Switch sides. 26 ADVANCED Straight Leg with Circles BENEFITS: Yoga poses vector Strengthens your outer thigh muscles the abductors. Begin on two knees. Hug the ball into Yoga poses vector one hip while moving your rib cage over the ball. Contour the space between your rib-cage and pelvis into the ball and lean sideways over the ball with your hands behind your head. Straighten the leg that’s away from the ball, then lift it up to hip-height, while still hugging the ball into your waist with your arm and side. Try not to allow your hips and pelvis to move away from the ball. Circle your straight leg backwards from your hip.
In summary, the various groups did not have the social stamina – the institutional and organisational framework – to succeed. The lack of yoga institutions and organisations meant that any doctrinal refinement, storage and transmission of the discourse’s DNA was a fragile process constantly under threat of becoming extinct. Hence it is of little surprise that the yoga discourse became such a heterogeneous cultural sub-system. New discourses would evolve and then quickly become extinct. This was due to two restrictions: time and geography. Timewise such groups would quickly disintegrate and disappear and with that their yoga cultural memory – the yoga DNA. Geographically, the lack of organisations and institutions meant that a given discourse dialect would not have been able to break out of its locality and become supra-regional. To become supra-regionally established would have been a necessary condition for any doctrine to establish itself in history. Only a supra-regionally established and institutionally carried doctrine would have had a chance to withstand the erosion due to time and history.
Individualisation and authority
In such a cultural field, segmentation becomes the norm and is often driven by individual idiosyncrasies. A charismatic person who for some reason – social, psychological or ideological – did not fit into existing structures and institutions would find it easy to break away. He would meet few and locally limited institutions to stop him. He could for instance study with as many teachers, sages, gurus, healers, hermits, and wizards in his region as he wanted. Medieval hagiographies show numerous examples of a novice adopting several, often opposing, teachings. Many of these teachers would – like the novice -have their homespun and compiled version to teach due to the lack of institutions. This enabled the novice to pick and choose between an enormous bouquet of philosophies and practices as he pleased – no institution within the cultural field would be able to force its discipline and monopoly on him.289 Hence a bit of Buddhism could easily be combined with some Brahmanism, Tantra, Saivism and some magical yoga tricks in whatever combination.
