Hold the weight gently without flexing at the wrist. Inhale Zodiac yoga poses and pull your top ribs and hip together as you lift your torso up off the ball Zodiac yoga poses . Your arm will move with your body and come into a flexed position at the elbow. Be sure your neck is relaxed and your shoulders are down. Hold for one or two seconds in the contraction. Make sure you keep your torso in alignment as you move. Return back to the stretch position. Do up to 10 times, then repeat on the other side.
Hence the Saivite Tantric monotheism of Tantraloka like the monotheism of Krishna (an early form of Vaishnavism we encountered in the Bhagavad-Gita ) turns liberation into salvation – i.e. religion. In the end – despite their liberating yogic technologies – both of the two monotheistic systems disempower yogic self-efforts and make citizens dependent on external forces. They express hegemonic ideologies, where the faithful believer is caught in an interlinked social and divine world, a claustrophobic world where a person’s situation in the end only can be relieved through submission and external intervention, a world where the individual is dependent on the goodwill of social and religious authorities. We get a strong sense of how Indian monotheism was an intrinsic part of the hegemonic ideological apparatus of the state and its disciplining of its subjects.
In the next chapter we will see that hatha-yoga’s originated among groups preoccupied by sexual fluids, chakras of the subtle body, divine polarities and goddesses like Kundalini and Kubjika.
