Yoga, The Greater Tradition

In Yoga The Greater Tradition, by David Frawley, he talks about the different types of yoga and how they help our daily lives. He also talks about the five different primary yoga paths. The first is Jnana Yoga( the yoga of knowledge); second, Bhakti Yoga( the yoga of devotion); third, Karma Yoga( the Yoga of service); fourth, Raja Yoga( the royal yoga); and lastly, Hatha yoga( the yoga of technique). Hatha yoga took up most of the book because inside of Hatha yoga there are four different types of techniques. Those techniques are Asana, Pranayama, Mantra, and meditation. "Asana is said to prepare the body for deeper yoga practices"( Frawley 58). It is the "seat" of yoga. "Pranayama is the term for our connection through the breath with the unlimited and inexhaustible universal life force"(Frawley 62). So basically Pranayama is the practice of how we breath. "Mantra is the most common tool of all yoga teachings. All yoga paths have their different Mantras( chantings or prayers)"( Frawley 89). "Meditation is the most commonly thought of form of yoga"( Frawlye 72). Meditation helps discover what is within our selves.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. David Frawley did great research and he helped me learn a ton. I think my favorite section of this book would have to have been the Mantra section. Mantra was just very different for me and reading about it made me look at yoga in a whole new light. Just the thought of chanting things kinda weirded me out but after reading it I loved it.
A few of things i did not like about the book were how he set it up and how he wrote it. Frawley set the book up weird for me. If I had wrote it I would not have put it in the order he did. It was not that the book was out of order, it was more that it could have been set up in a better, easier to understand, order. He divided it into two different parts, and some of the things he put in one part I would have put in the other and vise versa. Frawley also wrote it in a very superior way. It was hard to understand. While I was reading it I had to keep a dictionary beside me so I could look up most of the words. He also did not word it in a usual way. It was all backwards, kind of like Yoda off of star wars, you kind of had to interpret what he was saying.