Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

dear friend says, is to connect.
    I’ve come to think of the asanas this way too—each position changing the frequency with which our bodies vibrate. To be conscious of this, as we breathe, turns the physical practice into a devotional one, connecting us via resonant vibration to the cosmos, tuning the instruments of our bodies to a higher “symphonic” purpose. A well-tuned instrument is a healthy instrument; yoga helps us resonate more efficiently with the universe.
    I’ve also come to believe that the highest form of prayer is to pray and yet ask for nothing,
    To resonate with awareness, acceptance, and gratitude is surely to pray,
    To breathe and accept gratefully the air that surrounds me into my body.
    Why a new yoga book? The world is chock full of orthodoxies—religious, pseudo-religious, political. These orthodoxies tend to assume that mankind is a finished product, that the “sacred” word is the final word. Such absolutism means that most of these true believers are unhappy with the idea of evolution, and some actively work to suppress it.
Yoga Beyond Belief
steps out of that limited mold. It will strike a chord with people seeking a new level of awakening and freedom in yoga and in their life. This book offers a flexible and modern perspective that is needed more than ever to live in these times of accelerating change.
    Yoga has been pivotal and transformational in every aspect of my life. I regard myself as a work in progress. Yoga to me is an evolutionary, and indeed evolving, science, and orthodoxy needs to be challenged wherever it plants itself like a roadblock to progress. Of course, what is worth keeping will survive and continue to nourish future generations; whatever is moot and expendable will be proven so.
    I am confident that Ganga’s contemporary vision of yoga and the many tools he shares will be catalysts to aid readers in cultivating personal transformation. By combining ancient disciplines with cutting-edge knowledge and insights, this book can make yoga a living part of growth and development for those who practice any level of yoga and who have an interest in how yoga can be pertinent to modern living.
    Ganga’s lifelong study of yoga has not ossified into rigid modes of belief; indeed, his thinking is as flexible and improvisatory as his practice. His discipline is matched by his iconoclasm, his respect for the past by his courage to question authority in elucidating a new vision of yoga. Our human species’ need to evolve has never been more critical. Yoga is one of the tools that can help us make that evolutionary leap and I believe this challenging book can help us redefine who we are and where we are going.

INTRODUCTION
Awakening Insight—Ganga White’s Approach to Yoga
by Mark Schlenz, PhD
    Ganga White has led the evolution of yoga in America for nearly four decades. He helped host yoga’s arrival in this country during the sixties and seventies. He nurtured its development through the remainder of the twentieth century. Today, he remains at the forefront of yoga’s ongoing transformation into the twenty-first century.
    Once an officer in the Sivananda organization, Ganga established the first yoga centers in Los Angeles and several other major American cities. In 1968, his newly created White Lotus Foundation offered one of the first in-depth yoga teacher training programs in this country and established the working model for numerous programs that have since proliferated. Ganga’s departure from Sivananda stimulated a major transformation in yoga’s growth. Disillusioned by financial and ethical scandals involving the swamis, Ganga broke ties with traditional hierarchies of India, led the White Lotus to independence, and rededicated the foundation “to the development of the total human being” and to “elucidating a free, open, and contemporary approach to yoga.” Since then, thousands of yogis now teaching in the United States and around the world have trained with Ganga at White Lotus and share his liberating perspectives with thousands more of their students.
    As a leader of yoga’s modern development, Ganga has always been nourished, rather than bound, by the past. Today, yoga’s current popularity has given rise to a myriad of new market-driven forms and newly minted yogis. Much of what is currently marketed seems completely cut off from the vast richness of yoga’s deep history. Yoga’s age-old potential for fundamental transformation of the