The Purpose & Significance of Bandhas in Yoga

Aug 16
8 min read

Deepen your understanding of the subtler effects of internal energy locks.

By PRANA EDITORS | Updated: August 17, 2025

First Read: What are Bandhas: A Beginner’s Guide to Yogic Internal Locks

Editor’s Note: In the previous article of this Yoga Bandha Series, we introduced yogic internal locks, providing a brief overview of their meaning, types, uses, and benefits. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at their physical, energetic and spiritual significance in yoga.

If you’ve been practicing yoga for a while, most of your time has probably gone into asanas (poses) and perhaps some pranayama (breathwork). This means you’ve been working with the more physical aspects of yoga, which are relatively easier to grasp because their effects are felt immediately.

Bandhas, however, are different. They are subtle, internal locks that work directly with prana (life energy). They are not outwardly visible, and while you can practice them without deep study, understanding their purpose makes your training more aligned with yoga’s spiritual goals.

In this article, we’ll explore why bandhas are so important in yoga — from their physical health benefits to their role in energy management, and even their place in spiritual awakening. By the end, you’ll see how these techniques can have a powerful impact on every layer of your being.

What Are Bandhas (in Simple Terms)?

The Sanskrit word bandha literally means to lock or bind. In yoga, it refers to a set of internal “locks” created by contracting specific muscles while coordinating them with the breath.

Think of them as switches inside the body. When you flip them on, you change how energy flows through you — sometimes containing it, sometimes directing it, sometimes amplifying it.

There are four main bandhas you’ll hear about:

Jalandhara Bandha – the throat lock, created by gently tucking the chin toward the chest.
Uddiyana Bandha – the core lock, where the diaphragm and belly draw inward and upward.
Mula Bandha – the root lock, involving a subtle lift of the pelvic floor muscles.
Maha Bandha – the great lock, when the above three are practiced together

Although each lock focuses on one region, together they cover your entire torso and spine. In other words, they connect the three key hubs of your being — the throat, the core, and the root.

Why Do we Practice Bandhas in Yoga?

1. Physical Health Benefits

At the simplest level, bandhas work like targeted exercises for deep muscles that most people never consciously engage. When you activate them, a few things happen right away:

Your posture improves because the spine gets better support from the inside out.
Your core becomes more stable, protecting your back in everyday movements.
Organs in the torso get a gentle massage, which helps them function more efficiently.

So even before we talk about energy flow or spirituality, bandhas are good for keeping the body strong, stable, and resilient. Moreover, each bandha has its own set of health benefits, extending from the digestive to the reproductive, and the respiratory to the metabolic systems.

Modern research backs this up too. Take Mula Bandha for example. It tones the pelvic floor and has been shown in studies to help manage urinary incontinence in men and women.

We’ll discuss the benefits of each bandha in future articles of this series. For now, it’s enough to know that these subtle practices are already doing a lot for your physical well-being.

2. Stimulating the Nervous System:

Bandhas don’t just affect muscles—they also stimulate specific nerve centers and glands.

In Moola Bandha: The Master Key, Swami Buddhananda explains that the “contraction of these muscles (bandhas) affects the nervous, circulatory, respiratory, endocrine, and energy systems.”

He explains that when you intentionally contract a muscle, you send nerve impulses to the brain. This activates neuronal circuits and reflex centers that influence your state of consciousness. This is why bandhas can be energizing or calming, depending on how they are applied.

On a subtler level, they do wonders for our bio-energy systems, with benefits ranging from removing blockages to stimulating energy centers and supporting emotional regulation. This has, as you can imagine, cascading effects on mood, behavior, concentration, and energy levels.

3. Energy Management (Prana Control)

Bandhas are primarily used as ‘energy management’ techniques that enable yogis to control and redirect the movement of prana within the body. But what does this mean?

As you know, we learn pranayama before bandhas. But pranayama is like rain filling a river. It can increase or decrease the flow, but without a dam, that water moves wherever it wants.

For example, you can deliberately lengthen inhalation to increase your intake of prana. Likewise, if you shorten inhalation and lengthen exhalation, you would gradually reduce the amount of prana circulating in the body. Or, you could hold your breath after inhalation, keeping prana energy within you for a longer period, allowing it to penetrate deeper than it normally does.

But pranayama has its limitations. While breathing techniques are excellent tools to control the intake of prana, they cannot be used to direct life energy to specific areas, ensure a balanced distribution, or plug the outlets in the body through which prana easily escapes.

That’s when yoga bandhas come into the picture. The controlled contraction and release of muscles while practicing bandhas is akin to opening and closing gates to manage energy currents, much like how a dam controls the flow of water in a river.

4. Spiritual Development

“Bandhas are not just physical exercises, but techniques for consciously harnessing our internal energy,” says Geert Meijer, an Iyengar Yoga instructor. “While they offer many health benefits, but their tools of inner development that can help us deepen our connection.”

That’s the key: bandhas are a bridge that connect the yoga you can see — asana and pranayama — with the yoga you can’t see: meditative enquiry and spiritual insight. By learning how to gather and direct your energy with bandhas, you’re preparing the ground for deeper practices.

5. Awakening Kundalini Shakti

According to yogic teachings, every human being has a powerful reservoir of energy at the base of their spine. This energy, known as Kundalini Shakti, is depicted as a coiled, sleeping serpent. It exists in an untapped, dormant state but can be awakened through focused spiritual practice.

This Kundalini (or spiritual) awakening, represents a shift in our perception from sexual-awareness to self-awareness, or external to internal awareness. It is a pivotal spiritual milestone, leading to the realization that there is more to us that material and ego-driven aspirations.

Yogataravali, a 13th century Hatha yoga text, explains it like this: “By the practice of bandhas the dormant Kundalini awakens and enters into the Sushumna Nadi. The breath becomes still (Kevala kumbhaka) and the senses are purified.” This yoga text, like many others, places a lot of emphasis on practicing the bandhas to “transcend the world and the mind.”

Advanced yogis use bandhas – first and foremost – to awaken Kundalini Shakti, and then channel this energy upward through the central channel (Sushumna) to achieve self-realization.

The Spiritual Purpose of Bandhas

To really understand why bandhas are so important in yoga, you need to zoom out and look at how yoga philosophy describes human existence. They use two classic frameworks:

Treya Sharira – the Doctrine of the Three Bodies: physical, subtle, and causal.
Pancha Kosha – the Five Sheaths, from the physical body to the soul.

According to these teachings, each person has a physical (sthula sharira) and a subtle body (sukhshma sharira). The physical body consists of the material aspects—muscles, tissues, bones, and organs, whereas the subtle body is composed of energy, mind, and consciousness.

Yoga practice is designed to move up step by step, from the physical towards the subtle. It helps us refine each layer until we begin to experience who we truly are beneath it all.

As we move towards the subtler layers, we encounter energy clusters or patterns that yoga calls samskaras. They are karmic imprints or deeply ingrained impressions left behind by our past actions and experiences. They quietly shape our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, and in modern psychology, these might be seen as subconscious conditioning.

Yogis describe these energy clusters are the three granthis, which literally means “knots” that hinder or disrupt the flow of pranic energy. These knots can show up as physical, emotional, or intellectual forms of bondage, and that keep up stuck in repetitive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.

But these energy clusters are not in your conscious mind. You cannot just "decide" to get rid of them or reach them directly in the way you might stretch a tight muscle. These lower impulses sit beneath conscious awareness and are tied to survival instincts. They creating stress, fear, anger, cravings, and other reactive emotions. These "lower samskaras" take up a lot of your energy. Yet, at the same time, you may not even notice how they influence their thoughts, feelings, and actions.

So, how does yoga work on them? The answer is: indirectly.

This is where practices like bandhas come in. When applied with breath retention, bandhas create energetic shifts that break through unhealthy energy clusters and make space for new, healthier imprints to be formed through mindfulness and meditation.

Over time, these methods work together to dissolve samskaras at their energetic root, making way for clarity, self-awareness, and liberation—which is the true aim of the yogic path.

How Internal Locks Are Used in Yoga

So far, we’ve looked at what bandhas are and why they matter. But how do yogis use them in practice? The answer depends on whether you’re doing asana, pranayama, or meditation.

1. Bandhas and Asana (Physical Postures)

Out of the four bandhas, only Mula Bandha is regularly paired with physical postures. And even then, you’ll mostly see it in modern, dynamic styles like Ashtanga, Vinyasa, or Bikram Yoga.

Why? Because when you gently lift the pelvic floor, you’re not just working a hidden muscle. You’re actually stabilizing your entire core and supporting the lumbar spine. This creates a kind of internal scaffolding that helps you hold better posture, balance more easily, and protect your back. In flowing styles, it’s what keeps energy “contained” as you move from pose to pose.

2. Bandhas and Pranayama (Breath Control)

Bandhas really come alive in pranayama. In fact, you could say the two practices are made for each other. Pranayama builds the flow of energy, while bandhas guide and contain it.

And this isn’t just yogic tradition talking — even modern studies have found that pranayama is significantly more effective when combined with bandhas than when practiced on its own.

3. Bandhas and Dhyana (Meditation)

In traditional yoga, you don’t usually sit down and engage a bandha while meditating, as that would overcomplicate things. Instead, you practice a few rounds of a specific bandha before you start. This helps stabilize the mind and body, making it easier to enter deep meditative states.

Another scenario where bandhas are used is when your focus is scattered or your mind is getting easily distracted while meditating. Pausing practice and performing a few rounds of a bandha can help regain control over your breath, calm your senses, and anchor your mind.

Final Thoughts + What to Read Next

In a nutshell, Bandhas matter because they act as a bridge, linking the yoga you can see and feel — like poses and breathwork — with the deeper inner work of meditation and self-realization.

And this concludes the theoretical aspects of understanding what they truly are. Next up, we’ll be discussing some of the practical aspects of bandhas, including safety guidelines, common misconceptions, and a progressive three-step approach to mastering internal locks.

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