Kundalini yoga, in its simplest form, is the yoga of awareness. It helps in the activation of your chakras using your conscious self. The…
What is Kundalini Yoga?
It is a physical, mental, and spiritual discipline that helps one to develop strength, awareness, and consciousness. It focuses on expanding the individual sensory awareness and intuition to raise the individual consciousness and merge with infinite consciousness.
It helps you find your higher self through practice. Unlike, most ancient religious philosophies, it doesn’t hold you against a strict rule of practice and rather helps you find personal meaning in the practice. It is decentralized and selfless and only concerned with helping the practitioner find a higher self. Its true essence is to help find the balance of the 7 Chakras to create a clear path for the energy to rise (from the base of the spine).
The Origin of Kundalini Yoga
Kundalini yoga is said to be almost 5000 years old, marking its origin somewhere around 3300 BC. The earliest written mention of it is in the Yoga-Kundalini Upanishad, which is the eighty-sixth of 108 Muktita Upanishad that dates around 1000–500 BC.
In the late 1800s and the early 1900s, John Woodroffe, an Oxford graduate, wrote a book called, ‘ The Serpent Power: The secret of Tantric and Shakti Yoga ‘, under the pseudonym, Arthur Avalon. This book was very influential and turned a lot of curious minds towards Indian philosophy and spirituality.
In the 1960s, Yogi Bhajan traveled to California, and witnessed, first hand, the hippie cultural revolution. He saw that these people’s ideologies aligned to his Sikh upbringing.
But he also saw that the way those people were trying to achieve this form of higher self was aided by drugs and shrouded in mysticism. He also knew that he couldn’t teach Kundalini Yoga there due to its strict implication that the disciple had to prove themselves worthy and had to be of Indian lineage.
However, in 1968 during meditation on a weekend trip to Los Angeles, he saw a vision of the ancient spirituality combined with modern practicalities. He then set out on his mission to teach the west about Kundalini Yoga. He said that it was everybody’s birthright to be holy, healthy, and happy, which is why he established the 3HO (Healthy, Happy, Holy Organisation) and the Kundalini Research Institute.
He also wrote books and trained a lot of other yogis to be teachers. He believed that it was everybody’s responsibility to better our society through compassion and mindfulness. Today, Kundalini yoga is practiced all around the world.