From the Body to the Overself

Nowadays there are many different forms of hatha yoga, ranging from the extremely strenuous to the very soft. After many years of personal experience, both through practice and teaching, Dewar Adair, yoga teacher (BDY/EYU) and former aikido instructor, presents a path beyond the mainstream of hatha yoga. In this book he explores to what extent we reduce ourselves and our practice exclusively to the purely physical and asks where the spiritual dimension of hatha yoga is to be found. He offers answers to these and other questions by taking his readers on a journey away from the body and towards the Overself.

Dewar Adair was born on 22 April 1954 in Newton Stewart, Scotland and grew up as the youngest of three children. At the age of 14 he began to ask himself questions about the big issues in life. Since then he has been fascinated by the connection between the body and the mind. After studying as an interpreter and translator, he used his scholarship to study the Critical Theory of the 'Frankfurt School' at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University in Frankfurt. It was here that he first came into contact with body-oriented psychotherapy, especially bioenergetics, and the writings and works of Wilhelm Reich and Gerda Boysen. From the early 80s onwards, he practised and taught the Japanese martial art Aikido in addition to his main job as a personnel developer for a large German company. Since 1998 he has been practicing hatha yoga, and his enthusiasm for it led him to do a yoga teacher training course (BDY/EYU). He has been teaching yoga since 2010. Dewar Adair is married and lives in Dortmund, Germany.