The photos of good postures will help you in setting up Yoga poses routine proper starting positions when beginning each exercise series. Your postural positions and muscular balance will improve Yoga poses routine with practice, patience, and concentration. Keep in mind consistancy is key. Slow and steady progress will make your workout a natural part of your life, just like brushing your teeth! You want to mindfully set up each starting posture with a neutral spine. This term refers to the alignment of your joints and spine. Finding your center of gravity in each exercise helps you develop balance and coordinate your muscles on both the front and back of your body. This allows even engagement of the muscles recruited for each movement. Although a neutral position can be identified in many joints simultaneously, we will concentrate on the most significant the pelvis to begin.
In this way the Siddhas established a cultural field of immortality charging them with the cultural capital of knowing how to become immortal. Immortality was achievable through certain techniques which manipulated and even reversed the depletion of the vital energies. Some Siddhas now maintained that they could reverse the flow of vital fluids from the head to the stomach (making semen flow upwards again) others maintained they could transform the fluids (semen being restored to its original condition in the head – called nectar’). The subtle body was no longer just a map of the erosion of life but rather a process which could be manipulated by efforts of specialists.
A parallel notion of the subtle body also emerged among the Buddhists (Samuel 2007, Dasgupta 1976, Schaeffer vol. 30). Together Saivite Nath Siddhas and the so-called Siddhacarya Buddhists made further developments to this subtle body discourse. Thus a plethora of groups were involved in the subtle body discourse, some with rural Tantric backgrounds, some coming from cultural fields of liberation and salvation. In summary this cultural field of immortality was distinct to and not an outgrow of the cultural field of yoga.
