# Homework Master 5: Kundalini Sleeping
**1) What is the name of the tenth and final mudra or seal (including roots and cognates)? What is the general object of its action, and what are some other names for this object? Why finally is this object given this name? **
The name of the tenth and final mudra is shakti chalana {s*akti ca#lana}, which we translate as Inciting Her Power. The corresponding Tibetan is nukyu {NUS BSKYOD,} Shakti in general means power or ability; it comes from a root √shak {s*ak}, which means to be able. In this western languages this is related to an Indo-European root √segh, meaning both to hold and to hold or to have strength. Related words then are persevere (to hold tough), calisthenics (exercises for strength), and both school and scholar (a pause or holding to build strength of the mind). The –ti at the end of this word makes it a feminine power.
Chalana comes from a root √cal {cal}, which means to move or to run. We’ve already seen how the Sanskrit kala (time) is related; as are the English course, car, career, and chariot. Together then they mean “moving the woman’s power.”
The object towards which this practice is focused is the Kundalini, or serpent power: inner fire. Our Master gives us a number of different names used in scripture for Kundalini (which itself means the Coiled Serpent Lady), including Kutilangi (the Lady of the Crooked Limb), Bhujangi (the Snake Woman), Shakti (the Feminine Power), Ishvari (the Lady of Power), and Kundalyarundhati (the Circling Lady).
All of these names are meant to reflect the power of a coiled snake: that is, a potential, like a spring, waiting to be released. And then when this potential is released, there is a straightening of energy up the central channel, in the same way that a snake straightens when aroused.]
**2) In describing how kundalini is awakened, the Master makes a pun which is important for our understanding of yoga in general. Explain. **
The Master says that we must “use the serpent power” of kundalini to “break open the door to freedom,” in the way that we would “force open a door.” The word that he uses here for force is hathat {hatha#t}, which of course is a word built from the hatha of hatha yoga.
This verse then is a great opportunity to see how this word was really perceived by yoga practitioners of ancient times, and confirms the accuracy of the term that the Tibetans used to translate hatha, which was tsentap: “drastic means.”
Remember that the normal progression of yogic training in Tibet especially began with training of one’s attitudes, rather than ones body. Students undergoing this training were required at a minimum first to develop a sensitivity to and concern for the suffering of life; and then a compassion for the pain of others; and finally an insight into where reality is really coming from. Only much later does an aspirant in this tradition go on to the physical practices of yoga, which rely upon the interrelationship of body and mind: of winds and thoughts.
From this point of view, it would be a drastic step to work first from the body—it would be like forcing open the door of the central channel with a crowbar (trying to shove wind into it with for example asanas and mudras) rather than inducing the wind into it by training the mind in thoughts of wisdom and compassion. We of course coming from both traditions would want to follow the advice of chinang tab la tsowor bey: take advantage of using a combination of both the inner and outer methods.]
**3) The Master, in the reading for this lesson, says that “the Lady of Ultimate Power” sleeps, “covering the door with her mouth”; and that “beyond the door” lies “the path that one needs to travel” in order “to reach the abode of the Pure One,” which is “free of every impurity.” Explain. **
The “Lady of Ultimate Power” here is of course Kundalini or Shakti; and saying that she is of “ultimate power” is not an exaggeration. If we are able to incite the inner fire, straighten it, and use it to melt down the white element, then of course it acts to take us into the clear light— which in turn endows us with power to rebuild our own selves and the world at large.
In our current condition—what in scripture is called the “original condition” of the body and mind—Kundalini is “covering the door” of the central channel: meaning that the red element is lying dormant at the lower opening of this channel. (Although we will remember that the texts say that the white and red elements are not so much lying in reservoirs within the body, but rather their potential is lying at certain places—and when we need to call upon this element it rises.)
“Beyond this door,” meaning beyond the lower opening of the central channel, lies the “path that we need to travel”: remember that early on in the third chapter we saw the central channel itself referred to as the “path of emptiness” and the “middle path.” And so here we have a reference to the central channel itself.
It is through this channel that the inner fire must straighten and its heat travel up to the “Abode of the Pure One,” also of course known as the “Door of the Pure One”: the upper opening of the central channel. Here as we know is located the white element, “free of every impurity.”
The point of course again is to waken the kundalini, melt down the white element, and use its flow down (and then up) as a vehicle upon which to ride and perceive the four types of bliss and emptiness.]
**4) What is it that the Master describes as being both “freedom” and “bondage,” and why? **
In this text, what “means freedom for yogis and bondage for fools” is described as a fist-shaped area near the navel; in the yogic lineage as it came into Tibet, this would refer to the spot in the same location where the two side channels are said to connect into the central channel, like plumbing below a sink.
For “those who are fools”—for people who have not enjoyed any training about the inner body—this nexus of the channels “means bondage.” That is, if we have no understanding of how the three channels meet at this juncture, then we cannot know how to move winds out of the side channels and into the central one.
Without this knowledge, we are trapped in the cycle of pain: we will not be able to eliminate our misperceptions of objects and subjects (running through the two side channels). We will continue to believe that a loud and obnoxious phone call by our taxi driver is the cause of our headache; rather than understanding that both the driver’s conversation (object in this case) and the headache that it seems to produce (the subject state of mind holding to the conversation) have both come from a shared, and earlier, karmic cause of speaking in a way which irritates someone else.
What brings on our understanding, if we are a hatha yogi, is this very knowledge of the very same area, of the juncture: we understand how to move winds out of the side channels and into the central one. We use asanas and other hatha practices to effect this movement into the middle channel, and this then grants us the wisdom to see that no one thing in the present moment ever produces any kind of affect upon another thing: it’s not that two fingers snapping makes a sound, it’s that both fingers have grown from a common arm that existed before them—which is what really creates the fingersnap. This understanding then frees us, from exactly the same area that once bound us.]
**5) Why would the Master say that someone who really understands the nexus or juncture in the body would then “know what yoga is”? **
We have to remember to think of the word “yoga” in the sense of a union of two separated elements which, when joined together, liberate us. In the case of the nexus at the navel, we are bringing about a union in the sense of forcing the prana out of the side channels, and thereby causing them to atrophy and die out, in the way that ivy clinging to a rainspout might die and fall off during the cold of winter.
Although there are many different senses in which a union or joining occurs in yoga, with reference to this juncture point we are unifying these two energies into the middle: we are taking two misperceptions of what makes the changes in things and the changes that are wrought by it, and transforming them into a unification of two now sacred forces as they enter the middle.
This then is a deeper knowledge of the very idea of “yoga” that liberates us. We are not only combining winds in the body, we are combining the ideas or world-changing realizations which ride upon them. There is a lesser idea which describes the grosser fact that subject states of mind and the objects towards which they are focused disappear in a gross way during deep state of meditation; and that they disappear when we are in the direct perception of ultimate reality, since all states of mind are changing and thus part of deceptive or lower reality.
Higher than this is the idea, again, that nothing affects anything: nothing ever touches anything else, nothing ever changes anything else, in the present moment. Everything that brings us pain, and every perception we have of being hurt—either by people or events—are always both being produced by a single, unified and previous cause of how we have treated others. This is an ultimate idea, an ultimate knowledge, which possesses the power to remove this pain, since one who grasps it can begin to work on all pain through working on themselves.
The combination of these two understandings then is understood by real sages to be the meaning of “yoga,” or “union.”
**6) What would be an example of some mental methods that we could utilize to affect the movement of winds at the nexus near the navel? What is this general approach called in Tibetan, and what principle does it depend upon? **
We’ll be getting to a physical method for Inciting Her Power in a moment; in the meantime, we can look at some mental methods. In general, this approach in Tibetan is known as ne du nunpa, where ne means a “critical spot” in the body, and nunpa means to pierce or work in a concentrated way at this spot.
The general principle behind piercing or working at critical points in the body is that prana or inner wind will travel wherever we focus the mind, because of the foundational axiom that thoughts and inner winds move in tandem. If then it was our goal to move wind from the side channels into the central channel at the critical location at the “nexus” or juncture of the three primary channels, we could do so first of all simply by visualizing winds passing in this way.
One manner of doing this is the Tibetan pranayama known as lung-ro gu-truk, similar to the anuloma-viloma alternate-nostril breathing practice of the modern Indian schools of yoga. In this pranayama we would be visualizing wind moving up and down the side channels, from one to the other, and then finally moving from the side channels into the central one. The better our concentration in the visualization, the more the winds actually move through the juncture in the way that we want them to.
Remember though too that the central channel is where thoughts and winds of love and wisdom flow; whereas anger, possessiveness, and misunderstanding flow through the side channels. Knowing this, we could purposely induce prana into the central channel for example by very consciously sitting down and simply doing a very simple meditation where we think about people we know who are in some kind of physical or emotional pain, and imagining that we are helping them, perhaps with our breath.
This then would be piercing or working at a critical point in the body to move the winds with raja or royal yoga, rather than hatha.
**7) What are two physical methods that the Master describes for raising the kundalini, or bringing it up through the central channel? What meditative posture do we maintain during these particular practices, and what might lead to some confusion about its name? **
The Master describes an asana where we press upon the point of the juncture of the three channels in different ways. First he speaks about sitting in the “posture of diamond,” grasping our feet firmly with our two hands, and then “pressing upon” the juncture or nexus point, which when we are in full lotus is at “the area of our ankles.”
These are variations upon yoga mudra asana; in one classic form of this pose we place the legs in a full-lotus position, and then simply bend down forward over them. In another variation we reach around the back with both hands, grasp the big toes of the feet in full lotus, and bend; and in the form described here we are clasping our fists, pushing them into the lower abdomen, and bending over, still in full lotus. This then would loosen up the area of the juncture in a gross physical way, allowing prana to travel from the side channels into the central one.
The Master also mentions that we can add the practice of the bellows (bhastrika) to help “incite her power”; again, this practice (as described in verse II.35 of the text itself) involves “exhaling and inhaling in a flurry of motion”: sharp exhalations and inhalations, using the muscles of the lower abdomen in contractions and loosenings to help trigger this inner fire.
During both of these practices we maintain a full-lotus posture, which is here called the “posture of the diamond.” This in fact (rather than “full-lotus posture”) is the name given to this posture
in the lineage as it came into Tibet—another indication of the close connection between the Tibetan yogic tradition and that of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, through a shared parampara or (as the Tibetans translate this very word) “words passed from one practitioner to that of the next generation” {GCIG NAS GCIG TU ZHE,}.
Some confusion is possible here due to the fact that “posture of diamond” is however also used in some modern Indian schools of yoga to refer to sitting on or between the heels.
**8) To summarize then, we’ve seen different methods in this particular context for Inciting Her Power by opening up the juncture point between the three principal channels: two outer, physical, “hatha” methods; and then two inner, “critical point” meditations. Describe a “pung sumpa” or third option, and rate its effectiveness. **
We described the nine-step breathing practice, a Tibetan method of doing alternate-nostril practice which includes a visualization of the winds travelling from the side channels into the central channel; and then we spoke about possibly doing an additional meditation upon compassion to aid the process of opening up the middle channel. And then we described the different physical poses based upon the diamond posture.
There’s a beautiful Tibetan variation here which combines both the inner and the outer methods: one which reflects the axiom of chinang tab la tsowor bey: combining work from both the outside and the inside. We described this practice during the second chapter, as having come from a text called A Stairway for Those of Goodness to Climb to the Heaven of the Sky, written by Kaybje Pabongka Rinpoche (1878-1941), the root Lama of the root Lama of both Khen Rinpoche Geshe Lobsang Tharchin and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Here is the description of this practice:
First put your body in the proper meditation posture, with all the crucial points of this posture. Start the breathing practice then by exhaling out of your left nostril. The exhalation should be gentle at the beginning and end, and a little more forceful inbetween, to clear things out.
At this same time, picture that all your negativities—your two major types of obstacles, along with all the seeds for them, but most especially represented by your habit of liking things ignorantly—travels up the left-hand channel, the solitary channel, together with the wind and breath. If you can, then imagine as well that you are ridding one or more other people that you know of this same tendency.
As you exhale, all these negativities also pass out of the body through this nostril. Imagine first that they travel an armspan from you; and then that they go as far as outside of the building in which you are staying; and then that they pass out into the ends of the universe itself. Finally then they simply disappear into nothingness, like a cloud fading out of the sky.
Then simply sit there, in this space, for a good time. A sign that this passage of the breath is completely finished is that you'll get something like a little bit of a twinge around your heart.
It’s important for the practice in this context that we visualize inbreaths coming in first through the right-hand nostril, and then out through the left. We pay special attention to the juncture of the three channels, being sure to see it as opening up wide.
Then breathe in gently from the same nostril, and exhale from the right one. Go through the same picture then, except that your habit of disliking things ignorantly is passing out of your right-hand channel, the channel of taste. With it goes this same habit as exists in some one or more people that we love. Again, be sure to picture the triple juncture.
Then go through the same process—exhalation and then inhalation—again with both nostrils. See the breath—which is the prana, really—coming in through both the left and the right-hand channels, and then leaving through the central channel: the juncture of the three channels is open, and the side channels are going to be deprived of their life.
In this case the visualization is that your habit of ignorance itself is passing out via the central channel, out from the point between your eyebrows, and it is being cleaned from you. The point at which the exhalation is complete is the same in each case.
If we perform this practice with the lower-body lock provided by maintaining the diamond posture, then we get the combined benefits of both the inner and outer practices. This would be much more than twice as powerful as the individual practices by themselves—try it and see!
Coffeeshop assignment: Please meet with one other member of the class (preferably someone you didn’t know before the course started) to talk a bit about this class, before the next one.
Meditation assignment: 15 minutes per day, on the combined practice of the nine-step breathing practice; diamond posture; and removing ignorance, ignorant liking, and ignorant disliking from ourselves and others.
Meditation times and dates (homework without this section completed will not be accepted):**