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anirvachaniya
USA
4 Posts |
 Posted - Apr 04 2016 : 6:52:56 PM
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I have a reached a point with KY in which I feel as if I am becoming a little haywire, as if something is not right with my ability to sense (not physical things.) In a sense, it seems like I am becoming a worst person, experiencing extremely subtle insanity perhaps? I don't want to continue until I find a master.
With so many who claim their system is the best - even the great grand-son of Lahiri Mahasaya - I have only heard of only two masters which I consider humble ones and I would like to seek their guidance; Sri Mukherjee and Swami Nityananda Giri.
Unfortunately, I was supposed to meet Sri Mukherjee in Florida/USA but the spots filled up quickly.
I don't mind living in India for some time to "jump start" this practice. Just no BS... |
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hritpadma
USA
6 Posts |
Posted - Apr 10 2016 : 09:24:24 AM
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Which kriya are you doing?
How long and how intense have you been doing it?
KY stirs up your ego-personallity-mind-duality situation and you need time to adjust.
Might be time to back off a little bit or change Kriyas.
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Holy
796 Posts |
Posted - Apr 11 2016 : 7:21:27 PM
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Hi anirvachaniya,
we have discussed the topic of kriya yoga and masters in great length in this forum. If you have read those threads and posts, there is not much to add to them :P
There are different types of kriya yoga, depending upon the different lineages that have come out of Lahiri Mahasaya. All have their strengths, noone offers all. I have met great kriya yogis and masters of all lineages, therefore go with the one you feel most attracted to.
Peace and happy practice! :) |
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anirvachaniya
USA
4 Posts |
Posted - Apr 11 2016 : 11:30:15 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by hritpadma
Which kriya are you doing?
How long and how intense have you been doing it?
KY stirs up your ego-personallity-mind-duality situation and you need time to adjust.
Might be time to back off a little bit or change Kriyas.
I was following Swami Satyananda Saraswati's "A Systematic Course In The Ancient Tantric Techniques Of Yoga And Kriya."
I forget which kriya's I was doing; I'll have to refer back to the book tonight.
I was following it for about 2 months, practicing virtually everyday for about an hour. |
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anirvachaniya
USA
4 Posts |
Posted - Apr 11 2016 : 11:31:57 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by Holy
Hi anirvachaniya,
we have discussed the topic of kriya yoga and masters in great length in this forum. If you have read those threads and posts, there is not much to add to them :P
There are different types of kriya yoga, depending upon the different lineages that have come out of Lahiri Mahasaya. All have their strengths, noone offers all. I have met great kriya yogis and masters of all lineages, therefore go with the one you feel most attracted to.
Peace and happy practice! :)
Yeah, you make a good point. At the end of the day, it's how I feel about someone more than some intellectual answer someone on the internet gave me.
I tried invoking due diligence and search on the forum but I actually was not able to find much discussion about masters in particular; I did, however, find much more discussion about the essence/practice/etc of kriya. Maybe I am not as great as searching as I think I am! |
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Holy
796 Posts |
Posted - Apr 12 2016 : 8:24:17 PM
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Hi anirvachaniya,
the kriya yoga you described is of a completely different lineage (Saraswati) and does not belong to the one coming from Babaji -> Lahiri -> .. . Have read good things about that one also, but you should be aware, that kriya yoga as has been used often in this forum mostly hints to something from the Lahiri descendants.
There are three main divisions of kriya coming from Lahiri, one of them is focused on full length spinal breathing. The other is doing a special variant of spinal breathing, but being mainly focused on the crown. The third one is focused solely on the third eye aka kutastha.
All three divisions have different expressions and by this different forms of practices too, depending on the kriya master standing behind it.
Shibendu, Ashoke Kumar Chatterjee and Hans Neukomm keep it as it has been taught in the Lahiri family, means spinal breathing up and down the sushumna nadi with om in the chakras. At the end meditation can be done on the third eye aka kutastha.
Hariharananda's latest kriya as taught by Prajnananda, Peter, Mangalananda does the special spinal breathing variant with main focus on the crown chakra.
Hariharananda's early kriya taught by the current president of the karar ashram, namely Swami Yogeshwarananda Giri teaches the kriya (which he says is the kriya of Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri) in a very special way, both adressing the full length of the spinal channel, but having the main kriya focused on kutastha only.
Sri Mukherjee as coming from the lineage of Swami Pranabananda Giri teaches the kriya with kutastha focus only, by this being very similiar to the one of Yogeshwarananda, but keeping it MUCH MUCH simpler.
Gurunath teaches the kriya similiar to the Lahiri family, but as an addition keeps the attention at the crown at the end, blending some of Hariharananda's wisdom into the classic offering.
Have only read Swami Nityananda Giri's book, where he explains his kriya, but to my feel this man has not reached what kriya yoga aims at. His kriya is a mix of Hariharananda's latest kriya and the classic kriya of the Lahiri family, keeping the mantras away and adressing the full spine from top to bottom.
As said all kriya types have their strengths. You can see the arising qualities and lifestyles by the masters standing behind them. Everyone has a different taste, and if you go through all the threads and posts you may come out pretty confused. But it may be helpful to get a feel for them.
Just search for the names in the "guru" and "other systems.." section to read about some experience reports. For general discussions in a mixed way, you have to type kriya in the "other systems.. " section and will land in big threads like this one: http://www.aypsite.org/forum/topic....PIC_ID=12849
May god be with you :P
Peace and happy practice! :) |
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SuperTrouper
USA
49 Posts |
Posted - May 07 2016 : 11:12:13 PM
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I can help, since I practiced from "A Systematic Course in the Ancient Tantric Techniques of Kriya and Yoga" for 3 years, and the kriyas at the end of the book for 2 years.
I'm very familiar with the sense of insanity you're feeling. If you keep practicing, it'll only get worse. I became a very socially withdrawn person and had trouble relating not only with reality, but other people. I eventually had to stop altogether. It took a couple years for the damage to unwind.
Here are the problems with the Satyananda kriyas:
- There are too many, and they lead the energy all over the place in the body, so the body's energetic/pranic system goes a little haywire and becomes painfully sensitive.
- The amount of time spent doing kriya is way too much. Even after 3 years I was never able to complete the 3 recommended hours per sitting. You are pushing and pulling so much energy through the energy system that it's leading to an unstable overload. The beauty of kriya is that a little goes a very long way. 5-10 minutes of kriya does what 30-45 minutes of mindfulness of breathing accomplishes. The drawback is that it's hard to overload on old-school meditation techniques. With kriyas, it happens very quickly and easily if you're not paying attention and heeding the warning signs.
I would very highly recommend you stop practicing the kriyas from the book, give yourself several days to a week of rest without practicing anything, and then begin practicing the techniques from this website. The techniques on this website will give you the best foundation for being able to advance quickly and stably. If you should decide to switch to a different system later on, the techniques you'll learn on this site will provide the wisdom to keep you safe and sane during progress in those systems. "Self-pacing" is absolutely paramount when using any kriya. Kriya also should not be the meat of any meditation, it should be a preparatory practice for a still-ness style of meditation, like mantra, anapanasati, "kriya paravastha", etc. That is to say, it doesn't replace meditation, but makes progress IN meditation easier and faster.
I actually wrote a review of it on Amazon that details some of these problems, which I'll paste below.....
5.0 out of 5 stars 11 years of owning this book, and a comparison of different kriya yoga systems.
By Monkey on April 17, 2005
Format: Hardcover|Verified Purchase
I've owned this book for nearly 11 years now. I had also posted the first review of this book on this page about 10 years ago, but removed it a couple years ago because I had come across it after all those years and found that my viewpoint in life had changed dramatically. At the time that I wrote it during the kriya yoga sadhana from this book, I was heavily god-centric, and a bit dogmatic, but my experience has evolved to a much more agnostic and relaxed view of life, so I deleted it, and now I'm giving a more thorough review, especially as my scope of experience has significantly increased.
I had practiced for 4 years from this epic volume, spanning the entirety of the courses and all of the kriyas. There is no finer manual on yogic and meditative sadhana than this. However, the culmination of my journey was not at the end of the practices, as I had assumed it was going to be, but actually towards the beginning.
Lessons 1-12, which I went through in about 7 months, were life changing. I had been attempting to practice yoga and meditation somewhat irregularly for months prior to finding this book, but never really experienced much that had enticed me to keep going. But thanks to stories like Autobiography of a Yogi, I kept searching, and then I found this book (at that time this book cost $110 USD.) A daily sadhana of progressive practices revolutionized everything. Quite quickly I discovered what the experience of awareness and consciousness were, and how staunchly glued to sensory perceptions and body identification mine was, and perceived the noticeable benefits in my life that come from separating awareness from sensory identification and experience. I also became more physically flexible than I had ever been in my life, and I was only 20 years old then.
My sadhana exploded between Lesson 12 through the end of Lesson 16 with the introduction of Karma Yoga and Aum Chanting - the two driving catalysts that allowed me to experience the beginning states of savikalpa samadhi. In two months time, I made more progress with these two practices than I ever have at any other time since. And that may just be my own temperament. But I want to put it out there that if you find something that works extremely well for you, don't muddle with it. Just let it be and keep going with it. At the time I didn't know that it were these two practices specifically that got me there, before I moved onto another lesson and lost the ability to gently coast into samadhi during mental aum chanting. It wasn't until recently that I finally put those two pieces together. But at the time, in an effort to keep pace with the lessons, my sadhana changed accordingly, and I lost the benefits of complete absorption and hearing the inner sounds, along with a host of benefits and experiences in support of those lofty states that I can hardly begin to describe (and at the time, could hardly believe.)
I moved onto lesson 17 and the end of aum chanting, and the slow forgetting of karma yoga, and the loss of being able to achieve samadhi. My experience with the lessons from 17 to 24 was relatively uneventful. I didn't particularly enjoy many of the techniques and bided my time until I reached the lessons on kriya yoga, thinking kriya yoga was going to be the crowning jewel of the lessons.
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Kriya Yoga
The kriyas from this book... I miss those years of my life and I wish I had them back, as I feel it was a waste. I now have experience with 3 other systems of kriya yoga outside of this manual and I can say definitively, without question or hesitation, that these kriyas are absolutely awful. As is the idea of practicing that much kriya yoga as its own sadhana. I now know from personal experience that kriya is like supercharged pranayama. It is not meditation, nor should it ever be substituted for meditation. Nor should someone practice kriya for more time than one would practice a pranayama before meditation.
First of all, the pathways that most of the kriyas use are very awkward to perform, and don't at all yield much in the way of benefits. There is also absolutely no use for separate kriyas with different pathways to perform "specific functions" like shuttling amrita around the body. These specific functions all happens as a matter of course by way of normal meditative advancement, not by focusing on them as separate developments in one's sadhana.
Second: Too much kriya. Too much kriya generates too much internal energy. And with too much energy, the mind buzzes around like a live electrical wire, unable to calmly land on its target during meditation. Meditation becomes fitful, difficult, shallow, and unproductive. And if you do too much kriya without meditation to stabilize the energy and center the mind, you run into some severe psychological issues, which I'll highlight under the next problem...
Third: There is no real meditation practice allotted throughout the kriya sadhana in this book. In the early stages, a practice called antar mouna (inner silence) is recommended, but observing inner silence does not actually settle the mind or draw it deeper. Eventually the mind becomes bored by observing mental silence and begins manufacturing thoughts to entertain it. The kriya sadhanas eventually do away with meditation techniques altogether. The result of this is a mind electrified like a live wire by too much kriya with nothing to settle it. In my personal experience, this made me neurotic, antisocial, overwhelmed by people, feelings, or any sort of communication or commitment in life. I would lash out at people very rudely over nothing at all, and would become obsessed with a mental grip like a rabid dog over the most stupid and inconsequential things. I had many fights with internet strangers. I lost all of my friends, my family definitely thought I had dropped off the deep end, and I became very depressed, despondent, and withdrawn. Finally I came to the conclusion that I had to stop or I was going to end up in a nut hut. Except that there was a definite withdrawal experience, so I had to slowly ween myself off kriya practices until I could quit entirely, which lasted several years before I had normalized myself again.
And those were the best years of my life after quitting the kriya from this book. Once I fully recovered, I became the life of the party and made more good friends than I could ever have wish for. My life was increasingly better, and I could connect with people on a deeper level in a way that I never could before.
But eventually I began to yearn for the days from my early sadhana and my experiences in samadhi. As my social life was finally beginning to calm down, I started researching different systems of meditation. AYP (Advanced Yoga Practices) was one of the only systems I found that was reasonable in its time requirements, but also contained the elements from my early sadhana that I knew to be phenomenal for quick growth (asana, pranayama in the form of a simple kriya (the one used by Paramahansa Yogananada), mantra repetition, and rest). The speed of advancement from the techniques was astounding, and with the added concept of self-pacing (which doesn't seem to exist in any other system) monitoring and balancing practice times so as not to overload from too much kriya or meditation, kept the pace at maximum level without any problems.
Out of curiosity and to compare experiences however, I also switched to Insight meditation with "noting" practices as outlined in the free online book "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha", which is a phenomenal book. I had some wonderful and very insightful experiences, making it nearly to the end of stages of insight.
From there, I discovered the original kriyas of Lahiri Mahasaya in a book called "Kriya Secrets Revealed". I worked with many of the practices as laid out in that book for about 8 months before coming to the conclusion that, while the kriyas are good, there's still too much focus on kriya, and not enough focus on meditation. But I didn't have any of the kind of problems I had with the kriyas in this book.
And now I'm back to AYP, where I'm happy to stay for the foreseeable future.
My take away from my personal experience that I can give to everyone else is this: Do the practices, daily. Be mindful of their effects on you. Don't overdo it. If you intend on working through the kriyas in this book, please put your own mental well-being first and pay heed to the warnings above from my own experience above.
Do the different kriyas and kriya pathways of this system and other systems produce different results, or doesn't it matter? They do all produce different flavors in their results, and yes, it will matter. Some will cause introversion, some will cause extroversion. The ones that enter the brainstem or brain are more intense than the ones that don't. The ones that don't are much more calming, but depending on what they are, may not generate the energy necessary for deep meditation. The beauty of a good kriya, well-executed, is that it allows the individual to overcome the 5 hindrances to the early states of meditation, so that one can travel relatively deep from the very beginning each time they meditate (instead of having to wrestle with the 5 hindrances each and every time) -- allowing access to the more refined, tenuous states far more quickly. And finally: after you're done experimenting with different kriya pathways, find one kriya pathway and stick to it. One kriya pathway is all that's needed, and it's only needed in order to till the soil in preparation for deep meditation.
For those curious, my current sadhana routine is:
- 5-10 minutes of postures, or 1-3 rounds of Mahamudra
- 5-10 minutes of kriya via AYP (referred to there as Spinal Breathing Pranayama)
- 20 minutes of japa meditation (mental repetition of a word or phrase)
- 10 minutes of rest in shavasana. |
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AYPforum
351 Posts |
Posted - May 08 2016 : 09:27:09 AM
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| Moderator note: Topic moved for better placement |
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Qualified Kriya Yoga Masters
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