Kundalini Buzz

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Here's a post from another Kundalini Teacher Training student, Bahadurjot (Chris Roy). Enjoy!

It is said that in the Aquarian Age there are no secrets. Yes, you're welcome to read that again. Please feel free to take a moment, brew some tea, grab your sheepskin and meditate on it, as I assure you I did the first time I heard it. Now, in truth, I am slightly (way) too pragmatic to buy right into that idea. Here's what happens in my brain: "sure, that makes sense...however, there are those exceptions to the rule that I might call my sacred secrets".  You know--those things that we think, do, or say only to the select few.  Because, let's face it, we all have a handful of sacred secrets. While the idea of no secrets is hard for me to wrap my mind around, it's certainly not just something I said--it came from the man himself, Yogi Bhajan. And I'm learning just how true it is.

Allow me to paint a picture. I enrolled in the Kundalini Teacher Training with the full knowledge that there would be those amazing blissed out moments, but I was also well aware there would be those moments that (as one of my fellow trainees so eloquently shared) will feel like a cold shower. Well, this past Sunday was one of those (cold shower) moments. It's safe to say that Kundalini Yoga is not always passive--it can stir things up--and that's really the reason we do it.  For me, a few things got tossed and turned during the course of a six hour training on Saturday and come Sunday I was still processing a bit (a lot).  Now, as I was driving to Sunday's training there was an overriding thought in my head: "I am really not sure I can speak to anyone right now." I honestly think one of the mantras flipped my insecure high school switch and it was taking control of the wheel: "I'm not feeling very social. The beginning of class is so social... blah, blah...

When I arrived at class at 11:55, I snuck in and found myself a space that happened to be right in the middle of the room. I'm pretty sure I also opened my book to appear to be deep in a very important (please don't interrupt me) meditative state of study, although I did not retain a word on the page I had open.  Rather, my senses were a completely drowned out by that record playing in my brain about needing a moment (day) alone just by myself to adjust to this new internal scenery.

And so it went until my happy place finally arrived--tune in!  Yes, I am home free!  ONG, NAMO...GURU DEV...and it wasn't until somewhere between the third chant of Namo and Guru Dev that the sober realization set in...I am alone.  And I really mean...alone!  Imagine a class of 60-70 students with me sitting dead center in the completely full room with not a person to the right or left of me. How can that be? Coincidence? Do I...no, I have my new organic hemp oil deodorant on!

Once I got past the feeling of being the new kid in school during lunch hour, I had the epiphany: thoughts are things, Kundalini is a powerful practice and (whoa) there are no secrets.  Wa-hey-guru! My fellow trainees were simply honoring my psychically vibrational request. Acknowledging the humor and the good dose of transparency in the situation, I gently flipped my insecure high school switch back off and tuned into the beauty of the class.  And at that moment, like a butterfly, Sophia quietly entered the room and set her mat down in the spot right next to me.

Daily Personal Practice, Part 1

We've asked some of our current Kundalini Teacher Trainees to share with us their experiences as they undergo this immense process of learning and transformation. We hope that reading their stories will help inspire you in your own practice, whatever that may be! Here's an article from one of our guest authors, Amarpeet Singh:

The first 20 adult years of my existence was spent numbing out the seemingly meaninglessness of my every experience.  Nothing was fulfilling for any period of time, and it never seemed like I got what I wanted; in fact, even if I got what I wished for I was quick to realize that it didn't fill the void, the loneliness, and the periodic despair. Thank God for moments of desperation because during a time of crisis I developed a willingness to take action and seek change in my life.

Out of a necessity to have some serenity in my daily life, I began a spiritual journey that led me into a morning meditation practice.  Having never sat still for more than a few seconds in the previous 37 years of my life--including restless periods of sleep in which I often awoke feeling more tired than when I went to bed--I was forced to incorporate what I later learned in yoga class was considered "long deep breathing."  Ahhh what a blessing it was to finally sit still in the quiet (without getting bored!) for 5 minutes, then 10 and 15 minutes.  I began to realize that I wouldn't dare leave the house or do much of anything outside of waking up without first "tuning up/tuning in" with my morning meditation.

After a few months I began to crave something more to go along with my morning meditation, and I was advised to try Kundalini Yoga. It was a bit surprising at first how quickly I could transmute my irritating mind chatter and work through some of my feelings of angry self-pity during yoga class.  Kundalini Yoga is the yoga of awareness, and I began to delve into the deep recesses of my personality to find that my feelings of helplessness and irritability were nothing more than extreme forms of selfishness--that I was somehow blocking myself off from the Light of my Spirit. I had begun to become determined to rid myself of this selfishness, if only a little bit at a time...

This became my intention during morning meditation. I was soon to know more than just increasing serenity, but also a feeling of usefulness in all aspects of my life and in my community. The realization for me was that unless I incorporate a daily discipline into my life once and for all, I would soon regress back into old patterns of bad thinking and selfish behavior. So I sought out more of the Kundalini Yoga teachers and people on similar spiritual paths that seemed to have the inspiration that I wanted.  My attempt to learn more about how I could fine tune my daily personal practice led me to learning about classical sadhana approaches...

More to follow on the experience of Sadhana!

Kundalini Yoga in the Unlikeliest Places

There's a feeling of hope in the air this week in Austin, and we were excited to see another kind of hope being offered to prisoners in this Mexican prison. Prisoners are given the opportunity to practice Kundalini Yoga with the hopes that they will not just serve their sentence and leave unchanged but will be able to emerge with a new sense of understanding about themselves and the world.

Kundalini Yoga Clearing Techniques for Healers

 In light of the opening of our new yoga wellness spa, Mehtab offered these tips from Yogi Bhajan for becoming fully present and fully neutral before turning your attention to healing another person:

"Whenever you work on someone it is essential to prepare yourself first-
before your first touch. You need to be neutral, fully present and clear of
past imprints from other clients and from emotional bias in your self. Your
body is influenced immediately by its environment. It is not separated from
it at all. It can hold the memory of a state of energy indefinitely. Your
own conscious and unconscious attachments lock different parts of your
experience into the body. So it is necessary to have a habit to clear and
neutralize the body when you use it as an instrument for healing and
transformation of your self or others."

If you give massage treatments, energy work, or use your hands in other
healing modalities, you can use this simple Kundalini Yoga sequence
demonstrated by Yogi Bhajan in 1986 to help clear away residual energy from
previous clients.

This sequence is especially useful to clear out energy patterns you got into
while treating the previous client. It neutralizes the meridian energies. It
focuses energy through the hands and finger tips so you are immediately
ready to sense the next person.

1. Circular Spider Push-Ups: put the finger tips and thumb tips of opposite
hands together. Begin to trace out a slow intentional circle in front of the
chest. Go up and outward as the palms push together. Continue downward and
back toward the chest as the finer tips press hard and the palms separate.
It looks like a spider doing push-ups on a mirror. Repeat 5 to 11 times.

2. Grasp one hand with the other firmly: fingers crossed over the palm,
thumbs crossed behind opposite hand, all fingers of the same hand are
together, not interlaced. Squeeze this lock tightly for 1-2 seconds. Then
reverse hand positions and squeeze again. Repeat this switch and squeeze 2
to 5 times.

3. Press the hands together as you did in exercise #1. Keep the palms
separated. Push the finger tips together with a steady, strong pressure
15-20 lbs for 2 to 5 seconds. Relax the hands. Shake them and you are ready
to begin.