Bindu

Beyond its role as a nectar-bearing point in hatha yoga physiology, bindu carries a wider cosmological sense in Tantric thought generally. The Sanskrit word means "point" or "drop," and in several Tantric and Kashmir Shaiva cosmologies it names the concentrated point of potential from which an undifferentiated, unmanifest consciousness is said to first contract before unfolding into the diversity of the manifest world, a movement from formless unity to a single point and then outward into multiplicity. Read this way, the physical location at the back of the head is one specific application of a term that also names something closer to a metaphysical seed.

That double usage, an anatomical site and a cosmological principle sharing one name, is common in tantric vocabulary, where the body is treated as a working model of the cosmos, so that a point on the skull and a point in the structure of reality itself can be named with the same word without the tradition treating this as a coincidence. Bindu Visarga's crescent-moon-and-point image is itself sometimes read as a compressed diagram of that larger idea, potential held cupped and ready to be released.

Hatha yoga texts describe several practices aimed specifically at halting the loss of the nectar Bindu Visarga is said to hold and to release downward toward the digestive fire at the navel, where tantric physiology holds it is ordinarily consumed and wasted as the process of aging. Inverted postures such as viparita karani are described as reversing that downward flow by placing the body so that gravity works against the loss, while khecari mudra, in which the tongue is trained to reach back and up toward the soft palate, is described as intercepting the nectar at Lalana, the minor center just below Bindu, before it can descend further.

Some hatha yoga sources extend the same "preserving bindu" language to sexual restraint, treating semen retention as a physical parallel to the subtler nectar-preservation the practice targets, though the sources vary in how literally they mean the connection and the atlas notes the association here without treating any specific technique as instruction.