Khechari Mudra
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 5 years before Nov 15, 2017
MiBeloved 6 years ago
A student yogi inquired about Khechari Mudra, which is the lengthening of the tongue or the cutting of the frenum under the tongue so that the tongue can be reached back to close the throat passage, during samadhi practice.
This procedure is prohibited by all students who are following the kriya path from Babaji Mahashaya and also for anyone who is not in that path but who respects the wishes of Babaji. Sri Lahiri Mahashaya particularly prohibited this and in fact there is an instance in which he rejected a disciple who did this, and the rejected student was from then only condemned to no spiritual progress.
Here is a link which you might read:
Before anyone takes surgical action to cut the frenum of the tongue, one should be sure that the person who recommends this action, guarantees that one will get the particular result intended. Do not do this whimsically in the hope that one will become an enlightened being by this action. Be sure that you get some guarantee from the yogi who recommends this before one does this.
Personally I cannot guarantee anything in this regard. Subsequently I do not recommend this practice, except if the tongue lengthens naturally over a course of years of consistent practice.
Srila Yogeshwarananda Mahayogin never told me that this was necessary. So I cannot vouch for it.
Jonathan Cunningham 6 years ago
Thanks for the link. I have been practicing Khechari mudra by repeatedly curling the tongue back towards the throat and then extending it outside of the mouth. Its seems as if Ive made some progress but I sense some fear coming up as if im going to swallow my tongue. Are there any other methods of practice that may help?
MiBeloved 6 years ago
There are many kriyas with many objectives from many gurus from India. Khechari has become famous because of the promises mentioned in books in India about what would happen if one were to become proficient at it.
The main thing is to be sure that you understand which guru recommends it and what he says you would achieve by it. It is not a general practice that can be used by anyone anywhere without a guru who used it. The reason for this is the fact that it has a mystic side to the practice and the mere physical act will not give results.
For instance kundalini yoga is supposed to cause the student to control sex urge but some students find that it does the opposite which is to increase sex desire.
Once I was speaking to a guy who lives in Upstate New York. He was telling me that he liked to go to the yoga classes in the expensive parts of Manhattan in New York City. At the end of the explanation, he said this, “I love the women who come there with tights. There is sex all over the place, I love it.”
I did not say anything to him but actually yoga or ashtanga yoga as it is defined by Patanjali has little to do with sex and women in skimpy clothing and bikinis doing very difficult postures. These women are doing the postures physically but on the psychological plane they are doing everything but yoga.
A physical action of yoga which is without the corresponding psychic action, actually pushes the student away from yoga. In the Western countries everything is physical and if it cannot be proven physically it either does not exist or it is formless. That is how we see things in the Western world.
Cutting the base of the tongue, frenum, will not give the student the results of years of practice. The thing to do is to get some insight into why yogis stretched the tongue back into the throat. What was the reason for doing that? What will I gain if I do that?
Formerly the Nath yogis, who follow the lineage from Mahayogin Gorakshnath used to stretch the tongue by sticking it out as far as it will go out of the mouth and then using the right hand to squeeze it forward so that eventually it stretches. There is also another practice which is to curl the tongue up and back and push it back as far as possible. These practices paid off when the yogi mastered pranayama practice in terms of what is called kumbhaka.
Kumbhaka is mastered after many years of practicing to infuse fresh air into the body, and then mastering at last holding air out of the body. If you ever read for instance the Mahabharata, you will see that the villain of the story, Duryodhana mastered kumbhaka even though he was a leading warrior. He went into a lake and submerged his body so that he did not need air.
In this sort of practice, there is a need for Khechari mudra because with it the yogi makes sure that water or air does not enter his esophagus, because if water enters the lung, the body will die and if air enters the yogi will be pulled back into the body and his samadhi will come to an end.
The view that a yogi will taste nectar or subtle fluids when doing this practice, will only happen to someone who has mastered kundalini before doing the practice. In other words the results are not experienced unless the yogi has first conquered all the chakras and the kundalini system which is below the throat.
But if you plan on having your body enter samadhi and if you are already proficient at that but want to stay in samadhi for days or weeks at a time, then this Khechari practice can be used. Please also note that when yogis used to do this, they usually assigned the task of waking their body from the samadhi to a trusted disciple. Yogi Matsyendranath did this.
The other more important value of this practice is to kill your own body. Sometimes a yogi is instructed by his departed guru, to kill the body and forget about the mission to teach others here on earth. Then the yogi who is already proficient in samadhi will sit in lotus posture and do pranayama until he reaches the stage where he can stop breathing completely. This kills the body. This is the classic way of yogi suicide.
On the battlefield of Kurukshetra, before both armies, Drona, a warrior who was a master pranayama yogi, sat down and killed his own body after he heard a false rumor which indicated that his son was dead.
This sounds nice but it cannot be done by someone who has not mastered samadhi before hand and whose psyche is resistant and disobedient to the yogi’s will power as it usually is.
Khechari mudra cannot work if you have not already curbed kundalini and you are not already doing samadhis in real time. There is another related more basis practice which must be mastered and that is the one with cleaning all the matter out of the lower and upper intestines.
Before long samadhi a yogi is required to clean out all the food matter in the intestines and colon. If this is not done, then during samadhi the digestive process will keep working at a slow rate, the matter will harden to become almost like a brick and then it will give the yogi trouble when he comes out of the samadhi or it might even cause the samadhi to stop as the life force may obstruct the samadhi as it feels that its mission is to keep the body healthy and alive.
I hope this provides some clarity on these issues.
If you have a specific inquiry, please post it.
devaPriya Yogini 5 years ago
I read about this a few months ago and tried it out and it hurt. Thanks for the education. Makes much more sense when you talk about it than anything else I read.
Alfredo 5 years ago
Swami Hariharananda Guruji, a direct disciple of Swami Shriyukteshwar (who was a disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya of Benares), who taught me this mudra in person at the age of 90, was also adamantly against the cutting of the frenum, actually, he stated often to simply keep the tongue while in Kechari Mudra pointing towards the fontanel (crown chakra), meaning against the top part of the ceiling of the mouth.
MiBeloved 5 years ago
About khechari mudra
It is important to understand that this khecari mudra procedure is an action of forcing the kundalini to switch over to not having fresh air during samadhi practice. So why would you want to do this?
Unless that is your intention there is no need to do this. Let us consider what this really means.
First of all if you cut off kundalini’s access to fresh air then it means that you are going to kill your material body. You can do that easily by locking yourself in one of those new cars which are practically sealed once the windows are wound up; or even in a modern apartment which has air tight windows and doors.
You can do this easier and quicker by buying a cheap plastic bag and putting it over your head and using a very tight rubber band around the bag around your neck. In a short time you will be out of air. So doing this would cause the same blockage of the air passage to the lungs.
Some students think that if the tongue is cut and forced back into the palate the person will go into samadhi. Well yes, but what kind of samadhi?
Will it be samadhi in the mode of ignorance which is jada samadhi? Will it be a white-out, a black-out or a gold-out, which one?
If you tie that plastic bag around your head, you will quickly go into jada samadhi and you won’t have to waste time cutting your frenum. You will achieve the same thing.
But here is the catch. There were two types of objective with this. One was the system of increasing the apana energy and letting the kundalini live on that.
The other was increasing the prana and letting the kundalini live on that.
Which of these is your interest?
Trees also have kundalini and they live on apana carbon dioxide, so that proves that it is possible to go on existing like that.
Which samadhi will it be, the apana supported samadhi or the prana supported samadhi?
Duryodhana the villain of the Mahabharata escaped from the battlefield and went down to the bottom of a lake where he was doing apana samadhi. That means he has done yoga to such an extent that he could apply khecari mudra and block off air from entering that passage to the lungs while his kundalini lived on apana carbon dioxide.
Usually if you cut off kundalini from prana for a long period, it leaves the body and people say the body is dead, but Duryodhana coaxed the kundalini and got it to stay in the material body living on just apana energy. He was a crooked politician but we have to admit that he was an accomplished yogi.
Other yogis used the other system of infusing prana into the subtle body, in reserve and then going into samadhi while kundalini lived on that reserve pranic energy. That is prana samadhi, which is different to what Duryodhana did but the khechari mudra can be used in either case.
In both example khechari mudra was used to block air from going down into the lungs but in one the kundalini was supported by apana carbon dioxide while in the other case it was supported by a stored-up prana fresh air supply.
So which one are you interested in?
