You’ll notice a real difference in your posture and in the Yoga poses vinyasa curve of your waist. Begin on two knees. Hug the ball into one hip while Yoga poses vinyasa moving your rib cage over the ball. Contour the space between your rib cage and pelvis into the ball and lean sideways over the ball with your hands behind your head. Straighten the leg that’s away from the ball, then lift it up to hip-height, while still hugging the ball into your waist with your arm and side. Try not to allow your hips and pelvis to move away from the ball. Lower your leg back to floor. Do 5 times.
A critical part of this process was to build up authority and high status – cultural and symbolic capital. This is the lifeblood of any cultural field – not only the field of liberation of which yoga discourses formed a sub-system. In order to achieve this, several technologies and methods were available for the charismatic novice to choose between: various vows, styles of asceticism, Tantric possession, mendicant lifestyles, yoga techniques, ritual master-ship, reciting holy texts, gnostic rhetoric, and magic tricks. Such technologies, due to underlying power discourses, signalled authority to local people. This was critical for any success. So a religious entrepreneur’s interest in yoga would often also be motivated by its symbolic-value: the yoga discourse would endow the entrepreneur with authority and transform him into a holy man. This social differentiation was a critical pre-condition for any success in this field and yoga – unregulated and plastic – was an obvious choice of technology.
If a religious entrepreneur was sufficiently charismatic, he would at a certain point in time – after having maybe roamed the forests – have built up so much status (symbolic capital) that due to his charisma, he would be able to gather a cult around him. The next step could then be to settle and build up a religious community affiliated to the cult – a sampradaya. The founder would now have reached the level of a local community leader. With some luck and talent his community would attract adherents and sponsors – maybe a community, which had recently lost its existing guru lineage due to, an epidemic – the cultural field of yoga as springboard for social and religio-political power within the religious field. The yoga field almost did not exist on its own but had been absorbed by the overall religious field where it contributed to the build up of religious capital.
