Book Review: Invincible Living by Guru Jagat

We’re in a new trajectory on the planet. This is a new time with new challenges, requirements, and rules of engagement than even five years ago. And part of what’s happening is that the entire psychomagnetic field of the Earth is changing.

As a result of this shift in the Earth’s psychomagnetic field, there’s a pressure on our own individual psychomagnetic fields. Our own psyches, our own magnetic energies, have to change in order to keep up with the changes on the planet.

The Book

Invincible Living: The Power of Yoga, the Energy of Breath, and Other Tools for a Radiant Life by Guru Jagat
Genre: Wellness, yoga, new age
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017
Amazon | Goodreads
Author’s Links: Website | Facebook

What It Is

Using the power of Kundalini Yoga, Guru Jagat’s book Invincible Living is a guide to living a better, happier life. From yoga and meditation to beauty and anti-aging, this book covers every aspect of wellness.

It’s broken up into several parts, such as “Ancient Tech for Self-Healing,” “Balanced Emotions,” and “Sex is Science,” and each chapter includes directions for breathing exercises, meditations, mantras, and more.

Guru Jagat uses her own experiences to guide us through the practices and advice. She tried to write the book in such a way as to make it easily accessible to everyone. As she says several times:

“We don’t want to get caught up in fancy yogic terms for the sake of some idea and lose sight of the point of yogic technology – which is just to feel better now and into the future.”

What I Liked

(Full disclosure: I did not finish this book. I got about two-thirds of the way through it, and had to add it to my “did not finish” pile because I was getting frustrated at trying to finish it.)

The book is very well put together in terms of product quality. Beautiful glossy pages, a lot of eye-catching illustrations and typography, and a very spa-like color scheme. It’s literally a relaxing book to look at.

I also always appreciate books that include directions and information about meditation, because I’m a firm believer in how much better our lives can be with just a few minutes a day spent on a cushion watching our breaths.

Finally, she discusses the benefits of dry brushing before taking a cold shower, which is something I can get behind. I was first introduced to dry brushing when I worked in a spa, and it makes you feel wonderful.

What I Disliked

There was one glaring omission to the book that I’m shocked was never discussed: the entire book is about Kundalini yoga, but Guru Jagat never actually explains what that is, except vague statements regarding its founder, Yogi Bhajan, or that it’s beneficial to its practitioners. Some history of the practice would have been helpful.

Throughout the book, Guru Jagat makes a lot of far-fetched statements with no references to back them up, despite countless statements about her being a “yogic scientist” and Kundalini yoga being a practice with a scientific purpose. I enjoy reading books about wellness, so I’m used to some of the more woo-woo aspects, but some of her statements left me speechless and stunned. Here are a few examples (there were a lot, so I narrowed it down to these five):

• “Hair maintains the body’s electromagnetic field and acts as an antenna for the aura (think Avatar movie). Hair is the only instrument that directly feeds vitamin D from the sun straight into the brain… This kind of concentrated solar energy also stimulates the pineal gland, the gland of enlightenment.”
• “Your whole physical form can – and does – change based on your consciousness. And if you are consciously conscious of that, then you can have more direct control and influence over it.Now, what the priestesses of Avalon and the ancient yogis and tantrikas were doing was a little bit different. They were projecting through their auras, a special aspect of the aura called the circumvent force.”
• “I’ve worked a lot with burn survivors. The ones who didn’t mentally and emotionally identify with the blistering of the skin healed faster and more completely. There was a study done proving this, and I can personally attest to its accuracy. Essentially, the people who had massive burn experiences but didn’t go into “burn consciousness” minimized the whelping and damage to their skin.”
• “…you get to someone who’s going to give you something for your depression. And you figure you should probably take it because you’re really depressed. I mean, you have convinced yourself and everyone around you that you’re depressed. And when that doesn’t work, they give you an anti-anxiety pill, and then they give you the antidepressant for the antidepressant. It can be a very detrimental and harrowing cycle.”

The final two points, regarding burn victims and depression, struck a serious nerve in me. One of my family members was severely burned in a house fire (and thankfully recovered fully!), and the healing process is not as simple as “thinking yourself better.” I can’t disagree that having a positive mindset in the face of such a terrible ordeal can be beneficial to the person going through it, but it’s not how you heal from it.  And, as for the second point, I’ve dealt with depression for most of my life, and it’s not caused by repeatedly believing you’re depressed (which is what she writes). Advice like Guru Jagat’s can be harmful, as there are so many people who need the assistance anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication can provide. At least, it can help much more than her solution:

“Jump with your arms reaching up toward the ceiling for one minute. Breathe deeply….

Every time you jump off the ground – every time you try to pull your body weight off the ground – the body associates that with ‘I have to get lighter,’ so the brain and all the ten bodies associate that activity with getting lighter. When this occurs, you’re starting to dump the negativity.”

She also offers dangerous health advice like mono-diets (which can leave you nutrient-deficient), and uses un-verifiable myths as facts:

“For aeons, yogic practice has produced a plentitude of individuals called baal yogis. Baal yogis are men and women who appear eternally youthful, as though suspended in time in a seemingly ageless state. One of these yogis was a man named Baba Siri Chand. Baba Siri Chand is one of the most powerful yogis of the Kundalini Yoga lineage, and it is said that in his documented 150 years of his life, he looked forever like a boy. And Baba Siri Chand is just one of many yogis who have achieved such a feat.”

And then there’s the yogurt douching and putting ghee in your eyes. (No, I’m not kidding.)

Finally, this book feels like a lot of empty, general statements that don’t actually mean anything. There are a plethora of buzzwords like “wellness,” “bliss,” and the like, but the book doesn’t have much intellectual depth to it. I found that I had to force myself to read on, before eventually giving up on page 154 of 263.

Verdict (Buy/Borrow/Skip)

Skip. There are a lot of great yoga and wellness books out there, but there are too many problems with this book for me to recommend it.