Sun Square Moon: writings on yoga and writing

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Limited Edition Available:
Made with a sari cloth cover, gold-embossed, hand-stitched, hand-pasted and hand-bound, published by Writers Workshop, Kolkata
Email profsky@cal.vsnl.net.in for purchase info or Buy here

Other editions:
Published by sun square moon, 2005
ISBN 0-9758-220-0-4X
Republished by Booksurge (USA) 2006
ISBN 1-866-308-6235

From the introduction:

“The writer needs a body to perform writing. The body is a text upon which yoga writes. The body is a text written by thought, experience, genetics, culture, performance, fashion, personality. The body is the self, the self is an illusion, the personality is one of its illusions. The writer creates a body of work, writings written by a person whose idea of a cohesive self is demonstrably illusory, whose conscious mind plays only a small part in what she herself does.

As I began to write about the process of writing - observing my own methods and approaches, the influences on my practice, the origins and history of writing a novel, the ways these matters can be written of, I would find myself thinking of all this while doing yoga. Well, strictly speaking, yoga requires the total absorption of mind in the pose, so I should say I was thinking of all this while attempting to do yoga.

Writing and yoga emerge as related practices. Yoga, a text written on herself, has a discipline that a writer might employ to inquire into writing practice, a language that a writer might employ to inquire into the writing of texts written by herself.

The differences and the congruities of yoga and writing can be located in a territory where practice, body and self meet. That is the theme of this collection of writings.”

Squared to a relentless Sun

“Inez Baranay was born of Hungarian gypsies in Naples and brought up in Australia. The gypsies left India a thousand years ago and have forgotten everything, their language and their origin. But you can see everything in their music and their dance. It is all there. Inez is a writer. She is a yogini. She has lived with primitive tribes in New Guinea. She has traveled the world telling her stories and her story here, in sun square moon, her natal horoscope, is about her art and her yoga, it is about awareness, about creativity, and about her journey through those worlds.

It’s a story with a disarming honesty. She does not even avoid sex, dreams, drugs, retail therapy and money. Sex power money is the potent mantra of the age even for the health food goody goody yogis. She has indulged. But the theme of the book is practice, body and self.

She is not brain dead. She scotches the rumour that yoga produces an empty head and a flaccid sex life. She brings her awareness from yoga to writing and takes it the other way as well. Ultimately there are no differences. Only fools could insist there were. Writing has been with us for 300 years; yoga for 3000. But her book is not quite about writing as such, it is about art, the art of insight, and that has been around longer.

“We are what our bodies are” - but then there are points of view. She documents these and lays out the fascism of a fixed point of view. She has not spoken of demons. She abandoned them on the way from India a thousand years ago.

And here she is with her moon squared to a relentless sun. This is one of the few books on yoga that is not trivia.”

Norman Sjoman
Author of Yoga Touchstone and The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace -from Black Lotus Books