Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Kneeling Asanas

3 of 36 entries in Asanas. Click any to see everything it connects to.

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Postures taken from the knees rather than from the sitting bones. The classical manuals do not separate them out, so this grouping follows what the body is doing: Ushtrasana rises from a kneel into a backward arch, while Mandukasana and Uttana Mandukasana keep the knees wide and the seat low. Grouping them apart from the seated forms keeps the seated group meaning one thing, a stable base for breath work, rather than absorbing every posture that begins on the floor.

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Two Frog Postures and One Camel, All Absent From the Earlier Manual

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

Kneeling Asanas gathers three postures of the hatha yoga repertoire, and all three share one fact worth naming plainly: none of them appears in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika at all, only in the later Gheranda Samhita.

Mandukasana turns the toes back and brings the knees forward, so the practitioner sits low with the legs folded out to the sides in the shape of a frog, manduka. The Gheranda Samhita pairs it immediately with a second frog posture, Uttana Mandukasana, entered from the same base with the body raised and the head held, the arms brought up behind the head and taken hold of at the elbows. The text gives the second as a separate posture rather than a variant, one of a small set, alongside the tortoise and the cockerel, that the Gheranda Samhita explicitly describes as beginning from another.

Ushtrasana lies face down, folds the legs back over onto the back, takes hold of the feet with the hands and draws the mouth in; ushtra is the camel. The kneeling backward bend taught under this name today, rising from the knees to reach back for the heels, is a different shape from the prone form the classical text actually sets out, and the atlas records the text's own description rather than reading the modern posture back into it.

Together the three show a pattern true of several Gheranda Samhita additions: animal named shapes worked from the ground, extending the earlier manual's much narrower repertoire of seats.

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