Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

whole person is too often diluted to appeal to fashionable desires for physical attainments. Ganga’s scholarly study and thorough immersion in the literature, philosophy, and techniques of ancient yoga traditions inform and inspire the evolution of his own dedicated practice and teaching. With this deep grounding, Ganga’s innovative contributions build upon the vital essences of yoga’s timeless gifts without subservience to archaic institutions or doctrines.
    While many current yoga trends seem to disregard historical contexts, others tend to romanticize the past, fetishizing certain practices and depriving them of relevance to our current situations. Ganga’s deeper understanding of yoga’s many traditions recognizes how various practices emerged from specific historical, cultural, and social conditions and, even more important, how they have been consistently adapted as these conditions have inevitably changed through time. This dynamic sense of history nourishes Ganga’s efforts to make yoga more relevant to our present
and
to our future. Through all its manifestations, yoga has always offered liberatory alternatives to rigid hierarchies that threaten the survival of the human spirit. At this moment, that spirit, and in fact all life on the planet, is more threatened than ever before. Our present potential for global annihilation, whether by our explosive weapons of mass destruction or by our escalating devastation of our own ecosystem, requires new orientations to preserve the human spirit’s potential for creativity, healing, and love.
    Incorporating essential wisdom from yoga’s heritage with progressive insights of science and modernity, Ganga’s evolutionary approach makes yoga more applicable than ever to addressing the overwhelming problems that currently confront every person. The crux of his insight is that we can certainly change the future of our species by constantly developing the ways we perceive and value our individual selves. Through constant self-examination and ongoing reflection, one’s personal yoga practice becomes an invaluable tool for continual self-discovery and transformation.
    Ganga’s insights into dynamic principles animating the asanas enable his students to approach the poses as unfolding paths to personal evolution rather than as cul-de-sacs of arrested perfection. His teachings empower his students and allow them to let their own experiences guide them into deeper possibilities of personal growth and freedom. That is why this book, in contrast to so many yoga books written to formulas and dictates of the publishing market, offers principles rather than prescriptions.
    Most yoga books currently published exploit niche market appeal by prescribing specific practices that promise certain benefits to particular audiences. Many claim the ancient authenticity of a particular tradition or lineage of teacher for their authority. Others rely on charismatic teachers or celebrities to underwrite their inflated promises. A growing number of hybrid approaches claim benefits only possible through newly created combinations of yoga with something—almost anything, it seems—else.
Yoga Beyond Belief
presents a unique, non-dogmatic, integrative vision of contemporary yoga. It is an inspiring manual for beginners and experienced students alike.
    What most available books share in common is the premise that they can give you something special by
telling you how to do yoga their way
. In this book, by contrast, Ganga
shows you how you can learn to do yoga your way
. What Ganga shares in the following chapters is not based on passed-down authority, fashionable popularity, or eclectic gimmickry. It is based on working principles of careful inquiry, experimentation, and observation.
    Those of us who have had the fortune to learn from Ganga have learned much from watching his characteristic responses to questions from students. Perhaps an alignment he suggests contradicts an instruction a student has been taught by another teacher or has read some where, and so the student asks which is the right way. Older students who may have heard this question posed and answered more than once before know not to expect a definitive, or even the same, answer from Ganga.
    What we know to expect instead is a demonstration of sincere inquiry, often enlivened with his spontaneous wit and infectious laughter. Almost invariably Ganga will experiment in the pose with the juxtaposed alignments before