ASTANGA YOGA
Eight stations of a journey of balance
Archetypo Publications, June 2024
The book Astanga Yoga: Journey Back to Balance aims to serve as our resting cushion from the toil we put in trying to balance ourselves in a world of constant change. Its suggestion is to use the philosophy of the eightfold yoga (astanga yoga) of the ancient Indian sage Patanjali, as outlined in his work “Yoga Sutra” , not simply as a largely incomprehensible piece of knowledge that will remain unapplied, stacked on some shelf of the mind, but as a practical, daily guide of balance governed by one basic principle: Balance is, above all, a journey back to the stability that naturally characterizes us, to the unshuttered soul within us.
The eight stations of this journey of knowledge are presented in the three chapters of the book. The importance of observing specific social and individual ethical rules (yamas-niyamas), the practice of steady posture (asana), the control of vital energy (pranayama), the practice of the withdrawal of the senses (pratyahara), concentration (dharana), meditation (dhyana), and the complete absorption in the knowledge of the truth about ourselves (samadhi) emerges through the acknowledgement of our misconceptions in the first chapter, the principles of self-control, non-attachment, and rest in the second, as well as the role of will, the virtue of prudence, and intuition in the third and final part of the book.
Excerpts
Enter your email to receive a free pdf sample
Interviews
Patanjali’s yoga philosophy invites us to reinvent ourselves, discovering how truly enough, full, and complete we can be in our lives. And such an invitation knows no time. It is as ancient as it is modern.
Interview to Leticia Moustaki here
In the course of our yoga practice, the pieces of knowledge we attain about our body and the way we act with our mind serve as stepping stones that pave the way for our progress, only when they support each other. This element is essentially what makes yoga a holistic system.
Interview to Alexia Vlara here
Yoga cannot be the “entertaining” product you consume to have fun and then nothing more will remain inside you. It is a study and that is the way, I believe, we can only talk about it.
Interview to Stella Petridou here
Astanga yoga is the ancient technology that helps us move forward in our “awakenings” and create the world we want to see as we open our eyes.
Interview to Evridiki Kovani here
For me, the “darkest” side of our existence is not the one that has to do with all our bad thoughts, as many of us might think, rather the one that gives no “space” to new knowledge, demanding to take everything for granted, as we have learned or simply know it to be.
Interview to Konstantinos Ioakeimidis here
Listen or read it here.
Regarding the challenges in the face of which stands a book with yoga as a philosophical askesis as its subject, the audience it is addressed to, and the answers it aims to provide I talk in this podcast on Dimitris Meidanis’s show “In First Person” in the Hellenic Broadcasting Channel’s Program.