What Is Kundalini?
“Kundalini” has become a buzzword in many of the innumerable spiritual communities that span the globe these days. It has within it all the elements that attract people – knowledge, power, mystery, intimacy, excitement, alchemy, romance, adventure, danger, ecstasy and more. — Yogani, Advanced Yoga Practices - Easy Lessons for Ecstatic Living
I’ve had many students ask me about kundalini. Because it’s such a central concept in the style of yoga that I teach I thought it would be worth defining it and discussing the benefits of working with it.
If you’ve gone to more than a few yoga classes or you live in California, you’ve probably heard the Sanskrit word ‘kundalini.’ Yogis are all about activating their kundalini, getting it to rise, channeling it. Maybe you know someone who claims to have had a “kundalini awakening.” But what is it exactly?
Kundalini is arguably one of the most important concepts in yoga, and one that’s little understood in the West, especially if you’ve primarily been practicing postural yoga. (In this post I’m not talking about the style of yoga called “Kundalini Yoga, as taught by Yogi Bhajan.” More on the difference below.)
Like most ineffable experiences, something as profound and powerful as kundalini is hard to describe with mere words. You could say the same thing about kundalini that Lao Tzu said about the Tao: “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” The concept is not the experience. But I will do my best nevertheless.
One way to define kundalini is to say that it is the experience of your finite expression of Consciousness accelerating and evolving toward its own infinite nature; it is the fundamental organizing intelligence of embodied Consciousness, our infinite potential of being. But we need to unpack that definition. What do we mean by Consciousness? And what is its infinite nature? Are we talking about god?
In fewer words, kundalini is the vehicle for self-realization that Paramahansa Yogananda taught and wrote about. It is a direct path to spiritual transformation and pure ecstasy and bliss. It can be orgasmic. Some say better than orgasm. However, I make no promises.
To understand kundalini we also need to talk about the subtle energetic body. Ancient yogis, and especially the Tantrikas over a thousand years ago, studied the flow of energy through the body in great detail through experimentation (by practicing and refining different yoga techniques). And, like the Chinese healers who developed acupuncture, they mapped out the energy channels in the body. Tantrik yogis identified three main channels in the energetic body: sushumna, ida, and pingala. The sushumna is the primary channel running along the spine. The ida and pingala form a helix shape, crisscrossing the sushumna. Each intersection of the ida and pingala nadis forms a chakra. Kundalini energy rises up the sushumna nadi, through the chakras. You may think of the chakras as way stations along the path toward awakening. Of course we don’t always awaken or balance our chakras in ascending order, and that’s totally okay.
Okay, let’s dive in a bit more deeply.
In Sanskrit, ’kundalini’ means ”circular,” intended to invoke for the Tantrikas, who were the first to name it and work intentionally with it, the image of a coiled snake, the serpent of the transcendental realm at the base of the spine where prana transmutes into pure Consciousness. Early in his life, the great yogi saint Ramakrishna experienced the awakening of kundalini shakti as a “serpent power” lying asleep at the bottom of the spinal column, then rising along the sushumnā nadi and through the other six chakras. As it rose up the sushumnā nadi, “he saw the different lotuses of the chakras blooming as he entered a trance state.”
Kundalini rising upwards through the chakras
Kundalini is Shakti rising to meet her beloved Shiva at the ajna (“agya”) chakra—the third eye—where they unite stillness and dynamism, and open the portal to the experience of unity consciousness, causing Amrita to flow into the rest of the body conferring a number of benefits, including stronger intuition and an increase in your ability to tap into your inherent bliss nature. Although kundalini originates at the base of the spine in the first chakra, the ajna chakra (sixth chakra) controls the awakening of the kundalini energy. Again, this union is the process by which your consciousness expands and your soul evolves. In order to achieve this balanced union, we incorporate both activating and meditative (usually kriya) practices.
You could say that helping the kundalini energy flow more freely is one of the primary goals of yoga, although in a larger sense, there are no “goals” in yoga, just the fostering of a state of present moment awareness. One can access kundalini energy through regular practice of kriya, mantra, pranayama, meditation, and other yogic practices. Because Elemental Yoga—the integrated, holistic style of yoga I teach—is focused on transformation and spiritual evolution, we work quite a bit with kundalini in our journeys and kriya sets.
Prana and Kundalini
If kundalini is a form of energy, how does it relate to prana, the other yogic name for energy in the body? The Sanskrit word ‘praana’ simply means energy. As Christopher Wallis puts it, “[p]rana is the feeling of being alive in the body.” So it’s the broader term for all life force energy that flows through the human body, as well as that energy which animates plants and animals.
Kundalini is a special type of prana that travels along the central energy channel along the spine demarcated by the chakras. It is first awakened in the muladhara chakra, the first chakra, where it lies dormant and coiled until awakened through practice or, occasionally, spontaneously. It is coiled 3.5 times (one half to indicate movement toward unity), which indicates that it contains the unexpressed kinetic energy of awakening from the start. We all have the seeds of awakening within us.
Some yoga practices work with prana more broadly, and some are focused specifically on kundalini. Pranayama is often associated with prana and kriyas with kundalini. But there are exceptions in both cases.
Cosmic Consciousness
What about the consciousness I mentioned in the definition above? Explaining what we mean when we talk about consciousness is a big topic; far too large for this post. But it is important to define terms so we’re all on the same page. In most systems of yoga, everything is made of Cosmic Consciousness, also known as The Heart, Totality, or the Infinite. From a Tantrik perspective, which is where the concept of kundalini and specific practices to work with it comes from, the universe and everything in it is part of the Goddess, an undulating ocean of bliss that has chosen to forget its own unity nature and is constantly in the process of waking up and gradually remembering its unity nature at all times. All of reality is a therefore process of evolving toward greater and greater values of expanded consciousness. On an individual level, the various practices of yoga help to expand your consciousness to experience greater values of unity. You start to realize as an experience, rather than a mere thought, that you are part of a greater whole, this ocean of infinite bliss.
So, in yoga, when we talk about Consciousness, we are not talking about some monotheistic old man in the sky but a pantheistic continuum that is everything, that contains the seeds of its own awakening in every finite expression.
And when we say that kundalini energy helps us accelerate toward our own infinite nature, we are describing this process of evolving spiritually and truly waking up to our ultimate nature. Sat chit ananda: The truth is that we are pure bliss consciousness. It’s just that we start out forgetting this; it is usually obstructed by layers of conditioning, karma, trauma, and incorrect ideas. It’s part of the dance that the Goddess has chosen to dance, this forgetting. And we are further conditioned throughout our lives to feel separate. So kundalini is the express train to Unity Consciousness.
But there is no hurry. The Goddess has all of eternity.
A Note about “Kundalini Yoga”
There is also a Sikh style of yoga called “Kundalini Yoga,” the full name being “Kundalini as taught by Yogi Bhajan.” That yoga practice was introduced to America in the late 1960s by Yogi Bhajan, a teacher who left his body in 2004 and has recently been the subject of much controversy. Although I have spent time in Kundalini Yoga classes and trainings, and know a few Kundalini Yoga teachers, that practice has nothing to do with the yoga that I teach, except that it too is a kriya-based practice designed to work directly with kundalini.
The Sikh religion is a beautiful tradition and my time at the Golden Temple in Amritsar is one of my most treasured memories. However, as a yoga teacher who teaches kriya and other practices designed to work with kundalini energy, I do wish Bhajan had chosen a different name for his practice, in the same way many yogis familiar with Patanjali’s system of yoga wish Pattabhi Jois had called his style of yoga something less generic than “Ashtanga Yoga.” In fact, there was a time before Bhajan when Westerners understood Kundalini Yoga to mean the classical tantrik system of yoga that focused on the chakras (Carl Jung, for example, gave a series of lectures on this topic in the 1930s and saw tantrik yoga as analogous to his depth psychology in its transformative effects on the whole person.)
The Benefits Of Working Directly And Intentionally With Kundalini
There are many benefits to awakening kundalini and learning to channel it in different ways. Through this process, you start to feel more free. You can reduce suffering in your life and the lives of those connected to you. You can tap into your intuition. You worry less. You can manifest a future of infinite possibilities unconstrained by the confines of your past karma and conditioning. You become more joyful by tapping into your inherent bliss nature. It can improve your overall health and sense of wellbeing. In another sense, you are extending and overcoming your limitations through the rising of kundalini. You start to become more sensitive to vibrations in the cosmos, and within yourself.
But the question of why anyone engages in any form of spiritual practice is a tricky one. On the one hand, we want to evolve and inch ever closer to enlightenment. On the other hand, we are already whole and perfect in this moment. Sometimes it’s just a matter of what we enjoy doing with our time. For me the incentive to practice has been decreasing suffering, expanding possibilities in my life including being of greater service, realizing that the whole universe loves us, and feeling more natural joy more consistently.
The Crucial Process of Awakening Kundalini
The awakening of Kundalini is the beginning of spiritual consciousness and true liberation (from past conditioning, karma, and energetic blockages that impede the pure and infinite radiance of our unblemished spiritual consciousness). It can happen spontaneously or through concerted effort, although in either case it is ultimately an act of grace.
Kundalini is powerful. So, as we continue to raise the kundalini energy, it’s important that we tune our physical and energetic bodies to be able to handle greater amounts of kundalini. This is why, when we start to work with kundalini, we have a well-rounded, full-spectrum practice that offers grounding and stabilizing techniques, as well as kundalini-activating techniques.
There are three factors that influence the way you experience kundalini: your constitution, your lifestyle, and the types and consistency of your yoga practices. Some people seem more naturally receptive to kundalini; it’s more accessible to them. But it’s accessible to all of us with diligent practice.
In terms of lifestyle, any lifestyle in which you are introducing more blockages and impurities to the free flow of energy in the body will impede the flow of kundalini. For example, an unhealthy diet, an agitated mind and nervous system, and stress will make kundalini either inaccessible or erratic. Finally, everyone will benefit from performing practices that will first stabilize the physical and energetic body, preparing it for greater values of kundalini, and then incorporating practices that will encourage more kundalini to awaken, rise, and flow.
Kundalini and Sex
Some teachers describe kundalini as our connection between sex and spiritual transformation. Others say this is a misunderstanding of what the ancient yogis were teaching. In my experience it’s all part of the same larger energy system. You start to understand this when your kundalini begins to awaken. The flow of kundalini through the body is ecstatic. So they are connected. But we also shouldn’t get too distracted or sidetracked by this. There’s nothing about practicing kriya or kundalini yoga that requires that you change your sex life. Over time, your sex life may improve, evolve, or change in some other way but this is nothing for us to be concerned about.
Kriya and Kundalini
Although many yoga practices, including forms of yoga so seemingly removed from any kind of energy work such as bhakti yoga, can raise, channel, and stabilize the kundalini energy, kriyas work most directly with kundalini in different ways. There are kriyas that awaken kundalini, kriyas that cause it to rise, and kriyas that can help stabilize it. The Elemental Yoga practice offers a plethora of kriyas in each of these categories. (I discuss kriya and its benefits in a prior blog post.)
Conclusion
In short, kundalini is a special form of prana. It is the energy that guides you toward your own infinite potential. It’s your energetic connection to pure Consciousness. And it’s a powerful energy that requires a dedicated, holistic yoga practice that includes asana, pranayama, kriya, meditation, the refinement of your intellect, and a certain level of bhakti, devotion, and surrender.
Now that you know a little bit more about kundalini, at least conceptually, you can start to understand the larger system of classical, kriya, and Tantrik yoga, and talk more descriptively about the benefits of certain yogic practices, as well as understand your own spiritual evolution.
Join me to learn practices that help you do that in an accessible, yet powerful way.
