The Kriya Yoga Course
To participate in this 1-month course you must have completed a 10 or 14‑day course. (You can come on the 3‑month course without having participated in any other course.)
The Kriya Yoga course includes advanced meditations and yoga. We warm up with the methods that you have learnt on the shorter courses, including Shankprakshalana.
The main part of the course includes a period of silence for about 21 days, when the learning of Kriya Yoga takes place. Kriya Yoga can only be learned fully with thorough preparation and under conditions such as these, thus ensuring full absorption.
“I experience Kriya Yoga as a powerful meditation giving me a clearly-felt increase in energy, and a state where it is difficult to hold on to tensions and depressions. It cleans out my subconscious in a more effective way than any other method I know. The strength that I generate makes it easier to tolerate and confront the content of my mind ‑ my dreams become clearer. I am able to face that which would normally distract me or make me forget who I am.
In my experience, those who use this technique considerably reduce the need for sleep. Also creative abilities are strengthened and developed.”
(Swami Janakananda)
Measurements taken by an Indo‑French research team (Das & Gasteaut 1957) show, that “Kriya Yoga has more thorough effects than any other known therapy or relaxation technique.” This is confirmed by Erik Hoffman initially in 1991, and again in 1998. (Read about the study in Bindu #5 , "Lasting and deep-reaching effect" and Bindu #12: “Mapping the brain’s activity during Kriya Yoga”.)
“Kriya Yoga is a rite, a ceremony, a method, a sadhana. It is a method of refining one’s forces so that the individual awareness can penetrate the depth of one’s nature.”
(Swami Satyananda)
“Anyone who is inclined to do something about his or her own development will be able to learn and use this dynamic and deep‑reaching tool. The possibility is there when the aspiration is strong enough.”
(Swami Janakananda)
Prepare yourself prior to the course by practising what you have learned on the 10 or 14‑day course, especially Ajapa Japa, and train sitting in a meditation pose. Intensify your practice in the weeks before coming on the course!
Also read the conditions for learning Kriya Yoga in the description of the 3‑month course.
“The more centred or one‑pointed the human mind becomes, the more powerful, blissful and harmonised it becomes. The greater the one‑pointedness, the greater the wisdom and knowledge. On the yogic path, the mind has to become like bindu (a point) ‑ infinitesimally concentrated, yet with unlimited potential.
Kriya Yoga brings about this concentration of mind naturally, without force or excessive effort. The secret lies in the simultaneous harmonisation of the physical, psychic and mental energies of the human framework. This process automatically concentrates the mind in a perfect bindu. It is then that things start to happen that are beyond the normal comprehension of man. The blind begin to see for the first time.
Kriya Yoga converges all the energies, gross and subtle, into a bindu in the middle of the mandala of one’s being. This is the gateway to meditation...”
(Swami Satyananda)
Read more about Kriya Yoga in the magazine Bindu >>
>>> next: The Prana Vidya Course
