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If you practice yoga long enough, you start to understand that the lessons you learn on the mat are pretty much the same lessons you learn in everyday life. And vice-versa. That means that any wisdom that resonates for one almost always brings you additional insight when you apply it to the other. That’s certainly what we found with what we consider the best books of 2024.
Whether you’re seeking incited shared in an insightful, thought-provoking, instructional, or even that-would-look-lovely-on-my-coffee-table sorta way, the following titles will surprise you with their expansive applicability to all aspects of your everyday existence.
You’re welcome.
YJ’s Best Books of 2024
Listed below, in no particular order, are those books that brought us back to ourselves in some measure. In a sense, isn’t anything that accomplishes that yoga?
1. 101 Quotes That Will Change the Way You Think
This luxe coffee table book compiles the standout quotes from blogger-turned-best-selling author Brianna Wiest’s previous works, including The Pivot Year and The Mountain is You. The thoughts—Instagram-length and related to self-actualization—are just the right length to become your mantra for the rest of the hour, day, week, or journaling session. The subdued aesthetics of the book also make it an asset anywhere. Eminently giftable.
2. Rest is Sacred: Reclaiming Our Brilliance Through the Practice of Stillness
The sequel to Pause, Rest, Be, this book of contemporary “sutras”—as author Octavia Raheem refers to them—are intended to bring not only momentary calm but lasting self-revelation. These are words that you feel as much as you read, and one of those feelings is not being alone in your struggles.
3. Playing Dead: How Meditation Brought Me Back to Life
For many years, Robert Sheehan struggled with social anxiety, feelings of unworthiness, and imposter syndrome within his acting career. Sheehan’s experience of learning to prioritize intentional moments of silence and internal discovery brought out all the things he’d been hiding: the curious, the questioning, the bitter, even the cringy. The actor’s narrative serves as a mirror to his audience, validating how similarly we all strive for something beyond ourselves until we feel glimmers of acceptance for who we are.
4. The Teacher’s Guide to Accessible Yoga
For the last several decades, the founder of Accessible Yoga has been making the physical practice of yoga—and, by extension, all of yoga—a place of belonging for literally every body. Here, Jivana Heyman explains that sometimes it’s not the pose that needs to change, it’s the teacher’s perception. If only this book was required reading in yoga teacher trainings.
5. The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing
One doesn’t need to be an artist to understand the meaning behind the indecipherable scribbles that illustrate the cover of this book or the highlighter marks crossing them out. Written by Adam Moss, the highly accomplished former editor of New York Magazine, the book profiles various creatives on their process. Although the emphasis is on the relentless pursuit of art, the majority of the focus is on the experiences along the way that eventually lead to what you think is the work. Remind you of anything?
6. Break Up, On Purpose: A Catalyst for Growth
Author John Kim—known to his followers as The Angry Therapist—takes you through eight major breakup types, while addressing the possibility of transformation that’s available to anyone sorting through heartbreak. From seeing things as they were to acknowledging, in time, why separation was necessary, Kim walks you through the steps for healing and growth while illustrating how to keep your sense of self intact, no matter the relational circumstance.
7. Angelus Experiential Chakra Workbook
Technically, this book isn’t new. And figuratively, it’s less a book than an expository art lesson on energetics in which authors Erica Jago and Roos van der Kamp draw on fanciful artwork to evoke emotion. In so doing, they seek to channel intuition through the chakras or, as they write, “doorways into various worlds of ancient wisdom.” The authors assign each chakra a simple, one-word definition to help comprehension and memory. More than one reader has described the work as “magic.”
8. The Complete Guide to Yoga Props
Yoga therapist and longtime student and teacher and YJ contributor, Jenny Clise has amassed a startling number of variations for all manner of poses that make yoga more accessible to all—whether that means creating more ease or more intensity in the shape. Both a training manual and a reference book, it will surprise and serve students and teachers of any experience level.
9. Dying to Know: Ram Dass and Timothy Leary
This posthumous tribute to a little-known friendship draws on interviews and quotes from the counterculture friends, one a disseminator of Eastern spirituality and the other a proponent of psychedelic drugs. As editor Parvati Markus describes, “Together and separately, they ushered in an awakening of consciousness.” The thought-provoking compilation is based on the Gay Dillingham documentary of the same name.
10. Accessible Ashtanga: An All-Levels Guide to the Primary and Intermediate Series
A longtime Ashtanga practitioner and teacher, Kino MacGregor is adept at making the physical practice of the lineage-based yoga practice more accessible. She also makes the act of adapting poses permissible for an audience who sometimes considers innovation and appropriation to be synonymous. Don’t skip the Foreward.
