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Date Posted: 03:28:43 09/26/04 Sun
Author: depressamoy - 18 Aug 2004
Subject: kriya yoga and mental illness


Hi. Interesting board. First time posting here.

Just wondering how many people here have either experienced for themselves or noticed in others severe forms of mental illness arising after a few years of kriya practice. Stuff like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, and the like.

I ask because intense mental illness has been a major factor in my life for the past eight years, and I'm trying to get a handle on it. I'm 29 at the moment. Started meditating when I was 15, got kriya when I was 20, and then two years later had a psychotic break and wound up in a psych ward where I was diagnosed bipolar, something that has largely crippled me for the past few years.

I'm wondering if that would have happened if I hadn't been doing kriya.

When I first encountered kriya yoga, it sounded so cool - each kriya providing the equivalent of one full year's evolution! A million years of further evolution in a single lifetime! And it seemed to be presented as something basically... safe. That anybody could do and that would benefit anyone.

I remember attending a lecture given by Brother Satyananda of SRF. Somebody asked a question along the lines of "is it possible for kundalini to be awakened in a destructive fashion, creating intensely negative experiences?" His reply, to the best of my recollection, was "no, kundalini awakenings are always safe and can't happen until a person is ready for them and there really aren't any dangers involved and everything's fine."

That hasn't really been my experience.

And, I mean, if you think about it... attempting to cram a million years of biological evolution into a single human lifetime... isn't really likely to be an endeavour unaccmopanied massive amounts of risk, all along the way. On consideration, reflecting on my experiences over the last decade, I can't really think, offhand, of anything
that would carry a higher risk of causing brain damage and insanity than such an endeavour. Except perhaps trepanning, or injecting 200 cc's of hydrochloric acid directly into your cerebral cortex.

All right, I can think of a few things that are more immediately dangerous; still.

I find myself sitting here after nine years of practice - interrupted by four total psychoemotional breakdowns lasting 10-14 months each - with an essentially devastated brain and central nervous system, chronically clinically depressed, broke, unemployable, and living in constant fear of permanently slipping over the boundary separating sanity from insanity. A boundary that I've smacked up against many times.

This isn't what I was expecting.

When I started out.

Anyway. I blather. I'm just trying to find out if there's any other kriya people out there who've had or known of similar experiences and if so, how'd they handle 'em.

Does there come a point where certain kinds of people should just stop doing kriya, permanently?

Is it fair to say that perhaps there are some people who just shouldn't do kriya, that for certain genetically flawed individuals it's just too dangerous and they'd be better off without it?

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