AG Mohan on headstands from Yoga Makaranda (Part II) also his book and online Yoga sutra course

More from AG Mohan and how he's used, what he's referring to as, Yoga Makaranda (part 2) in his teaching, here headstands.

Krishnamacharya on Headstand

After he released the text last week and mentioned that he had used it as the basis for his teaching I ordered his first book Yoga for the Breath and Body to see how he'd gone about it. I'd read this book in the library at LMU while on Ramaswami's TT course, always meant to get around to buying it but never did.

The book turned up yesterday, curious to see the different way Mohan and Ramaswami approach similar material, I think they compliment each other. Mohan has a very clean presentation, I love the little asana drawings (did he or his wife draw them I wonder), the tables and clear indications of usage.
The video above gives a good idea of the text, there's a chapter devoted to headstands, but here's the link to Amazon for the preview.
http://www.amazon.com/Yoga-Body-Breath-Mind-Reintegration/dp/1570629773

I'll do a fuller review after I've spent more time on it, but one thing it is inspiring me to do this week/month is to take a handful of asana from YM2 and explore the different breath options in a more...scientific way. So in paschinmottanasana say, doing a few of them with a different approach to breathing each time,  regular breathing and then long slow breathing, then a short breath retention after the inhalation and the a long slow exhalation and retention. Also, exploring in the full posture breathing long and slow with exhaled retentions but also lifting out slightly on each inhalation to allow a fuller breath. All approaches I've taken before but not comparing them one to the other in this way.

Some care required here, Krishnamacharya gives indications in YM1 on which kumbhaka's to avoid in certain postures as well as, in YM2, how long to retain the breath, often in the beginning at least, 2 seconds after the inhalation and 5 seconds after the exhalation, so not long.

AG MOHAN on the Yoga Sutras.

I've also started taking a look at AG Mohan's yoga sutras online, this is a course of study, four to seven videos a month, looking in detail at the Yoga Sutras and of course taking very much a Krishnamacharya reading of the text. You pay $19 a month and Mohan produces a video on the text each Friday, but there are extras E.G. charming stories by his beautiful wife Indria, learning to chant the sutras with his daughter Nitya. It's inspiring me to work along with My Ramaswami, Misra and Aranya commentaries.

Here's a sample


And his daughter Nitya teaching a prayer to Patanjali

.....and here's the link to the site. If you start thinking about it and adding it up, the whole text will cost you a small fortune, you could probably go to India and take his TT course in person, but it's quite wonderful to go through the text line by line in this way. There's a years worth archived already so you can go back to the beginning. Try the first month (July 2011) perhaps, which includes the first four sutras, learning to chant the first ten and stories on Durvasana and Visvamitra as well as an introduction to the text and course. There's no commitment you can just choose which sutras your particularly interested in or work through the whole course. I'm really enjoying it.

http://www.svastha.net/yogasutras-online/

You can get more of a taste fro AG Mohan's approach in these videos by looking at his Youtube channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/SvasthaYogaAyurveda

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Also this week....

My previous post on Ramaswami's In -depth WildYogi interview

and Tuesday's

Guest post: Women & Yoga: A conversation about role models, yoga styles and body image