How to do Sun Salutations, a Hatha Yoga sequence (Surya Namaskar Vinyasa). Describing the physical postures (asana) and the connecting transitions between the asana in detail. Guides internal direction of the attention, and use of proprioception during practice. With options for both softer and more intense versions, this book is suitable for beginners, and as a reference for intermediate to advanced students. Illustrated with photographs.
This story is about best friends, Mimi and Soni, who live in an Indian metropolis. Initially they are afraid to try any kind of yoga. However, soon they learn how helpful it is and become eager to learn it. This comic book is meant to be a brief introduction to Surya Namaskar or Sun Salutation, for kids. It tells an interesting story about the benefits of starting to practice Surya Namaskar, at a young age. Benefits such as focus, flexibility, and character traits like gratitude. The book not only teaches kids all the Surya Namaskar poses, but also teaches them that with daily practice, you can learn anything you wish.
Surya Namaskar is a magical name in Indian history and now becoming popular all over the world, it has become a global household name. Surya Namaskar has many references in the Vedas and Puranas. Since that time this yoga has been practiced by many people all over the world. To begin one’s day with the Surya Namaskar is very beneficial as it connects the individual with the cosmos. Out of so many people interested in yoga and spirituality some persons have taken Suryanamaskar as their life style. One such person is Krzysztof Stec from Poland who loves this practice. I remember that as soon as he arrived at Vishwatmak Jangli Maharaj Ashram almost 10 years ago he was talking about and encouraging everyone to start practicing Suryanamaskar. He has been practicing it every day for many years, and in a little more than two hours he performs in excess of 1008 rounds of Suryanamaskar. Such feat is astonishing and worth praising. He has built tremendous stamina and extraordinary endurance over the years with such regular and disciplined practice. The medical practitioners in the nearby town of Kopargaon have examined him and came to conclusion that he has the physiological parameters of 25 year old youngster (as of today he is running 59 years old). Only two years ago he completed a demanding two years’ master degree program at the department of physical education at one of the primary universities of India, at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. There he had to compete and work-out with colleagues who were one third his age! Last year when he undertook 42 days’ complete fast for the Gurupurnima (anusthan), he began without water (or any food) and continued for full 23 days and later, to complete the fast, he drank only water. In spite of such severe tapasya (discipline and austerity), when most other people usually stay in bed and barely move or to help themselves get several I.V., he was so energetic and full of vitality that he was swimming daily the distance of 5 to 8 kilometers.
Create a Powerful Connection Between Yoga and the Wheel of the Year Find balance in your yoga practice and your life by connecting with nature and the cycle of the seasons. Yoga Through the Year reimagines yoga as a way to unite complimentary opposites—heaven and earth, sun and moon, male and female. Providing inspiration, guidance, and more than 100 illustrations, this book shows you how to work with the prevalent energy of each season and develop an authentic practice that makes you happier and healthier. Learn how to best work with the challenges and opportunities present throughout the wheel of the year. Explore mindfulness exercises, visualizations, meditations, and yoga poses and sequences that are specially designed for each season. This remarkable book's approach can be personalized to fit your needs all year long. With it, you can develop your own rhythm in response to each seasonal change.
A history of yoga’s transformation from sacred discipline to exercise program to embodied spiritual practice • Identifies the origin of exercise yoga as India’s response to the mania for exercise sweeping the West in the early 20th century • Examines yoga’s transformations through the lives and accomplishments of 11 key figures, including Sri Yogendra, K. V. Iyer, Louise Morgan, Krishnamacharya, Swami Sivananda, Indra Devi, and B. K. S. Iyengar • Draws on more than 10 years of research from rare primary sources and includes 99 illustrations In The Path of Modern Yoga, Elliott Goldberg shows how yoga was transformed from a sacred practice into a health and fitness regime for middle-class Indians in the early 20th century and then gradually transformed over the course of the 20th century into an embodied spiritual practice--a yoga for our times. Drawing on more than 10 years of research from rare primary sources as well as recent scholarship, Goldberg tells the sweeping story of modern yoga through the remarkable lives and accomplishments of 11 key figures: six Indian yogis (Sri Yogendra, Swami Kuvalayananda, S. Sundaram, T. Krishnamacharya, Swami Sivananda, and B. K. S. Iyengar), an Indian bodybuilder (K. V. Iyer), a rajah (Bhavanarao Pant Pratinidhi), an American-born journalist (Louise Morgan), an Indian diplomat (Apa Pant), and a Russian-born yogi trained in India (Indra Devi). The author places their achievements within the context of such Western trends as the physical culture movement, the commodification of exercise, militant nationalism, jazz age popular entertainment, the quest for youth and beauty, and 19th-century New Age religion. In chronicling how the transformation of yoga from sacred discipline to exercise program allowed for the creation of an embodied spiritual practice, Goldberg presents an original, authoritative, provocative, and illuminating interpretation of the history of modern yoga.
This book contains verbal cues for Ashtanga Yoga's Primary Series. Verbal cues are concise commands that a Yoga teacher uses to give clear directions to Yoga students. They are an essential tool for a teacher and are just as important as a physical adjustment. They help the student to find actions throughout the body so they can become skillful and autonomous in expressing a pose.
NEW YORK TIMES, USA TODAY, and PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BESTSELLER “Full of valuable insights to guide you.”—WILL SMITH “Thoughtful and life-affirming . . . a must-read.”—TONY ROBBINS “This book will put you back in charge of your own life.”—TOM BRADY A new perspective on the overused and misunderstood concept of “karma” that offers the key to happiness and enlightenment, from the world-renowned spiritual master Sadhguru. What is karma? Most people understand karma as a balance sheet of good and bad deeds, virtues and sins. The mechanism that decrees that we cannot evade the consequences of our own actions. In reality, karma has nothing to do with reward and punishment. Karma simply means action: your action, your responsibility. It isn’t some external system of crime and punishment, but an internal cycle generated by you. Accumulation of karma is determined only by your intention and the way you respond to what is happening to you. Over time, it’s possible to become ensnared by your own unconscious patterns of behavior. In Karma, Sadhguru seeks to put you back in the driver’s seat, turning you from a terror-struck passenger to a confident driver navigating the course of your own destiny. By living consciously and fully inhabiting each moment, you can free yourself from the cycle. Karma is an exploration and a manual, restoring our understanding of karma to its original potential for freedom and empowerment instead of a source of entanglement. Through Sadhguru’s teachings, you will learn how to live intelligently and joyfully in a challenging world.
Yoga is so prevalent in the modern world--practiced by pop stars, taught in schools, and offered in yoga centers, health clubs, and even shopping malls--that we take its presence, and its meaning, for granted. But how did the current yoga boom happen? And is it really rooted in ancient Indian practices, as many of its adherents claim? In this groundbreaking book, Mark Singleton calls into question many commonly held beliefs about the nature and origins of postural yoga (asana) and suggests a radically new way of understanding the meaning of yoga as it is practiced by millions of people across the world today. Singleton shows that, contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence in the Indian tradition for the kind of health and fitness-oriented asana practice that dominates the global yoga scene of the twenty-first century. Singleton's surprising--and surely controversial--thesis is that yoga as it is popularly practiced today owes a greater debt to modern Indian nationalism and, even more surprisingly, to the spiritual aspirations of European bodybuilding and early 20th-century women's gymnastic movements of Europe and America, than it does to any ancient Indian yoga tradition. This discovery enables Singleton to explain, as no one has done before, how the most prevalent forms of postural yoga, like Ashtanga, Bikram and "Hatha" yoga, came to be the hugely popular phenomena they are today. Drawing on a wealth of rare documents from archives in India, the UK and the USA, as well as interviews with the few remaining, now very elderly figures in the 1930s Mysore asana revival, Yoga Body turns the conventional wisdom about yoga on its head.
