This unfamiliar pause in our ordinary lives has been a time of loss and also a time of birth–my daughter gave birth to a son, Shalom Raphael, three weeks ago, and I am about to deliver my first novel, Temple Dancer. I’ll be live on Facebook for a reading and brief talk. I hope you’ll join me here tomorrow, May 21 at 4pm PT, 7ET. Temple Dancer is now available for pre-order and will be officially released on September 8.

Here is s bit about my journey…

Before my first visit to Kripalu in 1989, I was a fiction writer suffering from depression. I wrote from a dark place of angst and from my deep curiosity about the “why” questions—the psychological antecedents of why people do what they do, especially when pain is so often the result. Then I visited Kripalu for the first time, and my life changed. With psychiatric supervision and daily practice, I was able to stop taking antidepressants.

Once I began practicing and then teaching Kripalu Yoga in 1991, those “why” questions became less relevant. I devoted myself to the “how” questions of my happiness. How yoga postures, pranayama, mantra chanting, and meditation worked to create and sustain the optimum well-being that my students and I were experiencing. I worked with researchers to study these questions and wrote books about yoga and mental health. But my fiction writing ceased. The characters stopped… read more here