Steven Stewart3 said:Actually, I don't know if I totally agree with that, because you could pretty much say the same thing about a ton of different yoga styles! Like, think about Nada yoga, Nidra yoga, Shiva yoga, and all that. If we stick to that super "rigid" logic (no pressure, obviously!), then there are basically only a handful of yogas mentioned in the Vedic texts. But honestly, this newer way of categorizing things makes it way easier to grasp what’s actually going on. For instance, Kundalini yoga is kind of similar to Raja yoga, but when people talk about Kundalini yoga, they’re mostly focusing on that specific process of moving the Kundalini upward. With Raja yoga, you’re looking at the whole package—the Yama, Niyama, Pranayama, and everything else. In the world of Kundalini yoga, it’s usually assumed that those other aspects are already checked off and good to go!
Kundalini yoga doesn't exist as its own distinct traditional school. At its core, any Hatha yoga—which is a Tantric derivative—is implicitly Kundalini yoga.
So, the label itself is pretty much meaningless, aside from being a marketing tactic.
Yoga Nidra is a modern invention based on Western relaxation techniques. That’s basically what most people are doing under that name. It emerged relatively recently from Kripalu Yoga (
Kripalu Yoga), which is where someone like the widely known Swami Sivananda (
who studied there and built his specific style of yoga, even though his own guru didn't focus on it at all) picked it up. While there is some dream work (
milam) found in Tibetan yoga—specifically within Dzogchen traditions—it's much less common in Hindu traditions. The methods being practiced today under that name don't really have any connection to anything authentically Indian.
Raja (
written as Raja in standard Sanskrit transliteration; reading it as "Raya" is incorrect) yoga is just a relatively recent (
late colonial era) term for classical Patanjali yoga, often blended with later Tantric-Hatha traditions. This was largely the result of neo-Hindu attempts to codify and unify a bunch of disconnected Hindu traditions into one loosely coherent system during the era of "national awakening."
Either way, the yoga practiced under the name Kundalini yoga isn't anything special; it's no more "Kundalini" than any other style. It's pure marketing.