It has already been 6 years since Kareen released her very first book, The ABC of Yoga, as a Kindle Edition. Like the original hardcopy, this e-Book has proven to be extremely popular, and has gained her a new generation of followers.
For this e-Book version, Kareen provides you with a newly REVISED EDITION of her original best-selling book from 1970, which has had many reprints (over 1 million sold in 14 languages).
If you’d like to download your own copy of this pioneering work, you can do so at either Amazon.ca, or Amazon.com. The price is under $10.00, which includes free international wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet.
Below is an excerpt from the introduction:
THE TIME FOR YOGA IN CANADA HAD ARRIVED
As a result of the huge influence of the Beatles, as well as of the occasional Yoga TV-show beginning to pop up on the American TV-screen, Yoga had now become “in”, in the West…
A very few yoga-teachers had started to teach in Vancouver already, but a very vital role in spreading Yoga’s philosophy was played by Canadian TV—both in Canada and in the Northern United States. That is where this author comes into the picture!
Interestingly, I had gotten on TV with my own half-hour Network Yoga and Nutrition Show, without ever having taken one pro-active step towards it!
How is that possible?
It all started, because I had wanted to teach Yoga in a night-class in the very small town of Agassiz in the Fraser Valley – consisting of 3000 inhabitants with surroundings. They had a sad history, however, of never getting more than 6-8 people to come to classes for which a minimum of ten was required by the schoolboard.
To make that minimum, I had written a little blurb in the local paper, which told the readers all about what miraculous things Yoga had done for me …
…living through a cold winter in the dam-building town of Hudson’s Hope way up North.
I was feeling tired and depressed, because very of the cold weather they had there, indeed! Temperatures sometimes went down to -55F degrees (with wind-chill factor) that literally can—look it up—cause frostbite in two minutes! …
I was growing increasingly sorry for myself in the depths of winter, when my adventuresome Mother wrote me from the East about a very good new form of exercise class she was taking. It was called “Yoga” and had done her a world of good during her menopause; she had seen an ad for it in a health-food store and greatly encouraged me to take it up, too.
There was only one book on Yoga on the one rotating book-shelf in the one General Store in my town, however! It was called, “Yoga, Youth and Reincarnation” by the award-winning author/journalist Jess Stearn, about a Yoga-teacher who had studied in India, called Marcia Moore (with whom I was later to become great friends). Excellent photos illustrated her poses.
As a school-teacher, I had the know-how and discipline to plan out my own Yoga routine for myself, and I enthusiastically started a daily practice of Yoga that completely changed my life.
As a result of the exercises, the breath-control and the contemplation/ concentration/meditation—as well as a sensible diet, and the more cheerful attitude I was developing—I was able to lose my surplus weight in three months…
We had moved down to Agassiz that following summer, (1968), and my story in the paper caused an astonishing result on the night of registration.
I had hoped and prayed for at least ten students, but on the day of registration an unprecedented 78 people paid! (I had to hold 3 big classes in the Kent Elementary School gym).
A few months after that night, the famous Harrison Hot Springs Hotel hired me to teach their guests Yoga during a Weight-control Week…
To promote the Hotel’s Health-Week, the Assistant Manager, the Chef, and I were interviewed on an afternoon show on BCTV in Vancouver. The director of programming had seen me explaining all the Yoga poses—one of them while standing on my head—and he phoned me the next day to say that they wanted me to make a “pilot” of a Yoga Show.
My husband Peter and I had never done anything like it, but since we were both teachers—he a principal with an M.Ed, and I a grade VII teacher—we had no trouble of at least doing the lesson-planning for the program…
(Eventually, we were to do more than 1100 half-hour shows — more than M.A.S.H. — over a period of 10 years, after which the show was “bicycled” for another 6 years all over Canada.)
Very soon, I was getting 1000 letters a day, asking me to write a book of the over 100 poses I was demonstrating on my show—in the process upping our little post-office by two notches. At the time, not one publisher had seen the potential of my having my own TV show to daily promote my books, so a printer kindly suggested that we publish it ourselves.
We did, and the uniquely-designed, spiral-bound (for lying flat) THE ABC OF YOGA book was to become an immediate best-seller, with over 1.3 million copies sold in 11 languages, in time. After 3 years on-air across Canada, I was invited by the German ZDF-TV to do a weekly Yoga-show there, as well.
