This allows your body to work with foolproof efficiency, instead Yoga poses to strengthen back of dropping weight downward into your knees and ankles. Don’t worry if you only feel front Yoga poses to strengthen back thighs work when performing traditional squats. Stand against a wall with the ball centered between your upper and lower back. Lean back into the ball, bending your knees into a 90-degree right angle table top stance with neutral pelvic placement. The ball will feel as if it’s rolling up the wall as the body goes down. Keep your spine pressed into the ball, using your abs to scoop. Remain very straight and stop when your knees are even with your hips. Roll back up to your original starting position.
The founding of a Kanphata yogi order (strict, almost militarily organised; yielding protection in defendable monasteries) is probably related to such new social interactional patterns. It is my conjecture that Gorakhnath – who seems to be a symbolic figure representing several actual teachers – could represent displaced urban elite Saivites of this kind taking up and systematising rural ideas and practices. In short I believe that hatha-yoga and the social Jogi identity surfacing at this point of history evolved out of such a confluence of rural and urban interaction and discourses. Let me expand on this line of argument.
The new power elite of Turkic Muslims in Northern India must have had a tremendous impact on the hitherto ruling elites of princes and holy men (Brahmins, Buddhists, Saivites). These specialists within overlapping cultural fields of religion and liberation were an integral part of the political order of medieval India. As we recall such cultural and symbolic specialists were often directly working for and legitimising the local political rulers. Often holy men were local chiefs running feudal fiefs and temples controlling big areas of land. But with Turkic invasions and occupation, India’s mediaeval power structure was broken at the top of society290. Kings and princes who either employed or protected holy men were suddenly displaced. Some temples were plundered and burned down. The elite of holy men in this way lost their former social habitat.
