The Orientalists should therefore not be classified, as they often are, as scientific outsiders to the yoga tradition’, but actually as a crucial internal’ part of the yoga discourse. The Orientalists – a stratum of humanist and religious intellectuals mainly based in emerging academic institutions and universities – became the main carriers of the yoga discourse. They were the yoga interactors of modernity who came to dominate and redefine the cultural field of yoga. They revived and transformed an almost extinct discourse.. Their contribution was to charge the yoga sign with fresh symbolic powers giving rise to a radically different yoga signified. They gave birth to a hybrid modernist yoga sign, which drew much of its symbolic meaning from Romanticism, Protestantism, esotericism and rational scientism. The Orientalists were the fathers of modernist Indian colonial and Western yoga cultures
The Orientalists represented a type of yoga interactors who – like many pre-modern Indian intellectuals – had primarily an intellectual, cerebral and religious-political relation to the yoga sign. For them yoga did not signify a lifestyle which defined your life and selfidentity. However some of their enchanted audience in the cultural elites in East and West got much more involved. These yoga sympathisers often enthusiastically took up the yoga practice and discourse and seamlessly wove them into their respective colonial and Western cultural hybrid practices. Here the yoga signified began to refer to signs in emerging Western spiritual cultural practices and Indian colonial politics. Slowly the new yoga sign even reached into peoples’ lifestyles and self-identities.
Retain the elevated toes and widen your sitting bones and thighs Yoga vibe. You can lean forward a little to do this. With the thighs still wide, Yoga vibepull your tailbone down and your spine up vertically. Inhale and stretch up from the inside with full effort. You can relax your toes, but keep the leg muscles firm Exhale, bend forward, and touch the floor or the two blocks. Bend your knees if necessary. Extend your whole spine from your tailbone to the top of your head. Retain your arms deep in their sockets, even as you reach down.
