Trendsetting and trailblazing — this yogi is turning ancient tradition into modern reality.
Have you ever set out to do something extremely virtuous, tranquil and seemingly beneficial for your soul, but wound up wishing you had never stepped away from your T.V. to watch the newest episode of Real Housewives?
Suzanne Morrison, writer, performance artist, and author of the upcoming novel, Yoga Bitch: One Woman’s Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment has definitely experienced that humbling phenomenon.
Yoga Bitch is an inspirational, hilarious and refreshingly honest memoir from a woman who now knows every spiritual journey does not necessarily resolve itself quite like Eat, Pray, Love.
We have to admit that Seattle is home to its fair share of Yogis and enlightened souls. Morrison isn’t your typical born-and-bred spiritual enthusiast, but she did seek some sort of higher calling when she first started practicing yoga in her mid-twenties.
“Classic quarter-life crisis: one day I woke up and realized I was going to die — believe that day was September 12th, 2001. Within a few weeks, spiritual memoirs started accumulating next to my bed. Next thing I knew, I was in a yoga class chanting in Sanskrit,” she recalled.
Her novel and memoir is an exploration of a journey that never really ends, but begins with a yoga retreat to Bali in search of answers to the usual issues that concern us all: love, faith and the meaning of life.
“What I found was a cult of pissdrinkers, a personal propensity to be spiritually egomaniacal, and a marvelously hypocritical spiritual industry that turned me, for a time, into a yogic Martin Luther in a sports bra.”
Ten years later and she is still practicing yoga despite the (literal) pissdrinkers, but the last decade has been more of a roller coaster ride with plenty of unforeseen switchbacks on the path to transformation.
A self-proclaimed “Capitol Hill Yoga Slut,” if she’s not writing, performing, or traveling— she might just be found at Samadhi Yoga or Seattle Yoga Arts. However, you won’t find her teaching any time soon.
“There are plenty of yoga missionaries out there who will do a much better job of paving new yoga paths than I can do. And they’ll do it with less swearing.”
That’s fine by us—as long as she keeps writing and performing and swearing all she wants we could be perfectly happy.
Ultimately, Morrison’s invigoratingly raw, sincere and poetic realization is that transformation can’t simply be planned.
“I had some spiritual breakthroughs, sure, but by the next day, I’d be waking up with myself again. That total transformation didn’t happen for me, and that’s really what my story is about—how we might go looking for one thing, but find something completely different. We might find that we’re a bit of an asshole, really. Or we might find that the quest leads nowhere, and that nowhere is still an interesting place.”
Amen. Namaste. Sing it, sister.
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