On Being Human: A Memoir of Waking Up, Living Real, and Listening Hard

In this candid memoir, Manifest-Station blogger Pastiloff transforms from a troubled restaurant server at a celebrity haunt in Santa Monica, Calif., into a yoga teacher and maven for self-discovery. At eight, the author lost her father to drug use-related heart failure; shortly after, Pastiloff began losing her hearing but managed to hide it from everyone, even from herself (“unknowing became a theme” for her), by relying on lip-reading. In high school she became anorexic, which plagued her as a student at New York University, where she often lost “consciousness at nights on my dirty kitchen floor.” After dropping out of college, she moved to L.A. There, she worked serving veggie burgers to Hollywood stars and eventually found an exit ramp from her pain via yoga. Pastiloff learned to quiet her “Inner Asshole”—her term for the internal monologue of self-doubt that keeps people stuck in “bullshit stories” about themselves—and realized her burgeoning dream of helping others do the same, all the while overcoming depression, finding love, and becoming a mother. With can-do enthusiasm, Pastiloff tells of creating her On Being Human workshop retreats throughout the world, and shares her successes, including the thrill of doing “Karaoke Yoga” on Good Morning America. Readers feeling stuck in their lives will devour this inspiring story of a woman finding her way. (June)