Your weight should be distributed evenly on both feet. Round Yoga poses to strengthen core forward and put your hands on the ball with straight arms. Roll the ball forward, Yoga poses to strengthen core keeping your spine rounded, slowly releasing one vertebra at a time until your arms extend, and you feel the stretch in your lats and hamstrings. Feel as if you’re pulling taffy. Pull the ball back with straight arms, keeping your shoulder blades engaged, and then use your abs and hamstrings to roll up to a standing position. 14 BEGINNER Twisting Spiral Lunge, Hand on Hip BENEFITS: Strengthens your iliotibial band, which runs along the outside of your thigh. Stand straight and take a big step forward with one foot at least a leg’s length. Turn your back toes in and your front toes out, so your feet are parallel.
Some groups of holy men managed to adjust and survive293. Some could have joined a rural surplus population which was rising due to increased Muslim economic exploitation. Here such displaced elites of cultural specialists adopted existing rural identities or created new mixed breeds. These new social strata probably contributed to the rise of what should become the Nath jogis to whom the Kanphata yogis belonged.
In the countryside the emerging Nath jogis managed to build up good relations with the Turkic Muslim rulers, who had confidence in their magical powers (Vaudeville 1972, White 2009). Their symbolic capital and corresponding power discourses were still intact. So more horizontally organised rural cults often living in small bands as itinerants – not sticking their heads out too much, offering super-natural services – would probably have had a good chance of survival under the new social conditions. That seems to have been the case with the Kanphata yogis. Accordingly it might be in this period that the yoga discourse began to move from mainly urban elites to the kind of rural itinerants that we experience in India today. I will return to this question later.
