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by Melissa Townsend (Author)
A remarkable approach to the classic Yogic text, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali - A Visual Meditation, is both a traditional, knowledgeable full translation of Book One of the Yoga Sutras, with commentary; and it is gorgeous, sophisticated art book, with full color, full page images of the stunningly beautiful paintings for each sutra, created as meditative guides and in response to her years of work, studying, working with, and translating the Yoga Sutras. The sutras themselves are in the original Devanagari, with transliteration, translation and succinct, accessible, grounded commentary, that draws upon author and artist Melissa Townsend's 30+ years of spiritual practice, including meditation, yoga asana, Sanskrit, study of yogic and philosophical texts, Buddhism, and numerous other Eastern and Western philosophies and often their associated languages.
The book is as impeccably accurate and useful as it is lovely. A graduate of Brown University, Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude, along with her years of spiritual practice and study of Sanskrit, Ms. Townsend's many years' experience as an internationally known psychic, speaking to people one-on-one about their lives, informs her writing as well, helping to make the commentary clear, eminently practical, human and delightfully accessible. Wry and warm, as well as knowledgeable, her writing brings an important yogic text into clear focus, while the artwork takes the book to an entirely new level. The paintings are profoundly beautiful: meditative, mysterious, visionary.
Three years in the making, the author and artist has said of the work that when she undertook to work with the Yoga Sutras via painting them, she expected to be the one in charge. Only later did she learn that "they" say, "You don't work with the Yoga Sutras. They work on you." She writes, "Much to my initial anxiety and despair, it soon became clear that something else was in control, dictating the process: how the paintings would look, how that would be done, and when."
The work of Sanskrit and of the Yoga Sutras is to push one along the path towards Enlightenment. To this end, the Yoga Sutras "mean" both exactly what they "say," and each one means infinitely more. That, "infinitely more," is expressed through the remarkable artwork in this book.
