Family Wakes Us Up

How do a teacher of yoga and Buddhism and an ayurvedic practitioner prepare for parenting? How do they understand themselves as men, and fathers? How can love, separation, grief, acceptance, and falling in love again be spiritual practices? This is a serious book about family as the first site of our evolution. It’s intimate, existentially honest and strangely funny.

Michael Stone and Matthew Remski share thirty years of yoga practice and teaching experience between them. They’ve each travelled far and wide to study and practise their contemplative arts – living in campervans in the dead of winter, dusty monasteries in South India, frigid temples in Japan and ashrams in rural America.

As they both became expectant fathers, Michael and Matthew began an exchange of deeply personal letters that explore the interweaving themes of their lives amidst teachings from Zen, anecdotes from the yoga mat, observations from meditation and Ayurvedic recipes for postpartum broth.

How does yoga inform their kitchen, laundry room and their love? How will they find help and take responsibility within a culture of manhood struggling to redefine itself? How can they use presence to integrate their past? How will supporting their partners through pregnancy, labour, and birth enrich their commitment to a spirituality rooted in intimacy and interdependence?