Healing Yoga: A Guide to Integrating the Chakras With Your Yoga Practice

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About the Book Today healing has come to mean more then overcoming illness of disease, It is also about finding, maintaining and restoring balance and harmony in both body and mind - and in our relationships with ourselves and others.

HEALIN YOGA helps you to do just this, by teaching you how to integrate an awareness of the panchatattva - the five forces of vitality into you Yoga practice. Each tattva is housed in one of the body's five energy centres, the chakras. HEALING YOGA explores each specific tattviand the chakra where it resides, revealing the nature of its vital energy and what happens when this vitality is disturbed. The Yoga asanas (postures) most beneficial for enhancing the energy of each tattva are fully illustrated with clear step-by-step photography. Further techniques for attaining balance - breath work, gestures, visualizations, mantras and dietary advice - are also included.

By restoring the panchatattva to a state of balance, and improving the flow of prana (vitality) within the body, you can achieve a healthier, happier life. Let this beautifully illustrated book show you how.

• Explains Hatha Yoga techniques for enhancing the chakra-tattva energy system

• Reveals bow to develop an aware-ness of imbalance within the body

• Illustrates all asanas with clear, step-by-step colour photography

• Includes a reference chart of beneficial postures of common ailments.

Foreword During the past decade I have been both a student and a teacher of Yoga. The Panchatattva Way of Yoga, which Swami Ambikananda sets out in this book, has brought about profound healing and transformation within both myself and my students. It assists us in better understanding ourselves, other people and our relationships with them. In helping to liberate the body from the repressed emotions which hold muscles in chronic tension, it makes it possible to experience oneself in a different way, challenging the images one has of oneself and of the world.

The Panchatattva method of teaching Yoga postures (asanas) trains us in direct experience and perception, thereby developing not only our physical bodies but our consciousness - integrating body and mind. Students are taught to listen to and observe the body, rather than trying to force or control it towards reaching a goal. This focus on the process rather than the goal makes Hatha Yoga accessible to students of all ages and abilities, not only those who are young, flexible or fit. My students include people in their seventies and eighties as well as people with multiple sclerosis and other disabilities. Students of the Panchatattva Way of Yoga are not presented with models of perfection to live up to, but are encouraged to discover the perfection within themselves.

In this, and in so many ways, Swami Ambikananda’s teaching embodies the spirit of Yoga, giving us an example of how to move from fragmentation and alienation towards wholeness. I consider this book a gift to everyone.

Introduction When we make the space in our over-crowded schedules and on the floors our homes, to practise our Yoga postures, what is it that we are hoping to accomplish? What magic do we expect of Yoga that we cannot get elsewhere? Yes, Yoga does have the power to release muscles from their habitual state of tension and return them to their resting length. And it certainly can increase the mobility of our joints, restricted by years of sitting and standing with little regard or respect for the body's form and structure. ‘But will it bring good health? Will it make us live ‘any longer? My guru, Swami Venkatesananda, a world-renowned Yogi, died at the age of sixty-two after suffering from heart disease for a number of years. Indeed, in the West we have now come to see Yogis of all methods who have taught their message and then died after a more-or-less average lifespan. Does this mean the promise of Yoga has failed? And if a longer life is not the promise, what is it that draws us to Yoga and makes us dedicate the precious hours of our lives to it?

Perhaps what calls us to Yoga in this technological world of instant delivery and smart machines is that we are beginning to -understand the vision of the risk (seers) of India from many thousands of years ago. Maybe we had to come through the industrial and technological revolutions in order to begin to ask the right questions about our own existence in this time, to be able to understand the answers the rishis gave us from their time.

One of the most beautiful ancient Sanskrit texts associated with Yoga is the dialogue between the Devi (goddess), Shakti, and the god Shiva.

Thus the promise of Yoga is perfection, which embraces health, happiness and the quality of our lives, no matter how long we live. And, as we shall see, health is not an absence of disease, and happiness is not an absence of tragedy. Swami Venkatesananda, along with the many Yogis who brought us this wisdom from the East, lived this perfection. Every day of his life was lived to the full, in a wholeness and with a dynamic quality that can only be called human perfection. In the pages that follow, we will explore how coming to 'know the tattva' - the `vitalities' - through the philosophy and practice of Yoga can move each and every one of us closer to discovering our own innate perfection.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages