Book Review: Misadventures of a Garden State Yogi by Brian Leaf

So, you know those overly annoying ads in the sidebars on Facebook? One ad in particular kept popping up for me: the cover of Misadventures of a Garden State Yogi.

At first, I was like, yeah, no thanks, I don't have time to read anything else right now (being that I'm completely absorbed in two books by Iyengar and an old volume of the Dalai Lama's teachings), but yesterday, something drew me to it, and I followed the link to Amazon. For $8, I could download the Kindle edition.

Feeling like I was just adding one more thing to my growing collection of unread Kindle books, I clicked on the "download now" and almost forgot about it.

As I was waiting for dinner to finish baking in the oven, I opened my Kindle, and before I had finished the first chapter, I knew I had discovered the next book that I would read over and over and over again, until I had practically memorized every line.

This book, much like its author, I suspect, is true, gut-wrenchingly honest, and funny. I mean, laugh-out-loud funny.

Maybe it's because he's a fellow Jerseyite, maybe it's because so many aspects of his own story sounded eerily similar to my own, but this is one yogi who really GETS it.

Brian talks with comedic unease about his struggles with colitis as a teenager, and how, finally tired of the conventional medical treatments and the affects they were having on his body and his mind, decided that yoga was the way to cure his problems. What do you know? It actually worked.

We then get to follow Brian on his physical and spiritual journey across the country after his disillusionment with the Kripalu scandal to discover the secrets to happiness, while seeking the right type of yoga for him.

All of this deep, spiritual seeking is hilariously mixed with thirty-something pop culture references, making his observations of events unfolding even funnier.

While I haven't finished the entire book yet (I'm about 3/4 of the way through), I stayed up well past my bedtime last night, telling myself at the turning of each hour, "Well, I'll only read for another fifteen minutes..."

If you want to find out how a nice, Jewish boy from northern New Jersey gets in touch with his inner yogi and makes his light shine in the world, this is the book for you. Highly recommended, inspirational, and absolutely hilarious. Brian Leaf's Misadventures of a Garden State Yogi will be a cosmically comic inspiration to anyone seeking to walk their own path of spiritual awakening through yoga!