He told me to put my head down, get the qualification and then do my own thing. We were actually told at one point that if we messed with Kundalini Yoga we would be re-incarnated as a cockroach!Īlex, in his ever wonderfully practical way, talked me into staying the course on more that one occasion. Yet on this training we weren’t to question anything. What I’ve always loved about yoga is self-enquiry – you go deep within yourself to discover what is true.
It was quite clear that what I wanted so desperately to learn was being taught by people who didn’t understand it themselves and who, quite frankly, did not seem to be on the spiritual path at all. I found it really weird how quickly my fellow trainees started dressing in this peculiar uniform and why they accepted all of this without question.īy the second weekend of the training I wanted to quit. To pass the training I wore a white woolie hat in an act of defiance. I didn’t want to become a Sikh – I wanted to learn about Kundalini practices. I quickly became persona non grata on the training – everyone else seemed happy to wear white and took to turban wearing very quickly. Those of you who know me will know that I’m not shy in pointing out discrepancies! Any questions I raised were quickly dismissed and I was referred to the manual, a large, rambling work that was pieced together from the lectures of Yogi Bhajan, clearly by someone who had no knowledge of yoga beyond what he’d been told by his guru. Yogi B was revered as almost a God-like figure – we were not allowed to question his wisdom despite some of it being absurd and not scientifically true. People were expected to wear white robes and turbans to teach (and to practice in some cases). Yogi Bhajan was a Sikh and had tied in a lot of Sikh practice to the original Tantric yoga.
He quickly became a really popular teacher and established ashrams, training organisations (such as 3HO) and businesses such as Yogi Tea and Akal Security.īy the time I came to train In Kundalini as taught by Yogi Bhajan it was basically a cult. Yogi Bhajan was a civil servant from India who travelled to the USA in the 60s and started teaching Kundalini to the hippies, people whacked out on drugs and those looking for enlightenment. However, that wasn’t the scenario that greeted me when I signed up for teacher training! Back when I trained, outside of India, the only way to qualify to teach Kundalini Yoga was to learn Kundalini as taught by Yogi Bhajan. I came to Kundalini via Ravi Singh and Ana Brett – anyone who has come across them will know that they are pretty normal in their way of dressing and presenting Kundalini. It took me about 6 months to realise I wanted to learn to teach it. Now here was a practice that did all of this and more, drawing in bioenergetics, psychology and philosophy. Often Hatha practice frustrated me because it didn’t go far enough. I was never interested in using yoga as acrobatics or even for relaxation – for me it was always about using the body to access deeper states of consciousness. From the first moment I was absolutely hooked. Bizarrely it hadn’t come across my radar until then – I had studied Kundalini via Tantra but had not realised that there was a branch of yoga dedicated to it. These two disciplines combined introduced me to the idea of Kundalini energy.īut it took until 2009 for me to encounter Kundalini Yoga. By the time I took my first yoga class I was already practising Tantric meditation via the teachings of Swami Muktananda. I had been on the path for inner knowledge since university where I studied philosophy, Eastern philosophy in particular. I would hound the teacher for books about yoga philosophy in a quest for deeper knowledge. I first took a yoga class in 1993 – it was Hatha yoga and I absolutely loved it. Here is the reason why I’ve stayed away from it recently. Since moving online I haven’t been teaching like this and I know that a few of you have been missing it. Those of you that have practised Kundalini Yoga with me over the years know that traditionally the class starts and ends with chanting. Wondered why I’ve stopped the chanting during the Kundalini sessions? This will explain why.