Kriya yoga

Kriya yoga, in the sense almost everybody now means, is a seated breathing and meditation practice transmitted in the lineage of Lahiri Mahasaya and made famous by Paramahansa Yogananda, in which the central technique is given only by a teacher at an initiation after a long period of preparation.

Two things follow from that sentence, and they are the two things this page exists to say. First, kriya yoga is not a posture style. There is nothing here to put on a timetable beside hatha or vinyasa, because a kriya practice is somebody sitting upright with their eyes closed, breathing in a particular way, and that is the whole visible content of it. Second, the part of it that people search for is the part that is not published. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not going to reconstruct it from fragments and hand it to you as though I had it.

The word kriya by itself simply means an action or a completed practice, and it does other jobs elsewhere in yoga. In Patanjali's Yoga Sutras kriya yoga names something quite different: sutra 2.1 gives it as tapas, svadhyaya and ishvarapranidhana, meaning austerity, self study and devotion, which is a threefold discipline and not a breathing technique at all. In kundalini yoga a kriya is a timed sequence of exercises. So the same four letters name at least three unrelated things, and knowing which one somebody means is most of the confusion solved.

The story is specific and it is worth setting out plainly, because the names in it are the names you will meet on every website about this practice.

• Mahavatar Babaji. Described in the tradition as an immortal yogi living in the Himalayas. He is a figure of faith rather than of record, and I say that without any wish to argue with anybody who holds it.
• Lahiri Mahasaya, 1828 to 1895. A householder, an accountant by employment, who is said to have been initiated by Babaji around 1861 and who then taught kriya to householders rather than to renunciates. That last point is the historically interesting one: this is a contemplative path deliberately opened to people with jobs and families.
• Swami Sri Yukteswar. A direct disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya, and the teacher of Yogananda.
• Paramahansa Yogananda, 1893 to 1952. He founded a school for boys in 1917 at Dihika in Bengal, which grew into the Yogoda Satsanga Society of India, arrived in the United States in late September 1920, founded Self-Realization Fellowship the same year and established its Los Angeles headquarters in 1925.

The book is the reason any of this is famous. Autobiography of a Yogi, published in 1946, has sold in the millions and is the single most read book about Indian spiritual practice in English. If you searched for a kriya yoga book, that is almost certainly the one you want, and it is a genuinely good read whatever you conclude about its miracles. What it is not is a manual. It describes the effect of the practice and the lives of the people who held it, and it withholds the method, on purpose.

Yogananda described the practice publicly in a Boston address on 6 October 1920 as magnetising the spinal column and the brain, which contain the seven main centres, so as to free the spiritual consciousness. That is about as much technical detail as the tradition has ever put in public, and it tells you the shape of the thing: it is a pranayama directed along the spine, done sitting, with the attention on centres described in the older texts. If you want the vocabulary in that sentence explained without any mysticism, the glossary does it.

This is the honest part, and it is the reason the page is worth writing at all.

What is published, openly and in detail. Self-Realization Fellowship, the organisation Yogananda founded, teaches its Lessons as a home study course: eighteen lessons sent out every two weeks over roughly nine months. Three techniques are taught in that course and they are described on the organisation's own public pages. The Energization Exercises are a set of psychophysical exercises, about fifteen minutes long, meant to prepare the body to sit. The Hong-Sau technique is a concentration practice that withdraws attention from outward distraction. The Aum technique is a meditation on inner sound. None of those three is kriya yoga, and all three are the acknowledged preparation for it.

What is not published. The kriya technique itself. In the organisation's own words the technique is given to students who apply to receive it after a preliminary period of study and practice of the first three techniques, and students become eligible to apply after approximately eight months. The Indian branch, Yogoda Satsanga Society of India, says the same in the same terms, and explains the delay with a mountaineering image: a climber acclimatises before the Himalayas. The initiation is traditionally a ceremony, given within a teacher and student relationship, and the tradition asks that the technique not be passed on outside it.

So when a page offers you the seven steps of kriya yoga, or the original technique, free and immediately, you are being offered one of three things: a preparatory practice relabelled, somebody's reconstruction, or an unrelated method wearing the same name. Some of those may be perfectly good practices. None of them is what the lineage means by the word, and the difference matters if you care about honesty in the thing you are about to spend years on.

Why I will not publish a technique here. Not out of mystery keeping. I have not been initiated into this and I have no lineage in it, so anything I wrote would be a guess assembled from other people's guesses. What I can do instead is tell you exactly which practices on this site are the ordinary, unrestricted relatives of it, and that is the next section.

Everything a kriya practitioner does before initiation, and much of what they do around it, is ordinary yoga that nobody has ever restricted. All of it is on this site.

Sitting. The whole practice happens in one shape, upright and still, for a long time. That is Padmasana if your hips allow it, Sukhasana on a folded blanket if they do not, or Vajrasana if kneeling suits you better. The skill nobody talks about is sitting for forty minutes without the lower back giving up, and it takes months to build.

Breathing along the spine. The slow controlled breathing of any pranayama is the same craft: Ujjayi for the sound and the throat, Nadi Shodhana and Anulom Vilom for the alternate nostril work that every contemplative tradition in India uses, Sama Vritti for even ratios, and Kumbhaka for retention, which is where the cautions live and where they are stated.

Concentration on a single object. Hong-Sau is a syllable watched with the breath, and its plain cousin is So Hum meditation. The Aum technique listens to inner sound; Om chanting is the audible version and a reasonable place to begin. Trataka is the same discipline given to the eyes.

Preparing the body to sit. The Energization Exercises are proprietary to that organisation, but the job they do is not. Ten minutes of the ten minute morning routine does it, and so does Surya Namaskar at a slow count. If your hips are the obstacle to sitting, that is a stiffness problem with an ordinary answer, and the knee page is honest about when to stop forcing a cross legged position.

The real question here is not kriya against another style. It is whether you want a lifelong path with a lineage and an organisation, or a practice.

• You want a contemplative path, you are drawn to this lineage, and you are content to prepare for the best part of a year. Then go to the source, which is Self-Realization Fellowship or Yogoda Satsanga Society of India for this particular lineage, and do the Lessons properly. Nothing on this site is a substitute for that.
• You mainly want to meditate and you have no interest in initiation. Then you want breathing and concentration, not kriya. Anulom Vilom and So Hum for ten minutes a day for a month will teach you more than a year of reading will.
• You are stiff, tired or in pain and hoped this would help. It is the wrong tool. A posture practice is the right one, and how to start yoga at home is where to begin.
• You cannot sit upright for twenty minutes. Fix that first, in a chair if necessary. Chair yoga is not a lesser thing.
• You have found a website selling the secret technique for a fee, with no lineage named. My advice is to keep your money and read the book instead.
• You want the philosophy first. The eight limbs of yoga is the map that Yogananda himself described kriya as the distilled essence of.

My verdict. I am eighty nine years old and I have taught for about forty years, and I have never been initiated into kriya yoga, so on the technique itself my opinion is worth nothing and I will not manufacture one. On the shape of the thing I will say two things. The first is that a tradition which asks you to sit every day for eight months before it will give you its central practice is telling you something true about how slowly this all works, and most of what is sold as yoga now tells you the opposite. The second is that the preparation is not a queue you stand in. Concentration on the breath, done daily, is the practice, and anybody who does that for a year will be changed by it whether or not an initiation ever follows. If you are drawn to kriya, my honest advice is to begin sitting now, with something unrestricted, and let the path find you at its own speed.

Kriya yoga is not taught here, and it could not be: it is transmitted in a lineage by initiation, and this teacher holds no initiation in it and claims none. No style is taught here under a label at all. The classes are one teacher, about forty years of teaching, one hall at the residents' association in MSR Nagar in north Bangalore, in person there or live online, all ages and all levels, and the hour is asana, pranayama and relaxation, taught slowly.

There is no initiation, no guru relationship on offer, no lessons by post, no mantra given in private and nothing withheld. What is taught is said out loud in front of everybody in the room, which is a different arrangement from this one and not a better or worse one.

The overlap, and it is a real one, is the breathing. Pranayama has a place in every class here, it is taught by name, and the contraindications for the strong practices are said before rather than after. If it is the seated contemplative half of yoga that drew you to this page, that is on this site in full and you can start on your own this week: Anulom Vilom to begin, Nadi Shodhana as the fuller version, and Yoga Nidra lying down on the days sitting is beyond you. The classes page has timings and costs if you want the room as well.

Nothing in a seated practice is dangerous in the way a headstand can be. The cautions are the ordinary pranayama ones and they apply here as they do everywhere on this site.

Breath retention is the practice to be careful with. Holding the breath, and particularly holding it after an exhalation with any force, is not appropriate for everybody, and the standard cautions are uncontrolled high blood pressure, heart disease, glaucoma, epilepsy, recent abdominal or chest surgery and pregnancy. In any of those cases the answer is to breathe slowly and evenly without holding, which is a complete practice in itself. The Kumbhaka page sets out the specifics and yoga for high blood pressure gives the wider picture.

The second caution is not medical. This is a devotional path attached to organisations, and any organisation that asks for money, obedience or secrecy about something other than a technique deserves the same scepticism you would apply anywhere else. A tradition can be worth respecting and a particular group inside it can still be worth walking away from. Ask what is required of you and in what order, and be wary of anybody who will not answer plainly.

Finally, and this is the claim I want to be most careful about: no health benefit on this page is asserted as a clinical fact. What kriya yoga claims for itself is spiritual, and it says so. Where yoga has been measured in trials it has been measured as posture, breathing and relaxation programmes, and those findings are set out on the anxiety and back pain pages with their sources. Do not read the tradition's language about life force as though somebody had measured it.