Avoiding pitfalls: Keep the spine long and the bending leg Yoga vacations close in to the midline. If you have lumbar or thoracolumbar scoliosis, then do this Yoga vacations pose only on the convex side. Lie on your stomach. Prepare by lengthening: pull your ribs forward away from the pelvis and stretch your legs back. Come up onto your right forearm Bend your left knee and grasp your left arch with your left hand, with the palm facing to the left. Spread your toes, especially the fourth and fifth ones. This will help to protect your knee. Press the left knee down toward the floor to soften the groin.
As discussed earlier, most of the Indian colonial elite (and most modern popularisers of yoga) received their understanding of yoga directly or indirectly from the works of the Orientalists (Brekke 2002, Killingly 2005, Singleton 2008). Without the Orientalists, the revival and resurgence of Hindu culture among the colonial Indian middle classes would hardly have been possible in the form it actually took.
The Orientalists and neo-Hindu nationalists initiated a process of constructing the ancient Hindu culture’ as a continuous tradition based on rational philosophy comparable to Western Greek philosophy and Western science. It was within this project that the extinct Yoga Sutra of Patanjali (400 AD) was revived, translated and imagined as a snapshot of an unbroken classical yoga tradition’ dating back to the dawn of time.
