YG - für Dummies Flashcards
What means Yoga?
The word Yoga comes from the ancient Sanskrit language spoken by the traditional religious elite of India, the Brahmins. Yoga means “union” or “integration” and also “discipline,” so the system of Yoga is called a unitive or integrating discipline.
How can Yoga help you with your personal growth?
✓ It can put you in touch with your real feelings and balance your emotional life. ✓ It can help you understand and accept yourself and feel comfortable with who you are. You don’t have to “fake it” or reduce your life to con-stant role-playing. ✓ It helps you become more able to empathize and communicate with others.
What’s the meaning of Guru?
The sanskrit word guru means literally “weighty one.” According to traditional esoteric sources, the syllable gu signifies spiritual darkness and ru signifies the act of removing. Thus a guru is a teacher who leads the student from darkness to light.
Which are the Eight Main Branches of Yoga?
✓ Bhakti (bhuk-tee) Yoga: The Yoga of devotion ✓ Hatha (haht-ha) Yoga: The Yoga of physical discipline ✓ Jnana (gyah-nah) Yoga: The Yoga of wisdom ✓ Karma (kahr-mah) Yoga: The Yoga of self-transcending action ✓ Mantra (mahn-trah) Yoga: The Yoga of potent sound ✓ Raja (rah-jah) Yoga: The Royal Yoga ✓ Tantra (tahn-trah) Yoga (including Laya Yoga and Kundalini Yoga): The Yoga of continuity✓ Guru (goo-roo) Yoga, the Yoga of dedication to a Yoga master.
What is the eight-fold path?
The eight limbs of the prominent traditional approach, designed to lead to enlightenment or liberation, are as follows: ✓ Yama (yah-mah): Moral discipline, consisting of the practices of non-harming, truthfulness, nonstealing, chastity, and greedlessness.✓ Niyama (nee-yah-mah): Self-restraint, consisting of the five practices of purity, contentment, austerity, self-study, and devotion to a higher principle.✓ Asana (ah-sah-nah): Posture, which serves two basic purposes: meditation and health. ✓ Pranayama (prah-nah-yah-mah): Breath control, which raises and balances your mental energy, thus boosting your health and mental concentration. ✓ Pratyahara (prah-tyah-hah-rah): Sensory inhibition, which internalizes your consciousness to prepare your mind for the various stages of meditation. ✓ Dharana (dhah-rah-nah): Concentration, or extended mental focusing, which is fundamental to yogic meditation. ✓ Dhyana (dhee-yah-nah): Meditation, the principal practice of higher Yoga.✓ Samadhi (sah-mah-dhee): Ecstasy, or the experience in which you become inwardly one with the object of your contemplation. This state is surpassed by actual enlightenment, or spiritual liberation.
What is “om”?
The sacred syl-lable om (pronounced ommm, with a long o sound) is the symbol of the absolute reality — the Self or spirit. It’s composed of the letters a, u, and m and the nasal humming of the letter m. A corresponds to the waking state, u to the dream state, and m to the state of deep sleep; the nasal humming sound represents the ultimate reality.
Define Bhakti Yoga
The Yoga of devotionBhakti Yoga practitioners believe that a supreme being (the Divine) transcends their lives, and they feel moved to connect or even completely merge with that supreme being through acts of devotion. Bhakti Yoga includes such practices as making flower offerings, singing hymns of praise, and thinking about the Divine.
Define Hatha Yoga.
The Yoga of physical disciplineHatha Yoga approaches enlightenment through the body rather than through the mind or the emotions. Hatha Yoga practitioners believe that unless they properly purify and prepare their bodies, the higher stages of meditation and beyond are virtually impossible to achieve.Hatha Yoga is very much more than posture practice, which is so popular today. Like every form of authentic Yoga, it’s a spiritual path.
Define Jnana Yoga
The Yoga of wisdomJnana Yoga teaches the ideal of nondualism — that reality is singular, and your perception of countless distinct phenomena is a basic misconception. All things are real at your present level of consciousness, but they aren’t ultimately real as separate or distinct things. Upon enlightenment, everything melts into one, and you become one with the immortal spirit.
Define Karma Yoga
The Yoga of self-transcending action.Karma Yoga’s most important principle is to act unselfishly, without attachment, and with integrity. Karma Yoga practitioners believe that all actions, whether bodily, vocal, or mental, have farreaching consequences for which they must assume full responsibility.
Define Tantra Yoga?
The Yoga of continuityTantra Yoga is the most complex and most widely misunderstood branch of Yoga. In the West and in India, Tantra Yoga is often confused with “spiri-tualized” sex; although sexual rituals are used in some (so-called left-hand) schools of Tantra Yoga, they aren’t a regular practice in the majority of (so-called right-hand) schools. Tantra Yoga is actually a strict spiritual discipline involving fairly complex rituals and detailed visualizations of deities. These deities are either visions of the divine or the equivalent of Christianity’s angels and are invoked to aid the yogic process of contemplation.Another common name for Tantra Yoga is Kundalini Yoga (pronounced koon-dah-lee-nee). The latter name, which means “she who is coiled,” hints at the secret “serpent power” that Tantra Yoga seeks to activate: the latent spiritual energy stored in the human body.
Define Guru Yoga.
The Yoga of dedication to a master.In Guru Yoga, your teacher is the main focus of spiritual practice. Such a teacher is expected to be enlightened or at least close to being enlightened. In Guru Yoga, you honor and meditate on your guru until you merge with him or her. Because the guru is thought to already be one with the ultimate reality, this merger duplicates his or her spiritual realization in you.
Define Mantra Yoga.
The Yoga of potent soundMantra Yoga makes use of sound to harmonize the body and focus the mind. It works with mantras, which can be a syllable, word, or phrase. Traditionally, practitioners receive a mantra from their teacher in the context of a formal initiation. They’re asked to repeat it as often as possible and to keep it secret.
Which are some of the Prominent Styles of Hatha Yoga?
Of the many styles of Hatha Yoga available today, the following are the best known: ✓ Iyengar Yoga, which is the most widely recognized approach to Hatha Yoga, was created by B. K. S. Iyengar, the brother in-law of the famous T.S. Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) and uncle of T.K.V. Desikachar. This style is characterized by precision performance and the aid of numerous props. ✓ Viniyoga (pronounced vee-nee yoh-gah) is the approach first developed by Shri Krishnamacharya and continued with his son T.K.V. Desikachar. The emphasis is on the breath and practicing Yoga according to your individual needs and capacities. Desikachar has expanded his approach in conjunction with his son Kausthub under the new umbrella of The Krishnamacharya Healing and Yoga Foundation (KHYF), headquartered in Chennai (formerly Madras), India. As the teacher of well-known Yoga mas-ters B.K.S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, and Indra Devi, Professor T.S. Krishnamacharya can be said to have launched a veritable Hatha Yoga renaissance in modern times that is still sweeping the world. ✓ Ashtanga Yoga originated with Shri Krishnamacharya and was taught by K. Pattabhi Jois, who was born in 1915 but who had a suitably modern outlook to draw eager Western students to his Mysore, India, Ashtanga Yoga Institute until his death in 2009. He was a principal disciple of T.S. Krishnamacharya, who apparently instructed him to teach the sequences known as Ashtanga Yoga or Power Yoga. This style is by far the most athletic of the three versions of Hatha Yoga and it combines postures with breathing. Ashtanga Yoga differs from Patanjali’s eightfold path (also called Ashtanga Yoga), though it’s theoretically grounded in it.Power Yoga emphasizes flexibility and strength and was mainly responsible for introducing Yoga postures into gyms. In a similar manner, Vinyasa Yoga and Flow Yoga are also variatons of Ashtanga Yoga.✓ Anusara Yoga, with strong roots in Iyengar Yoga, has attained great popularity within a short span of time. Created in 1997 by the American Yoga teacher John Friend, its appeal is in its heart-centered approach. Based on the three As — attitude, alignment, and action — Anusara Yoga seeks to bring “grace” (anusara) into a posture.✓ Kripalu Yoga, inspired by Swami Kripalvananda (1913–1981) and developed by his disciple Yogi Amrit Desai, is a three-stage Yoga tailored for the needs of Western students. The first stage emphasizes postural alignment and coordination of breath and movement; you hold the postures for a short time only. The second stage adds meditation and prolongs the postures. In the final stage, practicing the postures becomes a spontaneous meditation in motion.✓ Integral Yoga was developed by Swami Satchidananda (1914–2002), a student of the famous Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, India. Swami Satchidananda made his debut at the Woodstock festival in 1969, where he taught the baby boomers to chant om, and over the years has attracted thousands of students. As the name suggests, this style aims to integrate the various aspects of the body-mind through a combination of postures, breathing techniques, deep relaxation, and meditation.✓ Sivananda Yoga is the creation of the late Swami Vishnudevananda (1927–1993), also a disciple of Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, India, who established his Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center in Montreal in 1959. He trained over 6,000 teachers, and you can find numerous Sivananda centers around the world. This style includes a series of 12 postures, the Sun Salutation sequence, breathing exercises, relaxation, and mantra chanting. ✓ Ananda Yoga is anchored in the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) and was developed by Swami Kriyananda (Donald Walters), one of his disciples. This gentle style prepares the student for meditation, and its distinguishing features are the silent affirmations associated with holding the postures. This Yoga style includes Yogananda’s unique energization exercises, first developed in 1917, which involve consciously directing the body’s energy (life force) to different organs and limbs.✓ Kundalini Yoga isn’t only an independent approach of Yoga but also the name of a style of Hatha Yoga, originated by the Sikh master Yogi Bhajan (1929–2004). Its purpose is to awaken the serpent power (kundalini) by means of postures, breath control, chanting, and meditation. Yogi Bhajan, who came to the United States in 1969, is the founder and spiritual head of the Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization (3HO), which has headquarters in Los Angeles and numerous branches around the world.✓ Hidden Language Yoga was developed by the late Swami Sivananda Radha (1911–1995), a German-born female student of Swami Sivananda. This style seeks to promote not only physical well-being but also self-understanding by exploring the symbolism inherent in the postures.✓ Somatic Yoga is the creation of Eleanor Criswell, EdD, a professor of psychology at Sonoma State University in California who has taught Yoga since the early 1960s. Somatic Yoga is an integrated approach to the harmonious development of body and mind, based both on traditional yogic principles and modern psychophysiological research. This gentle approach emphasizes visualization, very slow movement into and out of postures, conscious breathing, mindfulness, and frequent relaxation between postures. ✓ Moksha Yoga, which was originally based on the style of Bikram Yoga (in the following bullet) and is popular in Canada, uses traditional postures in a heated room and includes relaxation periods. It champions a green philosophy. ✓ Bikram Yoga is the style taught by Bikram Choudhury. Bikram Choudhury achieved fame as the teacher of Hollywood stars. This style, which has a set routine of 26 postures, is fairly vigorous and requires a certain fitness level for participation, especially because it calls for a high room temperature.
What have most approaches to Yoga in common?
Most traditional or tradition-oriented approaches to Yoga share two fundamental practices, the cultivation of awareness and relaxation: ✓ Awareness is the peculiarly human ability to pay close attention to something, to be consciously present, and to be mindful. Yoga is attention training.✓ Relaxation is the conscious release of unnecessary and therefore unwholesome tension in the body.✓ Conscious breathing is often added to awareness and relaxation as a third foundational practice.
Define Raja Yoga
The Royal Yoga.Raja Yoga means literally “Royal Yoga” and is also known as Classical Yoga. The eightfold path laid down in the Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali is the standard work of Raja Yoga. Another name for this yogic tradition is Ashtanga Yoga (pronounced ahsh-tahng-gah), the “eight-limbed Yoga” — from ashta (“eight”) and anga (“limb”). (Don’t confuse this tradition with the Yoga style known as Ashtanga Yoga)
What is health?
Health is a positive state of being. Health is wholeness. To be healthy means not only to possess a well-functioning body and a sane mind but also to vibrate with life, to be vitally connected with your social and physical environment. To be healthy also means to be happy.
Define spirit.
The word spiritual has been abused a lot lately, so we need to explain how we use it here. Spiritual relates to spirit — your ultimate nature. In Yoga, it’s called the atman (pronounced aht-mahn) or purusha (poo-roo-shah).According to nondualistic (based in one reality) Yoga philosophy, the spirit is one and the same in all beings and things. It’s formless, immortal, superconscious, and unimaginably blissful. It’s transcendental because it exists beyond the limited body and mind. You discover the spirit fully in the moment of your enlightenment.
Define Karma.
The Sanskrit term karma literally means “action.” It stands for activity in general but also for the “invisible action” of destiny. According to Yoga, every action of body, speech, and mind produces visible and also hidden consequences. Sometimes the hidden consequences — destiny — are far more sig-nificant than the obvious repercussions. Don’t think of karma as blind destiny. You’re always free to make choices. The purpose of Karma Yoga is to regulate how you act in the world so that you cease to be bound by karma. The practitioners of all types of Yoga seek to not only prevent bad (black) karma but also go beyond good (white) karma to no karma at all.
What’s the meaning of Sattva?
Clarity. The more sattva is present in your body-mind, the more relaxed and happy you will be.
What is the name for good stress and for bad stress?
Psychologists distinguish between distress and eustress (good stress). Yoga can help you minimize distress and maximize good, life-enhancing stress. The question is whether that stress is helping you or killing you.
Which are the phases of stress?
The three phases of the stress syndrome: 1) Alarm: Alarm can be a harmless activity.2) Resistance: Situations that require the body to make an adjustment.3) Exhaustion: When the demand on the body goes on for too long, the stage of exhaustion sets in, which can lead to a complete breakdown of the body and the mind — be it heart disease, hypertension, failure of the immune system, or mental illness.
What does bad stress cause?
Bad stress creates an imbalance in the body and the mind, causing you to tense your muscles and breathe in a rapid and shallow manner. Under stress, your adrenal glands work overtime and your blood becomes depleted of oxygen, which starves your cells. Constant stress triggers the fight-or-flight response, putting you in a chronic state of alertness that’s extremely demanding on your body’s energies.
How can you deal with chronic stress?
Yoga suggests a three-pronged solution: ✓ Correct stress-producing attitudes. ✓ Change habits that invite stress into your life. ✓ Release existing tension in the body on an ongoing basis. Stress can occur without any unpleasant stimulus. Stress is cumulative and can creep up on you so gradually that it’s imperceptible — until its acute and adverse symptoms manifest.
What’s the sanscrit name for Ego?
The ultimate source of stress is the ego, or what the Yoga masters call the “I-maker” (aham-kara), from aham (“I”) and kara (“maker”)
