be it romantic, familial, or otherwise, you’re likely to feel a wide range of emotions. You might feel hopeless, hopeful but directionless, a sense of freedom, deeply in pain, or unable to move or take a physical step forward. Sometimes multiple emotions—sadness, relief, anticipation, anger, despair—coexist at the same time. There are as many emotional experiences as there are individuals, and these undulating waves of emotional turmoil can feel all-consuming, overwhelming, paralyzing, depressing, and very hard to ride out on your own.

I wrote this book to be your life raft. Within its pages, I will take you on an intimate, twelve-week journey that will use physical and mental exercises to integrate your diverse emotions and help you develop a new, healing relationship with your heart. That’s not to say there’s a time frame for grief, like twelve weeks and you’re good to go. The path to emotional wellness is an ongoing process—you can’t rush it. I know this firsthand because it took me almost five years to fully recover from my first broken heart, and I’m still recovering from my last relationship—and that’s after a solid year apart. But I found that a schedule and framework for the journey, which is what this book provides, helps focus energies in a particular direction, and that twelve weeks is enough time to learn how to tap into a self-love that will carry you through. No matter how you’re feeling right now, you can take action, and those actions will create an emotional opening. I promise.

If you’re feeling crushed, this might seem like an impossible idea, but it is not only possible to achieve—through directing your emotions and using them to take actions—it is entirely doable and completely transforming.

It also might be nice to know you’re not alone in your plight. Heartbreak is a universal experience, and no one has the luxury of avoiding it, including my clients, who are well known for their successful careers and their runway-worthy bodies. Being a celebrity and “having it all” doesn’t exempt you from pain. There is no fast pass that allows you to skip being human. My client and friend Jennifer Aniston had one of the most famous and scrutinized breakups on the planet. She credits our work with helping her get through it and discovering that she could act her way into correct thinking. Jennifer is living evidence that moving the body with heart produces the emotional result you’re looking for. Using the emotional energy positively has transformed her. She has reached an entirely new level of personal power and comfort in her own skin. I hold very dearly the very first time we practiced yoga together. It was a devastating time, when she was exposed to more pain than most of us with a freshly wounded heart can handle, and I suggested that we simply move the energy with some yoga. I let her know that if she needed more energy she could tap into what she was feeling, and if that didn’t do it, that she can tap into me. That is what I suggest to you too, through this book.

Jennifer isn’t the only one who found her way to me at a devastating time. Many of my students first came to my class or began working with me during a difficult life phase. While many can become paralyzed by mourning and find it difficult to take a physical step forward, others, sometimes unknowingly, seek to find a way to release some of the pent-up grief by taking a yoga class. Perhaps intuitively they know that one of the best things you can do to help yourself heal is to find action-oriented ways to love yourself through physical movement. As an instructor, I’ve found that once people get into the routine of showing up for themselves, the endorphins kick in and they want to come back for more of that good feeling. Consequently, they end up getting in the best shape of their lives—while healing the emotional body, too.

The practices in this book are distinct from my first book, Yogalosophy: 28 Days to the Ultimate Mind-Body Makeover, in an important way. There I talk about emotion being a motivating force: take your emotion and change your body with it. Here, we flip that dynamic to discover how you can shift your emotions by getting physical—and, conversely, change your body by fully expressing your feelings through action tools and movement. There’s a saying—“Move a muscle, change a thought”—that perfectly reflects this dynamic.

So here we are. At your new beginning. Follow this book and I guarantee you’ll change your thoughts, your habits, and your body. But before we dive in, I want to share a bit about myself and my experience. This is something I’ll do throughout these pages because opening up and relating my personal experiences has always been key to connecting with my students—whether in my classes, with my private clients, through my DVD, or in my first book, Yogalosophy: 28 Days to the Ultimate Mind-Body Makeover. In the deeply personal arena of heartbreak, I will allow you inside my own journey as it speaks to each of the movements in the twelve-week process. Sharing is a way of teaching and also of learning. Instead of the feeling of isolation that often accompanies sadness, we can open ourselves up and widen our circle. In this sharing I also want to explain a bit about how this book works, so once you get into the twelve weeks you’ll know what to expect.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction
Overview
How Yoga Broke My Heart Wide Open
How To Use This Book

Part 1: Moving Through Heartbreak: Basics Of Yogic Tradition
The Eight Limbs Of Yoga
The Seven Chakras
Yogalosophy For Inner Strength Weekly Routines
Heart-Healthy Support: Eat Your Heart Out!
Heart-Healthy Foods

Part 2: The Weekly Companion To Emotional Wellness

Week 1:Claim Your Solitude
Week 2:Grow Down
Week 3:Talk Your Walk
Week 4:Be Your Own Mother
Week 5:Jumpstart Your Heart
Week 6:Reach Out From Your Compassion
Week 7:Bounce Back To Balance And Beauty
Week 8:Flirt With Life
Week 9:Leap Into The New Journey
Week 10:Widen Your Circle
Week 11:Follow Your Heart’s Desire
Week 12:Live In The Mystery