Start with a terminological bombshell that quietly reframes the whole subject. The word āsana, which modern yoga uses for every stretch and pose, originally meant something else entirely: a throne — specifically "the throne of the Deity in one's visualization practice," usually a padmāsana or lotus throne.1 By extension it came to mean "seat," and then any seated meditation posture. Using it for the whole gymnastic vocabulary of physical postures "dates from the 18th century" and is, "from the point of view of tradition... something of a misappropriation of the term."1
The actual general term for posture in Tantra is karaṇa — and it's broader and stranger than "āsana." Karaṇa "can indicate inversions, dance poses, and subtle internal adjustments as well as 'postures of awareness.'"2 That last category is the tell: a karaṇa isn't only a configuration of the body but can be a configuration of consciousness itself. The body and awareness are postured together — which is the thread that runs through this whole concept.
What karaṇas does Tantra actually describe? Wallis flags a few.3 The most important is the divya-karaṇa, the "divine posture" — a subtle arrangement of the head, neck, and face "considered crucial for successful meditation."3 His instructions are precise and bodily: hips elevated above the knees, a gentle hip-rotation that elongates the spine, "the head float[ing] at the top of the spine like a waterlily floating on the surface of a pond"; then the divya-karaṇa proper — "let the back of the neck be long and let the chin drop gently, unclenching the teeth and releasing the jaw," all facial muscles soft, eyes sinking back, "the tip [of the tongue] point[ing] toward the crown of the head."3 A tiny configuration of the face and neck that "can have a profound impact on your ability to let go into meditation."3
Other karaṇas are wilder: the Jayadratha-yāmala-tantra prescribes dance forms called karaṇas for practitioners "dressing as and imitating whichever form of the Goddess is the focus of their devotion."3 So a karaṇa can be a sober subtle adjustment of the jaw or an ecstatic dance in which you embody the Goddess you worship — the same category spanning the minimal and the maximal. (And one karaṇa survives in modern studios under its ancient name: the viparīta-karaṇī, the restorative inversion.)3
Here is the conceptual core, and it's a genuinely subtle idea. For Abhinava, "the words karaṇa and mudrā are nearly synonymous."4 And his definition of mudrā breaks the modern assumption that it means "hand gesture": for Abhinava (as for the haṭha manuals), mudrā means "any posture of the hands, body, or awareness that arises spontaneously in profound meditation or mystical experience (samāveśa)."4
Now the key move, built on mudrā's literal meaning of "seal" or "sign." A mudrā "is a sign of awakened consciousness" — when you're deep in samāveśa, certain postures arise on their own, spontaneously, as the body's natural expression of the awakened state. But Abhinava then says something remarkable: those who wish to awaken should "adopt and practice the mudrās that kuṇḍalinī-śakti has revealed in advanced meditators."4 In other words: the spontaneous gesture that is a sign of attainment can be deliberately adopted as a means to attainment. As Wallis crystallizes it: "a mudrā is both a reflection of an inner state and a means of realizing that state (depending on whether the trajectory is outward or inward respectively)."4
Sit with the bidirectionality, because it's the whole engine. Outward trajectory: the inner state of awakened consciousness produces the outer posture (state → sign). Inward trajectory: deliberately adopting the outer posture induces the inner state (means → state). The same mudrā runs both ways. When awakening produces it, it's a sign; when you produce it deliberately, it's a cause. "Using a mudrā to seal the experience of awakened consciousness" — the posture both reveals the state when it arises naturally and evokes the state when assumed on purpose. This is karaṇa-as-"posture of awareness" made operational: because body and awareness are postured together, configuring the body in the shape that awakening spontaneously produces can summon the awakening it normally only signals.
The supreme mudrā, the one Abhinava devotes most of Tantrāloka chapter 32 to, is khecarī — which "literally means 'moving in the sky [of consciousness].'"5 And it's a perfect case study in how interiorization gets lost and reinterpreted across traditions.
For Abhinava, khecarī "is essentially a name for a procedure of intensifying the 'central energy' (a name for kuṇḍalinī-śakti) at the base of the spine and raising it to the crown of the head, achieving a higher state of consciousness thereby" — accomplished, like all Tantric yoga, "by a combination of breath control, visualization, and mantra."5 It's a "posture of awareness" in the fullest sense: consciousness itself reconfigured to "move in the sky." Abhinava's verse: "Having abandoned the state of the void, he attains pure Being... Experiencing the Trident [of Powers] as a single staff of energy, rising through the three spaces, O Beloved, he adopts the Khecarī Mudrā, meditating on himself as Bhairava."6
Now the striking historical fact: "the real nature of this mudrā had been forgotten by the time of the haṭha-yoga texts, which describe a very different (and rather bizarre) procedure under that name."5 In haṭha-yoga, khecarī-mudrā became the literal, physical, somewhat grotesque practice of cutting and lengthening the tongue to fold it back and seal the upper palate. The same name, khecarī, but the meaning shifted from a "posture of awareness" (consciousness moving in the sky) to a physical manipulation of the tongue.
This is the karaṇa concept's whole story in miniature, and it tracks exactly the haṭha-from-Tantra degradation seen elsewhere: a Tantric "posture of awareness" (subtle, consciousness-based, the central energy raised in meditation) gets literalized into a physical procedure (the tongue technique) when the inner meaning is lost. The "posture" was always meant to span body and awareness; later tradition, having forgotten the awareness-half, kept only the body-half and made it ever more physically elaborate (and bizarre). The case study's lesson: a practice that unites body and consciousness is unstable across transmission, because once the consciousness-component is forgotten, the body-component remains and tends to be intensified to compensate for the lost interior — which is exactly how a meditation on raising the central energy became surgery on the tongue. It's the same dynamic by which "āsana" drifted from the deity's throne to a gym routine: lose the inner referent, keep and elaborate the outer form.
The practical teachings here are usable at several levels. The divya-karaṇa is directly available: before meditation, set the body (hips above knees, spine elongated, head floating), then do the facial release — long back of neck, chin gently dropped, jaw and teeth unclenched, face soft, eyes sinking back, tongue-tip curled gently toward the crown — and notice how this small configuration deepens your ability to let go. The mudrā-as-means principle generalizes: because posture and inner state are linked bidirectionally, you can work the inward trajectory — deliberately adopting the bodily/awareness-configuration that the state you seek spontaneously produces, to help evoke that state. (The caveat throughout: the advanced practices, khecarī especially, require a qualified teacher; the inner khecarī is not the tongue procedure and can't be learned from a description.) The deepest implementation is conceptual: treat "posture" as including postures of awareness, so that meditation isn't something you do in a posture but is itself the assuming of a particular configuration of consciousness — and watch, in your own practice, for the spontaneous mudrās (a hand position, a bodily attitude) that arise in deep states, since those are your own kuṇḍalinī-śakti showing you the signs you can later adopt as means.
Wallis is unusually candid about the thinness of the evidence: "We have little evidence of precisely what this term referred to in classical Tantra, apart from a few examples," and "I have not done a thorough examination of the topic."2 So the karaṇa picture is reconstructed from fragments (the divya-karaṇa, the Jayadratha-yāmala dance-forms, Abhinava's chapter 32 on mudrā/khecarī). The tension: the most developed material (mudrā as sign-and-means, khecarī) comes from Abhinava's gnostic interpretation, while the actual range of classical karaṇas — the dance forms especially — remains largely untranslated and unknown. Open question: how much of "posture" in classical Tantra was the subtle, consciousness-based thing Abhinava emphasizes (divya-karaṇa, khecarī-as-awareness) versus the vigorous, embodied, even dance-based practice hinted at by the untranslated Jayadratha-yāmala material — and is the "posture of awareness" reading partly an artifact of which texts got studied (the gnostic exegetes) rather than a representative picture of what Tantric practitioners' bodies were actually doing?
The page stages a tension between Abhinava's gnostic reading of posture and the later haṭha literalization, with Wallis clearly siding with Abhinava and treating the haṭha version as a degradation ("forgotten," "bizarre"). Abhinava reads khecarī as a posture of awareness — the central energy raised in consciousness; the haṭha texts read it as a posture of the body — the tongue manipulation. They converge on the name and on the goal (raising energy to the crown, a higher state). They diverge on the locus: consciousness-based versus literally physical. Wallis's verdict is unambiguous — the haṭha version "had forgotten" the real nature — but it's worth noticing this is the insider-gnostic reading he champions throughout, and a haṭha practitioner would not concede that their khecarī is a degraded misunderstanding rather than a legitimate, effective bodily technique in its own right. Underneath runs the recurring fault line between the gnostic and the somatic streams of this tradition: the gnostic stream treats the body-practice as a literalization of a lost inner meaning (decline), while the somatic stream treats the inner-meaning reading as an over-spiritualization of a real bodily technology — and the same practice (khecarī) is, depending on which stream you stand in, either a posture of awareness debased into a tongue trick or a potent physical technique over-coded with metaphysics it doesn't need. Wallis writes from the gnostic side, and the page inherits that side's confidence that the awareness-reading is the original and the body-reading the falling-off.
The bridge: this is a page about posture as something that both expresses an inner state and induces it — a bidirectional body-mind link — and about how a unified body-and-awareness practice degrades into a merely physical one when its inner meaning is lost.
The Sharpest Implication If a posture can be both the sign of an awakened state and the means to it, then the boundary between "faking it" and "becoming it" is far thinner — and far more interesting — than the cynic's "fake it till you make it" suggests. Adopting the mudrā that awakening spontaneously produces isn't pretending to be awakened; it's using the body's own bidirectional link to induce what it normally only expresses. Take that seriously and the relationship between your inner states and your outer configurations becomes a two-way street you can drive from either end: you are not only expressing yourself through posture, you are constructing yourself through it, constantly, usually unconsciously. The destabilizing part is the khecarī warning hidden in here — that a practice uniting body and awareness is unstable, and when the awareness-half is forgotten the body-half gets literalized and intensified into something that misses the point entirely (a meditation on raising consciousness becomes surgery on the tongue). Which means the same is true of your practices: lose sight of what a form is for, and you'll keep doing the form ever more elaborately while the reality it was meant to carry quietly drains out of it.
Generative Questions