Start with fewer reps initially and build up. Make sure Yoga poses using straps your arms are pulling the ball towards your body so your back and abs work together to Yoga poses using straps hold your chest up. 22 ADVANCED Standing Front Leg Lifts BENEFITS: Improves your posture while strengthening and lengthening your leg muscles. Stand with your legs together in a parallel position. Hold the ball with your arms down. Lift the ball over your head as you kick one leg up as high as you can in front of you. Use the ball to encourage your core to keep your pelvis and rib cage connected as your leg is moving off the floor. Extend your knee straight as you kick.
As many Tantras were deliberately written in ambiguous, symbolic and mystic style, it is often hard to tell whether we are witnessing real differences or only rhetoric. For instance the Tantraloka displayed a conscious attempt to domesticate orgiastic Shaman-like Tantric practices into an inner world of symbolic experiences. Here we might encounter mind mortifying meditative practices (the referent), which from the outside would look unchanged, but now they were signified by signs belonging to ecstatic cults. So the difference in Tantric rhetoric did not necessarily reflect a real difference in the referent. An outside disinterested observer might not have registered any difference between a Samkhya Yogi following Patanjali and a Saivist Trika Yogi following Abhinavagupta.
Having said that, there definitely would have been Tantric rural cults like the Kulas and Kramas, where we as observers would have found their Tantric practices to have generated states of possession absolutely different from Yogic mind mortifying meditation. However, it is my impression that when such emotional practices – originating in non-Aryan low castes -were adopted and included in elite theological discourses, they were transformed into the opposite: to mortified body-mind system in deep absorption. Indian inclusiveness – the ideology of adapting and downgrading the other and the new as an integral but inferior part of itself – was sometimes able to produce public relations marvels. On paper the Tantraloka, the Malini and similar texts might look different and seem Tantric, but on closer inspection they were often not practically different to the old. What had changed was mainly the metaphysical
