Kundalini yoga was coined, created and popularized in 1968 by Yogi Bhajan. He described the intent of his teaching to be a “healthy, happy, holy” (3HO) way of life. He taught his American students how to awaken their inner spiritual energy through mantra chanting, breath work, and yoga poses. This practice and lifestyle quickly caught on with many Westerners who were searching for a new approach to spirituality, health, and wellness. While Kundalini yoga flourished during the lifetime of Yogi Bhajan, new accounts have surfaced after his death that reveal a dark and disturbing past.

What is kundalini?

The Sanskrit term kundalini means “coiled serpent” and refers to the divine energy that lies dormant inside the human body. This vibrant energy is contained below the root chakra, located between the anus and genitals. It usually remains dormant and still, but there are specific Tantra Yoga and Hatha Yoga techniques that can be used to activate this energy. Once activated, it then rises from and travels upward. It moves through the susumna, the central energy channel in the center of the spine, through the seven chakras, until it reaches the crown chakra, where it becomes united with the divine consciousness.

Activating kundalini creates an ultimate state of bliss. Yet without adequate preparation, releasing this coiled-up serpent energy can lead to disaster. The release of such a powerful source of pranic energy into the body’s delicate systems can cause pain and, in rare cases, lead to mental instability. Before kundalini is activated and released upwards, the body and mind must be prepared through hatha yoga exercises, completed in a specific order.

During an activation, one can experience adverse effects as kundalini moves through the body and the nervous system adjusts to this dramatic increase of psychic energy. Therefore, it is not advised to activate kundalini without the guidance of a qualified teacher and support of a spiritual community.

What is kundalini yoga?

The Kundalini Yoga practice created by Yogi Bhajan combines breathing exercises, yoga postures, repetitive movement, meditation, mantra chanting and other Hatha Yoga and Sikh techniques to awaken the body’s kundalini energy.

In the Hatha Yoga tradition, Kundalini is slowly awakened by the practice of asanas (postures), pranayama (breathing techniques), meditation, and bandhas (energy locks). These practices prepare us to safely experience the power of kundalini. They also help us to understand the subtle nature of the chakras (energy centers) within the body. They should be practiced slowly and gradually over time to build up a yogi’s inner strength and awareness to manage and contain these high levels of life force energy.

How is kundalini different from other types of yoga?

Kundalini yoga classes include many of the same postures as other forms of yoga, but these are mostly the seated poses which focus on spinal exercises and repetitive movements. It also focuses more on the esoteric and energizing aspects than other types of yoga. Meditation, mantra, pranayama and visualization are emphasized over alignment and the other physical aspects of Hatha Yoga.

You will see dedicated practitioners wearing white clothes in a kundalini class and using sheepskins instead or on top of yoga mats. They believe wearing white will expand their aura and project positive energy out into the world. Kundalini yogis may also wear turbans or other head coverings as a way to focus their energy at the third eye or 6th chakra center. These are not required, but are used to symbolize the devotion to the practice and to strengthen the community.

History of kundalini yoga

Yogi Bhajan promoted his teachings as a secret tradition from an ancient lineage that he had publicly revealed for the first time. It is now understood that he made up this style of yoga from a fusion of two different traditions. The asanas and breathing exercises were derived from his studies with an Indian hatha yoga teacher named Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari. The chanting and devotional practices have their origins in the teachings of the Sikh saint Maharaj Virsa Singh.

Even though this was not the “ancient yoga practice” he promoted it to be, Yogi Bhajan’s teachings were a huge hit in Los Angeles in the early 70s. His teaching organization quickly grew across the US and worldwide, and expanded to over 300 centers in 35 countries. This expansion included the creation of multiple successful businesses and non-profit organizations that were estimated to be worth billions of dollars at the time of his death. He died of complications of heart failure at his home in New Mexico, on October 6, 2004, at the age of 75.

Accusations of abuse

While Yogi Bhajan became a revered teacher and had helped improve the lives of many of his followers, there have been many accusations of sexual, verbal, emotional and physical abuse made after his death. There have been other reports of drug smuggling, money laundering, and fraud.

To its credit, the parent company, SSSC, commissioned Olive Branch, to perform an independent investigation into the claims of abuse, and they collected and assessed accounts from nearly 300 witnesses. Olive Branch’s report, released to the public in August 2020, concluded that these accusations of abuse “more likely than not occurred.” Upon news of the report, some teachers and trainers have distanced themselves from the community or have stopped practicing teachings of Yogi Bhajan.

The SSSC created an independent healing and reparations program to acknowledge the harm and help heal the community. This voluntary program provides emotional resources and financial support to helping “individuals who experienced harm in our schools and youth programs, regardless of whether the harm was perpetrated by a staff member or a peer, and those who report sexual abuse by any leader or other person under institutional control in the community. ”

The dangers of kundalini yoga

Many people believe that awakening the kundalini energy within the body can be dangerous, and that it can cause you to become mentally unstable. Activating this serpent power energy can be achieved safely with the proper technique, teacher and intention.

Activating and stirring up this flow of energy without a clear purpose or intention can feel disruptive and lead to negative results. Quickly and forcefully stoking the serpent energy in a yoga class can create very strong and uncomfortable reactions. If you begin to feel unbalanced, lightheaded, or emotionally disrupted by this practice, slow down or stop, take some time to breathe deeply, and notice what you’re feeling. Taking time during and after the practice will be important to integrate any new energies that arise.

You should always consult with an experienced teacher before beginning any type of yoga, especially kundalini yoga. If you are concerned about its potential effects on your mental well-being, talk to your doctor, counselor, or therapist first.

The benefits of kundalini yoga

Kundalini yoga has many physical and mental benefits if practiced correctly. The intensity of this practice builds resilience, grit, and inner strength. Like other styles of yoga, it can increase your flexibility, strength, endurance, balance and coordination.. It reduces stress and anxiety and improves balance and coordination. The practice of Kundalini yoga can help release old patterns and habits and deepen your spiritual practice.

What to expect in a kundalini yoga class

A typical Kundalini yoga class is comprised of three parts: an opening chant (known as “tuning in”) followed by a brief warm-up for your spine, a kriya (which is a sequence of postures paired with breathing techniques), and a closing meditation or song.

A typical Kundalini yoga practice begins with a short chanting session known as tuning in. After the sequence of postures, there is a closing meditation or song, where we focus on stillness and silence.

Many of the common poses are used as kryias. A Kriya combines yoga postures with pranayama, Mudra and bandhas to move energy through the body. Most of the common kundalini poses are seated positions that focus on the spine. Cobra, Bow and Camel poses are all backbends that open the heart and chest. Spinal flexing in a seated cat cow pose and upper body movements in other seated positions are very common.

Several pranayama practices are used, but the most popular breathing techniques in a kundalini class is breath of fire. This focuses on expelling the breath as quickly as possible while still maintaining control over the inhalation through the nose. This can be a bit challenging for beginners, but the breath of fire has many great benefits to add to a yoga practice.

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As we all know, the last two years have been very interesting. As someone that consults and advises leaders around the world, to say that I have been busy is an understatement. When the global pandemic started, I was getting contacted by leaders from all over the world as they faced great uncertainty about the future. I felt it was important to give them the space to share their concerns and trepidations. However, I also made sure to shift the narrative and remind them that this is still a moment of great possibility and opportunity in the world. I’ve seen into the next twenty years and the world will never truly be the same. I want to share some insights with you for embracing and thriving at the next level. Remarkable leaders never get stuck in the past. Revolutionary leaders engineer the possibilities of tomorrow!

Fear is the greatest enemy of the future. As you just heard me share, many leaders were anxious, fearful, and uncertain about the future. While some people consider me an anomaly, I just believe that I am an optimist. As a respected thought leader and prophetic voice, I do not allow the future or uncertainty to rattle me. While I will admit that the last two years have been anything but normal, I refuse to allow cultural events or social constructs to frame my narrative. In other words, you may not be able to control what is happening in the world. However, you always have the power to control what is happening within you. So I challenge you to silence the fear. Why is this so important? Fear is the greatest enemy of your future. Furthermore, fear is a currency just like faith is a currency. Whatever you are rooted in will determine your reality. Refuse to allow fear to rule you or to write the narrative of what is possible for your life. Fear wants to paralyze you and cripple your potential. 

Faith is a muscle that must be developed. When you mention faith to some people, you start to get cynical looks and blank stares. However, what most people do not understand is that faith is both a currency and a spiritual force. Everything that you attract into your life will be the result of faith or fear. With that said, faith is a magnet just like fear is a magnet. In order for fear to be silenced in your life, you have to starve it. Notice that I did not say that you have to ignore it. What we ignore often imprisons us to cycles of frustration, failure, and defeat. On the other hand, what we confront we are empowered to conquer. Decades ago I made an incredible discovery about faith that changed my life.

Faith is a spiritual principle and a spiritual law. The power of a principle is that it provides a proven path to results and success. In other words, I can apply a principle repeatedly and see results in my life. Then one day I came to the awareness that faith is a muscle. The strength of your faith is determined by the investments you make in feeding it. The reality is that we are all feeding something. We only have two responses to life. We can either respond in faith or respond in fear. Fear will always send your life in reverse and create cycles of regret. 

Faith will always move your life forward and become the catalyst for embracing your prophetic future. If you will develop the muscle of faith, then you can starve doubt in your life and you can seize your destiny. The strength of any muscle is developed by resistance. Challenges are opportunities to build resistance and break into new realms of living.

“A vision is not just a picture of what could be; it is an appeal to our better selves, a call to become something more.” – Rosabeth Moss Kanter

You cannot embrace the next realm in your life without crisis. As the global pandemic rocked the world, I reminded leaders of a message that I have been speaking for years. I believe that crisis is a precious treasure. Most people have a negative connotation of crisis. I have discovered that most people see a crisis as a disruption, disturbance, or detriment to their lives. 

Personally, I see a crisis as a developmental tool that ushers you into realms of greatness ad unlimited possibilities. Your perception of crisis will determine the progress and change that you see manifest in your life. I talk to so many people that say that they want to go to the next level. However, the moment that adversity shows up in their lives they start to shrink back to mediocrity. 

In order to embrace the next realm in your life, you are going to have to experience a crisis. A crisis is simply an opportunity to develop and to press into the next dimension. A crisis is never sent into your life to cripple you. A crisis shows up as the catalyst ushering you into growth, transformation, and mastery. Your perception of crisis will ultimately determine your promotion and the unlocking of your true capacity. 

Living at the next level will require vision. As we head into the final days of 2021, we look back on the last two years as a time of great turbulence, uncertainty, and change in the world. In fact, I have been telling my clients globally that we just lived through one of the greatest shifts and pivots in history. Everything about the world has changed. 

When I had this vision of the next twenty years, I saw the total transformation of industries, systems, institutions, and nations. One of the most important skills that we must possess in this new era is vision. While we have understood vision to a certain degree, most people are not living their lives with a real sense of vision. I have discovered that when you live without vision you live a life without boundaries and clearly defined priorities. 

Unfortunately, living without vision will always make you a casualty to someone else’s vision. As we head into 2022 and beyond, I want to challenge you to get a clear vision for your life. Vision brings focus to our lives, clarity to our days, and intention to our moments. Most importantly, vision empowers us to give every day of our lives an assignment. Vision is one of the most powerful forms of currency on the planet. Vision empowers you to see, partner with, and give birth to a tomorrow that is not yet born to time.

 The world is desperately in need of visionary leadership. Visionary leaders inspire hope, awaken dreamers, and activate those that will champion change.

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Christianity is, officially, the religion of one third of the people in the world. The religion has spread across the world, claiming the devotion of nearly two thousand million people. Christians always have thought Jesus and the apostles’ age to be some kind of standard for all the other eras.

It brought the church’s trust in Jesus, the resurrected Son of God, as well as the promise of sin redemption by him. And the era illustrated, by Paul’s existence, that the gospel of grace knows no limits of country, ethnicity, gender, or religion.

The History

1. Catholic Churches

According to Catholic theology, the Catholic Church is the primary church built by Christ himself on the Disciples in the first century AD. Catholic Christianity, which embraced this fact, quickly spread across the Mediterranean region.

It challenged the foreign beliefs of Gnosticism, Montanism, and Marcionism and called a deception a lie by referring to the early church scriptures and the conservative bishops who protected them.

2. Orthodox Churches

The Eastern Orthodox Church focuses its argument largely on its insistence that it adheres to the traditional Christian Church’s rituals and values. Also, it notes that four of the Pentarchy’s five sees are still a member of it.

The word orthodox is commonly used to differentiate the “true Church’s” religion or views from other sects that contradict, which are historically alluded to as heresy.

Emperor Constantine I, during his rule, became the first one to publicly advocate Christianity, and the ideas of “orthodoxy” begin to show great importance.   Constantine called the very first Ecumenical Council, the Council of Nicea, which sought to include the Christian religion’s first universal doctrine.

3. Lutheran Churches

Lutheran traditions are also known as the age of reformation. Martin Luther blew the whistle, but a slew of others joined the movement. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Reformation had broken Western Europe’s conventional stability and left religious tolerance to changing times.

The faith proclaimed by Luther and his adherents is really nothing unique; however, the real Christian religion and their churches reflect the original Catholic Church.

4. Evangelical Churches

As a result of the evangelical transformations, new movements were launched to spread the word of Christ to remote places and to launch a slew of social welfare organizations in industrialized Europe and North America.

A defending church launched a series of rockets directed at secular opponents of the Catholic Church from the parapets of Rome. Despite the best intentions of Christians, Christianity was gradually pushed out of public life in the West.

Christian faith is filled with symbols and religious items that encourage faith in people and make them feel connected to God. People buy items prominently in the Christian faith from shops and online stores. One such store is Holyart; it is an Italian store consisting of a wide variety of religious items. The website is a haven for believers, and you will find different kinds of church handbells, statue of lady Medjogurje, religious rings, bracelets, paintings, crosses, crucifixes, and many more things.

The Significance Of Churches

The modern church’s position in the reality of the twenty-first-century Christian believer is important as it fills a gap that only a church can. When anyone needs a major spiritual boost, they ought to go to church to cleanse their heart and feel closer to God.

People want the church to offer Bible-based solutions which no other entity can give them. With all the stress and burdens of their society pressing down on their heads, they hope to get answers to solve their life problems.

1. Christian Churches are known for their public service – The church community will go out of their way to help the people in their surroundings as much as they can. Most churches offer food and clothes in the form of charity to the poor and make them feel noticed and important.
2. Churches are a great way of being closer to God – As discussed earlier, people with the burden of society over their shoulders can confide in the churches and feel at home.
3. Churches keep the belief intact and fresh – Millions of people are true believers of God, and they do good because, in their minds, they are answerable to God, and to be good Christians, they go out of their way to do good. Churches help these people and motivate them to do better.
4. Churches are the epitome of hope – People hope to God that things fall right into place and Churches keep their hopes alive.

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Yoga’s history has many places of obscurity and uncertainty due to its oral transmission of sacred texts and the secretive nature of its teachings. The early writings on yoga were transcribed on fragile palm leaves that were easily damaged, destroyed or lost. The development of yoga can be traced back to over 5,000 years ago, but some researchers think that yoga may be up to 10,000 years old old. Yoga’s long rich history can be divided into four main periods of innovation, practice and development.

Pre-Classical Yoga
The beginnings of Yoga were developed by the Indus-Sarasvati civilization in Northern India over 5,000 years ago. The word yoga was first mentioned in the oldest sacred texts, the Rig Veda. The Vedas were a collection of texts containing songs, mantras and rituals to be used by Brahmans, the Vedic priests. Yoga was slowly refined and developed by the Brahmans and Rishis (mystic seers) who documented their practices and beliefs in the upanishads, a huge work containing over 200 scriptures. The most renowned of the Yogic scriptures is the Bhagavad-Gîtâ, composed around 500 B.C.E. The Upanishads took the idea of ritual sacrifice from the Vedas and internalized it, teaching the sacrifice of the ego through self-knowledge, action (karma yoga) and wisdom (jnana yoga).

Classical Yoga
In the pre-classical stage, yoga was a mishmash of various ideas, beliefs and techniques that often conflicted and contradicted each other. The Classical period is defined by Patanjali’s Yoga-Sûtras, the first systematic presentation of yoga. Written some time in the second century, this text describes the path of RAJA YOGA, often called “classical yoga”. Patanjali organized the practice of yoga into an “eight limbed path” containing the steps and stages towards obtaining Samadhi or enlightenment. Patanjali is often considered the father of yoga and his Yoga-Sûtras still strongly influence most styles of modern yoga.

Post-Classical Yoga
A few centuries after Patanjali, yoga masters created a system of practices designed to rejuvenate the body and prolong life. They rejected the teachings of the ancient Vedas and embraced the physical body as the means to achieve enlightenment. They developed Tantra Yoga, with radical techniques to cleanse the body and mind to break the knots that bind us to our physical existence. This exploration of these physical-spiritual connections and body centered practices led to the creation of what we primarily think of yoga in the West: Hatha Yoga.

Modern Period
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, yoga masters began to travel to the West, attracting attention and followers. This began at the 1893 Parliament of Religions in Chicago, when Swami Vivekananda wowed the attendees with his lectures on yoga and the universality of the world’s religions. In the 1920s and 30s, Hatha Yoga was strongly promoted in India with the work of T. Krishnamacharya, Swami Sivananda and other yogis practicing Hatha Yoga. Krishnamacharya opened the first Hatha Yoga school in Mysore in 1924 and in 1936 Sivananda founded the Divine Life Society on the banks of the holy Ganges River. Krishnamacharya produced three students that would continue his legacy and increase the popularity of Hatha Yoga: B.K.S. Iyengar, T.K.V. Desikachar and Pattabhi Jois. Sivananda was a prolific author, writing over 200 books on yoga, and established nine ashrams and numerous yoga centers located around the world.

The importation of yoga to the West still continued at a trickle until Indra Devi opened her yoga studio in Hollywood in 1947. Since then, many more western and Indian teachers have become pioneers, popularizing hatha yoga and gaining millions of followers. Hatha Yoga now has many different schools or styles, all emphasizing the many different aspects of the practice.

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