Kriya Yoga: The Tantric Path of Moving Awareness

Kriya yoga is a system of practices that works by moving awareness deliberately around the body along fixed internal routes, rather than by holding it still on a single point. It belongs to the tantric stream of practice and was taught privately from teacher to student for most of its history. The word kriya means action or movement, and the movement in question is the movement of attention itself.

This makes it an unusual member of the yoga family. Almost every meditative method a beginner meets starts with some version of the instruction to concentrate. Kriya yoga starts by refusing that instruction, and the reasoning behind the refusal is the most interesting thing about it.

This page explains what the system is, where it came from, how it is structured and what the tradition says about who is ready for it. It does not teach the practices.

What does the word kriya mean?

Teachers give the word three senses at once, and all three are doing work.

The first is action or movement. In this context it means the movement of awareness: you rotate attention from one place to another along a prescribed path, under control, rather than letting it wander or forcing it to stop.

The second is practical. Kriya yoga is described as concerned with practice and not with philosophical speculation, a system designed to produce results rather than positions. The teachers who published it put this almost combatively, saying the reader should do one percent reading and ninety-nine percent practice.

The third is preliminary. On this reading kriya yoga is not yoga but the thing that leads to it, where yoga means the union that arrives at the end rather than the process. It is described as a technique designed to lead to a state that is beyond all technique.

The word is also used for each individual practice in the set. So kriya yoga is a sequence of kriyas, done one after another in a fixed order.

Why does kriya yoga exist at all?

This is where the system earns its place, and the argument is worth following in full because most people who have tried to meditate will recognise themselves in it.

It runs like this. Nearly every meditation system tells you to concentrate. Concentration means holding awareness on one point while excluding everything else. But awareness is habituated to movement; movement is simply what attention does. So when you try to force it still, you produce effort, then strain, then tension, and then frustration at failing. The teachers are blunt about the result: forcing concentration creates mental tension, headaches and frustration, and if you fight your mind you lose.

The conclusion they draw is the important part. Concentration is a product of relaxation, not a route to it. It happens on its own in a mind and body that are already settled. Telling an unsettled person to concentrate is asking them for the one thing their current state cannot produce. They try, they fail, and a great many of them decide that meditation is either a hoax or something other people can do.

Kriya yoga’s move is to stop asking. It does not request one-pointedness. It asks you to move awareness deliberately along a route instead. And the claim is that because concentration is never demanded, it turns up anyway.

Teachers describe this as entering the house of the mind by the back door, and they extend the same logic to the senses. In the early practices the eyes are deliberately kept open for part of the time rather than shut, because closing them tends to tip a beginner into daydreaming, while keeping them open tends to tip them into distraction. Alternating is meant to hold a line between the two. They note that Zen practice keeps the eyes open for a related reason, and that this brings its own problem.

The underlying observation, which the tradition states repeatedly, is that the mind behaves like a child who does the opposite of what it is told. Whether or not the mechanism is right, the description of the failure is accurate, and it is the honest answer to the question of why anyone needs another kind of yoga.

What is the difference between awareness and concentration?

The system rests on a distinction that is easy to blur and worth keeping sharp.

Concentration is focusing attention on one object to the exclusion of everything else. In practice it usually involves suppressing whatever else arrives.

Awareness, in this tradition, means witnessing: attending to something while also knowing that your attention is there, without suppressing the rest. Teachers are careful to note that the word is used in two different ways elsewhere, sometimes for this practice of witnessing and sometimes for a spontaneous meditative state, and that in kriya yoga it always means the first. If a person does not know they are perceiving something, the tradition does not count them as aware of it.

The practical difference is what you do with an unwanted thought. Under concentration you push it away. Under awareness you let it arrive, watch it, decline to climb into it, and carry on with what you were doing.

The tradition’s argument against pushing is a good one: suppression is like pressing down a bulge in an air bed, which simply raises it somewhere else. The same reasoning drives the early stages of antar mouna, and it is the view of the mind that underlies most of what this site covers about meditation. The tradition’s rule is “not yet” rather than “never”, though. Antar mouna’s fifth stage allows thoughts to be let go the moment they appear, on the grounds that by then they have thinned out and no longer push back. Psychologists who study thought suppression, starting with Daniel Wegner’s white-bear experiments in 1987, find that pushing away thoughts that still carry weight tends to bring them back stronger, which is the case the earlier stages are built around.

	Concentration	Awareness
What it asks	Hold one point, exclude the rest	Witness whatever is here, including the practice
What it does with stray thoughts	Suppresses them	Lets them arrive and pass
Who it suits	A mind that is already settled	Almost everyone else
Typical failure	Strain, headache, giving up	Drifting off and not noticing
Its place here	The result, arriving on its own	The method

Is kriya yoga in the ancient scriptures?

Mostly, no, and the tradition says so itself. This is one of the rare occasions when a yoga lineage volunteers an awkward fact about its own history.

There is no origin story. Teachers state plainly that the beginnings of kriya yoga are lost, that it stayed secret so thoroughly that not even a myth survives to explain where it came from, and, more surprisingly, that they consider this a good thing: with no founder to venerate and no history to argue about, there is nothing to get attached to except the practice.

It is also described as the only widely known path of yoga that is not set out in the classical texts. Two apparent exceptions turn out not to be exceptions:

• The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali do use the phrase. At 2:1 kriya yoga means tapas, swadhyaya and ishwara pranidhana, that is, austerity, self-study and surrender to the divine will. That is an ethical and preparatory discipline leading into raja yoga, and teachers in this lineage say directly that it has nothing to do with the system they teach.
• The Uddhava Gita, within the Srimad Bhagavatam, uses the term for ritual worship of a deity with flowers, food and mantras. Also unrelated.

Components of the system do appear in the older literature. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Gherand Samhita, the Shiva Samhita and the Kularnava Tantra all describe individual postures, seals, locks and sound practices that turn up inside kriyas. What none of them describes is the assembled sequence. As teachers in this lineage put it, the older literature hints without ever giving details.

The honest summary is therefore: the parts are old and attested, and the system built out of them is not attested anywhere.

What history does exist is recent and is given as a transmission rather than a record. This lineage traces its version to Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, and says it was passed on in fifteen or twenty minutes. Other Indian teachers associated with practices under the same name include Lahiri Mahasaya, Yukteshwar Giri and Swami Yogananda, whose organisation credits the figure of Babaji with reintroducing it. Mahatma Gandhi is named among its practitioners.

There is one genuinely interesting parallel. The Secret of the Golden Flower, a Chinese text translated by Richard Wilhelm with an introduction by Carl Jung, describes rotating awareness through passages at the front and back of the body, in the opposite direction to the Indian system. Teachers here are careful, and say only that the two have similarities, not that they are the same thing. That restraint is worth preserving.

How is kriya yoga structured?

The tradition counts roughly seventy-six kriyas and publishes about twenty. Those twenty are grouped by what they are meant to induce:

• practices one to nine, aimed at pratyahara, the withdrawal of the senses;
• practices ten to nineteen, aimed at dharana, concentration;
• practice twenty, associated with dhyana, meditation.

Each kriya is assembled from six kinds of component: posture, mudra (a physical gesture or seal), bandha (a muscular lock), mantra, breath practice, and awareness moved along internal routes. None of these is unique to kriya yoga. The claim is that combining them in specific ways multiplies their effect, and that this combining is what the system actually is.

Two structural points matter for anyone judging whether to pursue it.

Order is treated as load-bearing. Teachers say that practised in the wrong sequence the system loses its power or produces adverse effects, and they use the analogy of notes played in the wrong order producing noise instead of music. Durations and repetitions are fixed rather than adjustable.

And the top of the ladder comes with an admission. The twentieth practice is named for dhyana, and the tradition concedes that the name is a misnomer, because meditation is not something you can perform. It happens or it does not; you cannot make it. So the last step of an elaborate twenty-step system is openly described as, at most, the preliminary to the thing the system is for. This is unusually candid and it is the right note to end an explanation on.

The same teachers also caution against taking their own three-part classification too literally, saying that pratyahara, dharana and dhyana run into one another without clean boundaries. That caution sits oddly beside the insistence on exact sequence, and both positions are theirs.

Who is ready for kriya yoga?

Here the tradition contradicts itself, and the contradiction is worth setting out rather than smoothing over, because a reader deciding whether to start deserves to see it.

One set of passages is emphatically open. Kriya yoga is commonly thought to be secret and restricted, and teachers say flatly that these ideas are wrong, that anyone can practise it, and that there is no barrier of age, diet, social position or religion. The same passages reject any requirement of celibacy, and reinterpret the traditional language about conserving sexual energy as being about redirecting sexual thought rather than abstaining.

Another set, by the same teachers and sometimes in the same book, is emphatically restrictive. Do not begin if you have a serious physical illness, because the practices may worsen it. Do not begin if you are in significant mental distress; the system is described as supercharged and as very strong medicine that can heighten existing disturbance. Do not begin without prior experience of yoga. Sound health is called the fundamental requirement, and readers are told that without adequate preparation they may harm themselves. Elsewhere the requirement goes further still: practise only under a teacher who can confirm you are prepared and handle what arises.

There is a way to read these together that is fair to both. The open claims are about eligibility, and the restrictive ones are about readiness, and the tradition never separates the two. Nobody is disqualified by caste, creed, age, diet or marital status. Plenty of people are unready on grounds of health, experience and available time. Those are different questions, and separating them removes most of the apparent conflict.

What the tradition does not resolve is how much preparation counts as enough. In one place the recommendation is six months of preparatory practice. In another, roughly thirty pages later, readers are urged not to start without at least two years of other yoga behind them. Six months and two years, same authors, same subject. No reconciliation is offered.

Where the tradition disagrees with itself about a safety threshold, the sensible reader takes the longer figure.

Four preparations are named, and they are a more useful guide than any number of months:

1. Bodily health and steadiness, usually via hatha yoga. The reasoning is practical rather than mystical: pain and illness capture attention, and you cannot direct awareness elsewhere while the body is demanding it.
2. Fluency with the seals and locks the kriyas are built from.
3. Developed awareness of the breath.
4. Familiarity with the internal routes and the chakras, so that attention can find them without effort.

The published sequence assumes fifteen prior techniques, including three locks and several seals. That number, more than any warning, indicates what is actually being asked.

How much time does it take?

More than almost anyone expects, and the tradition is refreshingly direct about it.

The complete set of twenty runs to about two and a half hours a day. Practising roughly half of them takes around two hours. Learning the set is described as one kriya a week for about twenty weeks, cumulative, with many months beyond that before the practices become fluent.

Teachers advise people with only ten or thirty minutes a day not to begin, and suggest general yoga practice instead. One published practice timetable drops its thirty-minute option entirely once kriya yoga starts, on the grounds that half an hour will not cover even the first few practices.

This is the gate most readers can check honestly against their own life before any of the health questions arise. It is also, quietly, the strongest argument the tradition makes for its own seriousness: a practice with a two-and-a-half-hour daily footprint is not something to take up casually, and its teachers do not pretend otherwise.

What does the tradition say about difficult experiences?

Unusually candid, and mostly useful, with one claim that needs refusing outright.

Teachers say to expect emotional swings, sometimes severe, and describe them as a purging process rather than a malfunction. They say that long-suppressed material surfaces, that this is the point, and that it is often unpleasant. They describe frightening imagery arriving during practice or in dreams. They note that appetites and desires can intensify as previously suppressed wants express themselves. They advise reducing or stopping the practice when emotions become explosively negative, and consulting an experienced teacher.

All of that is responsible, and it is more forthcoming than most modern presentations of intensive practice manage.

But one line has to be rejected. In discussing physical side effects, the tradition states that whether your health improves or deteriorates, the change represents movement toward deeper harmony. Reports of practitioners becoming physically weak or unwell are explained to them as part of a cleansing process with no cause for alarm.

This site does not accept that framing, and the reason is structural rather than squeamish. A model in which improvement confirms the practice is working and deterioration also confirms the practice is working cannot generate a stop signal. Every outcome is evidence in its favour, which means it is evidence of nothing, and the person it fails is the one who most needs to stop.

The correct instruction is the one the same passage reaches two paragraphs later: if the downturn is serious, stop, and do not practise while ill. Deteriorating health is a reason to stop and see a clinician. It is not a milestone. Nothing in this tradition or any other should be treated as a substitute for medical care.

Who should take care

Kriya yoga sits at the demanding end of yoga practice, and the tradition’s own warnings are stronger than the ones this site would otherwise write.

Do not begin, and speak to a doctor first, if you have a serious or unstable physical illness, a heart or respiratory condition, uncontrolled high blood pressure, glaucoma or retinal problems, or if you are pregnant. Several of the component practices involve inversion, sustained breath retention and strong abdominal engagement, none of which are neutral.

Do not begin, and speak to a clinician first, if you have a history of psychosis, mania, dissociation or severe trauma, or if you are currently in acute distress. The tradition itself says this system can heighten mental disturbance, and it says so repeatedly.

Be realistic about time. A practice that cannot be done consistently is, on the tradition’s own account, not worth beginning.

Treat claims about specific conditions with suspicion, including any you encounter elsewhere that connect these practices to curing named diseases. Where this site has found such claims in traditional material it has said so and declined them.

And note the structural point underneath all of the above: the published versions of this system exist because teachers chose to break a convention of personal transmission, on the reasoning that many sincere people have no access to a teacher. Whatever you think of that decision, it removes the safeguard the tradition had always relied on, which was someone in the room who could see what was happening to you. That is worth holding in mind whenever a written account assures you that an unpleasant development is part of the process.

Where this fits

Kriya yoga is one expression of a much older body of practice. Its vocabulary of awakening energy, internal centres and routes comes from tantra, and it shares that vocabulary with kundalini practice and with the map of prana and the two currents described under ida and pingala. Its goal, the arrival of a settled and undirected attention, is the same goal approached differently by the paths set out under yoga philosophy: through service in karma yoga, through devotion in bhakti yoga, and through enquiry in jnana yoga.

What distinguishes it is the mechanism. Most systems address the mind by asking it to be other than it is. This one takes the restlessness as given, gives it a route to travel, and waits.

That is also why it is the least suitable of all of them for casual self-teaching, and why the tradition that published it spends so much of its own text saying so. If you are drawn to this material, the useful next step is not to find a sequence and start. It is to build the four preparations honestly, with someone who can see your practice, and let the question of readiness answer itself.

If you would like help working out where you actually are in that progression, and what would genuinely be next for you, that is what the coaching is for.

Frequently asked questions

What does kriya yoga mean?

Kriya means action or movement, and in this system it means the deliberate movement of awareness along set internal routes. The word also carries the senses of practical and preliminary, so kriya yoga is understood as the practice that leads up to yoga rather than yoga itself. Each individual practice in the sequence is also called a kriya.

Is kriya yoga in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali?

The phrase is, but it means something else. Patanjali uses kriya yoga for the combination of austerity, self-study and surrender, which is a preparatory discipline for raja yoga. It has no relationship to the sequence of practices taught under the same name today. Teachers in the tradition say so themselves.

How is kriya yoga different from meditation?

Most meditation methods ask you to hold attention on one point and exclude everything else. Kriya yoga asks the opposite: it moves awareness deliberately from place to place along fixed routes. The tradition's claim is that concentration then arrives by itself, because it was never asked for.

How long does kriya yoga take to practise?

The complete published sequence takes around two and a half hours a day, and roughly half of it takes about two hours. Teachers say it takes about twenty weeks to learn the set, one practice per week, and many months more to become fluent. They advise people who have only ten or thirty minutes a day not to begin.

Who should not practise kriya yoga?

Teachers in the tradition say not to begin if you have a serious physical illness, if you are in significant mental distress, or if you have no prior experience of yoga. They describe the system as strong medicine that can worsen existing conditions. Sound health is described as the basic requirement.

Is kriya yoga secret?

It was taught privately from teacher to student for most of its history, and the published versions exist because twentieth-century teachers decided to break that convention. The tradition is inconsistent about what follows: some passages say anyone may practise it, while others insist on a teacher present. The openness refers to who is eligible, not to who is ready.

This article is educational and is not medical or psychological advice. Talk to a qualified health professional before starting any new practice, especially if you have a physical or mental health condition. Read the full disclaimer.