Status :: Done
Desire :: 3
Medium :: Book
Completed :: 2024-09-01
Rating :: 3

A book I'll bring up again when I'm interested in actively learning new yoga shapes. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in Hatha yoga.

Summary

Introduction

• Takeaway: the complete experience of yoga cannot be understood intellectually; it will only becoming living (real) knowledge through practice and experience.
• Yoga derives from "to join", meaning to join one's consciousness with universal consciousness.
• There are eight arms of yoga:
  1. yama, self-restraints
  2. niyama, self-observances
  3. asana, roughly "holding poses comfortably for long periods of time" (and in raja yoga, refers to the sitting meditation position)
  4. pranayama, breathing practice
  5. pratyahara, disassociation of consciousness from the outside environment
  6. dharana, concentration
  7. dhyana, meditation
  8. samadhi, identification with pure consciousness
• Throughout history, different evolutions of yoga have emphasised different arms of it. Modern yogas emphasise asana first which makes it more accessible; because asana aims to remove ailment and disease of the physical body, emphasising asana for beginners (rather than yama, as it was in the past) makes it more applicable to people regardless of spiritual aims (or who do not yet have any).
• In the modern age where we have renounced much spiritual (religious) culture but not yet found a new one, yoga is an aid to establishing a new way of life which embraces inner reality (meditation, different states of consciousness) and outer realities (the body and physical world).