Vajroli mudra

Ida Craddock was the first Westerner to write about Vajroli mudra. The use she made of it enraged the American authorities, and she killed herself.[3]

Vajroli mudra is not often described in modern accounts, still less actually practised. The earliest Westerner to write about it was the American yoga scholar and sexologist Ida C. Craddock. Opposing the predominant religious culture of her nation at the time, fundamentalist Protestant Christianity, Craddock was struck by the Shiva Samhita's account of Vajroli mudra, with "the idea that sexual union could facilitate divine realization". She took the Hindu tantra concept that the male body was able to transform the sucked-up sexual fluids into an immortal "diamond body",[3] and reworked it into a system involving delayed ejaculation to increase sexual pleasure within marriage. Further, she asserted that God was the third partner in such a marriage, "in what amounted to a sacred menage-a-trois."[3] Craddock's emphasis on yoga and her new "mystico-erotic religion" enraged the authorities; she was tried in New York for obscenity and blasphemy, and imprisoned for three months. Facing federal charges on her release, in 1902 she killed herself. The yoga scholar Andrea Jain notes that Craddock's "sacralization of sexual intercourse"[3] is far from radical by modern standards, but it was "antisocial heterodoxy" in the 1900s, leading indeed to her "martyrdom".[3]

The British Orientalist John Woodroffe describes the ability of a yogi to draw air and fluid into the urethra and out, and says, "Apart from its suggested medical value as a lavement of the bladder it is a mudra (physical technique) used in sexual connection whereby the Hathayogi sucks into himself the forces of the woman without ejecting any of his force or substance—a practice which is to be condemned as injurious to the woman who 'withers' under such treatment"[13]

Theos Bernard demonstrated with this photograph that he had learnt the physical posture for the obscure hatha yoga practice of Vajroli mudra, probably the first Westerner to do so.[14]

The explorer and author Theos Bernard illustrates himself in a posture named Vajroli mudra in his 1943 participant observer book Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience. The posture, somewhat resembling Navasana, is seated, the legs raised to about 45 degrees and held out straight, the body leaning back and the back rounded so that the palms can be placed on the ground below the raised thighs, the arms held straight.[14] Bernard states that he was instructed to learn this once he could do lotus position (Padmasana) so that he would be strong enough to use it "in the more advanced stages" of his hatha yoga training; there is no suggestion in the book that he followed the full practice.[4]

The yoga scholar Norman Sjoman criticises Krishnamacharya, otherwise known as the father of modern yoga, for including "material on yogic practices from these academic sources in his text without knowing an actual tradition of teaching connected with the practice."[5] Sjoman explains that Krishnamacharya recommended for Vajroli mudra "a glass rod to be inserted into the urethra an inch at a time."[5] In Sjoman's view, this showed "that he has most certainly not experimented with this himself in the manner he recommends."[5]

The magazine of Satyananda Saraswati's Bihar School of Yoga, noting the criticism of Vajroli mudra, defends the practice in a 1985 article. It states that the Shatkarma Sangraha describes seven Vajroli practices, starting with "the simple contraction of the uro-genital muscles and later the sucking up of liquids".[15] It adds that only when the first six practices are completed can the last, "yogic intercourse",[15] succeed. It notes also that sexual climax is the one moment in ordinary lives when "the mind becomes completely void of its own accord",[15] but the moment is brief as the lowest chakras (energy centres in the subtle body) are involved. Withholding the semen allows the energy to awaken kundalini, the energy supposedly coiled at the base of the spine, instead.[15]

Colin Hall and Sarah Garden, writing in Yoga International, note that, as with "yogic practices" like Khechari mudra, Mula bandha, and the various shatkarmas such as Dhauti (cleaning the gastro-intestinal tract by swallowing and pulling out lengths of cloth), Vajroli mudra is "rarely practiced by anyone at all." They state that the question is not whether these practices are right or wrong, but whether they are appropriate in a modern context.[16] The practice is associated with bramacharya, dispassion towards sexual desire.[12]

The lack of discussion of Vajroli mudra is related to the more general historic denigration of hatha yoga as unscientific and dangerous. The translator Rai Bahadur Srisa Chandra Vasu translated texts such as the Gheranda Samhita and the Shiva Samhita, starting in 1884, giving "stern warnings against the inherent perils of engaging in these practices".[2] Vasu intentionally omitted Vajroli mudra from his translations, describing it as "an obscene practice indulged in by low class Tantrists".[2][17] The yoga scholar Mark Singleton noted in 2010 that "the practice of vajroli has continued to be censored in modern editions of hatha yoga texts", giving as example Vishnudevananda's omission of it from his Hatha Yoga Pradipika with the explanation that "it falls outside the bounds of wholesome practice", "sattvic sadhana",[2] along with sahajoli and amaroli. Similarly, Singleton notes, the leader of Arya Maitreya Mandala in Europe, Hans-Ulrich Rieker called these three practices "obscure and repugnant"[18] and omitted them from his 1957 translation of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika.[2]