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Originally Posted by jfelco
thanks for the guidelines... i havent heard of some of those.
yoga asanas? ive only practiced hatha.
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Hatha yoga is a particular system of yoga. Asanas are the yoga poses themselves. Bear in mind that yoga has eight aspects:
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(1) Yama (The five "abstentions"): violence, lying, theft, (illicit) sex, and possessions
(2) Niyama (The five "observances"): purity, contentment, austerities, study, and surrender to god
(3) Asana: Literally means "seat", and in Patanjali's Sutras refers to seated positions used for meditation. Later, with the rise of Hatha yoga, asana came to refer to all the "postures"
(4) Pranayama ("Life Force Control"): Control of prāna, life force, or vital energy
(5) Pratyahara ("Abstraction"): Reversal of the sense organs
(6) Dharana ("Concentration"): Fixing the attention on a single object
(7) Dhyana ("Meditation"): Intense contemplation of the true nature of reality
(8) Samadhi ("Liberation"): Super-conscious state of enlightenment
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Source: Wikipedia
The western view of yoga clearly focuses on the third and fourth components. And the asanas themselves are what we are concerned with here.
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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot
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