I am new to yoga and meditation. I started practicing AYP yoga due to the effects of a Kundalini awakening a couple of months ago. Prior to that, I had no experience with yoga or any meditation system, and don't have the background to evaluate what's good or bad, except for common sense, and good intuition. I found the site on the net; it looked good, and wasn't hustling anything. I was impressed that Yogani was basically giving all this stuff away for free, and I still think that's a great idea.
I've been at it for about two months. DM seems to produce noticeable results, but I see some people here claim that the practitioner sooner or later hits a dead end due to flaws in AYP methods.
I discovered taobums.com when looking up Yogani on Google to see if there were any possible negative references to him or AYP as part of due diligence to see if AYP was OK to work with. I saw Tibetan_Ice's claim that Yogani and he had a run-in on Amazon, but nothing else, so I let it go for the time being.
I recently tried posting my concerns whether yoga produces results that are "real" or illusions on the AYP fora, in the “Yoga, Science, and Philosophy” section, and included references from "Stripping the gurus" by Geoffrey D. Falk.
Well, that got the post rejected for "guru bashing". So how can you have an open discussion about the negative aspects of something you propose to devote a large portion of your life to if you can't bring up any negative aspects?
Smelling trouble, I signed up to this site to see how things go. I still think an online yoga resource site like AYP would be a good thing, but without the overly restrictive moderation of discussions. After all, we're adults who are trying to work out things that are core to what it is to be human, and maybe divine too.
What do you think of doing something like AYP here, but in an actual “open source” community-based way. Just because AYP has flaws doesn't mean the idea of a community-based online yoga instruction site is no good. Or does it? Does yoga have to be transmitted by a traditional guru?
At the very least, perhaps some suggestions on how to get started for people like me who have no background. There's so much to choose from, how does one know where to start? Is there a consensus among the cognoscenti here of what's good and, more importantly, what's bad?
Oh, and one more thing: Since I'm nowhere near self-realization, enlightenment, or whatever the correct term of art is, I will probably express myself in terms of dualism. I don't “get it” yet, so please be patient.
Cheers.
