Yoni Mudra is a mudra, a symbolic hand-gesture of the Indian religious traditions, known in Sanskrit as Yoni Mudra and signifying the womb gesture and withdrawal.
Form and meaning
In this seal the hands are used to close the openings of the face, or interlaced to form the shape of the yoni, in the practice of sensory withdrawal, pratyahara. It signifies turning inward and a return to the source.
Mudras appear across Hindu and Buddhist ritual, iconography, classical dance and yoga, where a fixed position of the hands carries a settled meaning or is held to direct attention and breath. The gesture is described here within those documented traditions.
History and attestation
Yoni Mudra stands apart from the finger-element seals immediately preceding it in this atlas: it is genuinely described in the classical Hatha yoga corpus, including the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the Gheranda Samhita, compiled between roughly the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, where it typically involves closing the ears, eyes, nostrils and mouth with the fingers and thumbs to seal the senses inward, a technique for withdrawing attention from the external world (pratyahara) in preparation for deeper meditative absorption, closely related to the similarly described Shanmukhi Mudra, the six-gated seal, named for the six sense-openings it closes.