Our Kundalini Yoga Classes and How We Teach
At Raja Yoga, we teach yoga in an honest and authentic way. Kundalini Yoga is one of several kinds of class we offer, and we think you deserve to know where the practices in it actually come from. The honest history is more interesting than the myth, and telling it plainly is part of how we teach.
When we teach the physical kriyas, the sets of posture, movement, and breath commonly known as “Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan,” we give credit to where those kriyas come from. Yogi Bhajan (1929–2004) brought this practice to the West in the late 1960s and for years presented it as an ancient, secret tradition carried through an unbroken lineage of masters. Careful historical research, most thoroughly by the scholar Philip Deslippe, tells a more honest story.
The physical side of the practice, the postures, the repetitive dynamic movements, and the breathwork draw substantially from the hatha yoga of Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari (1924–1994) and his system of sukshma vyayama, the “subtle exercises.” Many of the mantras we chant are Gurbani, sacred words composed by the Sikh Gurus and preserved in the Siri Guru Granth Sahib. The phrases Ik Onkar (One Creator) and Sat Nam (True Name), for example, come from the Mool Mantar of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith.
The particular way several of these are used here, chanted as repeated Naam, the remembrance of the sacred Name, reached Yogi Bhajan through a more recent teacher, the Sikh sant Maharaj (Baba) Virsa Singh, and his community at Gobind Sadan. We credit both: the Gurus as the source of the sacred language, and Virsa Singh as the channel through which the practice came to us.
As our own ongoing research keeps showing us, still other elements were gathered from further spiritual traditions and from modern disciplines, including psychology. In other words, this is a twentieth-century practice assembled from real, named, human sources, not a secret handed down unchanged from antiquity. The ancient teachers often named as its origin cannot be documented, and the evidence suggests they belong to a mythology that took shape in Yogi Bhajan’s first years of teaching in the West.
We do not teach a single lineage or bind ourselves to one school or teacher. We teach what we have found, in our own practice and study, to be genuinely effective, and we teach it in an authentic, safe, and honest way. That is the ground the practices rest on: not the authority of a named tradition, but what actually works when you do the work.
We share all of this not to diminish the practice but to honor it truthfully. Just because a practice is not ancient does not mean it does not work. The breath, the movement, and the mantra do what they do regardless of the story told about them, and we would rather stand on what is real than on a romantic pedigree.
So we credit the teachers and traditions these techniques actually come from, and we hold to a simple principle: nobody owns yoga. It is a shared human inheritance, and we offer it in that spirit, as fellow explorers, not as keepers of a secret.
