This paper is an in-depth exploration of the modern school of yoga popularly known as Kundalini Yoga As Taught By Yogi Bhajan (KYATBYB). The practice will be examined in its political, historical, and religious dimensions, as compared with other movements within Modern Postural Yoga and their historical precedents and as compared with other expressions of yoga within Sikh history. Yogi Bhajan’s influences will be explored, and the work of other critical authors will be revisited and revised where new information has come to light. Yogi Bhajan’s many inspirations will be laid out in detail, including the various political and interpersonal rivalries that may have shaped his path. Ultimately, the mind of the late Yogi Bhajan is unknowable, but those indelible fingerprints of the past that can be discerned will serve as a jumping off point by which the historical dimensions of the practice may be better understood.

This essay is written with a dual agenda, the first aspect of which is to demonstrate the influence that martial traditions particular to India have or may have had on the formation of what DeMichelis refers to as Modern Postural Yoga (MPY) and its antecedents. But the second goal in writing this piece is to challenge a number of assumptions made by select scholars of modern yoga, and frequently repeated by others, about the level to which modern yoga's incorporation of standing poses, the concepts of physical strength, the nervous system, and even energetic healing are derived from Western sources in response to British colonial rule....In doing so we may allow a deeper reconsideration of the role of a warrior tradition on yoga that dates back at least to the Mughal conflicts if not all the way back to the great epics of ancient India and that tradition's influence on the formation of modern postural yoga practices.