Kundalini & Sexual Practice
The practices of Yoga are designed to strengthen your vessel, to help make your body and mind resilient enough to hold your awakened Kundalini. When awakened, it illumines your entire being, both the outer and inner worlds, both “higher” and “lower” realms. Kundalini brings wisdom, creativity and heightened awareness to your actions and feelings. It allows you to explore the fullness and magnificence of who you are within and reveals your seamless unity with the world around you. Because we are habituated to looking outward and being drawn away from our higher selves, the classical Yoga teachings emphasize cultivating the upward movement of Kundalini, from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. Images of enlightenment are often associated with Kundalini becoming seated within the Sahasrar, the mystical space in the crown chakra. However, the awakened Kundalini moves freely both up and down the subtle body. You can align with this power to enliven your life in the world; to infuse it with grace, purpose and wisdom, so that you may give your gifts to this world with your entire being.
Sexual energy is a form of Kundalini. On a basic level, it serves many purposes. It creates a deep bond and reinforces your connection. It brings you into a space of vulnerability and intimacy that shortens the distance between you and your partner. It cuts through petty disagreements to forge a shared space. The ecstasy of orgasm gives you a taste—however momentary—of the inner union, of Shiva and Shakti. All couples have practiced some form of basic sex, and this is all well and good: it is a part of both reinforcing your bond and kindling the fire of love that burns within your marriage.
However, there is a steep price to be paid when you practice ordinary sex. Ayurveda states that there is a vital energy, ojas, that is created and circulated within your body. It brings vitality to your health and feeds your Kundalini energy. Ojas is consumed by orgasm. Esoteric teachings posit that expending the sexual fluids more than once a month will drain you of the energy you need to meditate, to feed your Kundalini’s unfolding in your being, and to maintain your health and vitality into old age.
Modern understanding of the body sheds light on it from a different angle. Lovemaking and affection in general produce an array of hormones in the body that promote desire, bonding, openness, and satiation. Just by being passionately affectionate, you receive the hormonal benefits of sex. However, when you have an orgasm, your body also releases satiated hormones. Your neurochemistry is wired to shut down desire and connection, and as a result you feel flattened, shallow, and mediocre. You cannot revive the feeling of aliveness simply by having more orgasms, either. You have to let the hormones subside, and this takes weeks for the body to do.
From either an Eastern or a Western perspective, therefore, ordinary sex, while delicious in the short term, is a limited bliss defined and bound by your body and senses. As long as you undercut the power you need to channel sexual energy into consciousness, your sense of union with the highest will be elusive. Your inner attention will tend to be weighted towards neediness, pettiness, and ego, and be less free to explore higher realms.
Sex presents the married sadhaka with a dilemma. Sexual intimacy is indeed the expression of Kundalini and is one of the most powerful forces you will ever experience, and it cannot be ignored. Yet how do you engage with it without undermining your capacity to transcend the grip of the senses and dissipating your focus?
We will consider two deliberate and disciplined sex practices here: Brahmacharya (celibacy), and a deliberate regular practice of sex while refraining from orgasm. Both paths cultivate and magnify your Kundalini Shakti, and both practices have challenges. If you refrain from sex you risk cutting yourself off from your partner and from your own creativity and inspiration. If you play around with sex, you risk being ruled by the fire of desire. And if you actively cultivate sexual energy, whether through abstinence or by active practice, sexual energy moving in you will expose the knots that cut off your natural flow of energy, the places where your marriage remains unexamined and bound by unhealthy habits and patterns. This is not easy and it will intensify your sadhana; you will understand why people readily choose shallow, diffusing sex instead of doing the hard work required to engage sex more powerfully. While you may freely explore conscious sex as a new couple, the maturity gained from years of prior intimate sadhana together will provide you with a stronger foundation on which to base your practice and vessel to contain the energy you unleash. We have encountered few couples who have truly mastered either of these approaches, and we have encountered others who dived in only to quickly flame out because they did not have the inner strength to contain the forces they were generating.
With deliberate, disciplined practice it is possible to cultivate sexual energy so that it manifests radiance, grace, and wisdom in your marriage. The power flowing between the two of you will be like the flow of Kundalini within yourself, between your inner poles of Shiva and Shakti. As a couple, you can work with this energy and use it to burn the flame of love more brightly. You will walk through your days as if your heart were in a sustained state of love, or each moment is an offering of gratitude to God for the fullness you feel. Your sexual energy can intensify and empower your other sadhana practices. Like tuning two strings on a single instrument, you become potently and finely harmonized with one another.
It should be mentioned that there are esoteric sexual teachings in some schools of Yoga. These must be taught by a qualified adept rooted in a lineage of teachers and are not discussed in this essay. Also, the term Tantra has been widely subverted by popular culture to confuse a spiritual tradition with indulgent sexuality. It is true, some esoteric Kaula Tantra traditions and scriptures include sexual ritual as a sanctioned yogic practice, but those traditions require extensive training and attainment in other esoteric practices prior to engaging in sex, and to imagine that we can follow these teachings casually without proper preparation is folly and even dangerous because of the control they require to contain the power they generate. These essays do not purport to discuss sexuality as Tantra. Instead, these essays reflect our experience with sex from the context of modern culture, interwoven with the ancient principles of Yoga.
Brahmacharya
Although Brahmacharya can be practiced simply as described in the earlier essay on Yama and Niyama, by upholding fidelity, an advanced approach is to adopt celibacy in your marriage. This can be considered to mean, sex no more often than monthly. This is not an avoidance or prohibition, but a disciplined observance. It is important to approach this lifestyle choice not as a restriction or a set of rules, but as a positive embrace of Kundalini in your lives. Here you do not suppress the energetic flow between you and your beloved, but rather use that energy while engaging in yogic practices together. In modern society, where genital sexuality is so thoroughly celebrated and emphasized, it may seem strange to embrace sexuality through your whole body, but this expanded focus is a time-tested path to ecstasy. A Bengali mystic once declared that, through his practice of brahmacharya, he experienced his entire body covered with Yoni’s, as if his entire being were making love ecstatically to the world.
Over the course of the month of abstention, experience “ripening” together: your energy and attraction builds, like the poles of a powerful battery. Allow the erotic impulse to circulate through your bodies and be experienced not through the singular portals of your genitals, but through your bodies more fully—your eyes, hands, skin, hearts, and ultimately through every pore of your bodies. Then devote a whole day to courtship, romance, affection, and union. Drink fully of one another and flow deeply together.
Like a dietary fast, when you first try Brahmacharya you may suffer from cravings for sex and not being able to feel gratification. The first days of a dietary fast are difficult, but after the third day, something magical happens: you feel light, and you find a deep, quiet, and energetic feeling coursing through you. The same holds true for observing Brahmacharya. Those who practice abstention are quick to remark, while they may miss normal sex, it is a small price to pay for the energy they feel, the scintillating aliveness, the brilliant clarity of mind.
To get a taste of what sexual abstinence might offer you, observe mauna, silence. Try to maintain silence for at least 24 hours, and if you can, try three days. You will notice the recurring impulse to spew your energy outwards, again and again, and will become aware of how much energy you expend by going outside yourself. As you refrain from talking, an extraordinary amount of energy builds within and you feel powerful in a way that your habitual talking denies you. Your senses become heightened and your inner awareness deepens. When you discover the power gained simply by living your life without using your vocal cords, and how much energy you waste in the impulse to go outside yourself, you will taste what it is like when you refrain from spending your energy through sex.
When you observe Brahmacharya in your marriage it is essential that you keep your affection and creative interactions alive: you meditate together, do puja together, perform practices such as hatha yoga and pranayama together, offer Guruseva together, exercise together. You are not disconnected entities walking on parallel paths; you are working together to magnify your sexual energy and channel it into creative collaborations, into your sadhana. Together you are growing a scintillating body of energy that supercharges you, and you use it to illumine the power of Shiva and Shakti.
Sexual Practice
The second choice is to embrace physical sex and use it to magnify your Kundalini Shakti. Just as Brahmacharya is not merely the avoidance of sex but a cultivation of the energy, sexual practice is not indulgence in sex but rather a disciplined observance. Conscious sex unleashes tremendous energy within you that requires structure and both partners to be fully committed. As with any tool of sadhana, the power may take months and years to develop. It is likely that there are shadows and wounds associated with your sexuality that will be recognized, spoken, embraced, and healed. If you have sex out of neediness or as an outlet for fear or anger, these constrictions will subvert and consume the energy that you are generating. Understand that the forces that you awaken and magnify can powerfully accelerate your sadhana, and they require a strong vessel to contain. Your sexual energy makes you radiant and enlivens your inner life, but it will also attract people and forces that seek to drain you, and thus you will need to take even more protective measures than you do with your other practices.
The core element of the practice is to abstain from genital orgasm, unless deliberately chosen, and to consciously work with the resulting energy flow between you and your spouse. This does not mean absolute abstention from orgasm; it means that you choose when orgasm will serve you. Esoteric teachings refer to a frequency of one orgasm a month as tantamount to celibacy. You might use that as a guide. You may intuit when it is time to re-set, to let the energy wash through you like a cleansing. Orgasmic indulgence in lovemaking is simply ordinary sex and leaves you flattened.
The effect of this type of abstention is a growing radiance and flow between you and your partner, and your inner realms will be empowered. Like any practice, you learn from doing it repetitively and deliberately for an extended period. And while this undertaking can be time-consuming and cumbersome, it can be utterly ecstatic and will imbue your life with joy. While we are not offering a How-To guide, here are a few things to consider:
Make sex a discipline, just as you may have adopted other practices for your sadhana. The frequency of your practice is for you to explore and choose. How often do you need to meditate or practice hatha yoga so that you maintain the power and aliveness that you derive from these disciplines? How often do you need to perform puja or offer Guruseva? How much physical exercise is enough to keep you toned and fit and alive in your body? Your practice of sexual yoga will also have its own appropriate frequency. A session may last a quick five minutes or may go on for over an hour. As with meditation you may go by the clock or simply proceed until you have drunk your fill.
It is essential that sexual practice be performed in conjunction with your other Yoga practices: the tremendous amount of energy you generate needs to be channeled into worship and service. The energy also must be grounded. It is critical that you attend to your physical health: exercise, get enough sleep, eat moderately. When engaging with conscious sexual energy work, you must be fully embodied and alive in your physical form to effectively work with its power.
Just as with any practice of sadhana, the power of conscious sex lies not in some peak experience during the effort, but rather in its cumulative effect on your life. Think of ordinary sex as being akin to jumping into a swimming pool off a diving board: you walk out and go bounce-bounce and then fly into the air and land with a splash. It's fun and you may pull a few tricks while you're doing it but then you end up in this small static pool, treading water and you have to swim out and start all over again; it gets old after a while, and it can tire you out. We get a sense that for many people they imagine sexual sadhana is learning how to pull off more tricks after they jump off the board or climbing to a higher diving board; in the end it is not much different than the same old bounce-bounce-splash. In Yoga, sexual practice doesn't have that splash and it doesn't have that little pool; rather, it is akin to riding a wave on the open ocean, finding your balance, navigating rough spots; sometimes the wave is smaller and slower, sometimes it's bigger and faster, and sometimes it's really huge. It's all about navigating this dynamic energy that has a consciousness and intelligence of its own, having to surrender to its direction, and even coming into a sense of oneness with the wave itself. Anyone can make a splash, but it takes practice, discipline and patience to learn the skills of riding an ocean wave.
If you develop a sustained practice, your days reverberate with depth, your heart fills with love and it spills over as a grateful offering to life, your own senses are heightened, your interactions with people around you are infused with fullness and blessings, wisdom and grace flows through your marriage, the dynamic spark – the power of polarity between you and your partner – is intensified. Your lovemaking fuels your ability to collaborate, co-create, and cooperate. Channel this energy into your inner life and, like a finely tuned musical instrument, your marriage becomes a scintillating, radiant, grace-filled song.