AS TAUGHT BY YOGI BHAJAN
When placed alongside the teachings of Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari and Maharaj Virsa Singh, it becomes strikingly apparent that at least in its earliest years, Mr Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga was not a distinct practice, but essentially a combination of yogic mechanics learned from the former and the Sikh-derived mantras and chanting from the latter. In the process of combining the teachings of classical Yoga, Tantra & Sikhism, Bhajan also made his Kundalini Yoga Brand more palatable and appealing to his young audience in the USA. He did this by inventing kriyas and claiming that they treat specific issues such as increasing stamina and strength, conquring sleep and pain, making skin glow and appearance beautiful etc.
A franchise model was then applied to this brand created by Mr Bhajan. He opened several pilot institutes and started printing out teacher training certificates. This expansion compromised the depth and actual maturity which comes with time and dedication into the process, and now a days we come across kundalini yoga teachers who themselves havent experienced or awakened kundalini. In case of an actual authentic kundalini event, the inexperienced teachers might even cause more havoc by trying to control rather than supporting through the process. It is like the blind leading the blind.
Most of the kriyas within the practice are not aimed at awakening or even indirectly working with the kundalini process, rather just manifesting certain desirable states. They are simply experimental techniques, that too fragmented and incomplete, technicaly as well as philosophically, since they are taken in parts from traditions that had some opposing ideologies. Sikhism is not a school of Yoga, and as we have seen, it is highly critical of many Yoga systems, and positively the antithesis of Tantric Yoga. Bhajan brought together elements of disparate practices and presented them to his students as his own distinct entity with a romantic mythology surrounding it. In an attempt to invent something new from combining and modifying practices, He ended up distorting and misinterpreting most of it.
The practice can even be dangerous to the nervous and endocrine system, as some of the kriyas use excessive hyperventilation and breath stimulation to reach hightened states which arent sufficiently integrated or grounded. This leaves the practitioner rather disoriented and incapable of functioning properly or induces mental delusions of grandeur , ego inflation and other instabilities. The excessive prana generated forcibly, also exerts pressure and makes the organs and glands overwork and eventually fatigued. The practice takes energy up the spine but one is not taught how to ground it back down, which is an equally important part of the process. Infact it is even missing the master key, the main switch closing kundalini circuitry, the king of all mudras and bandhas, that is the application of kechari, which also grounds and centers the practitioner.
Kriya is not something you ‘Do’, rather something that happens spontaneously, without any volition, from the flux of kundalini moving through you with its own inteligence. Read more here:
The practices enforce and feed the very entity it is trying to eradicate, namely the separate sense of self , ego. Read more here:
To realise the ultimate one must ultimately let go all practice and techniques. This post explains why: