Spiritual yoga : awakening to higher awareness
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Many thousands of Yoga practitioners yearn to explore the spiritual dimensions of the poses they practice every week. Spiritual Yoga fills a gap left by most modern Yoga manuals, which tell everything about bodily alignment and physical benefits, but leave out Yoga s higher dimensions: subtle energy control, meditation, and inner enlightenment. In this book, Nayaswami Gyandev McCord shares these spiritual teachings as originally taught by the great Yoga master, Paramhansa Yogananda (author of the classic Autobiography of a Yogi) and Yogananda s direct disciple (and Nayaswami Gyandev s teacher), Swami Kriyananda. These teachings include: the mind-energy-body connection; the art of meditation; dozens of techniques for spiritualizing one s Yoga postures practice; spiritual Yoga routines; affirmations and energy control suggestions for standing, seated, relaxation, and inverted postures; mastering pranayama (energy control), and breathing exercises for specific results (greater energy, calmness, concentration, etc.); and Yoga as a way of life. As Nayaswami Gyandev writes in his introduction: Imagine that you ve hired Michelangelo to repaint your kitchen cabinets. Plain white. No doubt he would do a great job, but might you be missing out on something much better? It s the same with Hatha Yoga, the physical branch of the greater science of (Raja) Yoga.