Product Details

• Actors: Naader Shagagi
• Directors: Naader Shagagi
• Format: Digital Sound, NTSC
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Number of discs: 1
• Studio: Yoga Kingdom Sanctuary
• DVD Release Date: November 7, 2003
• Run Time: 55 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0000UJC5Y
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #74,225 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect Yoga DVD, January 6, 2004

By 

Audrey Bilger (Altadena, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Power of Hatha Yoga: Challenging Series (DVD)

Naader Shagagi is an inspirational teacher, and his sequence of poses will leave you feeling energized, strengthened, and uplifted. After having practiced yoga for 16 years and tried many classes and DVDs, I found Naader's sequence to be the most complete I had ever encountered. I can't recommend this DVD highly enough. When you come to the end of the practice and lie in relaxation pose, you will have worked every muscle and opened up the body in profound and satisfying ways. What sets Naader's DVD apart from most others is his ability to convey both the deep physical aspects of yoga and the powerful spiritual dimension of a sincere practice. So many instructional tapes and DVDs overlook or ignore the spiritual side of yoga. With Naader's DVD you will get to experience the fullness of yoga. His wisdom and spirituality will improve the quality of your practice and your life.

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars poor body dynamics, plus technical problems with the DVD, June 21, 2005

By 

Bundita (Arbovale, WV USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Power of Hatha Yoga: Challenging Series (DVD)

Let me preface this review by saying that my yoga background includes exposure to lots of video instruction and over 7 years of practice. I have experienced a wide variety of instructional styles, and am fully aware that the original yoga sutras don't specify much about body dynamics, leave a lot of room for interpretation, and therefore there's not a "correct" way to practice the asanas. However, the cross-pollination of sports medicine, anatomical studies, physical therapy, and the dedicated practice of hundreds of yoga teachers with backgrounds in similar areas has contributed valuable information about body dynamics that reduces the risk of injury to the beginning yogi or yogini as yoga gains popularity in the West.

It is from this perspective that I tell you Naader Shagagi does not teach body dynamics "properly" and that if you are new and don't know better, you could hurt yourself following his instruction. A good example of this is in cobra pose; he simply tells you to look up and arch your back. If you watch what he's doing, his upper back is actually curved slightly forward and he's hyperextending his neck and lower back, the places where the back bends most easily. Cobra is suppossed to open the harder-to-bend-back areas of the spine in the upper back, hence a better way to instruct would be to tell the student to reach their sternum forward, not bend their neck back. Another dangerous example is that he's constantly telling the student "lock your knees" in asanas where the knees are supposed to be straight or close to straight. This not only endangers the knees, but it lends a rigidity to the poses that is counter to one aim of yoga to which is to enliven the body. In downward dog, for instance, if you lock your knees, it limits the forward pelvic (dog) tilt, and the pose hits a static limit instead of continuing to be a dynamic stretch. If you allow the knees to remain slightly bent, pull up with the quadriceps, and get your hamstring stretch from the forward pelvic tilt, you preserve the dynamic tensions of the pose without pushing against the limits of your skeletal structure, risking cartilidge damage. These are just a couple of examples, but I could go on. To be fair, some of the differences are probably just stylistically peculiar to Naader's teaching. For instance, in Parsvottanasana (the wide-legged standing forward release over the front leg), he tells you to bring your forehead to your knee instead of aiming the sternum towards the knee. I would have thought this was just plain wrong until he mentioned that this stimulates the thyroid as in shoulderstand. It's just a different stretch, that's all. Still, the crowning gripe about this Naader's instruction is that he takes corpse pose (which for some reason falls in the middle of the session if you play the DVD straight through) as an opportunity to go on at length about his yogic philosophy which keeps the the mind occupied in logical apprehension of what he's saying which rather defeats the purpose of corpse pose, that is, to release thought along with all muscular tension and experience a meditative state. To top it all off, the DVD had some technical problems, and digital "stuttering" (I don't know how else to describe it) in the two DVD players I tried playing it in. I unfortunately also purchased Naader's Ultimate series which I am returning unopened to Amazon.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Yoga for the Lapse, February 1, 2005

A Kid's Review

This review is from: The Power of Hatha Yoga: Challenging Series (DVD)

I had lost my routine and relationship to yoga for a few years. Thanks to my good friend Lisa's gift of The Power of Hatha Yoga-Beginner Series my enthusiasm and desire has been renewed. Naader Shagagai unites many important aspects of yoga;easy to follow visuals of the postures with attention to the small details,consistent reminders of the importance of breath,subtle positive and non dimentional spirtual reinforcements.

In a nut shell, he has helped to repair a mind body link and open a path toward body and spirit. I am always left at the end of the DVD , happy and nurished. Imaginge what a class in person could do?