The ball is just ahead of your right leg. Squeeze Yoga poses to help sleep your knee firmly against the ball to feel the inner thigh and trunk lift off the legs Yoga poses to help sleep . Now, engage your core muscles and evenly distribute the weight of your body over both legs. Bend both knees simultaneously, as the ball rolls forward, keeping your spine straight over your legs. Do 6 times on each side. 13 BEGINNER Rolling Spine Stretch BENEFITS: Stretches your whole back. Stand behind the ball, feet together, with your back thighs firmly held together. Your knees can either be bent or straight, depending on your hamstring flexibility.
Early hatha-yoga – a melting pot of medieval ideas and practices
The early hatha-yoga texts of this period tend to give much more detailed descriptions of techniques and signs than we are used to from previous yoga discourse. This might be because at this time the writings actually introduced genuinely novel techniques and understanding of the body. New techniques like bandhas and mudras were very physical in nature. Their purpose was to manipulate materially various parts and entities within what was called the subtle body. Sometimes they moved various types of fluids around, at other times they awakened and directed divine energies within the subtle body. Sometimes they brought together opposing forces, at other times they directed forces out through the skull of the adept. Some techniques in the early texts were very sexual in character – employing sexual fluids or sexual organs. At other times the techniques were almost alchemical in character as people wanted to transform their body into divinity – like metal being transmuted into gold.
The reader of the texts is left in no doubt that this was a style of yoga drastically different from the various styles of previous periods. First of all the signified of the yoga sign had changed. This yoga sign did not signify realisation of non-duality in deep absorption; nor the build up of supernatural powers; nor the Gnostic insight into underlying reality; nor the mortification of the body-mind system; nor the devotional submission to god. This yoga sign only appeared to share the word yoga’ – the signifier – with the older styles. Not only the signified had changed, but also the physical practice – the referent of the sign – was entirely new. It was a practice utilising physical force to move around the energies and fluids’ of the body.
