Repeat this 8-10 times. Your hands should be Yoga poses 2nd trimester pregnancy placed in front of the ball, shoulder’s width apart, your palms totally flat on top Yoga poses 2nd trimester pregnancy . Your elbows must be straight at all times or else your fulcrum will change. This is very important to remember, because if your arms bend at the elbow joint, the kinesthetic chain of energy flow has changed. You will have lost the assistance of the scapula to move the leverage forwards. This action is important to counterbalance the force the knees are applying to the arms and vice versa. 55 Floor Criss-Cross BENEFITS: Strengthens and tones the oblique muscles, creating a lean torso and smaller waist. Lie on your back on the floor, elbows bent with your hands placed behind your head.
Let us have a brief look at this manoeuvre, which became very influential (White 1996, 2003). Siva – who often represented pure consciousness – had now gained a new female dimension with Tantric origin: the Goddess Sakti. She was pure divine power and energy! Sakti was included in Saivite liberation discourse. As Siva was omnipresent, the goal of practice, according to Abhinavagupta, was to become Siva – jivan-mukti (living liberated). This could happen when due to divine grace Sakti descended (called saktipata) into the individual. But to prepare for this, the practitioner had to ascend a hierarchy of realisations of insight’ (tarka – perfected reason) into the non-duality of existence – grasping that the world just consists of various manifestations of Siva consciousness.
We can see that liberation equalled a kind of Gnostic insight – tarka. As the adept gained increasing levels of mystical insight, it seems that consciousness changed in parallel. It became more and more ecstatic as it became Siva-like’. It was the divine energies of Sakti, which drove the process.
Abhinavagupta claimed that yoga – and that was an eight-limb yoga (examples of limbs are for instance pranayama and pratyahara) – can only help to prepare for tarka. However, yoga could never on its own produce this Perfected Reason. The eight-limbs of yoga were – as they were situated in the external planes of existence’ (i.e. physical reality) – restricted by their physical starting position and therefore could not lead to ultimate consciousness, according to Abhinavagupta. Unlike Patanjali, Abhinavagupta did not aim for samadhi. For Patanjali samadhi equated the isolation and release of purusha in deep absorption. For Abhinavagupta, the liberating goal was instead to become possessed by the deity (Smith 2006). On paper this seems to be a major difference in metaphysical signification. It is, however, unclear what were the practical consequences of such differences regarding methods and techniques.
