The Wisdom Layer, also known as the higher mind, contains our intuition and intellect, our capacity for judgment and our awareness. The mental layer includes our automatic thoughts and feelings, as well as the experiencing of our senses and our instinctive impulses. The physical layer is what we know as the body. They are the containers of our true self. Yoga understands man as a group of five interconnected layers, each more subtle than the previous. What I mean by Kundalini YogaĪccording to the tradition in which I was educated the Tantra of Swami Satyananda, Swami Sivananda, and their teachers all the way to Adi Shankaracharya in the 8th Century Kundalini Yoga is the science of awakening powerful dormant energies in our body. Kundalini Yoga has been closely associated to many yoga traditions for centuries, and is a fundamental aspect of Tantra.

He was also extremely successful at spreading his teachings through his controversial Healthy, Happy and Holy Organization (3HO). He wasn’t the first to introduce Kundalini to the West ( John Woodroffe did that in the 1910s), but he was the first to remove the secrecy that had surrounded these practices since the dawn of time. So one could say that Yogi Bhajan’s yoga is a marriage between the Hindu and Sikh traditions (hence the turbans).

Yogi Bhajan’s is merely one interpretation of Kundalini Yoga, and a very recent one at that: Kundalini Yoga was first mentioned in the Upanishads around 500BC, Yogi Bhajan’s version dates from 1968.īorn to a Sikh father and a Hindu mother, Yogi Bhajan took the teachings of his yoga guru, Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari, and amalgamated them with the Sikh doctrines of his spiritual leader, Maharaj Virsa Singh. As it happens with many yogic and Sanskrit words, Kundalini is a very old concept that is today almost exclusively associated with the movement that first (or most) popularized it. When you hear the term Kundalini Yoga, you may think of the white turbans of Yogi Bhajan and his 3HO.

Yogi bhajan criticism