Repeat 5 times, working your way up to 10 times 8 yoga poses for sleep . 92 ADVANCED Swimming BENEFITS: Strengthens the back muscles and shoulders. Lie prone over the 8 yoga poses for sleep ball with your legs straight, hip-distance apart. Your full trunk should be on the ball and your arms straight at your sides. Pull your shoulder blades down, and away from your ears. Extend one arm palm facing down overhead, keeping your neck long. Switch arms, extending out through your fingers and keeping your shoulders down the whole time. Repeat 5 times, working your way up to 10 times.
The early Jain- and Ajivika Sramanas – I call them proto-Sramanas – adhered to a very strong version of austerities, which we could call the path of mortification: the belief that a life in severe asceticism, ultimately ending in death, would lead to some metaphysical achievements (Bronkhorst 1993). Asceticism was for them directly linked to the soul and its liberation. Thus we read in the early Jain text Ayaramga :
When a monk thinks: I am indeed tired of carrying around this body in these circumstances he should gradually reduce his food: having gradually reduced his food and diminished his passions, his body being prepared, standing like a plank, his body pacified.he should ask for grass. he should spread the grass; and having spread the grass, at that occasion, he should reject body, activity, and movement. The firm ones, having reached the liberation, powerful and wise, knowing all that is excellent.
