Forty Mornings

the first week is the hard one, and then there is the twenty-ninth morning, which nobody warns you about.

A 40-day practice in Kundalini Yoga means doing the same kriya or meditation every single day, at roughly the same hour, for forty consecutive days. The tradition teaches that forty days breaks a habit, ninety establishes the new one in its place, one hundred and twenty confirms it, and one thousand days gives you mastery of it.

Why is Kundalini Yoga practised in 40 days?

Because forty days is long enough for the practice to stop being a decision. For the first week you decide every morning whether to sit down. Somewhere in the third week the deciding stops, and it becomes a thing you do rather than a thing you weigh up.

Forty recurs across many traditions, which is interesting and is not evidence. Here it is taught as the time a pattern needs to be interrupted before it loosens. I teach it as a container with a visible end.

What do 40, 90, 120 and 1,000 days each do?

Read this as a map rather than a measurement.

How do you start a 40-day practice?

Seven decisions, made once. Most failures I see are not failures of will. They are a practice chosen too large, at an hour that was never going to survive a real week.

1. Choose one practice, and only one. One kriya, one meditation, or one breath. Repetition is the whole mechanism, and repetition needs something small enough to repeat on the morning you do not want to.
2. Fix the length before you begin. Eleven, twenty-two or thirty-one minutes are the lengths most practices are taught in. A short practice you finish beats a long one you abandon on day nine.
3. Choose the hour and the place, and stop renegotiating both. Traditionally the hours before sunrise, when the world asks nothing of you yet. If that is not your life, choose another hour and keep it.
4. Cover or tie up the head if the practice calls for it. Many practices are taught with the head covered in natural cloth. Tradition rather than requirement.
5. Tune in, and then sit still afterwards. Three repetitions of Ong Namo Guru Dev Namo before you start, and a minute of stillness when the timer ends. The stillness is the part people cut first.
6. Write one line a day. Date, minutes, one sentence. The only honest record you will have on day thirty-five of what day four felt like.
7. Decide now what you will do if you miss a day. Decide that while you are clear-headed, not at eleven at night on day twenty-two.

What happens if you miss a day of a 40-day sadhana?

You begin again at day one. I do not soften that, because forty mornings in a row is a different experience from forty mornings scattered across three months. Write down the reason before you restart. After two or three attempts the reasons become one reason, and that one is usually more interesting than the practice was.

Which practice should you choose for your first forty days?

One of these four. I would choose the first unless you have a reason not to.

• Kirtan Kriya, eleven or twelve minutes. A mantra and a hand movement, nothing athletic, and the most studied practice in the tradition.
• One of the three beginner meditations, if you want something shorter to start with.
• Sat Kriya, three to eleven minutes. Much more demanding physically, and there are people who should skip it.
• Breath of Fire, only if it is already in your body. Traditionally not practised in pregnancy or on the heavy days of menstruation, and anyone with high blood pressure, a heart condition, epilepsy or recent abdominal surgery should ask their doctor first.

What does the evidence actually say about forty days?

No trial has tested the 40, 90, 120 and 1,000 day structure. It is a teaching framework. What has been studied is individual practices, in small numbers of people. Kirtan Kriya is the clearest case: small trials on memory, stress and family caregivers, many funded by or linked to the Alzheimer's Research and Prevention Foundation, an organisation with an interest in the result. Small and interested is not the same as proven.

On habits in general there is no single number. A 2009 study of 96 people found a median of 66 days for a behaviour to feel automatic, with an enormous spread, from under three weeks to past a year. Forty is not the scientific number, and neither is the twenty-one days you have been told.

Where this teaching comes from

I credit these practices to the Kundalini Yoga tradition and to my own teachers, and have written about that lineage in the lineage behind the cloth. One thing belongs in plain sight here: the man who brought this tradition to the West faced serious abuse allegations, documented in an independent investigation published in 2020. The practices are older than he is.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a 40-day Kundalini practice be each day?

Eleven, twenty-two or thirty-one minutes, depending on how the practice is taught. The length matters far less than the sameness of it. A consistent eleven minutes does more over forty days than an inconsistent hour.

What does sadhana mean in Kundalini Yoga?

Daily spiritual practice. It usually describes what you do at the same hour every morning, before the day starts making requests of you. A 40-day practice is a sadhana with an end date attached. For the whole morning rather than one practice, see how to begin a morning sadhana.

Do you have to start over if you miss a day?

In the tradition, yes. A missed day returns you to day one, because continuity is the only active ingredient the practice has.

What should you wear for a daily Kundalini practice?

Something loose through the hip and the chest, in a natural fibre, with nothing at the waist that digs in when you sit cross-legged for thirty-one minutes. White is traditional and optional. The Kundalini Playsuit is 100% stonewashed French linen, OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certified. The longer answer is in our guide to clothing for Kundalini Yoga.

forty mornings will not make you a different woman. it will show you, fairly precisely, which one you already are at five in the morning.

With love from Bali,
Myrah