A Beginner’s Guide To Yoga Positions

A Beginner’s Guide To Yoga Positions

Yoga is increasingly gaining popularity as more and more people resort to it in an effort to de-stress after a hectic, chaotic day. If you are new to yoga and have decided to go it alone and not join a yoga class, you would need to do a lot of research on yoga positions for beginners. With the wealth of information on yoga available to you at your fingertips, all you need now is time to sift through it all and come up with the ideal program that suits you best.

Though a lot of yoga positions for beginners are easily available, it is not as easy as it sounds. You need to familiarize yourself with some basics before you get started or else you could end up tying yourself into a knot.

The most important things you need to know if you want to take up yoga are the prerequisites for yoga. There are certain dos and don’ts that you absolutely have to adhere to. Yoga, though a rather flexible activity is rather inflexible in many ways. Yoga can be practiced by people of all ages, but it is recommended that children under the age of twelve practice yoga only for shorts periods of time. If you are doing yoga for health reasons, you should be aware that to achieve the full health benefits of yoga you need to devote a minimum of 30-45 minutes a day towards yoga practice. The ideal time to practice yoga is early morning when you have just woken up from a restful sleep and the rest of the world is still asleep and peaceful. Yoga can also be practiced later in the day, but you have to make sure that certain diet restrictions are followed.

The philosophy of yoga recommends that yoga should be ideally practiced on an empty stomach. That’s one of the reasons why the best time to practice yoga is early in the morning. You need to plan your diet for the day if you plan on practicing yoga positions anytime during the day. Any liquid has to be had a minimum of one hour before yoga practice. Solid food, though allowed, should be eaten in limited quantities.

Yoga should ideally be practiced in an airy spacious room, free from any distractions and disturbances, as you need intense concentration to get it right. Apart from this, all you need for yoga is a carpet or a floor mat and loose comfortable clothing. It is recommended that you wear undergarments while practicing yoga.

Yoga is very beneficial towards your physical as well as mental well-being. It relaxes the body and stimulates the mind. If done well and all the rules are adhered to, the benefits could be amazing. To achieve ultimate results, the beginner must have absolute faith in the practice of yoga and must learn to concentrate fully on the every little movement during practice.

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HOW TO CONCENTRATE OBJECTIVELY

(_a_) In all undertakings whether of small or great importance shut
off all thoughts and ideas except such as have any immediate and direct
bearing upon the thing in hand. Pay attention. Bend all the energies
of your mind and will upon it till it is completed to your satisfaction.
Divert your attention from one thing to another only when you sanction
by a resolve and understand why you do so. Your daily work which you
must choose according to the special bent of your mind, will present you
opportunities.

(_b_) Control impulse. Suppose an idea enters your mind. Compose
yourself quietly before carrying out its purport. Consider it. Turn
it over in your mind. Contemplate it. Weave your mental energies
around it, as it were, till at last the idea with your final decision
stands out clear-cut and well-defined. Then proceed to act it out
physically with your mental concentration cutting a way for you straight
on to the execution of your designing. This is _forethought_.

(_c_) In perfect concentration time vanishes. In working out a
design on which you have set your heart dispense altogether with the
element of time and work at it concentratedly for days, months and
years with confident expectation of success.

(_d_) Take a picture, representing a landscape, the interior of a
building, an assembly of persons, a square, a triangle or a more
complicated geometrical figure. Look at it well. Then lay it aside. Close
your eyes. Reproduce the picture mentally in detail. Then repose your
mind on the same image to the exclusion of all other thoughts. This is
a more fixed and meditative method and will sharpen the mind wonderfully.
It will also develop the power of conscious Mental Imagery. The
key to Objective Concentration is _Conscious Attention_, remember.


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Mind and Self

Mind and Self

You cannot be surprised that under these conditions of continueddisappearance of functions, the unfortunate student asks: " Whatbecomes of the mind itself? If you suppress all the functions,what is left?" In the Indian way of teaching, when you come to adifficulty, someone jumps up and asks a question. And in thecommentaries, the question which raises the difficulty is alwaysput.

The answer of Patanjali is: "Then the spectator remains inhis own form."

Theosophy answers: "The Monad remains." It is theend of the human pilgrimage. That is the highest point to whichhumanity may climb: to suppress all the reflections in thefivefold universe through which the Monad has manifested hispowers, and then for the Monad to realise himself, enriched bythe experiences through which his manifested aspects have passed.But to the Samkhyan the difficulty is very great, for when he hasonly his spectator left, when spectacle ceases, the spectatorhimself almost vanishes. His only function was to look on at theplay of mind. When the play of mind is gone, what is left? He canno longer be a spectator, since there is nothing to see.

The onlyanswer is: " He remains in his own form." He is now out ofmanifestation, the duality is transcended, and so the Spiritsinks back into latency, no longer capable of manifestation.There you come to a very serious difference with the Theosophicalview of the universe, for according to that view of the universe,when all these functions have been suppressed, then the Monad isruler over matter and is prepared for a new cycle of activity, nolonger slave but master.

more next week

The Mental Body for yoga beginner

The Mental Body for yoga beginner
Part 1

We must now deal with the mental body, which is taken asequivalent to mind for practical purposes. The first thing for aman to do in practical Yoga is to separate himself from themental body, to draw away from that into the sheath next aboveit. And here remember what I said previously, that in Yoga theSelf is always the consciousness plus the vehicle from which theconsciousness is unable to separate itself.

All that is above thebody you cannot leave is the Self for practical purposes, andyour first attempt must be to draw away from your mental body.Under these conditions, Manas must be identified with the Self,and the spiritual Triad, the Atma-buddhi-manas, is to be realisedas separate from the mental body.

That is the first step. Youmust be able to take up and lay down your mind as you do a tool,before it is of any use to consider the further progress of theSelf in getting rid of its envelopes. Hence the mental body istaken as the starting point. Suppress thought. Quiet it. Stillit. Now what is the ordinary condition of the mental body?

As youlook upon that body from a higher plane, you see constant changesof colours playing in it. You find that they are sometimesinitiated from within, sometimes from without. Sometimes avibration from without has caused a change in consciousness, anda corresponding change in the colours in the mental body.

If there is a change of consciousness, that causes vibration in thematter in which that consciousness is functioning. The mentalbody is a body of ever-changing hues and colours, never still,changing colour with swift rapidity throughout the whole of it.Yoga is the stopping of all these, the inhibition of vibrationsand changes alike. Inhibition of the change of consciousnessstops the vibration of the mental body; the checking of thevibration of the mental body checks the change in consciousness.

In the mental body of a Master there is no change of colour saveas initiated from within; no outward stimulus can produce anyanswer, any vibration,ùin that perfectly controlled mental body.The colour of the mental body of a Master is as moonlight on therippling ocean. Within that whiteness of moon-like refulgence lieall possibilities of colour, but nothing in the outer world canmake the faintest change of hue sweep over its steady radiance.If a change of consciousness occurs within, then the change willsend a wave of delicate hues over the mental body which respondsonly in colour to changes initiated from within and never tochanges stimulated from without.

His mental body is never HisSelf, but only His tool or instrument, which He can take up orlay down at His will. It is only an outer sheath that He useswhen He needs to communicate with the lower world.

Yoga Is a Science

Yoga Is a Science For yoga beginner

ext, Yoga is a science. That is the second thing to grasp. Yogais a science, and not a vague, dreamy drifting or imagining. Itis an applied science, a systematized collection of laws appliedto bring about a definite end. It takes up the laws ofpsychology, applicable to the unfolding of the wholeconsciousness of man on every plane, in every world, and appliesthose rationally in a particular case.
This rational applicationof the laws of unfolding consciousness acts exactly on the sameprinciples that you see applied around you every day in otherdepartments of science.

You know, by looking at the world around you, how enormously theintelligence of man, co-operating with nature, may quicken"natural" processes, and the working of intelligence is as"natural" as anything else. We make this distinction, andpractically it is a real one, between "rational" and "natural"growth, because human intelligence can guide the working ofnatural laws; and when we come to deal with Yoga, we are in thesame department of applied science as, let us say, is thescientific farmer or gardener, when he applies the natural lawsof selection to breeding.

The farmer or gardener cannot transcendthe laws of nature, nor can he work against them. He has no otherlaws of nature to work with save universal laws by which natureis evolving forms around us, and yet he does in a few years whatnature takes, perhaps, hundreds of thousands of years to do. Andhow? By applying human intelligence to choose the laws that servehim and to neutralize the laws that hinder. He brings the divineintelligence in man to utilise the divine powers in nature thatare working for general rather than for particular ends.

THE NATURE OF YOGA -

For yoga beginner

In this first discourse we shall concern ourselves with thegaining of a general idea of the subject of Yoga, seeking itsplace in nature, its own character, its object in humanevolution.