When preparing to twist with the legs straight, offset your Yoga indianapolis hips to the left before twisting to the right. There is a lot to keep track Yoga indianapolis of in this pose, but the gains in range of motion, strength, coordination, and grace are worth it! Purpose: To strengthen the core abdominal muscles and the shoulders. Contraindications: Colostomy, iliostomy, extreme hypertension. Prop: A yoga mat. Avoiding pitfalls: Avoid rounding your upper back toward the ceiling, raising the hips too much or not enough, or dropping the head too low. The body makes one straight line in the plank. Stage I Lie facedown on the floor. Raise your head and chest up by supporting yourself on your forearms.
The negative meaning of yoga’ among the Jains
But what about the Jains – probably one of the main contributors to proto-yoga – did they claim they were practising yoga’? Reading their earliest texts and understanding their doctrines, the yoga’ signifier was given a different meaning. The problem with the Jain movement is that from early times they lost their written tradition – their original cultural memory – and did not, like the Brahmins, develop an exact oral tradition of transmission. So the texts available are from a rather late period – maybe 3-400 AD – when they could have been strongly influenced by Buddhist and Brahmin discourses (Dundas 2002).
In one of the earliest texts systematising their teachings – the Tattvartha Sutra – the word yoga’ is used but in a strongly negative way. Here, it meant any kind of human activity ‘ – be it mental, verbal or physical. Activity’ (yoga) was seen as the hindrance of liberation (Qvarnstrom 2003). All activity’ led to the influx of matter into the self’ (called jiva). This influx created karma (that which carries’), which made the self vibrate’. A soul contaminated with matter was restless and eternally on the move. The Jain practice of liberation had the purpose of stopping all action. This implied the arrest of karma as the jiva was slowly emptied of vibrations.
