Kundalini Yoga goes back to Yogi Bahajan, who was born in 1929 with the name Harbhajan Singh Puri in India, now Pakistan. He lived in the Sikh tradition and based his yoga on this. As the son of a doctor, he was given training by the spiritual teacher Sant Hazara Singh at the age of 7 (!), who released him as a master of Kundalini Yoga at the age of 16.
Due to the partition of India, they fled to Delhi in 1947, studied there, married and worked in the Indian administration. He eventually spent several years practicing Karma Yoga in the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the most important temple of the Sikhs.
In 1968, he was invited to Canada and finally to the USA and began training Kundalini yoga teachers. He came into the midst of the 1968 movement and was one of the most popular yoga teachers on the scene. He began to develop special yoga courses based on the Sikh yoga tradition and later founded the “3HO ” – the “Happy Healthy Holy Organization”. Yogi Bhajan thus created a well thought-out yoga exercise system with a spiritual background. Nevertheless, the participants should remain free in their religious beliefs.
He became a recognized advisor to politicians and managers, chaired welfare committees and looked after celebrities as well as ordinary people. He explicitly stood up for the dignity of women, although this has been called into question by the sexual abuse allegations. He initiated various peace movements and was a respected and influential man both religiously and politically. He died in the USA in 2004.
Kundalini yoga practice: awakening energies
First, a visual and acoustic impression of the yoga practice, because the style is so different from all other styles that words can hardly describe it:
The wearing of white clothing and turbans goes back to the Sikh tradition. Chanting, reciting mantras and prayers form the basis of a yoga class. Dynamic movements build on this, which are repeated again and again and combined with intensive breathing exercises and finally lead to meditation.
The aim of this style is to awaken the Kundalini energy, traditionally described as resting at the bottom of the spine and rising up the spine via the chakras to generate spiritual enlightenment.
During the long, strenuous practice, you encounter your resistance, aggression, anger and various other negative emotions. By continuing to practise in an inner state of the greatest possible serenity, these emotions should be transformed so that resistance becomes surrender, anger becomes peacefulness and powerlessness becomes strength. The knowledge that every negative emotion can be transformed into a positive one should be based on this experience.
Kundalini Yoga is practiced worldwide, in America the largest yoga center is a Kundalini center, the Golden Bridge Center in Los Angeles run by Gurmukh Kaur Kalsa (right in the video). In Germany, a special type of “yoga for pregnant women” is known to prepare for childbirth, which is based on Kundalini principles,
Continue to the next yoga style: The New Yoga Will
