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Siddhasana

AYP's name for "siddhasana" is "seat of the perfected ones," and its function is direct: sitting with gentle pressure from the heel against the perineum, continuously during spinal breathing pranayama and deep meditation, to keep kundalini flowing upward from the root. It is the next major step in AYP's integration of practices and is deliberately more aggressive than anything introduced so far — a real threshold. Do not add it before the rest of the routine is stable.

Procedure

  1. Sit on a soft surface with back support — bed or equivalent. Not on a hard surface for this learning phase.
  2. Bring one foot in far enough that the heel rests under the perineum, top of the foot lying nearly flat on the surface beneath you. You are gently sitting on the heel.
  3. The other leg can be tucked under the shin of the first leg (simplified form), or left straight (even easier), or eventually placed on top (half-lotus / formal form).
  4. Lean back against your support, using gentle rather than full weight on the heel. "Not too firm, not too light."
  5. You can switch feet for comfort as needed.
  6. Do SBP, mulabandha, sambhavi, and deep meditation exactly as before. Siddhasana runs in the background as a continuous pressure at the perineum throughout the full sitting session.

The bucking bronco

Siddhasana is sexually stimulating. That is the point. Yogani's metaphor:

Lesson 75: "Think of sexual energy as being like a wild horse. We want to use this horse for a useful purpose. So what do we do? We get on the wild horse and ride it. It jumps all over the place at first — the proverbial 'bucking bronco.' But pretty soon, the horse figures out who is in charge, and begins to settle down."

Early weeks are likely to be clunky and sexy at the same time. Some timeline:

  • First week or two: crazy. Strong sexual sensations, distraction, difficulty meditating.
  • One month: settling somewhat.
  • Three months: becoming comfortable.
  • Six months to a year: stable, natural, routine.
  • A few years: "bathed in ecstasy all the time, but never taking it for granted." Siddhasana becomes a setting you can enter anytime.

The shift from crazy sexual bouncing to a smooth upward flow of "delightful energy, much like a fountain coming up from our root" is the payoff. The nervous system has been trained; sexual energy has been harnessed for spiritual expansion without loss of its natural function in the rest of life.

Two kinds of training at once

What makes siddhasana genuinely tricky is that it involves both physical and energetic training simultaneously:

  1. Physical — getting comfortable in the leg position. Requires time for the body to adapt, same as learning any cross-legged posture.
  2. Energetic — riding through the sexual energy until it settles into an upward flow. Harder than the physical part for most.

You don't have to do both at once. Yogani explicitly offers a simpler staging: start with siddhasana during pranayama only, skip it during deep meditation, and introduce it to DM later once the energy has settled somewhat.

Alternatives for practitioners who can't cross legs

Full siddhasana assumes enough flexibility to bring a foot to the perineum. Practitioners for whom this is not possible can use a prosthetic object — a firm rubber ball, a hard small pillow, anything that approximates the pressure of the heel against the perineum. Lesson 75:

"You will still be training your sexual energy, which is the point of siddhasana. Everything else will be the same as discussed above. You will just be using a different method to achieve the same results."

The energetic effect is what matters, not the leg-pretzel. Prop-based siddhasana is fully valid.

What siddhasana is not for

Addition 75.2 explicitly rejects the idea of using siddhasana to suppress sexual desire. It does the opposite — it increases sexual energy and directs it upward. A practitioner trying to use it as a libido-reducer will discover that:

"Siddhasana increases sexual energy, flowing in an upward direction. … It is not for the purpose of decreasing sexual desire. Rather, it is to harness it for a spiritual purpose."

Suppression is neither the goal nor the effect. Attempts to use siddhasana against sexual desire are a sign the practice is premature — in that case, return to daily deep meditation as the foundation and let the muladhara balance itself naturally over time.

The ecstatic preorgasmic state

As siddhasana matures, the quality of sexual energy during sitting practice changes: from "bucking bronco" turbulence to smooth, wavelike, prolonged pleasure. Addition 75.3: some practitioners describe this as multi-orgasmic-feeling or non-ejaculatory (echoes of Taoist practices). The AYP term is "ecstatic preorgasmic state" — a continuous inner flow of sexual-spiritual pleasure that is not a discrete event and does not lead to discharge.

Yogani's guidance: this will refine further over time until it fades into "just part of your nature, barely noticed as a separate thing, underlying the overall joy of life." The "wow, gee whiz" quality fades; the underlying fountain remains. This is stillness in action emerging at the level of the body's own baseline pleasure.

Siddhasana vs padmasana — the tantra scale

Lesson 127 addresses a common question from experienced meditators: "I've been sitting in padmasana (full lotus) for a long time, should I switch to siddhasana?" Yogani's answer positions the two seats on a "tantra scale" measured by how directly a seat engages sexual energy:

  • Siddhasana is left of center on this scale — working more with sensuality, cultivating sexual energy directly upward via perineum pressure. More powerful for direct kundalini stimulation.
  • Padmasana (full lotus) is right of center — a traditional meditation seat that doesn't bring pressure to the perineum. Its benefits are postural and concentrative rather than directly sexual/energetic.

Neither is strictly "better." The choice depends on where a practitioner falls on the tantra scale at a point in time, which is itself a function of bhakti and how much purification has occurred in the nervous system. More purification tends to incline a practitioner toward more direct engagement with sexual-energy practices, not less.

Lesson 127: "In yoga it is not possible to avoid dealing with sexual energy indefinitely, because sooner or later the nervous system becomes activated by the rise of kundalini, and inner ecstasy explodes inside. There is nothing more sensual than that. All of the advanced yoga practices are designed to promote ecstasy's natural rise in the nervous system."

The practical recommendation for someone comfortable in padmasana who is interested in moving forward energetically: develop siddhasana gradually in parallel, see how it works for you energy-wise, and choose based on direct experience. Knowing both seats is useful. Yogani himself tested both and ended up in siddhasana for the long haul because it fit his direction experientially. "Whatever it is for you will be fully respected."

Pressure in the head — use SBP, sambhavi, and eventually kechari

Lesson 128 addresses a specific side effect: sitting in siddhasana for 30+ minutes produces an intense pressure building up in the head (similar to the head pressure from mulabandha). This is a sign of rising energies concentrating upward without enough outlets or polarity balance. The remedies:

  1. Make sure spinal breathing pranayama is in the routine. SBP balances the ascending and descending pranas along the sushumna and is the primary tool for head pressure.
  2. Do sambhavi alongside mulabandha and siddhasana. The full set of energy-balancing practices should be engaged together, not piecemeal.
  3. Eventually add kechari — it plays a big role in the "new biology in the head" and helps rising energies find balanced spiritual functioning.
  4. If discomfort is acute, back off the mudras, bandhas, and kumbhaka and give it a day or two to heal. These are "growing pains" — self-pace and don't force through them. See kundalini imbalances.
  5. Chronic, unresponsive head discomfort warrants medical advice to rule out non-practice causes.

Lesson 128: "To balance the pressure in the head, make sure you are doing spinal breathing. Also do sambhavi along with your mulabandha and siddhasana. Ultimately you will have kechari too, which plays a big role in the new biology in the head."

⚠️ Padmasana is not a long-hold practice in AYP

Addition 127.2 is blunt about an ambition some practitioners have: sitting in padmasana for many hours per day. AYP does not recommend this. Forced long-term padmasana can lead to permanent damage to knees and hips. Siddhasana much less so, because of the simpler leg position and easier entry, and because siddhasana is far more effective as a cultivator of ecstatic conductivity anyway.

Addition 127.2 keeps the seat in proportion: deep meditation "in any comfortable seat is by far the most important practice in the AYP system," with benefits far exceeding the physical practices. Moderate, balanced, full-scope daily practice over the long term is the surest way forward.

Any comfortable seat works for DM. The priority is depth of practice, not flashiness of posture. If siddhasana isn't accessible, the prosthetic-object alternative preserves the energetic effect without the flexibility requirement.

Siddhasana as the "no-brainer" for muladhara stimulation

Lesson 156 makes a distinctive point about why siddhasana is so valuable once mastered: it stimulates the muladhara/root without requiring any attention. The pressure of the heel at the perineum happens passively in the background; the practitioner's attention is free to engage with every other practice (SBP, DM, sambhavi, kechari, mulabandha, nauli, chin pump, kumbhaka, samyama) without being distracted by a separate "work on the root" component.

Lesson 156: "Using siddhasana to stimulate muladhara is a 'no-brainer.' Once siddhasana is mastered, then everything (spinal breathing, meditation, mulabandha, sambhavi, kechari, nauli, chin pump, kumbhaka, samyama, etc.) can be done without attention being distracted. 'Mastered' means able to stay in siddhasana with constant stimulation with attention not stuck on muladhara, and free to do all the other practices."

"Mastered" here specifically means being able to stay in siddhasana with the constant stimulation without attention being stuck on the muladhara. In the early clunky stage this is hard — the sexual sensations and pelvic-area stimulation pull attention there constantly. Once the nervous system adapts, the stimulation becomes background noise that the system is "responding to" energetically without pulling attention into the pelvis.

This is the practical reason AYP is so insistent that siddhasana be developed: it frees attention from having to deliberately work the root so that attention can do the higher-order work elsewhere in the system.

Don't fixate on muladhara

A related warning from Lesson 156: practitioners sometimes become fixated on the muladhara as the whole point of kundalini practice. This is a mistake. Muladhara is the essential beginning — but not the end.

Lesson 156: "Muladhara is the essential beginning of kundalini awakening, but it is not the end. Just as the basement is the essential beginning of a tall building, but the best views are definitely higher up. It is common sense, yes?"

The sushumna runs from root to brow. The energy has to go up. Fixating on the root — either physically (obsessing over how to stimulate it more) or attentionally (holding attention there) — keeps the energy trapped where it starts instead of letting it flow to where it's going. Siddhasana's elegance is that it handles the basement passively so the practitioner can attend to the upper floors.

Advanced siddhasana — optimizing stimulation

Lesson T28 describes an enhancement of the basic position that increases preorgasmic stimulation without shifting into active masturbation — premasturbation mode, not masturbation mode.

For women: - Inner heel moved forward to rest in the entrance of the yoni (instead of behind at the perineum). - Outer foot brought up with its heel resting against the clitoris, so both heels provide simultaneous preorgasmic stimulation. - If the outer leg position is difficult, cup the genitals with one hand resting fingers near the clitoris — same effect, fully valid.

For men: - Inner heel moved forward to the soft area just behind the pubic bone where the urethra emerges — increases direct upward stimulation compared to basic perineum position. - Outer foot brought up with heel resting lightly over the genitals, so the lingam is held between the two feet. - If the outer leg position is difficult, cupping the genitals with one hand is just as effective.

Key principles from T28: - This is not masturbation — no active stroking or movement. The stimulation is passive. - Erections during sitting practice are normal and should not be suppressed. Over time, as energy consistently routes upward, genital arousal during sitting diminishes naturally — without affecting sexual function at other times. - The heel can double as a blocking tool by leaning forward on it if arousal approaches orgasm.

Lesson T28: "Using advanced siddhasana in sitting practices will gradually change our relationship with our sexual energy to be much healthier. … Our sex life will be naturally expanded into the spiritual dimension, and we will be walking around with divine ecstasy permanently caressing us inside."

⚠️ Safety: don't compress the lingam root

Lesson T29 addresses a common beginner mistake: placing the heel too far forward, pressing the root of the lingam against the back of the pubic bone. This puts the lingam to sleep (numbness). It is not harmful, but it is a sign that the heel is too far forward — back it up slightly toward the perineum.

Some austere schools of yoga deliberately induce this numbness to prevent erection. AYP does not recommend this — the goal is pleasurable preorgasmic cultivation, not suppression.

Using back support makes it easy to regulate both the angle and pressure of the heel at any time during the session. This is why AYP consistently recommends informal siddhasana with back support over formal siddhasana without it.

Lesson T29: "Siddhasana should not require any attention at all, once comfortably established."

Prerequisites

How it relates to other practices

  • Runs in parallel with SBP, DM, mulabandha, and sambhavi — siddhasana is the seat; the other practices happen while sitting in it.
  • Amplifies mulabandha — direct pressure at the perineum replaces the need for as much conscious flexing. The two work together.
  • Amplifies kundalini awakening — siddhasana is the aggressive start of the "more focused" energy practices in AYP. Pair with careful self-pacing and grounding.
  • Foundation for later tantric practices covered in the T-series lessons. Lesson 97 makes the connection explicit: tantra is "an extension of the principles of siddhasana, really, where we are cultivating sexual energy upward into our nervous system." See tantra.

Cautions / self-pacing

  • Back off if overloaded. Lesson 75: "If at any point the stimulation is just too much, and it is not possible to meditate or do anything comfortably in practices, it is important to back off. … Find your best stable platform of reduced practice, and relax there before trying to move ahead again."
  • Don't be heroic. If siddhasana is making the rest of the routine impossible, that is a sign to reduce, not to push through.
  • Knees especially — see Addition 75.1. Pain in the knees while working toward the full leg position means stop and use a prop instead. "Yoga is 'no pain, more gain.'"
  • Not premature. Siddhasana on a shaky foundation can produce intense overload. Wait.

Source lessons