Excerpt from the book:

At many yoga conferences or training programs I attended, master teachers would put their practice up on boards for people to copy down. Quite a few students would get frustrated and tense because they had trouble drawing the stick figures. On several occasions, students noticed my notes and sat next to me to see how I drew then. One day, I was joking with a fellow teacher that I should write a book. Well,? here it is?

Because there are so many systems of yoga, postures are often called different names in different systems. I?ve tried to include the English names in the index so you can look up a posture if you don?t know the Sanskrit name. Many postures, however, have no English name, or if they do, I wasn?t able to find them in my research. Postures dedicated to sages usually do not have English names.

Sometimes you will see a posture spelled differently in different places. One of the reasons in that certain sounds in Sanskrit do not translate into a one letter sound in English. For instance, an ?S? in Sanskrit sounds like ?sh? and is either written as ?S? or ?sh? as in Sirsasana or ?Shirsasana?. Depending on the source, different choices were made to spell the name more phonetically.

Also, there are certain rules in Sanskrit that apply when particular letters follow each other when two words are put together. They are called the ?Sandhi? rules. Sandhi means ?to join?. An example of this is when an ?A? is followed by a ?U? ?the two letters become a single ?O? as in ?A? + ?UM? = ?Om or ?Pada? + ?Uttanasana? = ?Padottanasa?.

"Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere."
- G.K. Chesterton English novelist, poet.