Kundalini

Edited by Aaron M. Ullrey

At first glance, Kundalini seems highly specific. It is tempting to approach it as an eternal and static standard: This “Serpent Power” is a feminine energy that rests coiled at the base of the spine, in the subtle center of the muladhara (or root) chakra. When awakened, it rises like streaming fire to the crown of the head, transforming mind and body along the way. While rooted in a specific body of medieval Sanskrit literature, however, this model is far from eternal, static, or indeed ubiquitous, even in its native South Asia. Its seeming specificity belies a complex reality. In contemporary global spirituality, Kundalini behaves as a catch-all category. Every experience of energy within the body becomes Kundalini. Every serpentine symbol—Kundalini.  

This essay approaches Kundalini in its modern global form by broadly tracing the transmission history that produced it as well as outlining the major trends that define its manifestations from the twentieth century onwards.¹ It begins with a close look at the paradigmatic Kundalini experience made popular in the mid-twentieth century by an Indian civil administrator named Gopi Krishna. It then examines the entangled roots, both South Asian and Western, that helped form the conceptual and symbolic scaffolding of Gopi Krishna’s narrative. Having done so, the essay then traces the refractions of Kundalini, which are found in these roots and brought together by Gopi Krishna’s globally renowned book on the topic, into three trends that continue to define Kundalini today: the physicalization of Kundalini as a phenomenon, the psychologization of Kundalini as an experience and its ties to spiritual emergence/y and crisis, and the popular bundling of Kundalini and yoga. 

Crucially, each of these three trends incorporates its own version of claims to universality. All human bodies have a nervous system. All cultures have something to say about mystical experiences. All spiritual practices promise such experiences. This is how Kundalini can become everything. And yet it remains a slippery thing. Because how can “everything” be encompassed by any one standard model, much less one term? 

If there is any single node in the web of modern Kundalini narratives that serves as a true locus of convergence—drawing on much of what came before, feeding into nearly everything that comes after—it is the account of Gopi Krishna (1903–1984), first published in 1967 in the book Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man.  

The book details a life-altering experience that befell Gopi Krishna—then a government clerk in Jammu in the region of Kashmir—in the winter of 1938. By his own account, Gopi Krishna sat engaged in a simple meditation when he perceived a warm sensation at the base of his spine, quickly followed by a buzzing in his ears and a lightness in his head. The warmth grew, traveling up his spinal column until it blossomed into a consciousness of indescribable bliss. This experience would repeat itself several times over the subsequent days. Gopi Krishna continued his meditation practice, exhilarated by his apparent success. By the fifth day, however, the ecstasy began to turn into detachment, depression, and physical discomfort, driving Gopi Krishna to abandon his efforts in an attempt to return to normalcy. 

Unfortunately, it was too late. Roughly three weeks after the first stirrings of what Gopi Krishna came to identify as Kundalini, he entered a period of acute crisis. Over the subsequent month, several times he found himself at the edge of death: his heart racing, his stomach and bladder engulfed by a sensation of red-hot needles. Endlessly consumed by heat, he could not eat or sleep. 

At last, the crisis passed, though some effects lingered, forever altering Gopi Krishna’s metabolic function and shrouding his vision in a brilliant silver glow. Upon reprising his meditation practice, he would go on to experience another period of crisis in 1943, and his expanding consciousness finally resolved into what he interpreted as a state of enlightenment in 1949. 

Before the onset of his experience, Gopi Krishna had little knowledge of Kundalini. He did not refer to his meditation practice as “yoga,” and it seems likely that the term “Kundalini” was suggested to him by an ascetic he encountered during his early period of unease. During the first crisis, Gopi Krishna consulted a handful of local practitioners in addition to writing to Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950), a relatively well-known teacher of yoga residing in Pondicherry. Indeed, it is this correspondence with Aurobindo that verifies Gopi Krishna’s account of his experience as published nearly three decades later. 

Aurobindo cordially declined to take on Gopi Krishna as a student, yet it is clear that Aurobindo’s teachings on spiritual evolution deeply impacted Gopi Krishna’s own later understanding on Kundalini as the “evolutionary energy in man.” Left to his own devices, Gopi Krishna spent years absorbing and digesting the available literature on Kundalini and yoga. Though it is not described as such in his original letters to Aurobindo, by the time Kundalini appears in his 1967 book, it is clearly named the “serpent power,” and he clothes it in all the tropes of the existing literature. 

Importantly, this should not be understood to mean that Gopi Krishna was somehow disingenuous in his later account—only that he acquired new language through which to interpret his experience. Equally importantly, though Gopi Krishna clearly familiarized himself with the historical sources on Kundalini, including available medieval tantric literature, he did not dwell much on these models in his own account, having found them to be largely visionary and metaphorical and therefore of limited use. 

Instead, Gopi Krishna turned to the explanatory power of science, a move that many prominent modernizers of yoga had already made over the preceding century. Early editions of Gopi Krishna’s book interspersed accounts of his Kundalini experience with psychological commentary by his friend James Hillman (1926–2011), a specialist in the system of Carl Jung. In his second book, The Biological Basis of Religion and Genius (1972), Gopi Krishna collaborated with the German physicist Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker (1912–2007). Together with a global network of associates, he launched research initiatives aimed at establishing and explaining the biological dimensions of Kundalini as an evolutionary mechanism.²  

Though these initiatives yielded little in the way of concrete results, the networks that they created solidified Gopi Krishna’s status as the modern voice of Kundalini. This status was buttressed by two factors. First was the sheer rhetorical power of Gopi Krishna’s narrative. It was a raw report of experience, bringing the esoteric dimensions of Kundalini to life in intimate detail. It made the strange human, if not exactly familiar. Second was that the general features of Gopi Krishna’s framework actually were familiar insofar as they were formed in response to the already existing “canon” of the topic. 

Modern popularizers of Hindu traditions in general and yoga in particular, as well as Western proponents of various metaphysical traditions grounded in European thought, had long been working to translate the pre-modern language of subtle bodies and spiritual energies into the contemporary language of biology and physics. Parallel to this physiological turn was the evolution of psychology. Carl Jung famously delivered a series of lectures on Kundalini in 1932, and the concept became a tool for elaborating his own framework of human development as what he calls individuation. And, while Gopi Krishna never advanced himself as a teacher of yoga, the term became a fixture of his narrative, providing an anchor for readers faced with a tumultuous marketplace of yoga gurus. To understand the tangle in which Gopi Krishna found himself, it is helpful to consider how he came to understand his experience as Kundalini and to call it the “serpent power,” a term that leads us to another very famous book—but also, to so much more. 

The Serpent Power, published by Arthur Avalon in 1919, has had its place as the authoritative exposition on Kundalini on the bookshelves of everyone from Carl Jung to B.K.S. Iyengar. It was a poorly kept secret that Arthur Avalon was the nom de plume of Sir John George Woodroffe (1865–1936), a British barrister stationed in Colonial Calcutta. The secret was poorly kept on purpose, as Woodroffe’s identity and station lent an air of impartial authority and genteel propriety to the beleaguered topic that occupied the majority of Avalon’s literary corpus. Namely, Goddess (Śākta) tantra. 

In colonial India, tantra was associated primarily with idolatry, intoxication, and illicit sex—perversion, pure and simple.³ But Woodroffe’s direct identification with his Arthur Avalon pseudonym was somewhat of a red herring, if a strategic one. In reality, Avalon was not one man but several. In addition to Woodroffe, the team of collaborators included Bengali scholars and tantric practitioners like Atalbihari Ghosh (1864–1936) and Shivachandra Bhattacharyya Vidyarnava (1860–1913) among a number of others.⁴ Woodroffe himself may have received two tantric initiations. He and his wife Ellen, who likewise underwent initiations and studied Sanskrit alongside him, were closely involved with the Theosophical Society, as were a number of Woodroffe’s collaborators.⁵ 

It is therefore not surprising that the men behind Avalon chose to title their book after a term actively being used by Theosophical authors, though it is difficult to say whether this choice was despite or due to the fact that a significant portion of the book’s lengthy introduction is spent arguing against Theosophical models of Kundalini. “Though ‘Theosophical’ teaching is largely inspired by Indian ideas,” wrote Avalon, “the meaning which it attributes to the Indian terms which it employs is not always that given to these terms by Indians themselves. This is sometimes confusing and misleading, a result which would have been avoided had the writers of this school adopted in all cases their own nomenclature and definitions.”⁶ At over three hundred pages, the introduction of The Serpent Power, which balances such contemporary disputes with a primer on non-dual tantric metaphysics, accounts for over half the book’s text. The rest is devoted to a direct translation of the Ṣaṭcakra Nirūpaṇa (“The Description of the Six Cakras”), a sixteenth-century text from the Southern Transmission of the non-dual Kaula Śaiva tradition. 

Yet, if we are looking to The Serpent Power in search of roots, two notes of caution are in order. First, Kaula models of Kundalini, which are in themselves rife with diversity, are perhaps the most elaborate, but they are not representative of the entire medieval Sanskrit corpus where Kundalini is referenced, and this Sanskrit corpus is itself not representative of the complex South Asian cultural tropes on which its understandings of Kundalini draw. Second, the “serpent power” is not simply a translation. It is a bridge to another cultural network. When Avalon accuses the Theosophists of imputing upon Kundalini meanings not found among Indians, this is what is at stake. Euro-American Theosophical authors, in particular, often synthesized Sanskrit terminology with concepts rooted in non-Indic traditions such as Neo-Platonism, Hermetism, and Gnostic Christianity. In these traditions, the serpent took on a range of sometimes analogous and sometimes wholly distinct meanings. And, so, if roots are what we are after, we must keep these tangled serpents in mind. 

Within the Kaula tantric literature that emerged beginning around the eighth century CE, Kundalini is understood as an instantiation of the divine feminine energy as Śakti. Along with the masculine principle of Śiva as pure luminous consciousness, Śakti forms the non-dual polarity that characterizes ultimate reality. Within the human body, this Śakti energy rests at the lower entrance of the body’s central channel (suṣumnā), variously located at the base of the spine, in the abdomen, or in the heart. The energy is coiled in a state of resting potential—Kundalini or Kundali is most simply translated as “the coiled one”—and can be awakened through meditative and physical practices. When Kundalini uncoils and straightens, rising up the central channel, which is generally understood to follow the path of the spinal column, she reverses the process of cosmic creation within the body, burning up and collapsing the body’s material constituents into their more subtle forms, and ultimately returns the practitioner to the primordial state of non-dual consciousness by uniting the rising feminine principle with its masculine counterpart at the crown of the head. In some texts, this is represented as a form of voluntary death. Meanwhile, other sources describe Kundalini’s return, as she bathes the body in immortal nectar, heralding the practitioner’s transformation into a living embodiment of liberated consciousness. 

While the principle of raising something up the body’s central channel is a common feature of yoga traditions, there is quite a bit of variety when it comes to defining what rises. That rising thing might be Kundalini (or Candali, “The Fiery One,” an analogous concept and figure in Buddhist traditions), but it may just as easily be jīva (the living soul), prāṇa (the vital breath), bindu (seminal essence), or the power of mantra.⁷ There are certainly conceptual overlaps between all of these principles and Kundalini, but to equate them all directly to Kundalini would be irresponsible. To complicate matters further, there are also tantric texts belonging to Viṣṇu-centric traditions, rather than Śiva-oriented or Goddess-oriented traditions, that use the term Kundalini but apply it to an obstructive principle that blocks the central channel and that must be undone through practice.⁸  

Kundalini’s coiled form is frequently compared to a sleeping serpent, and there are certainly a number of symbolic associations that add depth to the simile. Nāgas, a class of divine serpentine shape-shifters, are found across South Asia in Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions. They share commonalities with other mythic serpents in the traditions of East and South East Asia,⁹ but also offer compelling analogies to ancient Mediterranean and later European motifs, as I will outline shortly. The association of famous Nāgas with equally famous Hindu deities—Śeṣa with Viṣṇu and Vāsuki with Śiva—certainly enhances the divine resonance of Kundalini as a serpent within the body. Both of the aforementioned Nāgas also incorporate older Indo-European mythemes, likewise found in the famous Vedic serpent Vṛtra, tying their deadly venom to a deathless elixir, and therefore the cosmic duality of creation and destruction, death and immortality, all of which is central to conceptions of Kundalini. 

However, it might be argued that when it comes to imagery, Kundalini’s serpentine shape is secondary to her fiery nature­—an association that is undeniable when one considers the Kundalini’s analog in the Buddhist Candali as the “Fiery One.” The identification of the Sun with the power of time in the macrocosm and the gastric fire in the microcosm—the “devouring” principle that consumes matter until life turns to death and creation to destruction—is a long-standing motif in South Asian cosmology. It takes on new significance in medieval alchemical traditions, closely tied to Kaula tantric models of the body and the cosmos alike.¹⁰ There, the union of the Sun and Moon, consuming fire and immortal elixir, embodying the cosmic union of Śakti and Śiva, became analogous to the chemical union of sulfur and mercury. And, as alchemical texts declare, “as in metal, so in the body”¹¹ —meaning yogic practices to raise Kundalini were a form of biological alchemy. The union of dualities yields perfection. 

And it is in these two symbols—the Sun and the serpent—that we find the bridge that early twentieth-century Euro-American Theosophists crossed, and the tangle that holds modern notions of Kundalini. The traditions of the ancient Mediterranean had their own significant serpents. There was the serpent that wound itself around the staff of the Greek healer god Asclepius, the twin serpents wrapping the caduceus of Greek Hermes and Roman Mercury, and the self-devouring serpent known as the ouroboros. Most obviously, of course, there was the Biblical serpent that infamously tempted humanity into its Fall from divine grace. And yet, even that serpent—who inevitably got tangled with the others just mentioned as traditions interacted, intermingled, and evolved across time and space—took on new valences in Gnostic and Hermetic forms of early Christianity and in the alchemical traditions that kept their essences alive even amidst later European Christian orthodoxy. Hermes lent his name to the larger “Hermetica,” a body of spiritual literature deeply entangled with the practice of alchemy. Mercury became the alchemical element itself. And the ouroboros came to symbolize the oneness of primordial matter. 

The traditions of the ancient Mediterranean also had their version of spiritual ascent, often understood in astrological terms. The soul would journey through the planetary spheres, following a map that charted its path along the zodiac, to a divine realm represented by the Sun.¹² As with South Asian tantra, such traditions passed along their practices and corresponding cosmologies through a system of initiation. Also like South Asian tantra, their sectarian nature meant that they often differed quite dramatically in the details and even the broad strokes of their worldviews. For instance, insofar as the serpent was often symbolically tied to matter, pessimistic forms of Gnosticism that understood matter as inherently corrupt and even evil often depicted the ouroboros as a sort of dragon, binding the disk of the Sun and blocking souls on their route to escape.¹³ (Recall, here, those models of Kundalini that treated it is as an obstruction blocking the central channel.) More optimistically, Hermetic traditions regarded the world as a divine creation and therefore understood the serpent as an embodiment of divine wisdom (sophia) and understood its bearers, such as Hermes or Asclepius, as sages who had come to light the path to liberation. 

Thinkers associated with the Theosophical Society, founded as an esoteric group in New York in the late nineteenth century, drew on all these traditions. For them, the Sun remained the realm of divine illumination to which human beings must ascend by transforming their bodies into perfected “solar” vehicles. Kundalini was often understood as a positive version of the Biblical serpent, an emissary of divine destiny.¹⁴ The more Hermetically-inclined among the Theosophists theorized that the divine fire of the Sun had its counterpart in the material core of the Earth, and humans might return to their divine birthright by drawing on this earthly fire. Kundalini became the fire inside matter—both the macrocosm of the earth and the microcosm of the human body—as well as the serpentine force that carries it to union with the divine fire above.¹⁵ 

Nearly without exception, among Euro-American Theosophists, Kundalini became rendered as the caduceus of Mercury. The rod and its twin serpents seemed to perfectly embody tantric descriptions of the central channel (suṣumnā) and the secondary channels (īḍā and piṅgalā) said to run along either side of it in South Asian sources. Meanwhile, those same South Asian sources seemed to put into concrete and embodied terms a vision of spiritual ascent that in the European mystical and alchemical traditions had largely lost its specificity. The rod of Mercury, and therefore the bodily path of Kundalini, formed an axis joining heaven (the Sun) and Earth. Instead of the old astrological maps that functioned like threads running through a labyrinth, Kundalini opened a direct path from the material to the divine. Awaken the serpent, and its fire bears you upwards. 

Of course, there are quite a few complications to this narrative. For one, despite their compelling analogies, there are crucial and irreducible differences between the South Asian models and Mediterranean-turned-Euro-American ones. The modern global synthesis of Kundalini attempts to collapse two internally diverse and complex systems into a single and standard model. No wonder that first impression of Kundalini’s simultaneous universality and specificity quickly dissolves into a cloud of symbolic and experiential signifiers that captures everything and therefore nothing. 

Second, as Gopi Krishna’s narrative quickly teaches us, Kundalini offers a compelling explanation for experiences of acute physical and spiritual crisis. In fact, it does so specifically because of the concept’s historical tendency to bridge the physical and the spiritual. However, in a global culture ruled by materialist physics and medicine, such a concept requires, at the very least, some translation. 

Nineteenth and twentieth-century advances in the physical and biological sciences certainly shaped the evolving understandings of Kundalini, especially on the global stage. However, this was hardly the first time that Kundalini had been considered in physical terms. From its roots in South Asia, the phenomenon was situated in medical models of the gastric fire, the movement of breath and life force, and the functions of sexual fluids. The advent of haṭha yogic traditions around the thirteenth century brought together tantric visionary models with the bodily techniques of ascetics, grounded in the control of vital forces through the manipulation of breath, internal muscular tension, and bodily movements. Visionary tantric models of the body had already associated Kundalini with various anatomical features, locations, or functions. But haṭha yogic sources introduced the novel idea that Kundalini could be awakened through distinctly physical in addition to meditative means.  

Likewise, pre- and early-modern European understandings of the body’s biological systems frequently blurred physical and spiritual categories, most literally through the persisting Galenic understandings of natural, vital, and animal spirits, which were thought to be responsible for the body’s various functions, but also in the form of later iatromechanical theories that sought to bridge the aforementioned model with emerging understandings of electromagnetism. When references to Kundalini first began appearing in anglophone sources in the late nineteenth century, the energy was frequently described as a force akin to electricity within the body. 

From this time onwards, it became increasingly common to associate the visionary cakras of tantric traditions with the body’s largest nerve plexuses. Bamandas Basu’s article “The Anatomy of the Tantras” (1888), published in in The Theosophist, was perhaps the first published source to do so, thus establishing the interpretation in Theosophical circles.¹⁶ However, after this theory was adopted by Swami Vivekananda, including in his wildly popular Raja Yoga (1896), it became nearly ubiquitous. Extrapolating on this model, if Kundalini traveled along or through the cakras, then it was only natural to conclude that it must have some connection to nerve impulses. 

Following the hatha-yogic understanding that Kundalini can be aroused through physical methods such as control of the breath (prāṇāyāma), Vivekananda described the process as follows: 

In the first place, from rhythmical breathing comes a tendency of all the molecules in the body to move in the same direction. When mind changes into will, the nerve currents change into a motion similar to electricity, because the nerves have been proved to show polarity under the action of electric currents. This shows that when the will is transformed into the nerve currents, it is changed into something like electricity. When all the motions of the body have become perfectly rhythmical, the body has, as it were, become a gigantic battery of will. This tremendous will is exactly what the Yogi wants. This is, therefore, a physiological explanation of the breathing exercise. It tends to bring a rhythmic action in the body, and helps us, through the respiratory centre, to control the other centres. The aim of Pranayama here is to rouse the coiled-up power in the Mulâdhâra, called the Kundalini.¹⁷ 

Vivekananda’s model brought haṭha-yogic understandings of the body’s internal physiological and energetic dynamics together with interpretations of physiology and electromagnetism, already common in Western systems like Mesmerism and Mind Cure, and with various forms of spiritualized physical culture. However, although it linked Kundalini to both physiological and physical phenomena, Vivekananda’s model did not reduce Kundalini to these dimensions. Kundalini was the crucial bridge between the physical and metaphysical. Vivekananda described it as a latent power comprised of accrued action and sensation—something perhaps half-way between traditional Indian notions of saṃskāras and the sort of thing early psychologists would soon dub as the subconscious. According to Vivekananda, this power, in small amounts, is responsible for the ordinary phenomena of dreams and imagination. If it is augmented and awakened through meditation, then this power can flood the nervous system to induce a reaction far beyond mental states made possible by normal sense perception, allowing the yogi to project his mind and his will throughout the whole of nature. In effect, this was Vivekananda’s explanation for the traditional notion of yogic superpowers (siddhis). 

However, others went much further in physicalizing Kundalini. Foremost among them was Vasant G. Rele, an Indian physician whose 1927 book The Mysterious Kundalini identified Kundalini explicitly and directly with the right vagus nerve. Reinterpreting the esoteric imagery of medieval tantric and haṭha yoga literature to be coded discussions of human anatomy, Rele adopted the now common understanding of cakras as nerve plexuses, and he extended this translation to encompass all other features of yogic subtle anatomy. The śaktis, originally female deities ruling over individual cakras, become the efferent nerve impulses originating from associated regions of the central nervous system and acting upon the body’s various organs. The central channel of the suṣumnā is the spinal cord; the two side channels of the iḍā and piṅgalā are the gangliated cords of the sympathetic nervous system. The thousand-petaled sahasrāra, the seventh pseudo-cakra of many Kaula sources, is “the plexus of nerves of a thousand branches or the cerebrum,”¹⁸ and, thus the divine nectar of amṛta becomes cerebro-spinal fluid. All this set the stage for Rele to identify Kundalini with vagus nerve—not a dynamic power but a static organ in the body. 

Rele was thus able to reframe the awakening of Kundalini as a specific physiological phenomenon within the body induced by the practice of various haṭha-yogic techniques, such as muscle “locks” and breath control. He proposed that the yogi uses such techniques to stimulate some nervous impulses while inhibiting others, eventually deranging the normal functions of the nervous system in a way that renders normally unconscious bodily processes open to the mind. Put simply, to awaken Kundalini means establishing control over the vagus nerve and, therefore, establishing control over normally involuntary functions of the parasympathetic nervous system. 

As for Vivekananda, this ability served for Rele as an explanatory function linked to the purportedly extraordinary abilities of yogis, such as stopping the heart at will. It was also here though that his physiological reductionism met its steepest challenge. Speculative notions of physiological causality aside, we can at least allow a clear link between the action of the heart and the nervous system—a link that becomes far more tenuous when considering other traditional yogic feats referenced by Rele, such as knowledge of the past and future or the transmutation of metals.¹⁹ 

Ultimately, the extremity of Rele’s physiological reductionism sets an outer limit for a general tendency that proved popular in contemporary sources, especially those concerned with modernizing understandings of yogic practices. The notion that Kundalini is (at least partly) a physiological force that could be controlled through physical methods was at the center of its marriage with the global popularization of yoga. I will address this at greater length shortly. However, another important aspect of Kundalini’s twentieth-century development, especially in the West, was the notion that its physiological dimensions could be activated not only physically but mechanically—that is, activated without any willing intent on the part of the experiencer. 

This framework is best exemplified by the work of Itzak Bentov (1923–1979), an Israeli-American biomechanical engineer and consciousness researcher whose model would become the standard for twentieth-century clinical explorations of Kundalini experience. Bentov identified a “sensory-motor cortex syndrome” or a “physio-kundalini syndrome” that he viewed as a mechanism of evolution of the nervous system. Technically speaking, Bentov’s Kundalini model amounts to a “stress-release mechanism” by virtue of which the nervous system is able to clear itself of accumulated stress and thus enter a state of greater maturity allowing for a higher and vaster functioning of consciousness.²⁰ Even more technically speaking, Bentov postulated that this mechanism manifests itself in a rhythmic motion that develops in the aorta, the body’s main artery that runs from the left ventricle of the heart and passes along the front of the spine through the chest and abdominal cavities to terminate in the pelvis. This rhythmic motion is caused by a specific interaction of the heart rate, the respiratory rate, and the motion of the diaphragm, which can be achieved intentionally during meditation but also “accidentally” due to exposure to certain mechanical vibrations, electromagnetic waves, and even sounds. (Bentov suggests the mechanism can be activated by a car ride or an air conditioning duct, provided that these produce frequencies in the required range.) ²¹ Essentially, the aorta becomes a simple harmonic oscillator that activates a number of other resonant vibratory motions within the body, producing sensory phenomena like internal sounds and ultimately creating a pulsating magnetic field around the brain. 

Unlike purely speculative earlier physiological models, Bentov supported his conjectures with data collected using a specially modified ballistocardiograph, an instrument that can detect micromovements within the body produced by the ejection of blood from the heart. He also attempted to substantiate the postulated field produced by the head through magnetic biofeedback. However, Bentov’s conclusions necessarily relied on subjective reporting from his subjects. Because symptoms can manifest sporadically over the course of months and even years, Bentov noted that they can be difficult to record accurately. He nevertheless suggested that the typical “syndrome” progresses as follows: 

Its complete presentation usually begins as a transient paresthesia of the toes or ankle with numbness and tingling. Occasionally, there is diminished sensitivity to touch or pain, or even partial paralysis of the foot or leg. The process most frequently begins on the left side and ascends in a sequential manner from foot, leg, hip, to involve completely the left side of the body, including the face. Once the hip is involved, it is not uncommon to experience an intermittent throbbing or rhythmic rumbling-like sensation in the lower lumbar and sacral spine. This is followed by an ascending sensation which rises along the spine to the cervical and occipital regions of the head.  

At these latter areas, severe pressure-caused occipital headaches and cervical neck aches may be experienced at times. These pressures, usually transient but occasionally persistent, may also be felt anywhere along the spine, right or left side of chest, different parts of the head and the eyes. Some individuals will notice tingling sensations descending along the face to the laryngeal areas. The tracheolaryngeal region may also be felt as a sudden rushing of air to and fro. Respiration may become spasmodic with involuntarily occurring maximum expirations. Various auditory tones have been noted, from constant low-pitched hums to high-pitched ringing. Visual aberrations and temporary decrease or loss of vision has been observed. The sequence of symptoms continues later down into the lower abdominal region.²² 

Because the mechanism is ultimately geared at releasing stress, it is only keenly felt when stress is encountered, meaning that a relatively relaxed person may not feel much at all. Indeed, Bentov noted that meditators who follow this pattern may experience lighter symptoms. However, when the syndrome occurs spontaneously, activated by something other than an intentional practice, it is associated with trauma and frequently leads to hospitalization and is diagnosed as schizophrenia.²³ 

It was this traumatic element of Bentov’s model that led to its adoption by the California-based psychiatrist Lee Sannella (1916–2010). Indeed, though it later appeared as part of Bentov’s own larger work on consciousness, the model was first published as an appendix to Sannella’s Kundalini: Psychosis or Transcendence? (1976).  

In Sannella’s work, the physicalization of Kundalini comes full circle. Channeled through the lens of psychiatry, the physical blends into the psychological, and thence back into the metaphysical. 

Insofar as Kundalini is tangled up in traditions of meditation and visionary experience, its psychological dimensions are no more novel than its physiological ones. When it comes to the modern discipline of psychology, however, Kundalini makes its first and most notable appearance in the work of Carl Jung, specifically in a now-published series of seminar lectures that he delivered on the topic in 1932. 

Jung’s library contained a heavily annotated copy of The Serpent Power.²⁴ But if Avalon’s text sought to codify a historical and Indian model of Kundalini, Jung proved nearly entirely immune to its agenda. Jung’s understanding of Kundalini was decidedly novel, insofar as it represented the cutting edge of his own psychological theories, and it was decidedly Western insofar as the imagery and symbolism it drew on arose primarily out of European alchemical and Gnostic traditions. 

While Jung has been critiqued by both practitioners and scholars for appropriating Kundalini to serve his own agenda, this is not the most productive way to approach Jung’s theories and their impact. In his introduction to the most recently published edition of Jung’s Kundalini lectures, Sonu Shamdasani explains that “for Jung, the Western ‘discovery’ of the East constituted a critical chapter in the ‘discovery’ of the collective unconscious.”²⁵ In Jung’s understanding, South Asian models of Kundalini became another culturally specific data point among many others in a broader theory concerning the psychological process of individuation, the embodied actualization of the human self, enacted through revealing, encountering, and integrating the various aspects of the psyche to achieve wholeness. Jung understood individuation as a universal phenomenon but one that could only be observed refracted through the lens of the specific cultural and historical context in which it occurred. Keeping this latter fact in mind, Shamdasani argues that Jung engaged with his data and sources in an earnest and constructive way. “It would also be a mistake,” Shamdasani writes, “to view Jung’s commentary as consisting in the translation of the terms of Kundalini yoga into psychological concepts whose meaning had already been delimited in advance, for in the course of translating the terms of Kundalini yoga into those of analytical psychology, the latter became altered and extended. At base, the symbolism of the cakras enabled Jung to develop an archetypal regional topography ofthe psyche and to provide a narration of the process of individuation in terms of the imaginal transit between these regions.”²⁶ 

Thus, for Jung, Kundalini became abstracted into an internal journey through the psychological landscape. Yet, the holistic nature of Jung’s system means that this journey does not take place only in the personal and immaterial space of the mind, but it is woven into the mind’s relationship to the body as well as to the cosmos. Jung’s treatment of Kundalini is not systematic in itself—the references are scattered and the connections are inconsistent—but it figures into his larger system of individuation, where it becomes a refraction of the anima, the feminine and unconscious aspects of the psyche. Jung associates serpent symbolism with the lower torso and its organs, and especially with the sympathetic nervous system, which he ultimately ties to his idea of the collective unconscious. He explains: 

In the sympathetic nervous system you would experience not as a person but as mankind, or even as belonging to the animal kingdom; you would experience nothing in particular, but the whole phenomena of life as if it were one. . . . But you see, this collective unconscious, in spite of its being everywhere, or in spite of its universal awareness, is located in the body; the sympathetic nervous system of the body is the organ by which you have the possibility of such awareness; therefore you can say the collective unconscious is in the lower centers of the brain and the spinal cord and the sympathetic system. Speaking accurately, this is the organ by which you experience the collective unconscious, which means as if there were nothing but you and the world—whether you are the world, or extend over the whole world, or the whole world is in you, is all the same.²⁷ 

Identifying Kundalini as the “Soter, the Saviour Serpent of the Gnostics,”²⁸ Jung frames it as a sort of suprapersonal subtle body that serves as a bridge to the collective unconscious. To awaken Kundalini is to activate the unconscious within the human self, thereby awakening the divine as a gateway to the ultimate goal of individuation. 

At this point, it is worth remembering that when Gopi Krishna’s account was first published, it appeared interspersed with James Hillman’s Jungian commentary. Catalogued in his Red Book and first made public only in 2009, Jung’s accounts of his own mystical experiences attest that individuation is not an easy process. Hillman’s Jungian imagery sometimes finds itself at odds with Gopi Krishna’s own culturally-specific interpretations of his experience, but there is a shared sense of spiritual trauma that nevertheless allows the commentary to resonate. And it is in the middle of this particular entanglement that we can locate approaches like the one that yielded Lee Sannella’s aforementioned Kundalini: Psychosis or Transcendence.  

Sannella ran a psychiatric clinic in Berkeley from 1962 until 1972. In 1974, he co-founded the Kundalini Clinic in San Francisco. Building on Bentov’s model as well as observations made in his own clinical practice, Sannella proposed what he called a “physio-kundalini cycle.” By “physio-kundalini” Sannella meant approximately the same thing as Bentov, which is “those aspects of kundalini awakening, both physiological and psychological, which can be accounted for by a purely physiological mechanism.”²⁹ However, due to his perspective as a psychiatrist, Sannella’s model included additional cognitive dimensions that Bentov did not explore, and he identified four basic categories of “signs and symptoms” characteristic of Kundalini awakening:

1. Motor: any manifestation that can be physically observed and measured, including bodily movement and abnormal breathing patterns.
2. Sensory: inner perceptions such as bodily sensations (tingling, vibrating, itching, orgasm, and so on), sensations of hot and cold, lights or visions, and sounds.
3. Interpretive: mental processes that interpret experience such as extreme emotions, distorted thought processes, and detachment or dissociation.
4. Non-physiological: phenomena that have no currently accepted physical explanation (paranormal phenomena, basically), such as out-of-body experiences or psychic perceptions.³⁰  

Sannella’s account drew on a considerable body of clinical data gathered from patients, but it struggled to accord itself with “traditional” South Asian sources, a fact he himself acknowledged. A more charitable analysis might suggest that these difficulties are due more to the limited form in which the diversity of those historical models was represented in sources available to Bentov and his contemporaries and less to an actual disjunction between Sannella’s data and the historical models of Kundalini. However, Sannella’s agenda, like Jung’s before him, did not lie in accurate historical representation. Even more than this, his approach was not psychological but psychiatric. That is, Sannella’s primary concern was not theoretical but applied and practical. 

Thus, above all, Samnella’s framing of Kundalini argued that it should be treated as a spiritual rebirth, which only appears pathological if one misinterprets what it is. This, Sannella says, would be the same for physical birth if it were examined only in terms of its “symptoms.” Emergence, in short, is a gruesome process but a vital one. 

This was the precise attitude of Christina and Stanislav Grof, founders of the Spiritual Emergency Network (SEN, established in 1980, subsequently renamed the Spiritual Emergence Network, also SEN). Pointing to the notion that “some of the dramatic experiences and unusual states of mind that traditional psychiatry diagnoses and treats as mental diseases are actually crises of personal transformation,” the Grofs argued that “when these states of mind are properly understood and treated supportively rather than suppressed by standard psychiatric routines, they can be healing and have very beneficial effects on the people who experience them. This positive potential is expressed in the term spiritual emergency, which is a play on words, suggesting both a crisis and an opportunity of rising to a new level of awareness, or ‘spiritual emergence.’”³¹ Kundalini awakening represented one of ten types of spiritual crisis codified by the Grofs and SEN. 

The challenge of such psychologically-grounded frameworks proves to be the inevitably messy nature of human experience. The historical sources on Kundalini already represent a variety of diverse and occasionally contradictory models, but putting even one of these models into conversation with actual human experiences quickly produces an even more unruly tangle of narratives. 

To this, we should add that the people seeking out Sannella’s Kundalini Clinic or the Grofs’ SEN were frequently exposed to a uniquely chaotic cultural landscape of ideas and practices. Tasked with explaining how his patients arrived at their struggles with Kundalini awakening, Sannella pointed to the common staples of 1970s counterculture: LSD, a slew of Asian meditative traditions, as well as more domestic fare based in European spirituality and esotericism such as “dowsing, ‘channeling’ (mediumism), magic, witchcraft, and psychic healing.”³² Which raises the question: If LSD, Zen, and Wicca can all induce Kundalini experience, then how do we delineate Kundalini as a specific phenomenon? 

Of course, there were certain practices that were explicitly associated with Kundalini during this period, and they were increasingly yoked to another cross-cultural behemoth: yoga. 

Though modern global yoga practice usually pivots on the fulcrum of āsana, or physical postures and movements, the first wave of yoga’s globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries retained the tantric logics of medieval haṭha yoga, centering the raising of Kundalini. This fact has long escaped historical notice because many of the key figures—Swami Vivekananda, Paramahansa Yogananda, Swami Sivananda and others—did not refer to their teachings as haṭha, much less tantra. And yet, a closer look reveals that these early global teachers all viewed Kundalini awakening as the ultimate goal of yoga. 

Vivekananda explicitly declared, in his Raja Yoga (1896), that “the rousing of Kundalini is the one and only way to attaining Divine Wisdom, super-conscious perception, realization of the spirit.”³³ As he explains, 

The rousing may come in various ways, through love for God, through the mercy of perfected sages, or through the power of the analytic will of the philosopher. Wherever there was any manifestation of what is ordinarily called supernatural power or wisdom, there a little current of Kundalini must have found its way into the Sushumna. Only, in the vast majority of such cases, people had ignorantly stumbled on some practice which set free a minute portion of the coiled-up Kundalini. All worship, consciously or unconsciously, lead to this end. The man who thinks that he is receiving response to his prayers does not know that the fulfilment comes from his own nature, that he has succeeded by the mental attitude of prayer in waking up a bit of this infinite power which is coiled up within himself.³⁴ 

This longer statement establishes the awakening of Kundalini not only as the highest goal of yoga but indeed of any religious or spiritual practice. Of course, in doing so, it necessarily broadens the scope of what counts as Kundalini. Vivekananda did not deny the efficacy of other paths (devotion, grace of the guru, philosophical gnosis, prayer, and so on). But, for him, all of these paths were effective not as alternatives to Kundalini awakening but because they represented alternative ways that the awakening is effected. All paths lead to the same goal. 

This position was echoed by Swami Sivananda Saraswati (1887–1963). Sivananda authored over two hundred books on yoga and related subjects, most of which are still distributed by his organization, the Divine Life Society. Sivananda’s Kundalini Yoga (1935) long persisted as the standout practical resource on the eponymous practice. Yet, Sivananda and the Divine Life Society did not and do not teach “Kundalini Yoga,” referring to Sivananda’s method as the “Yoga of Synthesis.” This is not because Kundalini is not important but rather because it is so central that its importance goes without saying. “No superconscious state or Samadhi is possible,” wrote Sivananda, “without awakening this primordial energy, whether it is Raja Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Hatha Yoga or Jnana Yoga.”³⁵  

Kundalini can be awakened by Pranayama, Asanas and Mudras by Hatha Yogis; by concentration and training of the mind by Raja Yogis; by devotion and perfect self-surrender by Bhaktas; by analytical will by the Jnanis; by Mantras by the Tantrikas; and by the grace of the Guru (Guru Kripa) through touch, sight or mere Sankalpa.³⁶ 

According to Sivananda, any one of these methods may be sufficient in itself, but for most students a combination of methods will prove necessary if the ultimate goal is to be attained. A personal cocktail of methods should be prescribed by the guru, like medicines by a doctor. This is the logic behind Divine Life Society’s “Yoga of Synthesis.” 

For other famous teachers, Kundalini remained hidden in plain sight. Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952), known best for the spiritual classic Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), belonged to a lineage of practice known as Kriya Yoga. Yogananda’s organization, the Self-Realization Fellowship, continues to this day to offer initiation into this lineage and its practices. Kriyās, a Sanskrit word here best translated as “exercises,” are the signature techniques of haṭha yoga and usually represent a mixture of physical movements, internal muscular “locks,” breath control, and meditation. True to its name, Yogananda’s Kriya Yoga represents precisely such a system of exercises.³⁷ Yogananda’s teachings used eclectic language—drawing upon Vedanta, Christianity, and contemporary science—but the Kaula tantric model of Kundalini awakening remained firmly at the center. Yogananda explained the ultimate state of realization as follows: 

When the yogi withdraws the life force from material objects, sensory organs, and sensory-motor nerves and takes the concentrated life upward through the spiral passageway of kundalini (coiled energy) in the coccyx, he perceives, as he ascends, the various spinal centers with their petaled light-rays and sounds of life energy. When the yogi’s consciousness reaches the medulla and the spiritual eye at the point between the eyebrows, he finds the doorway into the star-lotus of “a thousand” (innumerable) rays. He perceives the omnipresent light of God spreading over the sphere of eternity, and his body as a minuscule emanation of this light.  

In deepest ecstasy, the yogi perceives the cosmic light change into the vibrationless, ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new bliss of Spirit. It is this vibrationless Cosmic Consciousness that has become the one vibrating cosmic light. This light, projecting away from God, becomes shadowed with delusion, producing the cosmic motion picture of dream images, including the body of man.³⁸ 

This passage from Yogananda’s The Second Coming of Christ (1980), published posthumously by the Self-Realization Fellowship but compiled from Yogananda’s lectures and serialized writing, is one of the handful of explicit references to Kundalini in his published work. Yet the history, structure, and professed goals of Kriya Yoga make clear that Kundalini is the implicit backbone of the entire system. Kriya Yoga is Kundalini yoga. 

Kundalini’s centrality would falter amid the larger cohort of global gurus, born out of the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, who defined yoga’s second wave of popularization in the West. This is due, above all, to the far wider range of sectarian affiliations that these teachers represented. Some did not refer to their systems as yoga at all, or only did so in passing. Others asserted—contra the narrative presented by Vivekananda and Sivananda above—that not all yoga is Kundalini yoga. “Kundalini is very simply physical,” Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) curtly stated. “If a person controls a nadi, he controls Kundalini. This is not important. Kundalini yoga is not a yoga at all.”³⁹ Krishnamacharya’s students, especially B. K. S. Iyengar (1918–2014) and K. Pattabhi Jois (1915–2009), would dominate the global postural yoga scene for decades, nearly erasing Kundalini from many popular forms of postural practice in the process. 

And yet, while not all yoga was about Kundalini, most popular engagements with Kundalini were increasingly taking the form of yoga. Indeed, in a saturated spiritual market, Kundalini was increasingly “bundled” with yoga as a practice. Far more than their predecessors, global gurus in the second half of the twentieth century often encountered audiences who knew what Kundalini was, or at least thought they knew. A standard model of Kundalini was beginning to form, driven in large part by popularly available written sources. Part of any guru’s project, therefore, would have been to respond to this set of preconceptions, often by disagreeing with crucial parts of it. Hence, Krishnamacharya’s insistence that Kundalini yoga is not yoga at all, for instance. 

Teachers who did incorporate Kundalini into their teachings, meanwhile, were left to compete not only over whose version of Kundalini was more authentic but also whose method of awakening it was best. Unsurprisingly, Kundalini usually factored most prominently into the systems of gurus who came from non-dual and usually Kaula tantric lineages, most notably “shaktipat” gurus such as Swami Muktananda (1908–1982). Curiously, the only guru to actually name his method “Kundalini Yoga,” Yogi Bhajan (1929–2004), was the one who had few if any ties to Hindu tantra. 

Of the systems just mentioned, Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan is also the one that comes closest to familiar forms of global postural yoga insofar as it is centered on a specific physical method involving a set of practices that can be taught to anyone by anyone. While Yogi Bhajan certainly wielded his share of charisma, his personal involvement was not seen as crucial to the efficacy of his method. Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga is based on a style of dynamic physical exercises often referred to as vyāyama, exercises which from at least the eighteenth century onwards were frequently mixed with the physical and energetic techniques of haṭha yoga.⁴⁰ For its conceptual underpinnings, Yogi Bhajan pulled freely from Hindu (including Kaula tantric) traditions but also from Western spirituality and, most importantly, from his own Sikh background. 

Yogi Bhajan consciously positioned himself not only as the foremost authority on Kundalini, but in direct opposition to the style of Kundalini awakening championed by his most powerful competitors. Swami Muktananda, who called his own method Siddha Yoga, taught complete surrender to the guru as the ultimate method. While Siddha Yoga is nominally a technique insofar as it involves some chanting, its real technique is devotion. One can chant the names of God, or a longer devotional text such as the Guru Gītā, or simply the mantra “Guru Om,” as Muktananda himself did. But the method does not actually depend on anything the practitioner does to awaken Kundalini. The method is grace administered by the guru through shaktipat. 

Most typically tied to non-dual Śaiva-Śākta traditions, shaktipat (or śaktipāta) is a phenomenon in which the guru’s śakti (that is, his awakened divine energy) enters into the subtle body and activates the subtle body of the disciple. Effectively, it is a kind of intentional energetic contagion, and it is usually understood as the first step to Kundalini awakening, if not awakening itself. This phenomenon of “energetic possession” by the guru has historically been referred to using a number of Sanskrit terms, including vedha dīkṣā (initiation by piercing) and samāveśa (co-penetration),⁴¹ and it traditionally signified a formal act of initiation by the guru bestowing it. Muktananda became famous in North America during the 1970s for holding weekend workshops where he would make his way around the room, tapping seekers with a bundle of peacock feathers. The spectrum of reported experiences ranged from blissful to terrifying. People would laugh and cry, people would convulse, people would see God.⁴² 

The key is that shaktipat is not a technique that can be taught, like a set of exercises. It is an act of the guru as a conduit of the divine in which the recipient is utterly passive. As Muktananda liked to say, quoting the Śivasūtravimarśinī by the Kashmiri author Kṣemarāja,“The Guru is the grace-bestowing power of God.”⁴³ In shaktipat, you do not awaken your Kundalini; your Kundalini awakens you. According to Muktananda, the guru can bestow shaktipat in four ways: touch, an enlivened mantra, a look, and mere thought.⁴⁴ This is the special province of the guru. “Only a doctor is qualified to give medicine, a lawyer to practice law, a teacher to teach. Similarly, only a Guru can activate Kundalini,” he would say.⁴⁵ 

For Muktananda, the guru and Kundalini are so closely intwined as to actually be one. , In their essence, both embody the divine power of grace. He explained: 

When the disciple is initiated, the Guru’s Shakti enters him. As a tree exists in the form of a seed, so the Shakti exists in the form of the Guru, and entering the disciple, it induces many types of yogic movements. As the seeker, remembering his beloved Guru, sits for meditation, identifying himself with the Guru and repeating the Guru’s mantra, then the Guru in the form of the mantra becomes active within him. These movements, or kriyas, are not meaningless or fruitless. It is the Guru's Shakti which works inside in the form of these kriyas, producing many different contortions of the body, many kinds of yogic postures, pranayama, dances, mantras, and mudras. If anybody were to see these from the outside, they would look very strange and frightening, but the seeker is not afraid. He experiences from these movements a kind of intoxication, an ecstasy, a lightness of the limbs, a sturdiness of the body. Some of the kriyas are a part of Raja Yoga, some of Hatha Yoga, some of Mantra Yoga, and some of Bhakti Yoga, for when the power of the Guru enters the disciple, all these yogas occur spontaneously according to the disciple’s needs.⁴⁶ 

Shaktipat initiates the practitioner into—or, more accurately, it induces—the process of Siddha Yoga, which Muktananda translated as the “Perfect Yoga.” He also called it “maha yoga” or the “great yoga,” for it effectively contains all the other yogas.⁴⁷ When Kundalini is awakened by the grace of the guru, the haṭha-yogic kriyās—various forms of breath control, muscular contractions, and physical gestures and poses—begin to spontaneously manifest in the body.⁴⁸ Techniques that might otherwise take years to learn and perfect come naturally, whether the practitioner knows them or not. While this may seem like an unfair shortcut, Muktananda argued that it is the superior method. Because Kundalini is seen as a sentient force, essentially an instantiation of the Goddess, it (or rather She) knows precisely what any practitioner’s particular organism requires. Effectively, Kundalini is the will of the guru, which is also the will of the divine, working within the disciple. 

Yogi Bhajan, meanwhile, took an explicit stance against grand visions, psychic experiences, and physical convulsions associated with Kundalini. Indeed, he rejected the very usefulness of shaktipat itself, stating that “kundalini can be stimulated directly by a teacher. But that teacher is not much of a teacher! The students should be prepared, then given a technology to raise in themselves. Why should they wait at the feet of that teacher like puppies? They should go through the experience, then share the techniques with others.”⁴⁹ Yogi Bhajan’s 3HO (the Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization) was by all accounts a highly authoritarian structure, so this statement should not be understood as some sort of democratic or egalitarian stance. Instead, it should be seen as an advertisement of Yogi Bhajan’s specific and proprietary technique of Kundalini Yoga. Muktananda sold grace, Yogi Bhajan sold a manual for work. 

Yet both gurus converged on the tried-and-true position that all methods lead to Kundalini. Just as Muktananda argued that his yoga contained all other yogas within it, Yogi Bhajan explained that: 

You may have heard of transcendental meditation and integral meditation; there are many labels. Just as there are for mustard seed: yellow mustard seed, sunflower mustard seed, Sun Valley mustard seed, California mustard seed, Wisconsin mustard seed, New York Mustard seed; mustard seed is mustard seed. Similarly, different techniques of yoga have been given different names. Hatha yoga has the same end. Bhakti, shakti, gian [i.e. jñāna], karma yoga—all have the same end. To raise the dormant power of infinity in the man; that’s all.⁵⁰ 

The dormant power, of course, is Kundalini. Thus, even amidst a slew of competing options such as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation or Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga (neither of which billed itself as a method centered on Kundalini), the goal remained the same and all competing methods were roads climbing the same mountain. 

The modeling of Kundalini as Kundalini yoga, a method encompassing all other methods, is perhaps the corollary of the psychological turn that seeks to read Kundalini into every genre of mystical experience. Over the second half of the twentieth century, the explosion of such competing methods, all purporting to awaken Kundalini, parallels the understanding that any energetic experience, practiced or spontaneous, is a Kundalini experience. 

Gopi Krishna’s research initiatives generally faded away after his death in 1984, never producing the definitive scientific explanation of Kundalini he sought,⁵¹ but Kundalini continues to be evoked by experiencers and researchers worldwide to refer to sensations of “energy” within the body. This energy retains a scientifically-coded physical dimension insofar as practitioners associate it with concepts drawn from theories of electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, and other popular scientific understandings. In popular literature, now represented not only by print sources but the chaotic polyphony of social media, Kundalini is associated with everything from Neo-tantric sexuality, to psychosis, to instructions for how to “upgrade” one’s DNA using radiation from the sun. 

Scholarly research on Kundalini, meanwhile, has generally pivoted away from physical explanations in favor of psychological analysis. The exception to this trend is a growing body of literatures by scholars affiliated with Yogi Bhajan’s system who commonly appeal the method’s physical dimensions such as breathing techniques or physical movement to support a range of purported health benefits. When it comes to research on Kundalini experience, however, scholars have encountered the same hurdles as their predecessors. Spontaneous experiences prove difficult to track with clinical methods, while intentionally cultivated experiences cannot be reliably produced. More importantly, both types resist clinical analysis much less “diagnosis” insofar as experiencers present too many diverse symptoms with insufficiently consistent overlap.  

Other recent research has abandoned normative labels and instead centered the experience of practitioners on its own terms. A team of researchers under the umbrella of the Varieties of Contemplative Experience project found that some practitioners adopted the terminology of Kundalini to describe what the team more generally labelled “energy-like somatic experiences” (ELSEs). In a study focused on practitioners drawn from several varieties of Buddhist meditation, the researchers found that those whose traditions included frameworks for working with subtle energies were no more or less likely to report ELSEs than those whose traditions did not. However, when the latter group did have such experiences, they were forced to reach outside their home traditions for explanations. At this stage, Kundalini emerged as the most common model to be adopted, often combined with ideas from other traditions as well as contemporary psychology and neuroscience. Crucially, the study, which did not attempt to evaluate whether ELSEs corresponded to any normative model of Kundalini, found that just the basic fact of finding an interpretive framework proved to be a powerful remedy for those whose ELSEs were adverse in nature.⁵² 

These findings support two central aspects of the development and transmission history of Kundalini. First: insofar as Kundalini is a phenomenological term that describes some kind of embodied experience, such experiences may indeed occur in a variety of different contexts and in conjunction with any number of practices. So . . . is any energetic experience an experience of Kundalini, as popular opinion would have it? Well, perhaps. At least insofar as, second: labeling something Kundalini is first and foremost an act of meaning making that allows the experiencer to engage with a complex body of symbols, concepts, and cosmologies. The question thus becomes not whether the practice, the experience, or the serpentine symbol is an “authentic” representation of Kundalini, but whether its identification with Kundalini offers the experiencer a coherent and compelling explanation—a container for their experience. 

¹ This essay draws on my recent co-authored book, Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen, The Serpent’s Tale: Kuṇḍalinī, Yoga, and the History of an Experience (Columbia University Press, 2025). [Return to Section]

² Marleen Thaler, “The History of Modern Kundalini Research Gopi Krishna and the Transformation of a South Asian Goddess in the Late Twentieth Century” (Universität Wien, 2024). [Return to Section]

³ Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 148. [Return to Section]

⁴ Kathleen Taylor, Sir John Woodroffe, Tantra and Bengal: “An Indian Soul in a European Body?” (RoutledgeCurzon, 2001), 97; Julian Strube, Global Tantra: Religion Science and Nationalism in Colonial Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2022), 220. [Return to Section]

⁵ Strube, Global Tantra, 226–27. [Return to Section]

⁶ Arthur Avalon, The Serpent Power (Ganesh & Co, 1950), 14. See also Strube, Global Tantra, 228–29. [Return to Section]

⁷ James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, Roots of Yoga: A Sourcebook from the Indic Traditions (Penguin Classics, 2017), 179. [Return to Section]

⁸ Mallinson and Singleton, Roots of Yoga, 213. [Return to Section]

⁹ Gerrit Lange, “Cobra Deities and Divine Cobras: The Ambiguous Animality of Nāgas,” Religions 10, no. 8 (2019): 1–26, 2. [Return to Section]

¹⁰ David Gordon White, “Why Gurus Are Heavy,” Numen 31, no. 1 (1984): 40–73. [Return to Section]

¹¹ David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago University Press, 1996), 5. [Return to Section]

¹² Sarah Iles Johnston, “Rising to the Occasion: Theurgic Ascent in Its Cultural Milieu,” in Envisioning Magic: A Princeton Seminar and Symposium, ed. Peter Schäfer and Hans Kippenberg (Brill, 1997), 183. [Return to Section]

¹³ Tuomas Rasimus, Paradise Reconsidered in Gnostic Mythmaking: Rethinking Sethianism in Light of the Ophite Myth and Ritual (Brill, 2009), 70. [Return to Section]

¹⁴ James Morgan Pryse, The Apocalypse Unsealed: Being an Esoteric Interpretation of the Initiation of Iôannês (’Apokalypsis ’Iōánnou) Commonly Called the Revelation of [St.] John, With a New Translation (J. M. Pryse, 1910). [Return to Section]

¹⁵ C. W. Leadbeater, The Chakras (Theosophical Publishing House, 1927) and George Sydney Arundale, Kundalini: An Occult Experience (Theosophical Publishing House, 1938). [Return to Section]

¹⁶ Strube, Global Tantra, 120–21. [Return to Section]

¹⁷ Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 1 (Advaita Ashrama, 1915), 182. [Return to Section]

¹⁸ Vasant G. Rele, The Mysterious Kundalini (D. B. Taraporevala Sons & Co, 1931), 22. [Return to Section]

¹⁹ Rele, The Mysterious Kundalini, 25–26. [Return to Section]

²⁰ Itzak Bentov, Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness (Bantam Books, 1977), 178. [Return to Section]

²¹ Bentov, Stalking the Wild Pendulum, 181. [Return to Section]

²² Lee Sannella, Kundalini: Psychosis or Transcendence? (H. S. Dakin Company, 1976), 87–88. [Return to Section]

²³ Bentov, Stalking the Wild Pendulum, 183. [Return to Section]

²⁴ Sonu Shamdasani, “Introduction: Jung’s Journey to the East,” in The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1932, ed. Sonu Shamdasani (Princeton University Press, 1996), xxvi. [Return to Section]

²⁵ Shamdasani, “Introduction,” xliv. [Return to Section]

²⁶ Shamdasani, “Introduction,” xlv. [Return to Section]

²⁷ C. G. Jung, “Lecture IX, 11 December 1935,” in Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra”: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934–1939, ed. James L. Jarrett (Princeton University Press, 1988), 751. [Return to Section]

²⁸ Jung, “Lecture IX,” 68–69. [Return to Section]

²⁹ Sannella, Kundalini, 13. [Return to Section]

³⁰ Sannella, Kundalini, 44–51. [Return to Section]

³¹ Stanislav Grof and Christina Grof, eds., Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1989), x. [Return to Section]

³² Sannella, Kundalini, 19. [Return to Section]

³³ Vivekananda, The Complete Works, 185. [Return to Section]

³⁴ Vivekananda, The Complete Works, 185. [Return to Section]

³⁵ Sri Swami Sivananada, Kundalini Yoga (The Divine Life Society, 1994), 37. [Return to Section]

³⁶ Sivananada, Kundalini Yoga, 35. [Return to Section]

³⁷ Anya P. Foxen, Biography of a Yogi: Paramahansa Yogananda and the Origins of Modern Yoga (Oxford University Press, 2017), 133–36. [Return to Section]

³⁸ Paramahansa Yogananda, The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You: A Revelatory Commentary on the Original Teachings of Jesus (Self-Realization Fellowship, 2008), 790. [Return to Section]

³⁹ Quoted in Simon Atkinson, Krishnamacharya on Kuṇḍalinī: The Origins and Coherence of His Position (Equinox, 2022), 131. [Return to Section]

⁴⁰ Joseph S. Alter, The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India (University of California Press, 1992), 82–83; Jason Birch and Mark Singleton, “The Yoga of the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati: Haṭhayoga on the Cusp of Modernity,” Journal of Yoga Studies 2 (2019): 47–48; Jerome Armstrong, “Uncovering Vyāyāma in Yoga,” Journal of Yoga Studies 4 (2023): 271–302. See also Philip Deslippe, “From Maharaj to Mahan Tantric: The Construction of Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga,” Sikh Formations 8, no. 3 (2012): 369–387, 370. [Return to Section]

⁴¹ Ellen Goldberg, “Swami Kṛpālvānanda: The Man behind Kripalu Yoga,” in Gurus of Modern Yoga, ed. Mark Singleton and Ellen Goldberg (Oxford University Press, 2014), 176. See also Christopher Wallis, “The Descent of Power: Possession, Mysticism, and Initiation in the Śaiva Theology of Abhinavagupta,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 36, no. 2 (2008): 247–95. [Return to Section]

⁴² Lola Williamson, “The Perfectibility of Perfection: Siddha Yoga as a Global Movement,” in Gurus in America, ed. Thomas A. Forsthoefel and Cynthia Ann Humes (State University of New York Press, 2005), 151–2; Andrea R. Jain, “Muktananda: Entrepreneurial Godman, Tantric Hero,” in Gurus of Modern Yoga, ed. Mark Singleton and Ellen Goldberg (Oxford University Press, 2014), 195. [Return to Section]

⁴³ Swami Muktananda, Kundalini: The Secret of Life (SYDA Foundation, 1994), 11. [Return to Section]

⁴⁴ Muktananda, Kundalini, 15-16. [Return to Section]

⁴⁵ Muktananda, Kundalini, xvii. [Return to Section]

⁴⁶ Swami Muktananda, Play of Consciousness (Harper & Row, 1974), 24. [Return to Section]

⁴⁷ Muktananda, Kundalini, 18. [Return to Section]

⁴⁸ Muktananda, Play of Consciousness, 19. [Return to Section]

⁴⁹ Harbhajan Singh Khalsa, The Teachings of Yogi Bhajan (Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1977), 146– 47. [Return to Section]

⁵⁰ Khalsa, The Teachings of Yogi Bhajan, 182. [Return to Section]

⁵¹ Thaler, The History of Modern Kundalini Research. [Return to Section]

⁵² David J. Cooper et al., “‘Like a Vibration Cascading through the Body’: Energy-Like Somatic Experiences Reported by Western Buddhist Meditators,” Religions 12, no. 12 (2021): 1–27, 19. [Return to Section]

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