Formats Book Description Publication Date: January 2, 2004 In her early 20s, Elizabeth Kadetsky found herself running for hours every day, eating like a bird, and suffering from an excruciating but mysterious pain in her chest. Only in her yoga classes did she find some relief. Through a teacher, she heard about a yoga institute in India where an aging patriarch took in Western students for instruction. She wrote to him and waited years for an invitation to study with the master. FIRST THERE IS A MOUNTAIN is a tale of spiritual longing that brought a young American woman to the yoga institute of the renowned B.K.S. Iyengar, the man who introduced yoga to a Western audience. Once there, she became a wayward protge of this mercurial and demanding teacher, piecing together his life's vision of the ancient Hindu practice and finding her place within yoga as a Western aspirant. In the damp, musty practice rooms at the institute, her exhausted body hanging from ropes or propped up by wooden blocks, she found a spiritual discipline unlike any other. Under Iyengar's tutelage Kadetsky learns the 'subtle wisdom' of the body, leaving behind a discordant childhood and starvation diets to discover a kind of peace. Part personal memoir and part exploration of the vast gulf between body, will, and spirit, FIRST THERE IS A MOUNTAIN is written with grace, reverence, and wisdom. In her early 20s, Elizabeth Kadetsky found herself running for hours every day, eating like a bird, and suffering