Jason Birch & Jacqueline HargreavesHaṭhābhyāsapaddhati: A Re-construction of the Practice. - This workshop will present the history and practice of the only sequential āsana routine that has been preserved in a premodern manuscript, namely the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati (‘a manual on the practice of Haṭhayoga’). Students will learn about this text's significance in the corpus of Haṭhayoga and its contribution to the traditions of yoga at the Mysore Palace and its possible influence on Kṛṣṇamācārya. This session will guide participants through an exploratory practice based on a truncated sequence of the more accessible āsanas in the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati. The Sanskrit descriptions and some nineteenth-century illustrations will be presented so that various possibilities and ambiguities for each āsana can be investigated. The earliest known dog and cat poses, which are very different to those in modern yoga, will be included, as well as various birds and reptiles. In total, one hundred and twelve āsanas, many of which are based on the movements of animals, are described in this eighteenth-century yoga text. The āsanas are divided into six sequences and some of them involve repetitive movement and require extraordinary strength and flexibility, as well as the use of rope. Many of these āsanas remain unknown to modern yoga practitioners.