Vajrolī

''Vajroli mudra'' (Sanskrit: वज्रोली मुद्रा ''vajrolī mudrā''), the Vajroli Seal, is a practice in Hatha yoga which requires the yogi to preserve his semen, either by learning not to release it, or if released by drawing it up through his urethra from the vagina of "a woman devoted to the practice of yoga".

The mudra was described as "obscene" by the translator Rai Bahadur Srisa Chandra Vasu, and as "obscure and repugnant" by another translator, Hans-Ulrich Rieker.

The mudra is rarely practised in modern times. It was covered in the 1900s by the American sexologist Ida C. Craddock, the resulting legal proceedings against her leading to her imprisonment and suicide. The explorer Theos Bernard learnt and illustrated the posture associated with the mudra. The pioneer of modern yoga, Krishnamacharya, gives impractical instructions for the mudra, demonstrating in Norman Sjoman's opinion that he had never tried the practice.

Context

Hatha yoga is a branch of yoga that developed around the 11th century. Like earlier forms such as Patanjali's yoga, its ultimate goal was liberation, moksha, and its methods included meditation. It added a set of physical methods contributing to liberation including purification techniques ( satkarmas), non-seated postures (asanas), elaborate breath-control (pranayama), and physical techniques to manipulate vital energy, the mudras.

Mudras are gestures of the body, used in hatha yoga to assist in the spiritual journey towards liberation. Mudras such as Khechari Mudra and Mula Bandha are used to seal in the vital energy, which can take various forms such as prana (related to the breath) and bindu (related to the semen). The classical sources for the mudras in yoga are two medieval texts, the ''Gheranda Samhita'' and the ''Hatha Yoga Pradipika''. However, many hatha yoga texts describe mudras.

The ''Hatha Yoga Pradipika'' 3.5 states the importance of mudras in yoga practice:

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the yoga teacher Satyananda Saraswati, founder of the Bihar School of Yoga, continued to emphasize the importance of mudras in his instructional text ''Asana, Pranayama, Mudrā, Bandha''.

Mudra

Vajroli mudra, the Vajroli Seal, differs from other mudras in that it does not consist of sealing in a vital fluid physically, but involves its recovery. The mudra requires the yogin to preserve his semen, either by learning not to release it, or if released by drawing it up through his urethra from the vagina of "a woman devoted to the practice of yoga". It is described in the ''Hatha Yoga Pradipika'' 3.82–89.

The ''Shiva Samhita'' 4.78–104 calls Vajroli mudra "the secret of all secrets" and claims that it enables "even a householder" (a married man, not a yogic renunciate) to be liberated. It calls for the man to draw up the ''rajas'', the woman's sexual fluid, from her vagina. It explains that the loss of ''bindu'', the vital force of the semen, causes death, while its retention causes life. The god Shiva says "I am ''bindu'', the goddess (Shakti) is ''rajas''."

The ''Shiva Samhita'' states in the same passage that ''Sahajoli'' and ''Amaroli'' are variations of the mudra. The yogin is instructed to practice by using his wind to hold back the urine while he is urinating, and then to release it little by little. After six months' practice he will in this way become able to hold back his ''bindu'', "even if he enjoys a hundred women".

The practice has been proposed to serve to clean the bladder by drawing liquids towards the urethra as an auto-enema, similar to the intestinal shatkarma