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This ancient yoga technique involves sticking your tongue in your nose [1]

['Ellsworth Toohey']

Date: 2025-12-09  

Here's a yoga technique that sounds fake but isn't: roll your tongue backward, past the soft palate, and into your nasal cavity. Hold it there. That's Khechari mudra, and people have been doing it for centuries.

The name translates roughly to "one who moves the sky," which is more poetic than "person with their tongue in their sinuses." The goal is spiritual—practitioners say it stimulates glands that release a kind of internal nectar called amrita, leading to deeper meditation and, eventually, liberation.

Getting there takes work. Most people start by just touching their tongue to their soft palate. Months or years later, some can reach the uvula. The full practice—tongue actually entering the nasal cavity—requires either cutting the frenulum (the tissue connecting your tongue to the floor of your mouth) or doing enough stretching exercises to make your tongue long and flexible enough to get there without surgery.

The cutting method is traditional Hatha yoga. Practitioners snip the frenulum gradually over time, usually starting young, always under a guru's guidance. Raja yoga skips the cutting and just does the stretching exercises.

Doctors will tell you that cutting your frenulum is dangerous and unnecessary. Most modern yoga practitioners stick with the "small" version—tongue pressed to soft palate, no nasal entry required.

Previously:

• The secret of yogi levitation

• Panorama of yogi feet in the air

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