General Rules of Asana execution

One of the most notable historical contributions of our systematization was the discovery of the general rules, which are not encountered in any other type of Yôga… unless they have come to incorporate them recently, as a result of an influence from SwáSthya Yôga. We have already witnessed examples of this tendency in classes and texts of various types of Yôga in different countries, after they came in contact with SwáSthya Yôga.
It is easy to verify that the rules and other characteristics of our method were neither known nor utilized before. Consulting books of various modalities of Yôga that were published before the codification of SwáSthya Yôga is enough to show this. In not a single one of them will you encounter any reference to general rules of execution.
On the other hand, these general rules only constitute a discovery and not an adaptation, as they had always been subjacent to the existence of Yôga. Take, for example, any given techniques, such as a forward bend (paschimôttanásana), a backward bend (bhujangásana) and a side bend (trikônásana), and execute them according to the rules of SwáSthya Yôga. Afterwards, consult a book of Hatha Yôga and execute the same positions following their extensive descriptions for each technique. You will be surprised: the executions will be equivalent in more than 90% of the cases. Therefore, there exists a pattern of behavior. This pattern was identified by us and synthesized into general rules.
The existence of such a pattern went unnoticed by many generations of Masters throughout the world for thousands of years of practice and was only discovered at the beginning of the third millennium after Christ. This occurred in the same way that the law of gravity passed unregistered by the great thinkers and physicists of Greece, India, China, Egypt and the rest of the world, only to be discovered very recently by Newton. Just as Newton did not invent gravity, we also did not invent general rules of execution. They were always there, but no one had noticed them before.
In SwáSthya Yôga the rules help a great deal, simplifying learning and accelerating the evolution of the practitioner. To the teacher, aside from this, they save a precious time normally spent on unnecessary descriptions and instructions.
The rules will be explained in the chapter ÁSANA, subtitle General Rules.