Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guests are Karena Virginia and Dharm Khalsa. Karena has been a certified yoga instructor in the Kundalini and hatha yoga schools for nearly 20 years. She released the acclaimed Kundalini yoga video, “Abundance and Miracles in 2013,” and also released her iTunes app, “Relax and Attract with Karena” in 2014. She writes for the Huffington Post as well as her own blog and currently resides with her family in New York City.
Dharm Khalsa has been teaching Kundalini yoga since 1980 and spent many years as a close student and staff member of Yogi Bhajan, serving as his personal assistant for nearly a decade. Dharm is a minister of the Sikh faith and has also recorded four albums of mantra music. He teaches Kundalini yoga workshops throughout the United States and Europe, and currently resides at the Kundalini ashram community in Espanola, New Mexico.
With Sounds True, Dharm and Karena have teamed up to create a new book, Essential Kundalini Yoga: An Invitation to Radiant Health, Unconditional Love, and the Awakening of Your Energetic Potential. Essential Kundalini Yoga offers a clear, comprehensive instruction in many of the key insights and practices of Kundalini yoga; from philosophy and lifestyle, to working with anatomy and physical asana, to activating our energy bodies. Essential Kundalini Yoga is a uniquely practical and in-depth manual.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Karena, Dharm, and I spoke about what is unique about Kundalini yoga and how it’s considered to be the yoga of energy, and the personal energy that can be awakened within the body with Kundalini yoga. We talked about what it means to awaken your Kundalini, and Karena’s understanding of experiencing bliss. We also talked about the core principles of Kundalini yoga, and the potential we all hold to achieve awakening through Kundalini. Dharm and Karena also took us through two different practices, giving us a taste of what the energetic potential of Kundalini is actually like.
Finally, we spoke about the “love frequency phenomenon,” and how we can use mantras as a form of transportation to take us from fear into love. Here’s my conversation with Karena and Dharm:
I’d love to know from both of you right here at the outset, what makes Kundalini yoga different from other kinds of yoga that perhaps people are more familiar with, such as traditional hatha yoga approaches? What’s unique about Kundalini yoga? Karena, please go ahead and start us off here.
Karena Virginia: I’d love to. Kundalini yoga is a yoga that integrates mantra, breath work, [and] postures that are very different than hatha postures. You’re not necessarily going to be moving through a flow or sun salutations. You’re not doing a specific sequence each time, but you are working with a technology that becomes very scientific in its sequence being different each time, and the sequence being specifically organized for a specific outcome. Sometimes, there will be rapid breathing with a very rapid movement. Other times—for example this morning, I taught a class where everybody went into downward-facing dog and had to walk around the entire room in downward facing dog.
Sometimes people laugh, because they are just random things that come up. With hatha yoga, you can really think about, “OK, what’s next? Are we going to be going into a warrior pose now? Does this teacher normally put us into back bends towards the end of class? Do we do shoulder stand?” In Kundalini yoga, you never know what’s coming, and so you just sit there and wait for the instructor to let you know what’s next. Sometimes it can be quite profound. That’s what’s exciting and really fun about Kundalini yoga.
TS: Dharm, what might you add to that?
Dharm Khalsa: That’s great. The thing that I love about Kundalini yoga is that it’s the yoga of energy; that we’re really working not just on stretching a leg, but what is the energy that’s flowing through that leg? Kundalini, the word, refers to an energy, our personal energy that can be awakened within the body. When that happens all sorts of really wonderful potentials can be expressed. Physical potential through health, through radiance—and that’s that wonderful name that’s in the name of the book, the [word] radiance—for the feeling of being loved and being able to love—and that’s also in the title—and then expressing our potential.
We have tons of potential that people can’t get to and they know it’s there. They know they were born to do something. What I’ve seen again and again with Kundalini yoga [is] how life-changing it is. In a class, you’re going to be working with your body, but you’re going to be working on changing your energy. That’s what I would say would be the key of it.
TS: I think a lot of people might have an idea about what Kundalini is. It’s often described as a serpent coiled at the base of the spine. At some point, if you do enough Kundalini yoga, or perhaps you’re fortunate enough to be struck by a lightning or meet with a spiritual master, your “Kundalini” might awaken. I know people have questions, “Is my Kundalini awakened? Is it in the process of awakening? How would I even know?” I’m curious to know how you both would weigh in on this question of Kundalini awakening. If there’s some line that you cross at some point. “Now, I can tell that person’s Kundalini is awake. I can see it in their eyes.” What’s your response to that?
KV: It’s different for everybody. I don’t think you can really practice Kundalini without some sort of awakening that takes place. In terms of having a full Kundalini awakening, I’ve never seen anybody experience this transformation where they’d change personalities or anything like that. There’s a consciousness and an awareness of life that happens just from the beginning of the practice, the beginning of our own personal practices.
I believe that we’re born into this world through different dimensions, and that some of us were born with more of an awareness while others are born with maybe a little bit more of a simple awareness of just seeing things with the physical eyes, hearing things with the physical ears, and that sometimes for people who are born with a little bit more of the simple senses, the Kundalini awakening can feel a lot more intense. For those that are born already quite awake, the Kundalini feeling can actually feel like, “Oh, wow. I finally found my way home.” It really depends on the person.
What the Kundalini awakening is about is that that serpent that starts to the base to the spine that activates and balances all the chakras in the body all the way up through the top of the head. What we’re doing is we’re really activating our fullest potential, because there are dormant parts of us that we close off. We may close off our heart. We may close off our second chakra. We may close off our third-eye point.
The third eye-point, as most people on this call probably know, is the point of intuition. If we’re closing that off and then we have this Kundalini awakening, and all of a sudden the sixth chakra is awakened, we’re going to have an awareness of a lot more than what we see the physical eyes in here with the physical ears. For some people, they may, all of a sudden, experience different dimensions, and that might be how they consider their Kundalini awakening.
For someone like me, I was born with a very heightened awareness. When I found Kundalini yoga, it was a feeling of, “Thank God that there’s a practice where I can experience this with people who are also experiencing this.” That’s why I like to say it really depends on our starting point.
TS: Now Karena, just to ask a clarifying question, you say “experience bliss.” What do you mean by that?
KV: Wow, that’s a good question. Experience heaven on earth. Experience the miraculous. It feels like no matter how chaotic the world appears, there is a gentle flow of absolute perfection. It feels very vulnerable, very beautiful, very peaceful, very much like I want to speak to as many people as I possibly can in this exact second and say, “Please have some of this. Please just take this.” I want to open my heart, open my hands and say, “Have some of these, because this is what you need. Yes, I understand what’s happening in the Earth dimension. Yes, I understand pain, but I also know how to transcend it by bringing the higher dimensions in.” That’s the experience that I’m talking about.
TS: In your own life, you had a sense of this even before you found the practice of Kundalini yoga. Then when you started doing the practice, it was like a homecoming where you rest in the state?
KV: Yes. As a child, I was always able to see beyond the Earth dimension, and I was told that that was very strange. So I learned how to shut it down. Then when I was 12, I had a near-death experience and that activated it again. Then I went into high school thinking, “I really want to fit into the box where I cannot be separate. Most people don’t understand this.” So I went back into that place of, “Let me be a cheerleader. Let me be this.” Then by the time I got to college, when I was 18, I finally said, “OK, enough of that.”
I embraced it and that’s when I found my spiritual practices and my greatest joy—besides being with my babies, because I love being a mom. My greatest joy besides that is teaching, because when I watch other people have the experience, it just brings tears to my eyes. When I observe some of the miracles and the healing, and the knowing—these hearts opening, these auras expanding, and the knowing that comes over the person as their soul expands. I watch their eyes filled with tears, I just think, “This is what life’s all about.”
TS: Dharm, if you could tell me a little bit about your understanding of Kundalini awakening, and also your experience of that as well?
DK: The term “awakening” is a good one. It really feels like your cells waking up, your body waking up, and your consciousness waking up. When we’re asleep in bed, we’re all there: heart’s beating, mind is going, our eyes are looking at dreams or whatever they are. Then something happens where we wake up. If you were to try to describe that to somebody, I don’t know how you would do it, but the Kundalini experience I think is a lot like that. I think it’s actually something we all know. Karena was talking about feeling this sense of re-assuredness. She always knew these other dimensions were there. Then with the Kundalini, she was like, “Oh yeah, this is what I have been tapping to all my life.”
Some people wake up and jump out of bed in the morning and they’re off running, and other people take a long time to wake up. Is there a scale of more or less awake? I don’t think we can answer these questions, but I can tell you for sure that I was quite asleep. What Karena was talking about as a child, I certainly had a lot of awareness, but I think that children do. But I distinctly remember being in college and starting to practice Kundalini yoga, and walking out of my dorm and seeing things clearly and saying, “Wow, I never noticed that. I never noticed the sharpness of these images.” Literally, my senses were becoming awakened. I think it just goes on and on from there.
Ultimately, that awakening is to the love that is flowing through us in our breathing, in our consciousness so that we can share with each other, and we get attuned to that. Physically, I would say there’s often a sensation of a heat in the spine. A lot of people report that, but a lot of people don’t either. People wake up in different ways, just like I wake up in the morning. Kundalini definitely is about awakening. I love that title of “awakening.
KV: I like what you’re saying Dharm, because I think it’s really important to add the love, it’s awakening to love. What “guru” means is “from darkness to light,” and we use the word “guru” in Kundalini yoga all the time. From fear to love. From unconsciousness to consciousness. That’s the meaning of guru. Wahe guru. “Wahe guru” means, “Wow, here and now.” Guru—darkness becomes light. The awakening is always—when Kundalini yoga taught by Yogi Bhajan is practiced—always an awakening into light, into love, into the miraculous.
TS: If you were to summarize for people the core principles, if you will, of Kundalini yoga—if you really had to distill it, these are the main principles, what would you say?
DK: These are good questions, Tami. I think we have just talked about it. I think that we have a potential to awaken, and that through the Kundalini yoga we can achieve the potential. I don’t believe in a mesa, in a plateau, that somebody is enlightened and somebody else isn’t, like you throw on a switch. I think God is infinite, and there’s an infinite world around us, whatever you call that—great void—but with Kundalini yoga, we are working on that potential.
To me, that’s a nutshell. The techniques themselves, there are ancient techniques from Northern India, from the Himalaya area. They work with movement, with meditative movement, with breathing. We use sound in a form of sacred sound. Sound is one of the most powerful things in Kundalini yoga, because sound is vibration of atoms.
KV: Sacred geometry, we also work with. The postures might actually represent a mudra in the full body. You’re integrating all these different aspects in one. It was kept secret for many, many years, because of the power.
TS: Why is that? Why would this powerful technology be released and not be made available to as many people as possible?
KV: Well, without getting into politics or anything here, the power is wanted, they want it to keep it very selective to—
DK: Pretty traditional, too. In the Eastern cultures that these things would be whispered into the eyes of the disciples. Many traditions have these sacred things. It holds the specialness, right Karena? The treasure of it, in a certain way?
KV: Yes.
TS: The reason I’m questioning this is that here are the two of you working together to make Kundalini yoga available to anyone who’s interested.
DK: Yes.
KV: Absolutely.
TS: Clearly, we live in a time where we need people to be activated and empowered, and fulfilling their destiny fully.
KV: Yes.
TS: In our time, this power of Kundalini yoga is being made broadly available and we need it.
KV: Yes, yes, and there is no coincidence here. Dharm and I have been working on this book for three years. There’s absolutely no coincidence that it is coming out at this time. That I believe is orchestrated in a much higher realm. I believe that this technology is a gift to so many people, especially if it’s someone who doesn’t know about the technology yet, because it is so life-changing. Yes, it does utilize a magic and truth, a beautiful magic.
I just want to answer that question again, why was it kept secret? It was the sages that were really—and the kings that were really allowed to hold the power, because they didn’t want everybody to have the power. Now, we’re living in a time where yes, we need to—we’re all feeling this driving force inside of us to stand up for peace, right? Those of us that are on this podcast. We’re feeling a rumbling inside of us that’s saying, “I need to speak truth. I need to do something. I need to activate this potential inside of me. I need to make a difference. I need to step out of my comfort zone.”
And when we don’t, it hurts. Because at least from my own experience, whenever I have felt a rumbling move through me, which I’ve always recognized as Spirit moving through me, if I’ve been too afraid to act on it and I’ve repressed it, it’s created a depression inside of me. And that depression hurts so much. Sometimes it’s about recognizing, “Whoa, am I pressing this down or am I going to recognize that this powerful technology is here to enable me to move through the fear, to step forth as the Divine is working through me?”
Because we’re all conduits to the Divine. It’s just the matter of turning that vessel on. Or am I going to shrink back and say, “oh yes, I know, but no, but I’m scared,” and go to that place of, “Oh boy, now I’m depressed. Now, I’m looking for any way out of my pain. Now, maybe I’ll go have a glass of wine. Now, maybe I’ll go shopping. Now, maybe I’ll go—et cetera.” We look for ways to continue numbing ourselves, or we walk with courage.
Either way, we’re going to have experiences. But when we’re tapped into the light, we can use the courage to activate these experiences and not be numbing ourselves, but instead be stepping into our truth, knowing that there’s an army of support on the other side. That’s what happens with Kundalini yoga. There is this, “Oh wow, I’m being held. I am held.”
TS: Let’s give our listeners an actual taste, if you will, of Kundalini practice right here—a way that they can taste Kundalini yoga for themselves. Can we do that?
KV: Sure. Dharm, do you want to go first?
DK: OK. I wanted to just ask, we’re adding on each other, we’ll never get to it, is that you can step into this pretty lightly. Sometimes it sounds very daunting, and I think people don’t want to be completely overtaken. They’ve got their life, they’ve got their homes, and of course they do. This yoga can serve people in any way. It doesn’t require any signing up, life-changing activities. It just takes a little bit of breathing and feeling great, or a little bit of movement and feeling great.
I don’t want to just sound like it’s some overwhelming or huge undertaking. I think it’s perfect that here we are on a podcast and we can share a couple of these things, that people can just get into without worrying that they’re going to be in over their heads.
KV: OK.
DK: A lot of times, we talk about the energy, right? We have two sides of our body, the left side and the right side. Some of the main channels—we have energy channels running through our bodies in the ancient yogic energy anatomy. The ida and pingala are the two main cords that go on either side of the spine and there’s a central column of the spine as well. Now, we do a lot of work to balance out the left side and the right side. This little breathing exercise that I wanted to share can help people experience the difference between the left and the right and then can balance them together.
So you lift your palm up so it’s in front of your face. Lift up your right thumb, your right palm, so that your thumb is pointing towards your right cheek. You can close off your right nostril with the side of your thumb. You press that side of the nostril towards the center line so that you’re breathing through the left side only. Now, make that breath through your left side as long and slow, and deep as you possibly can. That’s about all there is to it.
We have four parts of the breath in Kundalini yoga that we talk about often and is used in different ways. In this way, you can do a three-part breath where you inhale very long, slow, and deep, through your left nostril. Once you inhale, you hold that breath in. We call it, “suspending the breath.” That’s a magical, wonderful, mystical moment revered by the yogis. Then just as slowly, exhale through that left nostril. When you’re fully exhaled, when all that air is expelled from the lungs, just take another deep, long inhalation. It’s a three-part breath, the inhale, the hold, and the exhale. All should be about the same amount of time. You can go up till about 20 seconds even, which is a one-minute breath.
Then you have this mudra on the right side, which is like an energy antenna—your fingers. All around us, we have an electromagnetic field. It’s a physical phenomena. If you have bioelectric energy going on inside your body, there is going to be a corresponding interaction with the magnetic field around your body. Many times, this is called the aura or electromagnetic field. Some people now call it the “bioelectric field” or “biomagnetic field.”
At any rate, your hand is there in this nice upward position on the fingers and you’re breathing long, slow, and deep. Also in Kundalini yoga, close your eyes. We do almost everything with our eyes closed, but not everything. Sometimes they’re open. Inwardly, let your eyesight, your awareness, come to what we call “the third-eye point,” which is where your eyebrows would meet if they did meet. It’s a natural resting place. It doesn’t take forcing.
We’re just breathing, slowing down the breath. OK. Then you now, very deeply this last time [pauses to breathe], and then exhale through both nostrils, bringing the right hand down. This breathing to the left side is a cooling breath. Sometimes people use the color blue to describe it. If you’re upset, agitated, [or] mad, it’s a great breath to do here. If you had an argument with someone you love, the two of you could sit down and do this together, but if you can even do it.
I won’t do it now, because of the timing of things, but f you did the other way, you want to do the other side? [audio cuts out] OK. Sometimes we balance by doing one side, but let’s do that Tami. Great. Okay, so—
KV: Can I just add one thing that’s really important, just because I want the listeners to know, since we did this practice?
DK: Yes, sounds good.
KV: Anytime any of you listeners have insomnia, if you practice breathing in and out with the left nostril only, just the way Dharm taught, you will be amazed at how quickly your insomnia passes. It’s one of the greatest ways to fall asleep, and if we wake up in the middle of the night, to fall back asleep, left nostril breathing.
DK: Beautiful. Thank you. On the other side, lift up your left hand, so that is straight up in front of your face with the thumb. Your left thumb is pointing back towards your left cheek. Close off your left nostril with the side of your thumb, pressing it in towards the center line, so that you’re breathing entirely through the right side. Again, we’re going to inhale very long, slow, and deep. Then hold that breath. As you hold the breath, you can feel the energy that your breath brings you circulating through your body, really tune into it.
Then when you feel ready, exhale again through that right side, long, slow, and deep. Now, this is a warming, stimulating [breath that’s] good for digestion. If you’re perpetually cold, it’s a good one. It stimulates the mind, it stimulates the passion. That navel fire, that flame that burns in our bellies, it can feel that. Keep slowing the breath down little by little.
Physiologically, these long, slow breaths activate the pituitary gland and the pineal gland to secrete differently, to wake up. The yogis talk about an awakening, which we now know as an awakening of the pituitary gland to secrete different hormones, to secrete different neuropeptides. What you find often as you slow your breath down is that it gets easier. Your breath becomes more concentrated, almost.
The breath carries prana; the energy of the universe, the energy that makes us alive is prana. We’re working with prana here to energize and awaken this right side. I think that’s probably about the right amount of time to balance the left, so when you’re done with the next round, please inhale fully and deeply through your right nostril. Then let your left hand down and slowly exhale. One of the things in the book that we really stressed with this is the magic momen—when you’re done with the practice, don’t jump up. Have a moment to feel different, to assimilate it, to see what’s going on inside, to thank that energy, to thank yourself for doing it. It’s always good to thank yourself. Then when you feel ready, then you open your eyes and you go about your day and it’s been changed. That’s why we do this. That’s why we love it.
TS: Then Dharm, just to ask you one question about the practice that you taught, you mentioned that our thumb is on the side of our nose and that our fingers are extended like an antenna. You talked about the bioelectromagnetic field that’s surrounding the body, and that there’s some connection between the extending of our fingers and this bioelectromagnetic field. Can you help me understand that? How are our fingers acting as an antenna in some way?
DK: Yes, they are. You don’t have to know, Tami. It’s going to happen anyway. It’s not like—I mean, we do have a biomagnetic field, and they can take pictures of the energy that extends from your fingertips and around the hands. Our hands have billions of nerve endings that are firing, and not the connections running from that hand up to your brain. A whole lot is going on that we’re really not aware of. It’s not necessary to visualize that antenna going on. It’s also why we can go into so much stuff.
Are you going to do a mantra Karena? I think Karena is going to do something with the mantra, which suddenly changes—it’s not just about the energy, it’s about the quality of the energy; what we can change our energy from say anger or bored—that’s a quality of energy—into something sacred.
TS: I just wanted to make a comment about the practice that you taught, which is it only took a handful of minutes and yet it was so tremendously state-changing. That’s so interesting that here there was this total state change in just a few minutes or less.
KV: Yes, that’s the power of Kundalini yoga. It really is.
DK: I felt it.
KV: Yes. I just want to add one answer to your question as well, Tami. Dharm and I, we work this way, we feed off each other. I think that’s—yes. This antenna that we’re creating with our hand or if we’re creating an antenna with our body, which we can do just in standing in tadasana. the way I like to explain it is that an antenna communicates with another antenna. This is the law of how we even have radios—through the antennas, right? Remember the old fashion antennas in the car or the old-fashioned radio that we move the bunny ears around or the television?
When we are working with mantra and we are working with high thought-process, which means we’re working with positive thoughts and we’re working with high frequencies from our energy field, the aura that Dharm was talking about—we are sending that message out to the rest of the world. Our auric field becomes a magnet, which will literally attract that same frequency.
When we’re working with creating an antenna from a mudra, and we’re sending love out, we are literally becoming magnetic beings drawing more love in. I love to explain this to people, because so often we think, “How can I get from A to B? How can I attract my love partner? How can I attract the job of my dreams?” It’s way beyond the mind. It’s about changing our energy field, dissolving the fear that can reside in that field with mantra, with sound, with Kundalini yoga, with Kundalini meditations. Then sending that vibratory message out into the energy field beyond us.
Because as we know through quantum physics, like attracts like. If we’re sending out love, we’re going to be drawing more love back in. We start to see synchronicities happen, and we start to—just like in those few minutes, we felt that shift, we start to see our lives operating in this shift. I’m not saying that lightly. I know for myself is I’m not in my alignment. I need to do whatever it takes to get myself back into that alignment before I even get into my car.
TS: There’s a quote from the book that I wrote down, from Essential Kundalini Yoga that I liked, which speaks exactly to what you’re saying. Here’s the quote: “The aura is an activation field.” I think that’s so interesting, I think most of the time when people are doing yoga or stretching, they’re not thinking, “Oh, I’m shifting the bioelectromagnetic field.” There’s an activation involved. Tell us what you mean by this phrase “activation field.”
KV: It’s where creation and action starts—from that field. Just before I even answered that question, I want to say that in Kundalini yoga, we have eight chakras, whereas in Hatha there are seven. The eighth chakra is this auric field, like an egg around us. It’s in that field where we clear, we feel, we recognize if we’re holding anybody else’s energy, and we clear it if it’s not positive energy. We recognize if someone has been seeping our energy and there’s a dent or a tear in that auric field, and we set an intention to bring that positive energy back in. Then what we do is we literally activate the potential for the illumination in that field and the healing of any rips, tears or dents in that auric field s that we can live in our fullest potential by almost like walking around in a bubble. Really, if we think of it like that, it’s this bubble that lives around us.
If we start to think about how if something—I have a friend who’s petrified of bugs, and she’s gotten much better now, because she’s been doing a lot of Kundalini yoga. Beforehand, she used to get every bug possible in her house, until finally it was cockroaches. Her house is so beautiful and clean, but she was attracting those bugs. Once she started to recognize it, to put that bubble around her and only send love out and not allow the fear to be attracting more of what she was afraid of, she never needed an exterminator. Not that that was ever good anyway, but there’s no more bugs. That’s the power of the activation of this energy field.
TS: Okay, Karena. You’re going to take us through a second taste of Kundalini yoga. Let’s do it.
KV: Okay. I am going to bring a mantra in. Guru, guru wahe guru, guru ram das guru. Guru, as I was saying before means “from darkness to light.” Guru, and then guru; “wa,” as I was saying before, means “wow;” “he”—here and now; guru. “Anything that was dark becomes light.” “Ram das”—”this miraculous energy brings the darkness into light.” So, guru, guru wahe guru, guru ram das guru. What we’re going to do is we’re going to inhale deeply with the eyes closed and with the eyes roll up and inwards, so you’re looking at your third-eye point with them closed. Almost like you’re looking for a little golden ball right between your eyebrows.
Now, guru, guru wahe, guru, guru, ram das guru. Inhale. Guru, guru wahe guru, guru ram das guru. Inhale. Guru, guru wahe guru, guru ram das guru. As you do it this time, you’re inhaling, inhaling, send this vibratory frequency into that bubble. Guru, guru wahe guru, guru ram das guru. Inhale, let the mantra melt away any negativity. Guru, guru wahe guru, guru ram das guru. Inhale so deeply—bring that breath, command it all the way down to the base of the spine, deep, deep, deep breathing. Guru, guru wahe guru, guru ram das guru. Let all the breath out, navel to the spine. Inhale, command that breath all the way down to the base of the spine like you’re pressing that breath all the way down into a cup.
Guru, guru wahe guru, guru ram das guru. Inhale. This time, we’ll sing it very gently, like a little angel. [Sings] Guru, guru wahe guru, guru ram das guru. Inhale. [Sings] Guru, guru wahe guru, guru ram das guru. Inhale. It doesn’t matter what your voice sounds like. You’re just sending that vibratory frequency out. [Sings] Guru, guru wahe guru, guru ram das guru. Feel every single chakra in your body with the sound. [Sings] Guru, guru wahe guru, guru ram das guru. Feel it in yourself one more time. Inhale. Bring that light. Bring that incredible, tangible feeling into every cell of your body.
Guru, guru wahe guru, guru ram das guru. Let all the breath out. Now, inhale. Bring it in. All that breath in. Bring in the light. Bring in the divine. Bring in the ecstasy. Bring in the miracles. Bring in every form of healing that you need—wherever you need it, draw it in. If it’s your heart, focus on your heart. Only light, only love. Hold, hold, hold, hold. Exhale. Turn the hands so the palms are facing up and the tops of your hands are gently resting on your legs, and feel that shift. Just focus on your breath.
Now inhale sat, which means “truth.” Exhale nam, which means “name or identity or essence.” You recognize that this light, this love, this miraculous energy is the truth of my soul. Our highest selves know this. Our souls were born into this world with this wisdom and awareness. We learned fear and we relearn love, and we return to this place. For me right now, just even instructing this, I can feel a vibration in my body that is that vibration that I was talking about before, of even in the midst of chaos, knowing that there is an avenue to bliss—through our breath, through mantra, through the divine, through one another, through choosing love.
Just a few more times, deep inhale, long exhale. In the exhale, just let go of anything that’s unsettling or painful, confusing. Just let it go. As you inhale, bring in the light from the heavens and let that be everything and everyone you love, any area that needs healing in your body. One more deep breath in. Again, hold that breath in. As we press that breath all the way down into the base of the spine, there’s like a cup there, and we’re literally sending the breath to the fascia of the nerve endings that send messages to the parasympathetic nervous system to bring the nervous system a sense of calm. As you exhale you can let yourself feel that calmness. Sat nam, there’s another meditation.
TS: Thank you.
KV: Very welcome.
TS: In the practice, one of the things that struck me is that part of your objective, the two of you together in this book on Essential Kundalini Yoga, is to really make Kundalini yoga widely accessible. Yet, one of the challenges, even just this word “guru,” and even though Karena, you defined it as “darkness into light,” the word “guru” triggers people, triggers certain people. Any foreign language word like that. people say, “I was raised in America. I speak English. Here I am chanting all of these words that are foreign.” What would you say to people who have a recoil response and say, “This type of yoga must not be for me.”
DK: The best way I think is the science. Some people have what I would say is a more spiritual side. What you’re describing is the more Western scientific approach. From a scientific approach, think of these sounds as something we called, a “sound current,” which is creating a vibration in matter. That matter is in your body, you’re making sound with your body in the air, that’s why you can hear it. The little air molecules, those tiny little things, they’re vibrating with this sound. Then you have a phenomenon called “sympathetic resonance” in which like molecules will resonate. This is how strings will vibrate in the Eastern Indian instruments, musical instruments use sympathetic resonance.
Really, with this little mantra, it’s not really about creating the energy, it’s creating the vibration within the energy. Everybody will say, if you ask them, “Do you want more energy?” It was like, “Oh yes. Heck yes, I want more energy.” If you then say, “Do you want more angry energy?” People are like, “No. No, of course not.” “You want more crazy energy?” “No, no, no, no.” What exactly is the energy that you do want? What is the energy we’re looking for? These mantras use some of the most sacred, devotional, and universal—they’re non-denominational.
KV: I think that’s the key is that we’re not specifically calling upon a specific guru by saying “guru.” Now we can, we can all do that, but we’re not saying this is a religion. We’re saying this is a technology and a science, and that the vibration of “guru” is what we’re creating as opposed to saying that we are calling upon Guru Gobind Singh for example. That is a choice, but that’s not what we are saying needs to be done to practice Kundalini yoga.
I think the word “guru” can—I know for me that I’m very triggered when I hear someone say, “That’s my guru.” Because for me, I have given my power away—and this is my own personal expression and I’m just sharing something very vulnerable with all of you, because I feel like when I share my vulnerability, it helps others. When others share theirs with me, it helps me to recognize I’m not alone. But I have given my power away to someone that I considered to be my guru. I have fallen intro extreme disappointment.
From my own experience, “guru” is a very powerful word, because it’s from within me. It’s the guru that lives inside of me that is not honoring another human being on this Earth realm, but is honoring a light field that is in the heavenly realm. I think that that’s very important, that we can use the word “guru” and recognize that guru is the light inside of me, not a representation of another human being who I’m going to bow to.
I think that’s very important in this day and age, as we’re going through this huge shift and this lots of paradigms are changing—lots of breakdowns in order for breakthroughs to occur. We’re recognizing how often we’ve given our power away. I like to emphasize the importance of reclaiming that power, so that we can share and we’re not asking people to look to us as gurus. I don’t want anyone to ever think of me as a guru. The guru lives within you. I’m just going to be here as a teacher to help you find that spark inside of you.
DK: That’s the new paradigm is that you’re bowing to a light. We have to surrender, because otherwise you hang onto your own stuff. This ability to surrender and give up to something higher than ourselves is an important one. In the old ways—and I think it ties back into one of your other questions, why was this held secret—is that people were asked to surrender to in other human being. That human being might be the one who holds these teachings.
I was very blessed in my life to have interacted with Yogi Bhajan to a large extent. The way he talked about it, he said, “This is a pipeline. The teacher, or the guru, is the conduit.”
There’s no need—that was just some old politics, some old ego driven stuff to worship. What Karena was saying is very beautiful though. There is a choice that people can make. Ultimately, what we talk about in the book is that the term “guru,” from “going”—this is an energy, it’s a direction, going from darkness—
KV: Yes, it’s an energy.
DK: If you don’t experience that, the other thing I wanted to say about, Karena, in your meditation that you just shared so beautifully, is that it has to be experienced. The beauty of Kundalini yoga—like you said, Tami, right after the exercises, you feel something. I would say if you don’t feel something, don’t believe it. This is experiential.
KV: Right.
DK: In writing this book, we just wanted to share these experiences that we had had so that other people could have them. What they do with that I think is just going to be beautiful and everybody will do it in their own way, with their own faith, and with their own lineage, with their own narrative.
KV: It does not matter if someone is sitting next to the Bible or the Torah. Whatever religion we practice, this can be part of our worship. If we do worship Buddhism, it’s beautiful practice to practice along with Buddhism. Any—Muslim, any religion at all, it’s utilizing this as a technology. It does come from the Sikh faith; there are Gurdwaras, which are the temples that Sikhs worship in, and there are Kundalini yogis who also go to Gurdwara. It’s another choice, but it does not mean that if you practice Kundalini yoga, you have to go to Gurdwara or you have to not believe in Jesus or whatever it is that you believe in. That’s very important. Otherwise, it does scare people.
I have seen people say, “Can I still be Christian? Can I still be Muslim?” Of course, absolutely. Bring that in. Bring all of your own religion in while you’re practicing. That’s the other beauty of it.
TS: I just want to ask one final question, and this is another sentence that I pulled out of the book, Essential Kundalini Yoga, which is filled with so much scientific information as well as dozens and dozens of practices and sequences for different challenging experiences people might be facing in their life. Here’s the sentence, “In Essential Kundalini Yoga, you’re activating the ‘love frequency phenomenon.'” What is the love frequency phenomenon?
DK: This is just what I was saying. What’s the vibration that you want to live by? You want more energy, but the love frequency is actually an algorithm of energy that goes into our entire being. It activates our cells. It activates our consciousness. We have seen it again and again. It’s the highest most beautiful frequency there is. Which is why we’re as humans so attracted to love. The most compelling force that we have, it’s also the most powerful force. But it’s nebulous. We don’t hold onto it very well. We can go to a yoga class, do our meditation practice and then jump out in traffic and all of a sudden, we’re swearing at the neighbor next door.
This love frequency phenomenon, we created that term to describe all the benefits that happen when our frequency in our aura, within our being, within our consciousness is vibrating at that frequency that we call love.
KV: That’s not necessarily a Kundalini yoga term. As Dharm was saying, it’s something that we came up with just from trial and error and how are we going to explain this to people where they’ll understand. Then we’ve thought of the love frequency phenomenon. If you think about shame and guilt as being the absolute lowest frequency—and we all know how awful it feels. Some people are more prone to shame depending on their childhood and et cetera. Then we think of love as the highest frequency. If we can use a mantra as almost a transportation to take us out of shame or out of fear, which is just one level up from shame—into love, we bring ourselves into that buzzing frequency where we can feel that tangible sensation in ourselves.
If we sit and say, “Hey, Tami and Dharm, how are you doing today? You know what, let’s just think about love. Cool.” We go, “Yeah, but I’m stuck on this thing.” “No, just think love. Just think love. Just think love.” Then the brain starts to say, “Think love. Now, I’m just thinking more fear. Now, I’m mad. Now, I’m getting frustrated.” When we use the mantras, or the yoga, or the breathing as a means of transportation to take us out of that dark tunnel and to uplift us into that love frequency phenomenon, all of the sudden, we start to feel that our energy changes. We change from that external energy field, that bubble, in towards our hearts. That’s where the true transformation happens, because we’re not thinking it, we’re actually activating it as we were saying before about activating the aura. We’re activating it. We’re creating it. It becomes an action-oriented phenomenon instead of just the mind trying to play games with us.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Karena Virginia and Dharm Khalsa. Together they’ve created a new book called Essential Kundalini Yoga: An Invitation to Radiant Health, Unconditional Love, and the Awakening of Your Energetic Potential. A book that contains many of the essential practices and the essential principles of Kundalini yoga. A book that makes Kundalini yoga accessible to anyone. I want to thank you both for all of the effort, love, and good energy that you’ve brought into the creation of this book, Essential Kundalini Yoga. It’s filled with so many helpful practices and sequences, and all of the technical information that anyone would need to be able to practice Kundalini yoga on their own.
Thank you both and thanks for being with us here on Insights at the Edge.
KV: Thank you, Tami, so much for having us, and for bringing us into the Sounds True family, because it has been such an incredible journey working with every single one of you. You’re just such magnificent people. I know for me and I think I can say this for Dharm as well, but I’ll let you talk after, Dharm. I just feel so grateful for having this vessel of Sounds True to bring these incredible teachings to the world. Thank you.
DK: Thank you, Tami. We’re really honored to be here with you. Thank you.
TS: SoundsTrue.com, many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
