Matri Global Publications · Trade catalogue 2026

Amazon Australia bestselling author of THE SPINE · October 2026

#3 Hindu Sūtras · #6 Hinduism · #8 Indian Philosophy

Yoga (as a philosophy) · Hindu Sūtras · Eastern philosophy

Shelves & Themes: Self-Help, Psychology, Meditation, Spiritual Development, Mental & Spiritual Healing, Autofiction, Hindu Sūtras, Eastern Philosophy, Yoga as Philosophy, Rituals & Practice, Sacred Writings, Hinduism, Religious & Inspirational, Visionary & Metaphysical

A book called The Spine, that builds one

Classical Raja Yoga and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali Made Modern — Your Own Self, Top to Bottom, and the Root of Anxiety. A meditation book in plain English, for anyone with a job, a family and half an hour on a Tuesday.

The Spine

For three thousand years one tradition did nothing but watch how a human being actually works — and wrote down what it found with an exactness that has not needed correcting since. Not beliefs. Not comfort. A map. Compressed two thousand years ago by Patañjali into a hundred and ninety-six sentences, and carried down a living lineage ever since.

Almost nobody outside that lineage has ever been shown the whole of it.

THE SPINE walks all of it — eighteen stretches of country, in plain language, for a person with a job, a family, a history, and half an hour on a Tuesday. Nine chapters climb. Nine come back down, and the coming down is the harder half. Nothing is softened. Nothing is sold.

Matri runs one argument underneath all eighteen: a human being is an ecology, and almost everything that exhausts you is a leak rather than a shortage.

It does not offer you somewhere to belong. It offers you a spine.

It is carried in rich eloquent visuals of rivers, fences, gardens, animals and weeds. Nothing in it is hard going or dry meta-science — and it is often more humorous than a book on the Sūtras is expected to be.

Shelves in mind-body-spirit, yoga, philosophy and self-development. Of standing interest to academic and institutional buyers, and to yoga schools teaching from the source text.

Order through Ingram 55% trade discount · AU, US and UK prices below.

Whoever taught you that boundaries are unkind was, look closely, usually standing on the profitable side of your missing fence.
THE SPINE

The whole reads easily, like a story — but no glib tale here, rather a revelatory repast, to be inhaled, savoured, digested and ultimately revisited. Each chapter acts upon the mind like a furtive paring knife, peeling back our every assumption and dispelling every misconception to expose the silent obscure machinery that balances our core sense of well-being.
— Leslie Kingsley, from the Foreword
Painter; his work is held in collections on five continents, among them The Royal Marsden, London.

Inside

Why you wake up tired after eight hours — and what the part of you that never switches off is doing all night
What burnout actually is, and why rest alone has never once fixed it
The imprints you did not choose and did not make — and how a new one is really laid down
The six levers a manipulator pulls, not one of which they invented
The difference between surrender you give and surrender that was taken from you
Why some days leave you rinsed and others wreck you, when you did the same amount
The five things sitting underneath every kind of suffering — including the fear that reaches even the wise
Which season of your life you are actually in, rather than the one you are performing
How to tell a real teacher from a convincing one, and the two-year test that settles it

Between the chapters, on cards of their own, runs a second voice: photographs and fragments of the author's own life, set down without explanation and without a lesson at the end. They do not illustrate the teaching. They are the ground it grew in. The book is whole without them.

This book is for you if you have practised yoga for years and were never shown the map behind it; if your mind will not stop, and you want to know what a three-thousand-year-old psychology actually says about fear before anyone hands you a technique; if you are rebuilding judgement and self-trust after living beside someone who worked to erode both; or if you have read a great deal about the mind and want the older, stricter account of it.

There is no enlightenment for sale in these pages, no programme, and nothing you must believe. Two things are promised and kept: it will never preach at you, and it will never tell you where you are supposed to end up. It ends where every real journey ends — at your own gate, on an ordinary Tuesday, in the life you already have.

Includes a complete glossary of Sanskrit terms with a pronunciation guide, and seventeen reflection pages for your own working.

Matri teaches Rāja Yoga, which includes yoga psychology. As she puts it: yoga is the ecology of an individual; ecology is the yoga of the collective. Not one joule of energy has to be wasted.

The book

The Spine: Classical Raja Yoga and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali Made Modern — Your Own Self, Top to Bottom, and the Root of Anxiety

Hardcover in gloss case laminate, black with gold; paperback matte. Black-and-white photographs on cards between the chapters, on cream stock.

The Sūtras are a manual, not a devotional text, and this reads them as one: what attention is, how a person is assembled, and what a mind does under pressure. The reader is handed the map rather than the conclusion. Also available as an audiobook — 5½ hours, narrated as a mellifluous meditation on an ordinary day, eighteen of them.

Paperback

978-1-7648686-5-5

AU	A$43.99 (39.99 ex GST)
US	US$22.99
UK	£17.99

Hardcover

978-1-7648686-4-8

AU	A$60.49 (54.99 ex GST)
US	US$34.99
UK	£29.99

308 pp

Look inside

The book, as printed · swipe

Title page, with the foreword by Leslie Kingsley

Epigraphs — Patañjali and the Īśā Upaniṣad, in devanāgarī and transliteration

Contents — eighteen chapters, glossary, lineage

Two readings of the same thing, and the instruction to hold both

The garden you inherit — the fruit trees and the poison

Five, and the same five in the beggar and the king

The musician — what a manipulator actually learns

Said fierce, and said quietly — the war is not entirely your doing

Between the chapters, a card of her own — chapter seventeen

Also by Matri

MYST · MEGHA · MYTH — historical fiction that takes its heroine out of nineteen years in the Sydney CBD and into the Himalaya, carried by the queens who set the record straight before the word feminism existed.

ZENVOYAGE — eight full-colour illustrated books for readers eight to fifteen and over, more than two thousand pages making one voyage: the major archetypes and the patterns of behaviour laid down early, so a young reader goes on into later life carrying a compass.

About the author

Matri was born in Palekh, the old Russian village of icon-painters, and raised in Kyrgyzstan from the age of two, on the old Central Asian corridor, and studied the history of civilisations with Central Asia as her field. India received her at twenty‑five — the country that had been lying just over those mountains the whole time. Her grandmother's own collection, some three thousand Russian volumes, travelled with her, and she now writes near the sea, in the Northern Rivers. She teaches Rāja Yoga internationally.

To order

Through	Ingram
Imprint	Matri Global Publications
Prices	AU — RRP shown including GST; the figure in brackets is the ex-GST trade list, the basis Ingram invoices on and the one the discount applies to. US — one figure: RRP and trade list are the same. Sales tax is added at checkout and varies by state. UK — one figure: printed books are zero-rated for VAT, so the list price is the shelf price.
Trade discount	55% on all titles in this catalogue applied to the AU ex-GST list, and to the US and UK list
Orderable now	The Myst · Megha · Myth trilogy in three volumes, THE SPINE in paperback and hardcover, all eight Zenvoyage paperbacks, and the two Roerich companions — THE VISION and the Meditation Booklet — in paperback and hardcover.
Printed	In Australia for the Australian trade — no import wait
Full list	The complete fourteen-book list, and the full trade terms, are available on request.
Local supply	Direct supply is available to Northern Rivers accounts. 55% standard; a deeper rate where the buyer is GST-registered. Payment on delivery.

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