Avoiding pitfalls: Bend forward from the hips, not the Yoga tops waist. Reach your chest forward as you go down. Sit on the front edge of Yoga topsa chair, with your feet parallel and a bit wider apart Yoga tops than your hips. Manually pull your sitting bones and buttocks back and apart as in Pressure Yoga tops Cooker see 73. Inhale, and lengthen up through your spine. Exhale. Reach your chest forward and unroll your whole spine out between your legs. Pull in your abdomen; breathe deeply; be sure to fill the backs of your lungs down to the bottom of your rib cage.
This hybrid Orientalist yoga discourse de-contextualised ideas and practices and re-contextualised them in a modernist ecosystem of signs. The yoga sign received new meaning and was linked to issues occupying discourses of modernity.82 Today, more than a century later, most contemporary yoga discourse among scholars and popularisers still – implicitly or explicitly – shares this conceptual platform when talking about yoga. It has become a significant part of the habitus of modernist yoga.
In many ways this construction of a coherent, timeless and mystical system was inadvertently a repetition of the way the orthodox Brahmin caste constructed yoga and the overall Vedic cultural heritage: as a continuous orthodox system kept alive by a ruling caste. Based on a Brahmin textual tradition, Orientalists and the later colonial Hindu reformers ignored India’s myriad of popular religions, mainly based on oral traditions, which were about spirit worship, ecstatic rituals (sometimes even sexual), worship of stones and other natural objects, relentless devotion to gods, euphoric festivals and exorcism. They often explained such things as the sad degeneration of India’s former noble religions’. They further ignored the millions of rural jogis and fakirs, the naked warrior ascetics, the rural surplus population whose yoga was about supernatural powers. In summary the Orientalists constructed Hinduism and yoga as orthodox, textual based systems, ignoring popular aspects they did not like.
