Tibetan Yoga. Theory and Practice of Tantric Buddhism

Tibetan yoga is a secret treasure kept in the very heart of the Tibetan Buddhist tantric tradition— a spiritual and bodily practice that allows for a wide range of experiences related to the human body and its energetic and cognitive potential. This work by Ian A. Baker is the first of its kind. As an illustrated album, it contains a brief overview of the tradition, providing a general understanding of the fundamental principles of Tibetan yoga practice, as well as numerous traditional illustrations of special tantric yoga exercises and reproductions of artworks from the Himalayan region that have not been published before.
Addressing the history of Tibetan culture and contemporary scientific research, the author examines Tibetan yoga from historical, anthropological, and biological perspectives, offering rich material that enables readers to understand this ancient tradition both intellectually and emotionally. He provides comprehensive illustrated instructions for meditation, visualization, and sequences of exercises for working with the body and breath, as well as explanations of various esoteric practices such as sexual union yoga, dream yoga, and consciousness transfer yoga. The author explains the peculiarity of Tibetan yoga, which lies in the fact that, based on the techniques of Indian hatha yoga and Daoist energy work, this tradition has rapidly developed, utilizing physical yoga exercises and qigong to direct prana, or life energy, towards the development of hidden potential abilities and cognitive states. The techniques of Tibetan yoga allow one to transcend their own 'self' and suffering, leading to the attainment of enlightenment through transformative processes occurring in the body, breath, and consciousness.
The album presents a rich collection of contemporary photographs of practitioners of Tibetan yoga techniques, as well as rare artworks from the Himalayan region, including Tibetan thangkas, frescoes from the meditation room of the Dalai Lama in Lhasa, previously closed to visitors, as well as drawings of yogic practices from traditional meditation instructions, and therefore can rightfully be considered a fundamental work that reveals the deep meaning of the Tibetan yoga tradition, representing the expression of the interconnectedness of all existence.