Bhakti spread all over Southern India and then entered the North where it especially became a part of Vishnu worship. Vaishnavism – the cult of Vishnu – became a devotional tradition with ecstatic practices of emotional surrender (Flood 1996; Colas 2005).
The bhakti cults often rejected the high status of the Brahmin caste. Buddhist and Jain monks were particularly hated and physically chased away. Bhakti was a serious threat to the established hegemony of holy men, as it did not accept their high status and power discourse236. So the very existence of bhakti threatened to pull the rug from under the feet of ascetic holy men, depreciating their symbolic capital. Hence the bhakti movement was a serious threat to the very foundation of the entire field of liberation; it challenged its use- and symbolic-value head-on.
The bhakti cults were easily turned into vehicles divinising the kings and they became an important part of the ideological underpinning of the dynastic rulers. The cults created sentimental legends around the rulers. They often received royal patronage in their clashes with Buddhist and Jain renouncers. So bhakti seriously put these groups on the defensive in the South (Peterson 1998, Davis 1998).
Their response is adjustable and proportional to the speed of the Yoga bed stretch. Since they adjust internally to tension, they generally respond less to slow movements and Yoga bed have their greatest influence early in the process of muscle stretching.2 Their influence fades fast, though, especially if the muscle just stays at its new length.3 The inhibitory Golgi tendon organs damp down muscle contraction with a force that is weaker than the positive contraction-producing stimulus of the intrafusal fibers. But they continue to exert the same amount of inhibitory influence, at their original strength, over long periods of time. After a while, their constant input outstrips the diminishing influence of the intrafusal fibers. This naturally tends to reduce a muscle’s contractile force as a yoga pose is held. Afer a short time less than two minutes the muscle will become quiet and stretch more easily and less painfully.
