Kriya is a Sanskrit word meaning “action,” “effort,” or “cleansing,” and in yoga it points to two genuinely different things that happen to share a name. One is a set of physical purification techniques from hatha yoga, meant to clean the body before deeper practice. The other is a psychological and ethical discipline described by Patanjali as a path of action for reducing the mental obstacles that block clarity. They aren’t variations on the same idea — they come from different texts, serve different purposes, and only overlap in the word used to describe them. Sorting out which “kriya” a source is talking about is the fastest way to actually understand any of them.
The Shatkarma Kriyas: Cleansing the Body
The first meaning of kriya belongs to hatha yoga’s purification tradition, most fully described in texts like the Gheranda Samhita and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. These texts group six categories of cleansing techniques together under the name shatkarma — literally “six actions” — and each individual technique within that set is called a kriya.
The six shatkarmas address different parts of the body: neti clears the nasal passages, typically using a saline rinse through a neti pot; dhauti covers a family of techniques for cleansing the digestive tract; nauli is an abdominal-churning technique that massages the internal organs; basti is a yogic form of internal cleansing of the lower digestive tract; trataka is a steady, unblinking gaze practice said to cleanse and strengthen the eyes and settle the mind; and kapalabhati, a forceful, rhythmic breathing pattern, appears in this list as a cleansing kriya even though it’s also widely practiced today as a pranayama technique in its own right.
The logic behind all six is consistent: the body is treated as something that accumulates waste and obstruction over time, and shatkarma kriyas exist to clear that out before a practitioner moves into more subtle, internal work. In the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, these practices are explicitly framed as preparatory — they come before pranayama and meditation, not instead of them. This is the sense of “kriya” you’ll most often encounter in a hatha yoga studio or teacher training: a physical technique, usually taught with specific instructions, that clears something out.
Kriya Yoga of Patanjali: The Yoga of Action
The second meaning has nothing to do with cleansing the sinuses or the gut. It comes from the opening verse of the second chapter of the Yoga Sutras, where Patanjali defines Kriya Yoga — the “yoga of action” — as three practices combined: tapas (disciplined effort, often translated as austerity or the heat of sustained practice), svadhyaya (self-study, including study of oneself and of sacred texts), and ishvara pranidhana (surrender to a higher principle, or letting go of the sense that everything depends on personal effort alone).
Patanjali doesn’t present Kriya Yoga as a set of physical exercises. It’s a description of how to live and practice in a way that gradually weakens the kleshas — the root obstacles the Yoga Sutras identify as the real obstructions to clarity, things like ignorance, ego, attachment, aversion, and fear. Kriya Yoga is offered as a practical, everyday-usable path: not a state you achieve once, but an ongoing orientation of disciplined effort, honest self-examination, and letting go of the illusion of total control. It’s covered in more depth in our guide to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and it connects directly to the broader ethical and practical framework laid out in the eight limbs of yoga, where tapas, svadhyaya, and ishvara pranidhana also appear as three of the five niyamas.
Why the Same Word Covers Both
The overlap isn’t a coincidence, even though the two traditions developed somewhat independently. Kriya, at its root, simply means “action” or “doing” — and both usages describe deliberate, effortful action taken toward a specific result. The shatkarmas are actions taken on the body to remove physical obstruction; Patanjali’s Kriya Yoga is action taken through discipline, self-study, and surrender to remove mental and spiritual obstruction. The shared logic is: obstacles accumulate, and specific, deliberate action clears them. Hatha yoga applies that logic to the physical body; Patanjali applies it to the mind. Once you see that shared structure, the two meanings stop feeling like a coincidence and start feeling like two applications of the same underlying idea, aimed at different layers of a practitioner’s experience.
A Third, Later Usage: “Kriya Yoga” as a Modern Lineage Name
There’s a third context where you’ll encounter the term: several twentieth-century teachers and lineages adopted the name “Kriya Yoga” for specific systems of meditation and energy practices they taught, often drawing loosely on Patanjali’s terminology while adding their own techniques and structure. These modern schools are worth knowing exist, but they’re distinct enough from both the shatkarmas and from Patanjali’s original sutra that it isn’t accurate to treat any one of them as the definitive meaning of Kriya Yoga — each is its own tradition, and the specifics vary by lineage.
How to Tell Which Kriya Is Meant
In practice, context almost always makes the meaning clear. If someone is talking about neti pots, nasal rinses, or a physical cleansing routine done before pranayama, they mean a shatkarma kriya. If the conversation is about ethics, self-discipline, or Patanjali’s framework for reducing mental obstacles, they mean Kriya Yoga as defined in Yoga Sutra 2.1. And if someone references “Kriya Yoga” as the name of a specific meditation lineage or organization, that’s the modern usage — related to Patanjali’s term by name and inspiration, but its own distinct system. None of the three is more “correct” than the others; they’re simply different things that share a word, much like how “practice” can mean a single yoga session or a lifelong commitment depending on context.
Want to build a steady, effort-based practice of your own? Try yoga-bits to learn all 68 yoga pose names through an interactive quiz, or start with a seated foundation in Easy Pose or Lotus Pose before resting in Corpse Pose at the end of your session.