Sahaja Yoga and other kundalini practices — A serious warning

Practices based on a serious misunderstanding…

The basic trouble with ALL practices that are regarded as being at least primarily for raising or 'awakening' the purported kundalini 'energy' is that they're greatly unbalanced, and the use of any of them is actually trying to force an out-of-context change in one aspect of your 'energy system'. This is true even for people who would be regarded as 'ready' for kundalini 'awakening'.

Virtually universally, people are regarded as ready for kundalini 'awakening' if they don't have particular blocks in their 'energy system' that would cause major and obvious mental / emotional disturbances when the kundalini quickly 'rises', but nonetheless, using a kundalini-specific practice at all creates harmful energy imbalance.

Also, all these methods are ungrounding and so are harmful in that respect — and that's so even when the supposed kundalini 'rises' (I would prefer to say, 'integrates') without immediately obvious harmful effects.

Yet another harmful aspect, strongly related to the origin of the various practices (i.e., from the garbage,), is that the practices lead people to believe that when they've had a supposed kundalini 'awakening', they've 'got there' and have found enlightenment and self-actualization / self-realization — so that they typically have little or no motivation to continue for true enlightenment and beyond to optimal self-actualization.

Even those who do have such motivation, if they've followed the route of supposed kundalini 'awakening', in almost all cases they've been left with an unbalanced outlook that would be a serious obstacle to gaining optimal self-actualization.

I mention Sahaja Yoga in particular, because a particular guru, Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, has founded and is widely promoting this method as a purported fast-track and indeed almost instantaneous means to self-realization. One thing it does NOT achieve or truly help towards is true self-realization / self-actualization. It appears that she has trained quite a number of people to teach this practice, and they're introducing people to it quite widely throughout the world.

My own experience

I myself encountered Sahaja Yoga in about 2002, when for some weeks a couple of very well-intentioned young men trained by Shri Mataji gave weekly free (but donations rather expected!) group sessions of Sahaja Yoga close to where I live in Exeter. At that stage I didn't know of anything specifically 'wrong' about it, but was intrigued (and quite a bit sceptical) about the claim of near-instant self-realization.

Another cause of scepticism was the matter of kundalini 'awakening', for even then I'd already come to understand that the latter was something that was inclined to cause severe problems for many people. Yet these teachers were making out as though Sahaja Yoga was completely safe and would cause no-one any problems. Curious!

Because I'd already been enlightened for a good five years then, I suspected that my kundalini would very likely have already been rising in a healthy and gradual way and that their method wouldn't harm me and might benefit me*, so I went to two of their sessions and repeated the practice once or twice at home before altogether losing interest in it.

I have to say, the whole Sahaja Yoga practice seemed to me to be primitive in the worst sense, in that it incorporated a simplistic outlook that expected enlightenment and self-actualization to be handed to you on a plate if you sat for about 15 to 20 minutes with your hands on a sequence of positions on your body, at each hand position asking some non-physical 'higher' source for a particular type of improvement in your personality, and at the final position directly asking for your self-realization now.

So, you go through what is effectively a type of prayer ritual and ask for self-realization to be given — yes, given! — to you as though on a plate! At that point I felt remarkably like a young schoolboy putting my hand up in class and asking, Please, Miss, I've been a good boy and completed this practice, so can I have my Brownie points / sweets / ice cream / self-realization now (And can I go to the toilet)?. Indeed, to me it was quite comical and I found it a little bit difficult not to burst out into laughter in the group or display an offending smirk — maybe I even involuntarily did the latter!

Another problem about Sahaja Yoga, or at least the way it was presented, was that it was confusing enlightenment and self-actualization. That's serious, because even when a person does achieve genuine enlightenment through that practice (a small proportion of people might conceivably do so, though in a narrow and unbalanced way), the person actually still has in virtually all cases a long way to go for optimal self-actualization, which can't be achieved by any method remotely like that one.

I now recognise Sahaja Yoga very much to be garbage-sourced stuff, regardless of the good intentions of at least the vast majority of the people who are promoting it.

I myself experienced nothing to notice when I did those practices — but, as I say, I suspected that through my own self-healing and enlightenment I'd already achieved in a more gentle and balanced way what Sahaja Yoga was claiming to do*. What I didn't know then was that those sessions did actually do me a little harm, in slightly further weakening my grounding and increasing my connections with the garbage, as part of the unedifying sequence of events that led up to my severely troublesome shenanigans with the garbage from 2003 onwards.

At the time when those Sahaja Yoga sessions were running in Exeter I mentioned the practice to a very experienced local 'healer', who, it turned out, was outspoken against it. He told me that he'd had a 'healing' stand at a mind, body and spirit fair where there'd been a Sahaja Yoga stand with lots of people being guided through that practice, none of them being given any cautions about possible undesirable effects. He said that during that fair he'd had a well-nigh constant stream of people coming to him for 'healing' because of immediate serious troubles they'd got from trying Sahaja Yoga.

Unfortunately, as that 'healer' himself was being seriously controlled and misled by the garbage, it's unlikely that anyone got genuine benefit from his attempted assistance, and generally he'd have surely compounded their problems, particularly with the harmful energy implants that he was prone to put into people's systems (as he did into mine in a weekly Reiki 'shares' group), apparently believing that they were healing implants that would dissolve over a week or two.

The good news that arises out of all this is that for enlightenment and true self-actualization you NEVER need a kundalini-specific practice, because true self-actualization methods — all of them — bring about a progressive integration of whatever aspects of one's awareness get labelled as kundalini (if indeed the latter isn't already fully integrated), in balance with all the other positive changes in your whole being.

So, you could well say that the practices presented and pointed to in Some potent self-actualization / healing practices are among the ultimate 'kundalini' practices, because they don't focus specifically on kundalini at all but still bring about a steady and, you could say, 'safely rapid' integration of that 'energy', if and as required, in balance with the whole system — and always cultivating groundedness, while kundalini-specific practices are all ungrounding and thus open you (more) to garbage interference and influence.

"The owner of this site gives false knowledge about kundalini practice."

You bet I do (i.e., according to that guy and countless other 'spirituality-heads')!

And on what basis does that accuser think he knows better than me about supposed 'kundalini'??! — His only possible 'information' source can surely be none other than channelled or clairvoyantly obtained 'information' or 'received wisdom' from some guru or tradition. And what would be the original source of any 'received wisdom' on non-physical issues? — Why, channelled or clairvoyantly obtained 'information' again, of course!

Yes, of course people locked into their own particular beliefs and 'received wisdoms', and unable to genuinely observe and think for themselves, will come out with dismissals of this page and indeed this site in like manner to the above-quoted example, which latter is a comment from an evidently very rigid and opinionated person who gave this site a fully 'Poor' (red) rating in WOT (the so-called Web of Trust) — both his overall rating and his rating of this site for child safety — all on the basis of his disagreeing with the contents of one out of a large number of pages.

Unfortunately, so far the WOT admin have been complacent to the point of culpable complicity in allowing opinionated people to abuse the WOT system by giving 'double Poor' ratings to sites like this one, which actually fulfil the criteria for an 'Excellent' rating but happen to challenge the respective individuals' own beliefs and thus trigger irrational, reactive responses from them.