Excerpt from Transformative Yoga

My journey toward the healing effects of yoga began in 1993. At the time, I was seeking relief from emotional stress on both a conscious and an unconscious level. During my first year at college, I was a mess inside. I desperately lacked inner peace, although this wasn’t outwardly apparent.

My parents had recently gone bankrupt, so I was exhausted from working three jobs between high school and college to pay my tuition, and I continued to work part-time while in college. The daily grind was unfulfilling, to say the least. Meanwhile, my twin sister, Alanis Morissette, exploded onto the music scene with her groundbreaking album Jagged Little Pill, which went on to become the highest-selling debut album of all time. With her rapidly mounting success, I felt more emotionally and spiritually lost than ever before and longed to find my own identity and path in life.

I was studying to become an environmental lawyer, a vocation I had an interest in, but one that didn’t fully satisfy me. Deep down, I knew academic study wasn’t going to fulfill my quest for inner peace and happiness. Most of the books I was required to read focused on theory. I needed truth—an unwavering, blatant truth with no smoke and mirrors. In the end, I decided not to complete a degree in environmental law. Ironically, though, the time I spent at college led me in a different and unexpected direction: toward a new sense of spirituality.

by guest blogger Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D., author of

1. There’s nothing wrong with hope.
2. Make peace with your body.
3. Give yourself permission to do something you’ve been putting off.
4. Remove something from your self-improvement or to-do list.
5. Ask for support.

Excerpt from Five Good Minutes®

Setting an intention is a way of pointing yourself in a direction, toward an important value or goal. It is a way to identify a quality you wish to nurture in your life.

A skillful intention is more like a friendly guide. Acknowledge from the beginning that important changes take time. You, like everyone else, must make the effort to return repeatedly to the goal you seek.

Excerpt from Five Good Minutes®

You will work with a variety of approaches in your five good minutes. They include the following:

• Mindfulness
• Meditation
• Imagery
• Acting wholeheartedly

Excerpt from Five Good Minutes®

As you experiment and practice with the five good minutes exercises, you will learn to apply consciously your attention, intention, and wholeheartedness. You will see for yourself the power of being present and acting with intention while doing specifically guided exercises. Beyond the exercises, you may even discover more ways to apply these same principles throughout your life.

Excerpt from Five Good Minutes®

From our perspective, five minutes of clock time begins to change into something much more powerful and interesting when you are present (attention is in the present moment, and not lost in thoughts of past or future), when you set a clear intention for your actions, and when you act wholeheartedly. When you apply attention, intention, and wholeheartedness to the exercises in this book, which are aimed at cultivating peace and relaxation, deepening awareness and connection to life, enhancing relationships, and developing kindness and wisdom, then your five minutes truly becomes five good minutes.