Sanskrit of the Yoga Postures

The Sanskrit of the Yoga Postures

The purpose of yoga practice is to align our organisms with the patterns of intelligence and activity we see ‘outside’ ourselves. These patterns take the form of everything from rocky mountains to organic plants to dynamic humans.

In this Workshop, we explore how powerful Hatha Yoga postures automatically re-attune us to the ancient consciousness from which we have emerged and whose evolutionary trajectory we fulfill. One of the most powerful ways to see how the internal and external worlds mirror one another is to explore precise physical alignment and accurate mythic interpretation of the postures at the same time. One of the most important postulates of Yoga therefore focuses on the inter-penetration of what we imagine mentally and what we experience physically. Are you ‘really’ a lotus because of your posture? In what way does assuming the attitude of a hero (vīra) in some strange sense make you a hero? Is there some sense in which, by aligning ourselves with our primordial past, our deep roots in nature, that we come to rediscover the capacities of awareness?

In this Workshop, you’ll find out physically what it means to be a plant.

• You’ll discover the dynamic and balanced intelligence of the dance.
• Just behind the dance lies the ferocity that makes the lion’s focus so subtle and so powerful.
• And the sublest creature lies behind them all: the serpent, or kundalini.