Contraindications: Severe wrist arthritis, severe rotator cuff syndrome. Yoga landing Prop: A wall. Avoiding pitfalls: Concentrate on maintaining the shoulder alignment, which should Yoga landing not be disturbed by moving the arms. Keep the shoulder blades pulled in toward the spine. Stand facing a wall. Place your hands on the wall at about chest level, with your fingers pointing straight up, shoulder-width apart. Take a deep breath as you lift up through your torso with a feeling of expansion and readiness. Make the sides of your body long, from waist to armpits.
Still others – like the Kshatriyas in the Upanishads – argued that it was all a question of knowledge of ontological categories like the One. So they linked Vedic god signs with Axial Age wisdom discourses. Wisdom discourses moved centre stage. Knowledge – Gnosis -became the corner stone of Samkhya philosophy. Here effort should be focussed on an intellectual and meditative based understanding of the nature of all moving and change-able things’ (prakriti) and the immoveable self’ (purusha). It was critical to understand the implications of the three fundamental principles called the gunas, as they generated change in prakriti (i.e. also in body and mind/ thinking). By realising this, the knowing subject would lose his attachment to the gunas and the changing world of prakriti, in which the body and the mind was utterly entangled. The soul of the knower was then liberated.
So such pure Axial Age knowledge discourse often dismissed the path of meditative-asceticism as superfluous liberation efforts. Such knowledge discourses would over time develop into the highly influential Samkhya philosophy, which became an intrinsic part of many yoga systems. In this way many yoga systems through history were impaired and charged by inherent philosophical tensions between pre-Axial Age ascetic-meditative discourses and Axial Age wisdom based discourses.
