History

                 All yoga forms are believed to raise kundalini energy, and have their origins in the pillars and Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, a foundational yoga scripture believed to have been compiled around the 2nd century BCE. Based on this foundation, most yoga forms and meditation derive their structure and discipline from the ashtanga 8-limbed approach, which provide guidelines for the austerities of practice.

              Kundalini yoga differs at that point because its focus is on raising awareness and strengthening the nervous system to handle raising the internal human energy ("kundalini") in order to help enhance the ultimate spiritual experience.

               Before contemporary times, Kundalini Yoga was on the whole a secretive technology. It has it roots in the tantric yoga tradition, which date back to the 8th century, but was not widely taught to the West until Yogi Bhajan (born 1929) brought his understanding of the teachings out of India and to the United States in 1969.

               An earlier written mention of Kundalini Yoga is in the Yoga-Kundalini Upanishad, one of the oldest scriptures of Hinduism. The Yoga-Kundalini Upanishad is eighty-sixth among the 108 Muktika Upanishads, associated with the Krishna Yajurveda from India. The origin of this particular writing is difficult to substantiate because scholars disagree about the exact dates of the composition of the Upanishads, but agree that all Upanishads have been passed down through oral tradition. Some have estimated that the composition of the Yajurveda texts date as far back as between 1,400 and 1,000 BC.

               In the late 1800s into the early 1900s author John Woodroffe, an Oxford graduate, translated some twenty original Sanskrit texts under the pseudonym Arthur Avalon. His most popular and influential book titled The Serpent Power: The Secrets of Tantric and Shaktic Yoga, became a major contribution of the time to the appreciation of Indian philosophy and spirituality and the source of many early Western occult appropriations of tantra and kundalini practice.

                  In 1935 Sri Swami Sivananda penned a detailed depiction of some historically classic Kundalini Yoga practices in a treatise called Kundalini Yoga.