About the Author

Melissa Townsend, whose Sanskrit name is Manisha, lives in San Francisco with her husband and son and their cat, a magnificent Siberian, who has no difficulty accepting love. She is an artist, writer, and an internationally known and published psychic and astrologer. She has been a serious Yoga practitioner since 1984, and teaches Sanskrit, which she has been studying since 2005. As well, she has studied numerous eastern and western spiritual and esoteric traditions, and often the languages associated with them, including the I Ching/Chinese, Kabbalah (Tarot)/Hebrew, and Buddhism. She graduated from Brown University, Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude, after which she moved to New York City, where she lived for over twenty years. She attended her first yoga asana class in New York, with Dharma Mittra, her long-time teacher, and she's explored and practiced numerous other traditions of asana. Asana felt instantly, joyously familiar, but she found the chanting worrisome, and was secretly afraid that it might induce her to dress in orange and start handing out brightly colored books written in a strange language in airports. Little did she know that she would eventually spend years studying that strange language, ultimately creating her own - more subtly colored - books in it. In fact, most of the significant events in her life have taken her by surprise. She is grateful that something wiser than she is in charge of planning.