This collection of writings from award-winning ascent magazine compiles the most compelling voices of yogis who are thinking deeply about yoga and actively living a spiritual life.

Whether traveling through China, sitting with an ailing mother or feeling the fire of a stretch in yoga class, the wide range of stories in Inspired Lives are told with the intimacy and humanity characteristic of ascent magazine. It is the rarity of this kind of writing that has won ascent numerous awards of excellence, including Utne’s Best Spiritual Coverage, and has brought the magazine a devoted readership.

Collected from 1999–2004 and presented in three sections (engagement/encounters with community, inspiration/encounters with others, and reflection/encounters with self), Inspired Lives revisits engaging interviews such as “Theory Into Practice” where Georg Feuerstein speaks about the exciting potential of yoga in the West. Elsewhere, bell hooks talks about love and healing as acts of political resistance, and author Yann Martel explores his relationship to writing and religion. Regular contributors Sarah Truman, Sikeena Karmali, Lesley Marian Neilson and Soren Gordhamer offer up their best material.

There is just something incredibly sincere about the acceptance of the joys and difficulties in being human presented in this book. I think the special gift that ascent has is that it provides a forum for this work of yoga, the real life work.

The depth of human experience is revealed in candid personal essays, concerning illness and health, life and death, suffering and happiness. With the magazine’s emphasis on the arts and social engagement, Inspired Lives gets to the heart of how we live our yoga.

Clea McDougall is the former editor of ascent magazine: “We just had a vision of how to explore yoga, what it could look like, how it could be lived, practiced and loved. The best of what came out of that vision is assembled in this book.”