Work your way up to doing 10 on each side. 9 yoga poses to release the hips 86 INTERMEDIATE Two Leg Extension Lie on the ball and roll forward to lean on your elbows 9 yoga poses to release the hips , forearms, and hands. With your legs extended, roll forward, supporting yourself with your elbows on the floor, and lifting from your hips. Feel the contraction in your butt. Lower and repeat 5 times. ADVANCED Prone Scissors Lie prone over the ball, your pelvis resting on the top of the ball, supporting yourself with your elbows. Be sure to line up your shoulders and wrists. Slowly open and close your legs in a wide scissors motion.
Sramanic asceticism and goals of liberation were further tied into strict rules of how to live. We could call this a philosophical lifestyle (Hadot 1995), as it was a life interwoven and ruled by ethics. Among Greek and Chinese intellectuals it was similarly argued that living a life of wisdom and ethics would lead to happiness. As we shall soon see the aspiration of ethical living in India also became critical for the release of the soul. This quest grew out of the new notion of karma (‘action’). Karma was tightly intertwined with the notion of samsara (re-birth): through ethical living – own efforts (i.e. own actions) – the individual could influence future re-births (Obeyesekere 2007, Gombrich 2009). This kind of thinking carries all the hallmark of Axial Age based wisdom discourses: individualism and transcendent ontological entities both being connected with ethics (Bellah 2011).
It seems that these different groups of proto-Sramanas developed a relatively shared platform of ethics. Later Buddhist, Jain and Samkhya yoga texts are very similar in their ethical prescriptions of the correct lifestyle preparing the ground for final liberation. These were prescriptions like non-harming, truthfulness, non-stealing, celibacy, non-greediness, correct view, correct intention, and correct mindfulness. In the much later Yoga Sutra, for instance, such ethical rules were grouped into two: yama and niyama. The novice Sramana would commence living according to such rules and as his body-mind-complex was slowly purified, calmed and achieved insight, he was then finally seen to be able to engage with the challenge of gaining true liberation (Sarbacker 2008). This line of thought became central to the Jains, but we will see it appear over and over again in liberation and salvation discourses throughout Indian history.
We have now given an overview of the new Axial Age discourses – connecting wisdom (transcendental insights), happiness, lifestyle and ethics – emerging among the Kshatriyas and Sramanas. We will now investigate the cultural field from which such new discourses grew out. In such a context we will find that these discourses were tightly intertwined with new practices of stilling the mind – meditation. In fact we will see that when brought together in a cultural field, the new discourses and practices of meditation then mutually defined and gave meaning to each other. We will then see that it was such a configuration that later gave rise to the early-yoga discourse.
