The way forward

A few months ago we shared about how the publishing of a book about Yogi Bhajan set in motion an avalanche of revelations, many stories about the man and his organisation came to the surface that didn’t leave us untouched. We needed a break to do some deep soul searching into how we want to continue sharing Kundalini Yoga in a way that is congruent to our heart and conscience.

Everyone has a different way of handling situations like this, for some it is easy to separate the teacher from the teachings, for some this is impossible. There are as many different ways to choose as there are people, at the end of the day one needs to choose the path that resonates with oneself. We went through a whole process these past two months, it was hard, scary, beautiful, sobering, humbling. As we shared before we didn’t want to jump to conclusions, we wanted to give all the space to this essential process and allow ourselves the time to come to a response from the heart instead of a premature reaction.

Our biggest struggle was that we love Kundalini Yoga, we love to do it, we love to share it and we love what it can do for people. For us the validity of the practice is a fact, speaking out of our own experience of almost ten years. However, the acts of the founder of this practice and his organisation is something we cannot come to terms with at this point in time.

So what to do? Give it all up? Let it all go? Drop it and move on?

At first it seems like that was the only solution, but we really struggled with that too, since that also didn’t feel right. We allowed ourselves the time to patiently wait, although our minds wanted to make a decision. But decisions this big, can’t come from the mind, they need to come from deep within.

Sometimes time is indeed the best healer. When the biggest storm started to calm down and much of the emotions were expressed, all of a sudden there was very clear insight:

We can continue to teach Kundalini Yoga when we give ourselves permission to share it in our own way. We can let go of the old paradigm that only allows us to teach the Kriyas exactly the way Yogi Bhajan did. Not by changing the Kriyas, but through creating our own sequences of asana, mudra and mantra, based on our own experience, understanding, insight, intuition and further study.

And so the research began. For the past several weeks we have gone through all the manuals, identifying the different postures, mudras, breathing techniques and mantras that are used. Simultaneously we are tapping into different sources of knowledge, different lineages of yoga traditions, healing modalities such as Ayurveda, Chinese Medicine, Acupressure, anatomy, body & energy work, etc. We are opening up to a broad spectrum of resources, not to invent something new, but to become much more clear about why Kundalini Yoga works the way it does and how we can develop our knowledge and skills as yoga practitioners and teachers to work with the exercises in an intuitive yet knowledge based way. We are very aware that this seems to go against the paradigm that only the Master Yogi Bhajan was allowed to design Kriyas (or channel, download them, however one may want to call it) but we want to dedicate our time and energy to the evolution of the practice, leaving behind this paradigm that no longer feels right for us.

We feel that the way forward is about us, not us as in the two of us, but us the practitioners and teachers that are willing to move forward in full trust that we can indeed tap into that intuitive wisdom that guides us into how to move the body, whilst deepening our understanding about how our bodies work, how the subtle energies flow (meridian, nadis), how we can benefit our health through the individual asanas and asanas in sequence, how we can have a positive impact on the mind through the breath, etc. It’s not magic, it’s ancient knowledge that is getting backed up by science more and more. How beautiful would it be if we can learn to work with this knowledge from that deeper understanding and start to share and create from there?

As we said two months ago, this crucial moment for the future of Kundalini Yoga can be a revolution or an evolution. We are choosing evolution. With this decision we honour ourselves and the power and the beauty of this practice, evolving the approach and the way we share in alignment with our heart.