ADVANCED Tricep Dips Begin to lower your body, bending your Yoga poses for 6 year olds elbows while allowing them to move back. Try to shift your weight up off your arms Yoga poses for 6 year olds with your hips. Engage your abdominal muscles to help support the weight of your trunk off of your shoulder joints. Lower until you feel your shoulders beginning to lose stability or your middle sagging. Stretch your arms and lift back to the beginning posture. Repeat up to ten times. For a super challenge: Add a second set or lift one leg while doing your reps. Keep your midsection lifted at all times to avoid dropping into your shoulders.
Let us now investigate how this Tantric-Saivite movement engaged with the yoga discourse in their Tantras.
The Saivite yoga discourse
Saivite yoga and Tantric Saivism
There is not much research on yoga within the Saivite Tantras, sometimes called the Saivagamas or just the Agamas . H. Brunner (1992, 1994) observes that within the Agamas the notion of yoga has many meanings, as we have seen within most texts on yoga. The Agamas are mainly (80%) about temple rituals (kriya) and yoga plays just a minor part of those. So once more in this study we encounter texts which only in passing mention yoga. The sadhana -the practice of these Saivites – was aimed at winning over god’s grace. Practice consisted typically of meditation (dhyana), ritual (puja), fire sacrifice (homas) and mantra recitations (japa). In some cults these practices would be combined with asceticism. Initiation (diksa) by a guru was absolutely critical in these circles. So in many respects the Agamas repeat our impressions of monotheistic yoga in an earlier chapter: yoga signified as a subservient ritual incorporated into a wider set of theistic rites.
The main purpose of the Tantric text was not so much to educate and instruct – especially not in yoga. Rather the texts were mainly used for recitation in rituals, where the words in themselves had powerful effects by just being chanted. The words of texts would vibrate the consciousness into such intense ecstatic oscillations that it would finally reach Siva levels.
