The Practice Nobody Talks About
When people think of Yogananda, they think of meditation. Maybe Kriya Yoga. Maybe that famous photograph of him with his eyes half-closed and his hair long. But there’s a practice he developed that he considered absolutely foundational, one he did every single day of his adult life, and most people outside of Self-Realization Fellowship have never heard of it.
The Energization Exercises. A set of 39 exercises that take about twelve minutes and involve systematically tensing and relaxing every part of the body while consciously directing energy through will power.
It sounds simple. It’s not. And the reason Yogananda insisted on it reveals something important about how he understood the relationship between body, energy, and consciousness.
What They Actually Are
The core principle is this: you can draw cosmic energy into your body through conscious will.
Yogananda taught that most people recharge their bodies exclusively through food, oxygen, and sleep. But there’s a fourth source, what he called “cosmic energy” or prana, that enters the body through the medulla oblongata (the base of the skull) and can be consciously directed anywhere in the body through focused attention and tension.
“The greater the will, the greater the flow of energy.”
– Paramahansa Yogananda
Each exercise follows a basic pattern: you focus your attention on a specific body part, tense it with a measured degree of force (low, medium, or high), hold the tension briefly while willing energy into that area, and then release completely. The release is as important as the tension. You’re training the body to respond to your conscious direction, to tense when you say tense and relax fully when you say relax.
The exercises move systematically through the entire body, hands, forearms, upper arms, shoulders, neck, chest, stomach, back, thighs, calves, feet, and the whole body simultaneously. Some exercises are done standing, others involve bending or stretching. The full set covers 39 distinct exercises and can be completed in roughly twelve minutes once you know the sequence.
Why Yogananda Considered Them Non-Negotiable
Here’s what I find fascinating: Yogananda didn’t present these as optional warm-ups. He placed them before meditation in his prescribed sequence of practices. His recommended order was energization exercises first, then pranayama, then meditation techniques.
Why? Because trying to meditate in a body that’s sluggish, tense, or full of restless energy is like trying to tune a radio that’s full of static. The signal might be there, but you can’t receive it clearly.
The exercises address this on multiple levels. Physically, they release tension patterns you might not even know you’re carrying. Energetically, they increase the flow of prana, making the body feel alive and alert rather than heavy. And mentally, this is the part that surprised me most, they train concentration.
Think about it. Each exercise requires you to isolate a specific body part, direct your full attention there, apply exactly the right amount of tension, and then release. That’s concentration practice. Thirty-nine repetitions of it. By the time you sit down to meditate, your mind has already been doing focused work for twelve minutes.
Yogananda was explicit about the connection:
“Will power is the instrument through which the Creator works. It is the divine power by which you draw energy into the body and direct it to accomplish any task. Exercise your will through the Energization Exercises daily, and you will find a great increase in your power to do all things.”
– Paramahansa Yogananda
The Body as an Energy Instrument
Most exercise systems treat the body as a mechanical thing, muscles, bones, levers. You push weight, the muscle grows. Cause and effect. Yogananda’s approach is radically different. He treated the body as an energy system first and a physical system second.
In his view, a muscle doesn’t move because of chemical reactions alone. It moves because will directs energy to it, and the energy produces the physical effect. The chemistry is the downstream result, not the cause. This is a fundamentally different model of the body, and the Energization Exercises are built on it.
When you practice them regularly, something interesting starts to happen. You begin to feel the energy component of physical action directly. You become aware of how much energy it takes to hold tension in your jaw versus your shoulders. You notice where energy flows freely and where it’s blocked. You start to sense the body as a field rather than a machine.
I’ll be honest, this took weeks of daily practice before I noticed it. The first few days, it just felt like a strange calisthenics routine. But there was a morning, maybe three weeks in, where I felt a distinct tingling warmth flow into my hands during one of the exercises. Not from muscular effort, but from something else. Something I was directing there with my attention.
That was the moment the exercises stopped being a warm-up and started being a practice.
What They Do for Meditation
The practical effect on meditation was noticeable faster than I expected. Two things changed.
First, my body was simply more comfortable sitting still. The combination of tension and release seems to clear out the fidgety restlessness that usually takes the first ten minutes of meditation to settle. After the exercises, I could sit down and be relatively still almost immediately.
Second, my concentration was sharper from the start. Instead of spending the first five minutes trying to corral my attention, it was already somewhat gathered. The exercises had done preliminary focusing work that made everything downstream easier.
I think this is why Yogananda was so insistent about them. He wasn’t being rigid for rigidity’s sake. He was an engineer of consciousness, and he’d designed a system where each component prepared the ground for the next.
A Simplified Version to Start With
The full set of 39 exercises is taught through Self-Realization Fellowship’s Lessons, and I’d encourage anyone seriously interested to learn them properly. But here’s a simplified version of the core principle that you can practice right now to get a feel for what’s involved.
Exercise 1: The Hands
Stand with your arms at your sides. Bring your attention fully to your right hand. Now tense it, make a fist with medium force. As you tense, consciously will energy into the hand. Imagine drawing energy from the center of your body out through your arm into the fist. Hold for three to five seconds. Then release completely. Let the hand go totally limp. Feel the difference between the tensed state and the relaxed state. Repeat with the left hand.
Exercise 2: The Forearms
Same principle. Tense both forearms with medium force, directing your full attention and will into them. Hold. Release completely. Notice the wave of relaxation.
Exercise 3: Full Arms
Extend both arms in front of you. Tense the entire arm, hands, forearms, upper arms, with high tension. Will energy through the whole length. Hold five seconds. Drop the arms and release everything at once.
Exercise 4: The Whole Body
This is the capstone. Stand straight, inhale, and tense your entire body simultaneously, feet, legs, abdomen, chest, arms, neck, face. Everything. Hold with maximum tension for five seconds, willing energy into every cell. Then exhale and release everything at once. Let the body go completely slack for a moment.
Do these four exercises three times each. The whole sequence takes about five minutes. Pay close attention to the moment of release, that’s where the magic lives. The contrast between total tension and total relaxation teaches the body what real relaxation feels like. Most of us have never fully relaxed because we’ve never fully tensed.
The Lesson Underneath the Exercises
After practicing these for several months, I think the deepest teaching isn’t really about energy or relaxation or even meditation preparation. It’s about the relationship between will and body.
We spend most of our lives feeling like the body runs us. It’s tired, so we stop. It’s hungry, so we eat. It hurts, so we rest. The body proposes and we comply. The Energization Exercises reverse that dynamic. You tell the body what to do. You direct energy where you choose. You tense on command, relax on command, and through repetition, you develop an experiential understanding that you are not the body, you are the one directing it.
That’s a meditation insight disguised as a physical exercise. And it’s available to anyone with twelve minutes and a willingness to stand in their living room tensing their left calf while willing cosmic energy into it.
It’ll feel strange at first. That’s fine. Yogananda did it every single day for decades. He probably felt strange the first time too.
