Kundalini

What it is

In tantric and haṭha yoga traditions, kuṇḍalinī — "the coiled one" — is a latent power described as lying dormant at the base of the spine, coiled like a sleeping serpent, which practice may awaken and draw upward through the central channel to the crown.

The imagery is consistent: a serpent, a coil, a rising heat, a piercing of the centres in sequence. Kuṇḍalinī is identified with Śakti, the goddess and the active power of the divine, and her ascent to unite with Śiva at the crown is described as liberation.

Where it came from

The concept belongs to the tantric period rather than to the Vedas or early Upaniṣads. It is developed in Śaiva and Śākta tantric literature and in the haṭha yoga corpus — the fifteenth-century Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā is the best-known handbook, and treats awakening as the central purpose of its physical techniques.

It reached the West through the same channel as the chakras — Arthur Avalon's The Serpent Power (1919), whose title made the image famous in English.

The modern Western encounter is shaped by two later sources. Gopi Krishna's Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man (1967) is a first-person account of an awakening that went badly — years of burning sensation, insomnia, inability to eat, and what he described as near-madness before it resolved. And Siddha Yoga under Swami Muktananda popularised śaktipāt, transmission of the awakening by a guru, from the 1970s.

How it is used

Traditionally, through a combination of posture, breath retention, bandhas (internal locks), mudrās, mantra and visualisation, under a teacher, within a lineage, over a long period. The traditions are emphatic that preparation is required and that the sequence matters.

In the modern West it is pursued through Kundalini Yoga classes, intensive breathwork, retreat practice, and sometimes sought deliberately as an experience.

What we can and cannot say

We can say there is no evidence of an energy rising. No physiological measurement identifies anything ascending the spine, and the anatomical claims are those already discussed under the subtle body.

We can say the experiences are real, well documented, and sometimes seriously destabilising. The reported phenomena are consistent across many accounts: intense heat, involuntary movements and postures (kriyās), shaking, sensations of electricity or streaming, spontaneous vocalisation, light phenomena, prolonged insomnia, emotional flooding, terror, depersonalisation, and difficulty functioning in ordinary life for weeks or months.

And we can say something no other page in this section can: this has a diagnostic code. In 1994 the DSM-IV introduced the category "Religious or Spiritual Problem" (V62.89), a V-code covering distressing experiences of a religious or spiritual nature that are not in themselves mental disorders. It was added partly in response to sustained argument by transpersonal clinicians — Stanislav and Christina Grof's "spiritual emergency" framework and Lee Sannella's earlier clinical work on kundalini among them — that people in these states were being misdiagnosed as psychotic and treated accordingly.

That is a striking institutional fact. American psychiatry created a category because enough people were arriving in distress after contemplative practice that the existing options were causing harm.

We can say this connects to the wider evidence on adverse effects of intensive practice. The research by Willoughby Britton, Jared Lindahl and colleagues cited under medical harm documents the same cluster in meditators generally — and notes that teachers frequently had no framework for it and told practitioners to keep going.

We can say the traditional sources were less naive about this than the modern market. The texts insist on preparation, sequence, teacher and lineage, and warn about what happens when the sequence is forced. Modern practice frequently discards all four while retaining the technique, and the technique is the part that produces the effects.

We should say plainly that the guru dynamics described under the guru problem are especially live here. A teacher claiming to transmit awakening by touch or glance holds an unusual kind of authority, and several lineages built on that claim have been the subject of documented abuse findings.

We cannot say what is happening in these states. What can be said is that they are not imaginary, that they can hurt people, that a psychiatric category exists because of it, and that anyone in one deserves better than either "keep practising" or "you are psychotic".

Further reading

• Gopi Krishna, Kundalini (1967) — the first-person account, and unusually honest about the difficulty.
• Lindahl et al., "The Varieties of Contemplative Experience" (PLOS ONE, 2017).
• David Lukoff, Francis Lu and Robert Turner's work on the DSM-IV V-code, for how and why the category was created.