[Reflection] #16 Meditation, yoga… watch out!!
In 2022, I catch up with a friend who practices kundalini yoga, and I’m surprised to see she’s getting weaker by the day, even though she does yoga three times a week. She tells me that kundalini yoga has been making her vomit lately. A few months later, she tells me she has to go to the hospital regularly for dialysis sessions and is waiting for a transplant. Since then, whenever I come across info about yoga and/or meditation, I pay a bit more attention and I ask spiritual masters questions whenever I meet them (I call them “master” to show their level, but they have few or no disciples).
During an unplanned encounter with a Chinese masseur, he warns me about the rise of Kundalini, even though he’s used to manipulating energy for tui-na. A few months later, I come across a document released to the public by the CIA since 2003 (which I’ve translated into French) that explains the physical mechanism that occurs during a Kundalini rise and why it can drive you crazy. This method is now used in app form and sold to anyone. They run a very aggressive ad campaign on Facebook and Instagram, and I see several of my friends liking these pages. Alarmed, I casually read Autobiography of A Spiritual Genius by Gopi Krishna, which explains how the Kundalini rise nearly destroyed him.
In 2023, I come across the website of a Vietnamese spiritualist who claims that no one knows how to meditate properly. He cites several examples to show that you should only meditate twice a day (at sunrise and sunset) and definitely not when you’re in the city! Meditating at the wrong time and in the wrong place only worsens your health. Even with an experienced meditation teacher, a super powerful Vietnamese businessman fell into madness after 49 days of meditation and fasting in the jungle.
In 2023 and 2024, I read several books by Taoist alchemists like The Secret of the Golden Flower and then another book written by Takafuji Sōichirō, translated only into Chinese and Vietnamese, which discuss alchemical practices of qigong that closely resemble kundalini yoga.
And then I understood.
Meditation and yoga practices are spiritual in origin, so they are not practices to be taken lightly. Even though the techniques have since been adapted for public health benefits, they are still based on ancient knowledge that affects invisible things such as qi (an invisible energy. If this energy runs dry, you die); and our soul. However, using meditation or yoga, even for health, stirs up this qi and this “soul” which suddenly become unsettled, often in a bad way. Because yoga teachers aren’t properly trained!!! and don’t understand the gravity of the gestures they’re teaching people.
It’s while searching for translated versions of certain famous Chinese books that I realize too few things are translated. Speaking three languages fluently (French, English, Vietnamese), I have more choices than many people, but many important spiritual books aren’t translated. Even the Chinese struggle to understand the meaning of their old books because meanings change, characters change, some passages or words are poorly copied…
So your yoga teacher, who can’t read Hindi or Chinese… will never fully understand the ancient teachings because many important books still aren’t translated. They have to make do with training from people who were also poorly trained. Even if they go to Bali or India for training… you also have to know who they’re training with. What are the acceptance criteria?
Even in a spiritual country like Vietnam, it’s extremely difficult to find a good yoga or meditation teacher. These people hide and don’t want to take on disciples. If they do, it’s often to pass on knowledge to the rare disciples capable of understanding, not to make the knowledge known to the general public; because they know it will be misunderstood, misinterpreted, misapplied – and people with bad intentions will use it for the wrong purposes (e.g., opening a public yoga center!). Some gifts come at the cost of a huge sacrifice, and you really have to want it.
Some disciplines that allow predicting the future have been truncated, modified… these disciplines, once meant for kings, can only be learned by royal members or certain priests. They especially don’t want to pass them on to the people, otherwise the people could calculate the kings’ destinies themselves and start a revolution. Then, to satisfy the people’s curiosity anyway, an erroneous and truncated version was released to the public.
Or simply, because of obscurantism in Europe, many documents were burned and lost. And when Europeans asked the Arabs for advice, they gave them the wrong document. LOL. That’s why you find astrology doesn’t work anymore. Because even the so-called tropical astrology sky (the one you see in magazines) no longer matches the real sky! That is, about 85% of people born under the sign of Virgo (according to magazine horoscopes) are actually born under the sign of Leo and so on! But there you go, people are deceived even in their astrological sign, so imagine more advanced knowledge. I’m not talking about conspiracy theories, all of this happens only due to a lack of knowledge: astrologers who have always learned from the wrong sky pass on their erroneous knowledge to other astrologers, and then to other astrologers… and now that the truth is coming to light, they’ll say “ohhhh well, tropical or sidereal astrology, it’s all the same!”. Watch this video if you’re remotely interested. This gentleman’s books are a bit technical though:
So your yoga teachers are surely full of good intentions, but stupidity spreads much faster than truth, and here we are with bad meditation and yoga techniques that mess up our soul, the most precious asset of all our existences.
Not to mention numerous New Age authors spreading fake news. This comment found on the Internet sums up what I think: “Disciples of New Age authors almost always share a critical incapacity and a predisposition to magical thinking, often coupled with great sensitivity towards their detractors. Unfortunately, on a collective scale, this results in a weakening of that extraordinary gift nature has bestowed upon us: consciousness. It is our duty to refine and cultivate this consciousness, sometimes painfully, often with much effort, but always towards a ‘true’ evolution of the mind. The result is a healthy lucidity — which protects us from charlatans of all kinds, spiritual or political — as well as a constantly renewed capacity for wonder. This is therefore a call to human solidarity against the worst threat of ignorance: obscurantism and the territorial reflex, intellectual or state-related, which invariably lead to aggression or war.”
Regarding alchemical practice, which closely resembles kundalini yoga, namely raising the qi along the body, here’s a warning from a Chinese author:
In the world of Chinese qigong, one of the most poorly transmitted and abusively propagated practices is the opening of the Ren and Du meridians (which consists of guiding the sensation of qi along the spine, up to the crown of the head, then down the front of the body, and then back up the spine in a continuous cycle). This method was written by the two ancestral masters Wu and Liu, who described the complete process of cultivating the Dan Dao in a half-true, half-fictional manner. Due to its brilliant writing, it was considered a revelation of secrets and quickly became very popular.
Moreover, when practicing this method, simply mentally imagining the energy flow circulating in the Ren and Du meridians makes the body warm up quickly and the mind become sharper, making you believe in its effectiveness. In reality, it only consumes your energy.
Why learn spiritual techniques from the other side of the world when there are tons of spiritual practices that come from France? At least you can search for information yourself in the vast archives of the BnF, read works written in a language you master, find teachers who have received teachings passed down through generations? To better refine and cultivate the soul?
In reality, if you’re not sure about techniques, or haven’t found your master yet, you should just settle for doing things as naturally as possible: eating balanced, playing sports, being good to people.
This article cites very few sources because this is information from masters I’ve exchanged with who wish to remain in the shadows. You can do whatever you want with it.
