BEGINNER Prone Tricep Extensions BENEFITS: Tones the back of your Yoga poses 1st chakra upper arms. Lie prone with full trunk over ball, legs wide and slightly bent. Yoga poses 1st chakra Bend your elbows up to point to the ceiling. Straighten your arms with a twisting action of the upper arm, pinky finger rotating in. Return to bent elbows. Repeat 10 times. You can turn this into a back extension as well if you straighten your legs and pull your arms back without clenching your shoulders together. 53 BEGINNER Decline Chest Press Lie with your back on the ball, neck stretched and head back, weights in your hands above your chest.
Can we cautiously call this discourse the emergence of Tantric yoga? In other words is it a theistic yoga discourse – founded in symbolised Tantric rituals and god’s grace – leading to ecstatic consciousness by union of internal divine polarities? A yoga enmeshed in theistic rituals turning humans into god – a living God?
Alternatively, we could ask if Abhinavagupta and the Trika cult – by reducing the role and power of yoga – rather signalled the end of Saivite yoga as expressed in the Malini? As we recall, the Saivite yoga we found in the Malini written some hundred years earlier was also a theistic Gnostic (knowledge based) discourse. Yoga here played a central role. Now the Tantraloka of the Trika cults only paid lip service to yoga: salvation was a function of initiation and grace – not of Yogic self-effort.
