Kriya Yoga 18 Postures

[Juliane Bari]

Ihave been following Yoganandaji's teachings for over 1 year and want to begin taking the online courses to learn the path of Kriya Yoga. I am overweight and wonder if my weight will be a difficulty for me in meditation if I am unable to do certain postures fully. I hope you will help me with this.

Your ability to do the yoga postures is not inherently linked to your ability to meditate, which is far more important for spiritual growth than are the asanas (postures). However, your weight could impede both meditation and asana practice if it interferes with your breathing, as is often the case for overweight people. So move forward with your meditation practice, and do what you can about your weight issue.

Pranayama, or conscious breathing exercises, are practiced initially to connect the mind, body, and breath (spirit). Various pranayama have differing effects and when combined with the movements can create a strong chemical change in the body.

Kundalini Yoga is a practice that has been gifted to us to strengthen and improve our nervous system. These Kundalini kriyas and yoga poses will clear and focus the mind, and bring balance to your body.

For your first time practicing each of the following, begin with 30 seconds or 5 deep breaths and work up to 3 minutes for each exercise. This allows time for the oxygen and chemical changes to occur in the bloodstream.

This detoxifies your body, oxygenates blood, and strengthens your solar plexus chakra. The Solar Plexus Chakra is the seat of our willpower and determination, enabling us to have the strength and power to continue with the set practice (which at times can be very challenging) or goal of the Kriya.

This wonderful mobility practice for the cervical spine eases tension and stiffness around your upper back, shoulders, and neck. Your breath also opens and recharges your lungs, creating immense energy that strengthens and enlarges your aura, as we churn up the energy around the body.

This wonderful exercise tones, shapes and strengthens the lower body while providing a cardiovascular workout. The energy that gets stimulated in the lower chakras is then pushed up your spine to connect with the higher chakras.

Exploring Kundalini Yoga: Chanting and Pranayama Techniques

Much of Kundalini Yoga is both challenging and comforting in equal parts. The profound science of the practice brings about chemical reactions in the body that create palpable, profound shifts in your thinking, physical health, and daily life.

Read

An āsana (Sanskrit: आसन) is a body posture, originally and still a general term for a sitting meditation pose,[1] and later extended in hatha yoga and modern yoga as exercise, to any type of position, adding reclining, standing, inverted, twisting, and balancing poses. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali define "asana" as "[a position that] is steady and comfortable".[2] Patanjali mentions the ability to sit for extended periods as one of the eight limbs of his system.[2] Asanas are also called yoga poses or yoga postures in English.

The 10th or 11th century Goraksha Sataka and the 15th century Hatha Yoga Pradipika identify 84 asanas; the 17th century Hatha Ratnavali provides a different list of 84 asanas, describing some of them. In the 20th century, Indian nationalism favoured physical culture in response to colonialism. In that environment, pioneers such as Yogendra, Kuvalayananda, and Krishnamacharya taught a new system of asanas (incorporating systems of exercise as well as traditional hatha yoga). Among Krishnamacharya's pupils were influential Indian yoga teachers including Pattabhi Jois, founder of Ashtanga vinyasa yoga, and B.K.S. Iyengar, founder of Iyengar yoga. Together they described hundreds more asanas, revived the popularity of yoga, and brought it to the Western world. Many more asanas have been devised since Iyengar's 1966 Light on Yoga which described some 200 asanas. Hundreds more were illustrated by Dharma Mittra.

Asanas were claimed to provide both spiritual and physical benefits in medieval hatha yoga texts. More recently, studies have provided evidence that they improve flexibility, strength, and balance; to reduce stress and conditions related to it; and specifically to alleviate some diseases such as asthma[3][4] and diabetes.[5]

Asanas have appeared in culture for many centuries. Religious Indian art depicts figures of the Buddha, Jain tirthankaras, and Shiva in lotus position and other meditation seats, and in the "royal ease" position, lalitasana. With the popularity of yoga as exercise, asanas feature commonly in novels and films, and sometimes also in advertising.

The eight limbs are, in order, the yamas (codes of social conduct), niyamas (self-observances), asanas (postures), pranayama (breath work), pratyahara (sense withdrawal or non-attachment), dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation), and samadhi (realization of the true Self or Atman, and unity with Brahman, ultimate reality).[16]Asanas, along with the breathing exercises of pranayama, are the physical movements of hatha yoga and of modern yoga.[17][18] Patanjali describes asanas as a "steady and comfortable posture",[19] referring to the seated postures used for pranayama and for meditation, where meditation is the path to samadhi, transpersonal self-realization.[20][21]

The Sutras are embedded in the Bhasya commentary, which scholars suggest may also be by Patanjali;[23] it names 12 seated meditation asanas including Padmasana, Virasana, Bhadrasana, and Svastikasana.[24]

The pillars of the 16th century Achyutaraya temple at Hampi are decorated with numerous relief statues of yogins in asanas including Siddhasana balanced on a stick, Chakrasana, Yogapattasana which requires the use of a strap, and a hand-standing inverted pose with a stick, as well as several unidentified poses.[32]

By the 17th century, asanas became an important component of Hatha yoga practice, and more non-seated poses appear.[33] The Hatha Ratnavali by Srinivasa (17th century)[34][35] is one of the few texts to attempt an actual listing of 84 asanas,[e]although 4 out of its list cannot be translated from the Sanskrit, and at least 11[f] are merely mentioned without any description, their appearance known from other texts.[35]

The Gheranda Samhita (late 17th century) again asserts that Shiva taught 84 lakh of asanas, out of which 84 are preeminent, and "32 are useful in the world of mortals."[g][36] The yoga teacher and scholar Mark Singleton notes from study of the primary texts that "asana was rarely, if ever, the primary feature of the significant yoga traditions in India."[37] The scholar Norman Sjoman comments that a continuous tradition running all the way back to the medieval yoga texts cannot be traced, either in the practice of asanas or in a history of scholarship.[38]

From the 1850s onwards, a culture of physical exercise developed in India to counter the colonial stereotype of supposed "degeneracy" of Indians compared to the British,[41][42] a belief reinforced by then-current ideas of Lamarckism and eugenics.[43][44] This culture was taken up from the 1880s to the early 20th century by Indian nationalists such as Tiruka, who taught exercises and unarmed combat techniques under the guise of yoga.[45][46] Meanwhile, proponents of Indian physical culture like K. V. Iyer consciously combined "hata yoga" [sic] with bodybuilding in his Bangalore gymnasium.[47][48]

Singleton notes that poses close to Parighasana, Parsvottanasana, Navasana and others were described in Niels Bukh's 1924 Danish text Grundgymnastik eller primitiv gymnastik[39] (known in English as Primary Gymnastics).[37] These in turn were derived from a 19th-century Scandinavian tradition of gymnastics dating back to Pehr Ling, and "found their way to India" by the early 20th century.[37][49]

In 1924, Swami Kuvalayananda founded the Kaivalyadhama Health and Yoga Research Center in Maharashtra.[51] He combined asanas with Indian systems of exercise and modern European gymnastics, having according to the scholar Joseph Alter a "profound" effect on the evolution of yoga.[52]

In 1925, Paramahansa Yogananda, having moved from India to America, set up the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles, and taught yoga, including asanas, breathing, chanting and meditation, to tens of thousands of Americans, as described in his 1946 Autobiography of a Yogi.[53][54]

In 1960, Vishnudevananda Saraswati, in the Sivananda yoga school, published a compilation of sixty-six basic postures and 136 variations of those postures in The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga.[61]

In 1966, Iyengar published Light on Yoga: Yoga Dipika, illustrated with some 600 photographs of Iyengar demonstrating around 200 asanas; it systematised the physical practice of asanas. It became a bestseller, selling three million copies, and was translated into some 17 languages.[62]

In 1984, Dharma Mittra compiled a list of about 1,300 asanas and their variations, derived from ancient and modern sources, illustrating them with photographs of himself in each posture; the Dharma Yoga website suggests that he created some 300 of these.[63][64][65]

The asanas have been created at different times, a few being ancient, some being medieval, and a growing number recent.[66][67][68] Some that appear traditional, such as Virabhadrasana I (Warrior Pose I), are relatively recent: that pose was probably devised by Krishnamacharya around 1940, and it was popularised by his pupil, Iyengar.[69] A pose that is certainly younger than that is Parivritta Parsvakonasana (Revolved Side Angle Pose): it was not in the first edition of Pattabhi Jois's Yoga Mala in 1962.[70] Viparita Virabhadrasana (Reversed Warrior Pose) is still more recent, and may have been created after 2000.[70] Several poses that are now commonly practised, such as Dog Pose and standing asanas including Trikonasana (triangle pose), first appeared in the 20th century,[71] as did the sequence of asanas, Surya Namaskar (Salute to the Sun). A different sun salutation, the Aditya Hridayam, is certainly ancient, as it is described in the "Yuddha Kaanda" Canto 107 of the Ramayana.[72] Surya Namaskar in its modern form was created by the Raja of Aundh, Bhawanrao Shriniwasrao Pant Pratinidhi;[73][74][75] K. Pattabhi Jois defined the variant forms Surya Namaskar A and B for Ashtanga Yoga, possibly derived from Krishnamacharya.[76] Surya Namaskar can be seen as "a modern, physical culture-oriented rendition" of the simple ancient practice of prostrating oneself to the sun.[77]

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