When Westerners get into Indian Tantra these days, they usually encounter the Mahavidyas first. The ten manifestations of absolute reality represented by female goddesses: Kali, Bagalamukhi, Tara, Chinnamasta, Bhuvaneshvari, Matangi, Kamala, Dhumavati, Bhairavi, Tripura Sundari. Ten faces of what can’t actually be divided but shows up in these forms so we can work with it.
If you go to India looking for Tantra, you’ll probably come across mantras related to one or more of these goddesses. That’s the standard transmission. Learn the mantra. Recite it. Let the sound pattern do its work on your consciousness. For people raised in that linguistic and cultural matrix, this makes perfect sense. The mantras carry generations of resonance. They work.
In Forbidden Yoga, we honor and relate to these Mahavidya energies differently. We use Kriya Sadhana. Kriya means working with the body directly: asana, body alignment, postures, breath patterns, pranayama (breath control), pratyahara (sensory withdrawal), various cleansing techniques, the whole spectrum of practices that use your actual organism as the instrument.
We think mantras are something you should touch carefully if you’re not of Indian origin. That’s our opinion. It doesn’t have to be true. Transcendental Meditation became hugely successful in the West using only mantras, so clearly it can work. We’re not saying one approach is better than the other. We’re saying that for Western bodies, Western nervous systems, Western minds that live in completely different linguistic and cultural soil, working through the body and breath is more direct.
You don’t need to believe anything when you’re holding a difficult asana and breathing in a pattern that destabilizes your usual defenses. You don’t need cultural context when your nervous system is being repatterned by a kriya. The body speaks a language that crosses cultures. Breath doesn’t care about your belief system.
So that’s how we work with the Mahavidyas. Through kriyas specific to each goddess, not through her mantra. The practices put you in direct contact with that energy, that face of reality, through your actual lived experience in a body rather than through sound.
But there’s another system most Westerners never hear about: the Nityas.
The Nityas are sixteen goddesses, also manifestations of the same undivided non-dual reality. They’re more subtle than the Mahavidyas, less known, less accessible. In traditional practice, they’re connected to the lunar tithis, the phases of the moon, worked with through mantra and linked deeply to astrological timing. They’re part of Sri Vidya tradition, which is more refined, more “right-handed,” less transgressive than the Shakta lineages that gave us the Mahavidyas.
The sixteen Nityas include Kameshvari, Bhagamalini, Nityaklinna, Bherunda, Vahnivasini, Mahavajreshvari, Shivaduti, Tvarita, Kulasundari, Nitya, Nilapataka, Vijaya, Sarvamangala, Jvalamalini, Chitra, and Tripura Sundari herself (or in some counts, Maha Nitya as the sixteenth).
Each represents a different quality of consciousness, a different doorway into the absolute. Where the Mahavidyas tend toward the fierce, the confrontational, the edges of what we can tolerate, the Nityas are more about subtle gradations, lunar rhythms, the slow spiral approach to what can’t be grasped directly.
In Forbidden Yoga, we also work with these sixteen Nityas. But again, we don’t use their mantras. We don’t connect them to lunar astrology or timing practices based on tithis. We use Kriya Sadhana to get a little step into the hologram of each Nitya. Just a glimpse. Just enough bodily contact with that particular face of reality to begin recognizing it in your own experience.
Why do we say “a little step into the hologram”? Because the Nityas are subtle. They’re not going to hit you over the head like Kali or Chinnamasta. They’re more like adjusting the aperture on perception by tiny degrees. Each kriya designed for a Nitya gives you a felt sense, a bodily knowing, of that particular quality of consciousness.
Take Kameshvari, the first Nitya, the goddess of desire and fulfillment. There’s a kriya that works with her energy directly through specific breath patterns and movements. You do this practice alone, with nobody watching. You don’t chant her name. You don’t need to know her mythology. You do the practice and your body learns what that frequency feels like. What it means to be in a state where desire and fulfillment aren’t separate, where wanting itself becomes the satisfaction.
Or Nityaklinna, the ever-moist one, associated with the nectar of bliss that flows when dualities dissolve. Again, there’s a kriya. Specific instructions. You follow them, alone, in private. Your nervous system encounters that state. Not as a concept, as a lived reality in your cells.
We’re not claiming this is the traditional way. It’s not. The traditional way uses mantra, astrology, yantra, elaborate ritual frameworks that require you to be steeped in the culture that created them. We’re doing something else: extracting the essence, the actual transformation these goddesses represent, and finding body-based doorways that work for people who weren’t raised chanting in Sanskrit.
Some people will say this is appropriation, dilution, missing the point. Maybe. Or maybe it’s what these teachings look like when they cross into a different soil and have to take root in Western bodies that need direct physical transmission more than linguistic or conceptual frameworks.
The Mahavidyas and Nityas together give you twenty-six different faces of reality, twenty-six different ways consciousness can organize itself, twenty-six doorways into states that most people never touch in an entire lifetime. Ten fierce. Sixteen subtle. All of them manifestations of the same thing: what you already are when you stop performing the limited version you think you’re supposed to be.
We honor them through practice, not prayer. Through kriya, not mantra. Through the body remembering what the mind can’t conceptualize. That’s the forbidden part. Not that it’s transgressive. That it bypasses all the frameworks, all the beliefs, all the cultural containers, and goes straight to the organism itself.
Your body knows these goddesses. It just forgot. The kriyas remind it.
You are feeling intrigued? don’t hesitate to drop us a line.. 🫶
love@forbidden-yoga.com
