34. What is Kuṇḍalinī?
Yoga Studies in Five Minutes - Theodora Wildcroft
Ruth Westoby [+]
SOAS, University of London
Ruth Westoby is a doctoral candidate at SOAS University of London and she teaches for
SOAS YogaStudies Online. Ruth’s thesis is a historical textual study of the yoga body in
Sanskrit sources on early haṭhayoga identifying the functional paradigms of the body that
explain how yoga works. As a practitioner Ruth has collaborated on the reconstruction of
historical textual sequences of postures, contributing to the development of a new
methodology: embodied philology. Ruth’s 2021 article, ‘Raising rajas in haṭha yoga and
beyond’, appears in Religions of South Asia, also published by Equinox. Her research interests include yoga, the body, gender, textual history and critical theory.
Description
The concept of the coiled, snakelike kuṇḍalinī, who awakens and rises upwards during yoga, is intrinsically connected with yoga in the modern and premodern periods. The awakening and forceful rising upwards of kuṇḍalinī, by which she breaks through the energetic vortices (cakras) and locks (granthis), is definitional of haṭhayoga: the yoga of force.