Kundalini

The fullest early technical account of kundalini appears in Hatha Yoga and tantric literature such as the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Shiva Samhita and the Sat-Cakra-Nirupana, which describe her as a coiled, sleeping serpent, kundalini meaning "coiled one," resting at the base of the sushumna nadi inside Muladhara, the root chakra, where she is said to close the mouth of the central channel with three and a half coils around a svayambhu linga. Practice aims to wake her through a combination of pranayama (breath retention), bandhas (bodily locks, especially mula bandha at the perineum), mudras and mantra, forcing the accumulated prana to strike the base of sushumna until kundalini uncoils and begins to rise.

As she ascends she is said to pierce each chakra in sequence, and her arrival at Sahasrara, the crown, is described as the union of Shakti, the goddess-power she embodies, with Shiva, consciousness itself, said to reside there; this union is the tantric image of liberation, not a metaphor added afterward. The texts are explicit that this is advanced, dangerous practice, to be undertaken only under a qualified guru's supervision after the body and channels have been purified by preliminary yogic disciplines, and several warn plainly of physical and mental harm from forcing kundalini without that preparation.

Kundalini crossed into Western esoteric and psychological vocabulary substantially through Sir John Woodroffe, writing as Arthur Avalon, whose 1919 translation and study _The Serpent Power_ rendered the Sat-Cakra-Nirupana into English and gave the West its first serious technical account of the chakra and kundalini system, distinct from the looser Theosophical treatments that had circulated earlier. Carl Jung lectured on kundalini yoga psychologically in the 1930s, reading its ascent as a symbolic map of individuation rather than a physiological claim, a reframing that shaped much later Western reception.

In the later twentieth century some Western practitioners and a body of clinical literature began describing a "kundalini syndrome" or "spiritual emergency," involuntary movement, heat, altered states and psychological distress reported after intensive meditation or yoga, terms used by clinicians such as Stanislav Grof to discuss the phenomenon without settling whether it confirms the traditional physiology. Traditional sources would recognize the caution in this literature: the texts themselves treat unsupervised awakening as a real hazard, long before any Western clinical vocabulary existed for it.