This is not just an exercise class to master; it’s Yoga poses one leg an education about your body. And once you feel educated and in control of your body Yoga poses one leg , you will also feel more confident. I have also come to believe that the knowledge and effectiveness that is part of Pilates training keeps people exercising longer and more consistently. The most common reason people give me for not exercising is frustration due to not seeing and feeling results. But this only happens when someone performs their movements recklessly and without proper body awareness. When you exercise properly and understand even a little about body mechanics and postural form, you see and experience immediate results. Then you can also learn how to apply these principals to improve functionality during everyday activities. This experience of results improves your quality of life and encourages lifelong fitness habits.
The genealogy of the various and often contradictory notions of hatha-yoga have now been traced to mainly non-Aryan goddess and serpent worshipping religions, Tantric Kula clans’ sexual rituals, Tantric Saivites talking about uniting divine polarities, new forceful techniques among Tantric Buddhists and alchemist Siddhas – all stirred up and mixed by the process of Hinduisation and Turkic Muslim invasions. Out of this field grew various sign systems, which slowly became linked: subtle body signified as both a fluid system and a divine energy system; the internalisations of various goddesses and Tantric symbols; new physical techniques; new detailed maps of the subtle body; the bringing together of female and male divine opposites; and the quest for immortality, magical power and living liberation. After a phase of creation and genealogy we have now reached a phase of systematisation.
We will now investigate one of these milieus, which became very influential in systematising – but not creating – what we today understand as hatha-yoga. This intellectual systematisation was a part of hatha-yoga being included in the elite cultural field of liberation (of which yoga was a sub-system). Several groups instigated this process and the efforts of one of them outmanoeuvred the other – the Kanphata yogis – a Saivite Nath cult who claimed as their founder the famous Gorakhnath. As innovative Tantric signs now became systematised they also became strongly re-constructed, re-valued and reorientated. And this is exactly a central aspect of what religious and cultural fields (like liberation) do, according to cultural sociology.
