Honoring the Light in You: Heart Opening Poems of Everyday Heroes, Yoga, and Mind Body Spirit Wellbeing by Julie Dunlop

Honoring yoga and the shared humanity of our diverse walks of life, Julie Dunlop has made us a miraculous book of poems.  Here are the cable repairman, the waitress, the botanist, and you and I easing into balance, “decoding the text of what reaches beyond words,/ the expanse of the cosmos within the breath.”  We need this book for ourselves and for every one of our yogi friends and acquaintances!

–Hilda Raz, author of Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been:  New and Collected Poems

Honoring the Light in You is delightful and heartfelt; it has something to offer to us all.  Whether you practice yoga or not, I feel you will be touched by these poems that honor our everyday heroes with compassion and respect.  Julie’s writing style is so descriptive.  She has a way of drawing the reader into each posture as well as into the true nature of yoga itself.  Sometimes I read one of her poems before I go into a yoga posture to bring a deeper sense of the pose.  I can’t wait to read these poems to my yoga students—to start class with one of the poems and let that be the theme of the practice. These poems will contribute greatly to our yoga community.

–Gloria Drayer, yoga teacher and co-author of Yoga and Grief:  A Compassionate Journey Toward Healing

Yoga teaches us that before we find everything else, we must find ourselves – otherwise the scenery around us would keep changing and we would continue to remain unchanged. Yoga is thus the path of refinement of human consciousness, and to accomplish that, one common language is required at the level of collective consciousness. What could be a better way than uniting Yoga and Poetry to find that language? Julie Dunlop’s book offers us a way to find the answers to the quest of humanity in the most erudite manner. My earnest congratulations to her for this masterpiece!

–Dr. Chinmay Pandya, Pro Vice Chancellor of Dev Sanskriti Vishwavidyalaya University and Chairperson of the International Festival of Yoga, Culture, and Spirituality

Honoring the Light in You offers a mind-body-embrace of humanity, in myriad forms and facets, compassionately illustrating our very human responses to stress.  The centering and peace in the movement and breath of a yoga practice is a powerful theme in the poems, connecting us across space and time, and underscoring how yoga can reduce stress.

 –Kristina Graff, Managing Director, Yoga Alliance Foundation