Kundalini yoga

Kundalini yoga, as taught in most classes carrying the name today, is a practice of set sequences called kriyas, each combining a repeated movement, a vigorous breathing technique, a hand position and often a chant, held for a fixed number of minutes, followed by long seated meditations.

It is the style on this site least like a posture class. Most of an hour is spent sitting cross legged. There is very little standing, almost no alignment instruction, and nothing that a photographer would recognise as a yoga pose. What there is instead is duration: the same small arm movement for three minutes, then eleven, with a strong breath running underneath it. People who expect a stretching class are usually astonished by how physically hard that is.

The word kundalini refers in the classical texts to an energy described as coiled at the base of the spine, which the practice is said to raise. Whether you take that as physiology, as metaphor or as neither, it is worth knowing that this is the one popular style whose stated aim is not health, flexibility or fitness. It is the aim of the tradition itself, and a class taught by somebody who believes that will feel different from a class taught as breath work.

The structure is unusually fixed, and knowing it removes most of the strangeness of a first class.

• Tuning in. A chant, sung together, sitting upright. This is not optional in most rooms and it is how every class opens.
• Warm up, five minutes. Spinal movements, seated. Flexing the spine forwards and back on the breath is almost universal, and it is the same movement this site teaches as Marjariasana done sitting rather than on all fours.
• The kriya, twenty five to forty minutes. A set sequence of exercises with fixed times: one minute, three minutes, sometimes eleven. Arms held out, legs lifted, a repeated twist, all with a strong breath. You are told the time before you start, and the times are the difficulty.
• Relaxation, five to ten minutes. Flat on the back in Savasana, often with a gong.
• Meditation, eleven to thirty one minutes. Seated, usually with a mantra and a hand position, and often with a specific breath ratio.
• Closing chant. Short, and the class ends on it.

The breathing is the part to pay attention to. Breath of fire is a rapid, even, forceful breath through the nose, closely related to what this site teaches as Kapalbhati and to the stronger Bhastrika. Long deep breathing and Anulom Vilom also appear constantly. In other words, a kundalini class is mostly a pranayama class with movement attached, which is why I take it seriously even though almost nothing else about it resembles what I teach.

This is, unexpectedly, the best studied style on this site, because it is short, standardised and easy to deliver in a trial.

The important one is a randomised clinical trial published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2020, in which 226 adults with generalised anxiety disorder were assigned to twelve weeks of group kundalini yoga, to cognitive behavioural therapy, or to stress education. Both kundalini yoga and the therapy beat stress education. Response rates were 54 per cent for yoga against 71 per cent for cognitive behavioural therapy, and the trial's test of whether yoga was as good as therapy failed. The authors' own conclusion is the one to carry away: kundalini yoga can reduce anxiety, and cognitive behavioural therapy should remain the first line treatment. That is a genuinely useful finding and it is not the finding the internet reports.

On cognition, a 2024 systematic review of five randomised trials with 215 participants between them reported consistent improvements in memory, executive function and mood in older adults at risk of decline, while noting small samples and a high risk of bias in several of the studies. Promising, and not settled.

The caution is about the breathing rather than the postures. Forceful rapid breathing is not appropriate for everybody, and the standard contraindications for it apply here in full: uncontrolled high blood pressure, heart disease, glaucoma, epilepsy, recent abdominal surgery and pregnancy. If any of those applies to you, the honest answer is to do the movement and the meditation and to breathe normally, and a good teacher will tell you the same. Yoga for high blood pressure and the Kapalbhati page set out the specifics.

Kundalini is the most polarising style on this list, and the deciding factor is rarely physical.

• You want breath work and meditation to be the main content, not the last five minutes. Kundalini. Nothing else delivers this much of it.
• You are anxious and want the best evidenced yoga option. Kundalini has the strongest trial behind it, and that same trial says therapy worked better. Do both if you can. Yoga for anxiety is the page for this.
• You want to learn postures properly. Not kundalini. There is almost no alignment teaching and very little standing work. Iyengar or hatha.
• You want to get fitter. Not kundalini, although it is harder than it looks. Power yoga or vinyasa.
• You have high blood pressure, glaucoma, epilepsy, a heart condition, or you are pregnant. Not the forceful breathing, whatever the class is doing. Ask before you book rather than in the room.
• Chanting in a group would make you uncomfortable. Then this is not for you, and that is a perfectly sufficient reason. Every class opens and closes with it.

My verdict. I have a divided view and I would rather say so than pretend to a neat one. The respect I have is for the breathing and for the length of the meditations. A tradition that will sit somebody down for thirty one minutes is doing something almost nobody else does, and the anxiety trial is the strongest piece of evidence on this whole site. The reservation is that kundalini as taught in the last fifty years has been bound up with a single organisation and a good deal of belief, and some of what is asserted in a class about what the practice is doing to your nervous system is not something I can source. My practical advice is this. If you want the breath work and the meditation, go, and take the framing as the tradition's own language rather than as instruction. If a room asks you to accept a claim about your body that nobody can show you, keep your reservation and keep breathing.

Kundalini is not taught here. No style here is: 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, without a style label.

There is no chanting, no kriya, no gong and no mantra meditation. What there is, and this is the honest overlap, is breath work taught as a subject in its own right rather than tacked on at the end. Pranayama has a place in every class, it is taught by name, and the contraindications are said out loud before the strong practices rather than after.

If it is the breathing you want, that part is on this site in full and you can begin without a class. Anulom Vilom is where to start, Nadi Shodhana is the fuller version, Bhramari is the one I give an anxious person first, and Kapalbhati is the closest relative of breath of fire with its cautions stated. For the long seated meditation, Yoga Nidra is lying down and easier to keep up. The first class is free if you want to look at the room, and the classes page has timings and costs.

Because so little of a kundalini class is posture, the useful map is of the breathing and the seated shapes rather than of the asanas.

You will sit cross legged for most of the hour, which is Padmasana or an easier version of it, and if your hips will not allow that then sitting on a folded blanket or in Vajrasana is entirely acceptable and no teacher should argue. The seated spinal flexes are Marjariasana in a chair shape. Where postures do appear they tend to be Bhujangasana, Balasana and occasionally Sarvangasana at the end.

The breathing is the real content: Kapalbhati and Bhastrika for the forceful work, Anulom Vilom for the alternate nostril meditations, and long slow breathing for most of the rest. If you want the philosophical frame that kundalini language sits inside, the eight limbs of yoga is the map, and the glossary defines kriya, mantra, mudra and bandha without the mysticism. What a kundalini class will not give you is the standing half of a practice, so put the ten minute morning routine beside it.