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Three Seated Twists, Each Named for a Different Sage

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Three Seated Twists, Each Named for a Different Sage

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Twist Asanas gathers three seated spinal twists of the hatha yoga repertoire, and every member is named for a sage rather than for an animal or a shape, which sets the group apart from most of the atlas's other asana groupings.

Matsyendrasana is the only posture in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika named after a person, Matsyendranath, counted in the Nath tradition as one of the founding masters of hatha yoga and the teacher of Gorakshanath. The text has the practitioner place the foot at the root of the thigh, take the knee across the body and turn the trunk toward it, and claims the posture kindles the digestive fire and ends disease, a claim the atlas reports as the text's own. The Gheranda Samhita carries it too, and the Nath lineage behind the name is the setting for most of the classical hatha corpus.

Bharadvajasana is named for the Vedic sage Bharadvaja, performed by folding the legs to one side and rotating the torso the opposite way. It belongs alongside Matsyendrasana in the seated twisting family and is commonly taught today as a gentler entry point before attempting Matsyendrasana's deeper bind.

Marichyasana is named for Marichi, one of the mind born sons of Brahma, and combines a bound forward fold of one leg with a twist and bind of the arms around the other. It is not part of the Gheranda Samhita's closed list of thirty two asanas; its attestation belongs to the wider hatha tradition and its later systematization, and its several numbered variations progress in difficulty. Like the other two, it belongs to the core repertoire of seated twists attributed to named sages.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Source Roots of YogaJames Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.)
Sources
Roots of Yoga
James Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.), Penguin Classics, 2017View the Source
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