This book is based on 19 years of yoga practice and 14 years of teaching yoga and healing. It contains over 300 pictures of asanas -- how to come into them and how to go out, energy flows and possible mistakes while practicing Hatha.
Structurally, the book is divided into several levels of mind body spirit so that it can be useful to all readers with different experience in yoga -- from beginners to experienced practitioners.
In this book you will learn how to assemble your own yoga complex, depending on your health.
Excerpt:
The first idea to write this book appeared quite long ago when, after some years of practicing yoga, I finally understood how asanas «work». After this unfortunately I found out that most of modern books on yoga give asanas the wrong way. The picture can be nice, but tiny inaccuracies that only a professional can notice, make such performance useless. In one posture the back is not stretched enough, in the second one — the heap is sticking out, in the third one the pelvis or the neck is not straight. From the point of view of gymnastics these are details, but, if you understand the energy aspects of asana, it is obvious, that such performance is not only useless, but to some extent harmful. So I wanted to get all those bad examples from many books and to explain what troubles may ensue from such practice. But the principles of ahimsa didn’t allow me to write such book.
Later on, teaching how to do right asanas and pranayamas, I understood, that people do them wrong not because they aren’t aware of how to do it right — they just practice according to their actual energy bearing. And I mean not those difficult asanas, demanding extraordinary flexibility, but quite simple at first blush postures. This discovery underlay the brand new understanding of hatha-yoga as a method of spiritual evolution and not just a physical development of a person. Eventually on the base of this understanding I built my own principles of teaching yoga.
The second problem that encouraged me to write this book was this very unpleasant tendency to «religionize» yoga, which in fact is a profoundly rational and pragmatic teaching. Various Schools are arguing about how to do this or that technique appealing to original sources and treatises or citing Teachers. Apprentices are trying to find those «genuine», «traditional», «authentic» practices. Some people try to sit in lotus position for many years, thinking that there is no yoga with-out it. They forget the essential: that yoga is a creative teaching, people oriented, not canon oriented. Ancient Indian canon, as any other, was meant for a certain kind of person, living in a certain ambience - natural and cultural. Does it always suit a modern European? Humanity approaches ancient knowledge differently and finds new ways to understand esoteric learning. On the other hand practices that used to work 30–50 years ago, are irrelevant today and just don’t «work». That is why, if you want to gain from a canon, you should deconstruct it: you must get to the essential principle of those techniques and recreate new ones, appropriate to modern conditions and contemporary life. Nevertheless I didn’t find books, where such work would be done. Feeling a need for such research I came back to my idea of writing a book, that would namely describe principles of yoga.
But this book still had to wait for many years. New subjects were appealing to reflection, other books were being written, my methods were maturing. Yoga Federation was founded and started to grow. The need in a comprehensible yoga manual became urgent. I couldn’t put off writing this book anymore.