kundalini · vagus

Kundalini is the old name for a rise you can feel. The vagus is the long nerve down that line.

JM Thomas · 20 August 2026

You can feel heat in your chest and want a name for it.

That heat can come with a shake or a lift. People report a tremor under the ribs and then a lift. People used kundalini as the name for that feeling.

What is kundalini?

Kundalini is an old Sanskrit word, and Sanskrit is the language those maps used, so the name is older than the nerve words that come next. In that map, people put a coiled force at the base of the spine, called that base muladhara, and said the force moves up a central channel called sushumna. People who use the practice report heat, tremor, and a lift. Wikipedia has a page on kundalini. That page is a field note from the tradition. Nobody ran a kundalini lab test for that page.

What is the vagus nerve?

The long nerve that runs from your brainstem to your gut is the vagus. Your head has twelve cranial nerves, the big nerves that leave the brain, and the vagus is number 10, the longest of the twelve.

Kenny and Bordoni wrote the StatPearls chapter on it in 2022. StatPearls is a medical handbook doctors keep open. The nerve starts in the medulla, the lower part of the brainstem, the part of the brain that sits on top of the spine and runs automatic jobs like breathing and heart rate. From there the nerve goes through a hole in the skull called the jugular foramen, then down the neck, past the voice box, to the heart, the lungs, and the gut. You can read that chapter on NCBI.

About 80 percent of its fibers carry messages in. Those inbound fibers are called afferent. Afferent means the message is coming from the body toward the brain. So most of the vagus is telling the brain what the chest and gut are doing.

Stephen Porges named a model called polyvagal theory. Polyvagal is one model of how the vagus helps you feel safe. Wikipedia has a page on polyvagal theory. Researchers still argue about how far the model goes.

How does a longer exhale work on the vagus?

A longer out-breath is one way to work on that nerve. Gerritsen and Band wrote about this in Frontiers in 2018, and they looked at slow breathing with a longer exhale as a way to stimulate the vagus through breathing. They named the idea an rVNS model. Those letters mean a breathing version of vagus nerve stimulation. You do the breathing. The paper is on PubMed Central.

Lehrer and Gevirtz wrote in 2014 about breathing near 0.1 hertz. Hertz is how many times something happens in one second, so 0.1 hertz is about one full breath every ten seconds, or about 5.5 to 6 breaths a minute. At that pace the heart-rate swings get big because of the baroreflex, the loop that steadies blood pressure by slowing the heart when pressure rises and speeding it back up when pressure falls. Heart-rate variability is the healthy wobble between beats. A bigger wobble, in this setting, means that loop is working. Wikipedia has a short page on resonant frequency breathing.

Laborde and others looked at 223 studies on slow breathing and heart-rate variability in 2022. A lot of those studies had a high risk of bias, which means the way they were run can tilt the result. Researchers in those 223 papers kept finding a link with slow breathing. If you want the slow-breath clock, open the resonant breathing page.

What about a tone in the throat?

A tone in the throat is another way to work on the same nerve. Kalyani and her group had twelve people chant OM out loud in 2011, then chant a plain ssss sound, and the right amygdala, a small pair of almond-shaped spots in the brain that help you tag fear, got quieter on OM. OM is a sacred syllable people chant in yoga and in other practices. People hold that sound in the throat and the mouth. They guessed the ear branch of the vagus was part of why. The paper does not name a percent. Wikipedia has a page on Om. The OM scan is on the mantra page.

Streeter compared yoga with walking and looked at GABA. GABA is a calm-down chemical in the brain. That test looked at yoga and walking. They did not test kundalini. People also named stations along the body on those maps. That is on the chakras page.

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