Samkhya-Yoga-Kundalini
People may wonder, how is anonymous author Old School Yoga qualified to provide instruction in the practice of kundalini? It is true that I am not a swami and do not have formal training or academic credentials relevant to the subject matter. I can only speak from my own experience, and so I will relate my experience and readers can judge for themselves whether or not to accept what I have to offer.
For probably the first ten years that I studied and practiced yoga, I was skeptical of the claims about kundalini. I am a child of the technologically driven American culture, and steeped in Samkhya philosophy, which makes no mention of kundalini at all, but is oriented toward things that are observable or the product of reason and are provable. The Yoga Sutras also makes only very oblique references to chakras and things of that nature. My thinking was, if it’s not part of Samkhya-Yoga, I’m not buying it.
At a certain point, I had started to look through the Yoga Upanishads and came across the Yoga Kundalini Upanishad. Reading through that, I was able to decipher that it was describing a practice, and I decided to try it without much expectation of what the result might be. The very first time that I tried it, I was stunned by what happened. It was like getting struck by a bolt of lightning, or as if somebody had slipped a powerful drug into my drink, but beyond any psychedelic I’d ever experienced. It was an all enveloping white light, but otherwise an indescribable experience. It shook me up quite a bit. Shortly afterward, due to economic necessity, I started a job that required constant travel in austere conditions, and I did not practice again for seven years.
In recent years, I’ve come across a few others who have described similar experiences. Swami Sarvapriyananda has called it “the uncreated light”. I’ve come to realize that my experience was not the be all and end all of kundalini practice, but more of a wake up call for me.
The first thing that readers should take away from this is that the kundalini experience is a real thing that can be awakened by understanding and practicing correctly.
Getting struck by a bolt of lightning is not necessarily the best way to wake up. All teachers of kundalini advocate a more gradual approach that is much more benign. Learned incrementally over a period of time, there is nothing to fear from kundalini practice, and it can actually help you to consciously evolve into your best self.
My initial experience was a peak experience, and most people do not go through that, at least not initially. It is, however, the result of a well-defined practice that can be used by experienced pratitioners from time to time.
I do not recommend that people try reading the Yoga Kundalini Upanishad. Unless you have some background and experience with that kind of text, you probably won’t understand much of it, and may become discouraged and confused.