The Connection Between Tantra & Kundalini Yoga

Why is kundalini yoga considered a tantric yoga? How can it help us on our tantric journey? Lets explore the connection between these two practices and how they can be used as tools for transformation on our journey.

Transcript

So today we're talking about Kundalini Yoga and Tantra and how these things go together.

So my experience of Kundalini Yoga started back when I was still on the farm.

I was married,

We had a dairy farm and this was back like in the early 200s,

Big 200s,

2000s,

When I ordered everything off of Amazon.

It was just the only way to find kind of obscure things like yoga videos and DVDs.

Well they were DVDs.

So I would order all kinds of yoga,

All kinds of dance and everything and I had my little studio in the living room around all the kids toys and the dogs and the cats and everything.

And one day I ordered a video by Gurmuk and it was a Kundalini Yoga video.

And I was sitting on my sheepskin and I've got my DVD going and I'm doing this Kundalini Yoga class and I'm all in.

I'd never done anything like it.

There's great hobbies,

There's great entertainment,

There's great entertainment.

And I'm sitting on my sheepskin and I've got my DVD going and I'm doing this Kundalini Yoga class and I'm all in.

I'd never done anything like it.

There's great Hatha classes,

There's great Hatha teachers,

But my mind was always too busy.

I couldn't relax or I could relax but my body would relax but my mind would still be going.

And so I'd be just off doing a hundred things.

So I'd never really been much into yoga until I did this DVD.

By the end of the class I was sitting there and our hands were touching and I was doing this and I was doing this and I was doing this and I was doing this and I was doing this and I was doing this and I was doing this and I was doing this and I was doing this and I was doing this and I was doing this and I was doing this and I was doing this and I was doing this and I was doing this.

By the end of the class I was sitting there and our hands were sort of up at our sides and my body was vibrating.

It was literally humming.

I was in an altered state and I'm sitting there in the middle of this insane experience,

Like literally not out of body,

Just out of this reality.

And I finished it and I stood up and my spine felt different and my body felt different.

I was like what was that?

So then I proceeded to order every Kundalini Yoga DVD that they had,

Like every single one.

It didn't matter what it was,

I just ordered all of them because one of the things about living in a really isolated space is you don't spend money going out to classes so buying DVDs is really easy.

And I started doing Kundalini Yoga every day and it blew my mind.

And this is really interesting because the Tantric journey is a journey of transformation.

It's not just a set of sexual practices,

It's absolutely not that.

But it's not even just a set of beliefs or anything like that.

It actually is a journey of transformation.

It's a journey of a transformation from this limited self that we believe that we are into our true self,

Which really comes into this foundation of Tantra that it's about merging the physical and the divine within each of us.

That although we're living in this limited form,

We each have a unique incarnation,

Every one of us is infinite.

Every one of us is divine.

And this is one of the things that I really love about Tantra is that in many spiritual traditions,

The only goal is to connect with God.

And so anything physical is a distraction from that journey.

So you don't want to have sex and you don't want to have relationships and money is evil and I don't want to have a job.

I just want to simply commune with the divine and anything they even would say that they even would say that the physical body is gross and not gross like bad,

Just gross like heavy,

Thick,

Dense.

And it's filled with desires and karma and all these things.

And then you look at the secular society,

The rest of the world who are all like,

Yeah,

Money,

Sex,

Drugs,

Rock and roll.

No,

But it's all about the physical.

It's all about what's going on in the world.

Maybe we burn incense once in a while,

Maybe we meditate,

Maybe we go to a yoga class once in a while,

Maybe I go to church on Sundays,

Maybe that's my spirituality.

But what I love about Tantra is it says,

No,

That divinity,

That infinity is meant to come into our relationships.

It's meant to come into our intimacy.

It's meant to come into our food.

It's meant to come into our morning run.

Imagine the difference between going for a run and you're all in the body and you're thinking about the stuff that you're struggling with and you're thinking about this and you're wondering about your time and you're just kind of going.

You know,

That's one way to do it.

Imagine instead you wake up in the morning and you viscerally understand that you are a divine being and you get one more day on earth and you decide to go for a run.

Like to think how light that is in the body and you're just like,

You see everything.

It's a completely different way of living.

And so the thing about the yoga is what it does is it helps us break through the blocks the blocks that keep us from knowing that we're divine.

It's not a question that,

Well,

That guru over there is more divine than this person over here who's who's struggling.

We're all equally divine.

The question is,

How thick is our cage?

How deep are the adaptations we've had to make in our life to survive?

Because every time we adapt to this very strange world we live in,

We kind of become a little heavier.

We become a little less able to experience that divine reality.

When I wrote my book Tantric Intimacy,

I included a section that was all of the programs that held us back,

All the constructs that we live within.

And the constructs could be societal,

Like historically it might be that men are ahead of the family or that money doesn't grow on trees,

You know,

Or it's a dog-eat-dog world.

And these are really important constructs because if you believe it's a dog-eat-dog world,

Then we're going to walk around with our guards up.

We're going to believe that miracles don't happen.

We're going to believe that we have to always be on defensiveness.

I'll always be on the defense because you never know when something might happen.

Well,

How do you ever expand into anything when you're always in a contracted state?

Maybe some of those constructs came from past lives or it came from your early childhood that made you believe that you're not enough or that other people are smarter than you or that I can't do anything right or yeah well I really was bad in school so I'm not really very smart and I don't really have any confidence.

Maybe you were hurt and you're afraid to stick your neck out and try things for fear of judgment.

These are huge limitations and they all exist in our mind or they exist in our liver or they exist in our kidneys but they all exist within us.

They have nothing to do with anyone else.

Even if that was put there by our parents,

It no longer lives in them.

It only lives inside of us.

So the Tantric Journey is about healing that because we don't have to become divine.

We just have to get rid of the things that are stopping us from knowing that we're divine.

So this is what's really interesting about Kundalini Yoga.

So I'll talk about Kundalini Yoga for a minute because there's a lot of different kinds of Kundalini Yoga for one thing.

The one that I learned was brought here by Yogi Bhajan back in the 60s.

He taught for decades before he passed and he since actually has followed from grace.

A book came out about sexual horrible things as has happened in many,

Many,

Many,

Many spiritual communities.

And it was really interesting because a lot of people came to me,

Especially a lot of my students because I've been teaching yoga teacher trainings in Kundalini Yoga for a long time.

And they said,

You know,

What are you going to do now?

And I said,

I'm going to teach Kundalini Yoga.

Yogi Bhajan might have been the conduit,

But I was never particularly drawn to him.

I didn't like him.

I'm not much of a guru person anyway.

And I have a lot of opinions about that,

Which isn't really the context of our talk today.

But what I did know was that the yoga transformed you.

And if we stayed with it,

If we focused as we are taught to do with it,

It would break through those blocks,

It would break through those constructs.

It's almost like you wouldn't be able to do the yoga if the construct was there.

And the way the yoga works is it's almost like you meet yourself.

So one of the things if you've never ever seen Kundalini Yoga or ever done it,

It's not asana based,

It's not posture based,

Which is what makes it the greatest difference between this and Hatha Yoga.

And again,

Hatha Yoga is beautiful and it has many beautiful applications.

There's this is an and statement in the yoga world.

There are many great yogas.

It uses a lot of movement,

Like you might have your hands on your shoulders and you're twisting and inhaling left and exhaling right.

But even in that very simple movement,

Our arms are up here,

We're twisting,

We're massaging the organs,

Which of course hold all of these emotions and all of this trauma and everything that we've had happen to us.

We're inhaling to the left and exhaling to the right,

We're inhaling to the left,

Because in the naudies,

In the energies,

In the energy channels in the body,

There is the Ida on the left and the Pingala on the right and the Shushmana in the second,

In the center.

These are the main energy channels.

Energy channels move through our whole body that the prana flows in,

But these are the main ones.

This is where you see the caduceus of the medical symbol,

And you see the cross and you see the snake doing this.

This is the Ida and the Pingala going through the chakras.

It's a very ancient symbol.

What's interesting about the Ida,

The Ida governs what comes into our body and the Pingala governs what leaves.

So the simple act of your hands are up here and you're twisting,

You are stimulating these energy meridians,

Chinese meridians,

You're inhaling to Ida,

Exhaling through Pingala,

You're focused at your third eye.

So you're actually moving the energy through your body while you're stimulating all of these organs,

You're stimulating all of these flows that are blocked,

Like little beaver dams,

Just sort of blocking the flow.

And what's beautiful about it is that you do it at your own pace.

When I first started teaching Kundalini Yoga,

If you googled it,

I don't know if it was on Google or Wikipedia,

I don't know what it was,

But people would google it and of course it would tell them that if you do Kundalini Yoga,

You'll have a psychotic break.

People would come to me and say,

Well I'm not going to do this yoga because I don't want to go crazy.

Well again,

There's lots of different kinds of Kundalini Yoga and unfortunately in the world there's a lot of retreats you can go on.

They like to promise enlightenment or they like to promise a seventh chakra opening or to raise your Kundalini.

And it tends to be a little extreme and it's a very tight container.

But the problem is we have issues.

We have pain.

We have trauma.

We have things that have happened to us,

Whether in this lifetime or other ones,

That have created adaptations to the world that are necessary.

They were maybe necessary when we were children to interact with our parents.

Lots of parents are not kind and loving and easy going people and they're no different today.

As the children are in their 30s and 40s and 50s.

So those adaptations are still needed.

Maybe we have trauma from,

We have sexual trauma,

We were abused or maybe,

Who knows,

Maybe something subtle happened that changed the whole trajectory of our life.

So in many ways these adaptations that are within us are what we need right now to stay sane.

These are the things that keep us going.

These are the things that keep us in homeostasis.

They allow us to go to work and still talk to our friends and feel like we're safe on the planet.

It's really really important that we never judge where we are right now because we're exactly where we need to be based on perhaps many many lifetimes and many many experiences.

Even within this life that we don't even understand the paper cuts that happened.

And so to go away and try to bust through all of those beaver dams and bust through all of that trauma,

It's not sustainable.

You can imagine the break that would happen and even if you don't have a psychic break there,

When you get home you can put it on hold.

You can put it on hold and you you're completely lost.

You don't even know you have no bearings.

And I'm not putting down all yoga paths like that or retreats like that.

But I've been to enough of them and I've run,

I've taught enough of them to see first of all as a facilitator the desire for people to have great breakthroughs.

The more people crying the better,

The more people screaming the better.

But I've watched a lot of people leave these retreats,

Tantra retreats,

All kinds of things and for the next three months their Facebook feed is just filled with sorrow.

I've watched it and gone,

I don't think that's okay.

That's just my opinion.

And this is what I really love about this particular style of yoga that was brought because you determine whether or not you continue the exercise.

You listen within.

One of the mantras that we use a lot is called Sat Nam.

And we've talked a lot about Satya in our talks before,

The truth.

So Sat Nam means that I honor the truth within me.

We even tune in with a mantra,

Aum Namo Gurudev Namo.

Aum means all that is,

The oneness,

God,

God,

Totality.

Namo means that I bow to that,

That I'm a part of that,

That I am woven into that,

You know,

And I seamlessly flow with that.

Aum Namo.

And then the second part is Gurudev Namo.

Guru is teacher and Gurudev is the teacher within.

Every one of our highest wisdom,

Every one of our highest wisdom.

And Namo means I bow to that.

So while we're in the practice,

Part of it is okay,

Knowing that I'm held by everything.

But even within this exercise,

Am I going to go faster?

Am I going to go slower?

Do I need to stop and rest and breathe?

What do I need right now?

That's the path.

We practice that in the yoga.

It's yoga practice.

It's meditation practice.

And we're practicing it,

Creating a visceral experience,

A visceral memory inside of us,

So that when we go out into the world,

It's easy.

No matter what we're doing,

No matter what crazy thing we might be doing,

We always breathe and we ask,

What's true for me?

Doesn't matter what anyone else in the class is doing.

It's always interesting because when I teach Kundalini Yoga,

I don't adjust anybody and I'm not doing the Kriya with you.

I'm just sitting there.

Because every person is having their own experience according to their Satnam,

Listening to their Gurudev.

And this is a very,

Very,

Very important thing on our Tantric journey.

That whatever your desire is,

If your desire is to be Tantric,

To live in this very divinely physical or physically divine way in life,

In love,

In sex,

In eating,

In work,

In childbearing,

Child rearing,

Everything,

Then we have to be able to honor our truth.

And as stuff comes up,

We need to know that I have a unique way to look at this and I have a unique way to heal it.

And this is what we're practicing in the yoga.

And so what's really beautiful about this is this applies to all different aspects of Tantra.

There's the classical Tantra,

Which I love.

And this is the real spiritual stuff.

Like this is the real thing that said,

Somewhere along the line,

Humans went off path.

Maybe we were taken off path.

Maybe it's through the domination paradigm.

Maybe who knows what took us off path.

But somehow we forgot who we were.

So the path of Tantra,

Which has been around for thousands of years,

It said we need to regain this.

And so there's all kinds of interesting practices.

It might say,

You must stare at a yantra,

Which is different than a mandala.

A yantra is a geometric picture that often has a point in the center.

Not always,

But it's always this interesting concentric thing,

But it's not circles like a mandala.

And the idea is that you look at mandala.

And the idea is that when you stare at the yantra,

Your mind becomes focused,

And you can have an experience of God.

Sometimes you use mantra.

Mantra helps us to retrain our mind and reprogram our nervous system through sound vibration.

Because we come from sound,

We come from vibration.

Every aspect of us is vibration.

So sometimes we can't talk ourselves out of something.

But we may be able to chant our way partly out of it anyway.

Because we use Sanskrit or in Kundalini Yoga,

We chant in Gurmukhi or Gurbani.

But these sounds resonate in the body and literally heal us.

And when we become healed,

I love the definition of healing as being whole.

But that's all that healing does.

Healing brings back all the parts of us that we've disconnected from or have been damaged.

So as we heal through sound,

We become more of our true divine physical self.

So that's more the classical style.

And there's a lot of different paths in the tantric classical style.

And then there's Neo-tantra.

Neo-tantra is the other end of the spectrum.

I tend to sort of flow somewhere in between.

Neo-tantra,

There's a lot of interesting history around that.

But essentially,

It has become very much about how to be a great lover,

How to have these out of body existential seventh chakra orgasms.

And I'm laughing,

But it is real.

That's what they're aiming for.

Because if you imagine,

If we take the classical tantra path,

And you really do whatever it is,

Maybe you do Kundalini Yoga,

Maybe you stare at yantras or chant mantras,

Or you read various books,

Or we study the Radiant Sutras and things like that.

And you slowly start to feel more expansive.

You slowly start to feel more light,

Like literally enlightened.

And all of a sudden,

Our attachments disappear.

Our issues are slowly teased out and replaced with something different.

So now imagine you meet someone,

And they're lovely.

And you stare at them with this vision.

And you really look at them and you see them differently.

And you're like,

Wow,

You're an incredible human.

And then maybe you become closer.

And if they touch you,

You're like,

Oh,

And you experience it completely differently,

Because you're experiencing everything completely differently.

You're not going to be some tantric lover in the bedroom,

And completely messed up in the kitchen.

Like that's not a thing.

It's just you.

So that's why it's so important,

This inner journey.

Having a partner has nothing to do with studying tantra.

In fact,

It's extremely distracting.

And we end up just sort of on that addictive roller coaster of,

I just want more sex,

And I just want a partner and I just want this,

You don't want to study tantra at all.

We're just lonely,

And we just want to have a partner,

Which is totally understandable.

Tantra has nothing to do with that.

Because how you make love is how you eat.

And if you can slow down and enjoy it and have full gratitude,

That's how you'll make love.

And the crazy thing is we get out of our heads,

Which is also a big thing we'll talk about in a minute.

We get out of our heads,

And then our divinity rises naturally.

And this happens to all of us.

It could be lying on a beach and totally relaxing and feeling the sun on your body,

On your skin,

Smelling the salt air,

Hearing the sounds,

And literally being in bliss.

And if someone came up behind you and kissed you on the lips,

It would feel like the most ecstatic experience you'd ever had.

Like it's not some weird thing you learn from a guru.

It's very,

Very simple.

And so now all of a sudden,

You're in bed with someone,

You both are wide open.

You know,

You're not afraid,

You don't have self body,

Body issues,

You're not worried about performance,

You're not thinking about whatever.

And you're just exploring each other,

You're exploring this other infinite being.

And the bodies all of a sudden just become vehicles for an entirely different experience.

That's all from the inside.

There's no technique,

There's no position,

There's no anything.

You don't have to know anything.

And this is what people know.

It's like almost like deep down,

We know that.

And so when we go to neotantric events,

They're aiming for that.

I'm sure there's teachers out there,

Well,

I've been to retreats that were not great at all.

But even like I teach at a tantra festival in Toronto,

In September,

And it's predominantly a neotantra festival.

And I love the people.

And the intention is so beautiful.

And it's a gorgeous community.

And so I love coming and I tend to kind of add my classical tantra piece and a bit of fun with masculine and feminine interactions and things like that.

And it's lovely.

And what they tend to focus on is relationships,

Sex,

Openness,

Consent,

Trauma,

Healing,

Things like that,

Which is really important.

But what I think is really beautiful is when we can marry that with a personal practice.

Let's say you go to something like that,

And you realize something about yourself or something opens up,

What are you going to do with that?

What are you going to do with that when you go home?

And this is where the kundalini practice is so beautiful,

Because you're able to continue to move that out semantically out of your body,

And you're able to start weaving your emotions and your thoughts and your physical experience together.

So I kind of love that it helps all ends of the spectrum in the tantra world.

It's just very cool.

One of the practices in Kundalini Yoga is to do a 40-day sadhana.

And you can do it many ways.

When I do yoga,

Oftentimes I just sort of spin the dial and I just do a different Kriya every day or whatever I want.

And it just depends on what my mood is,

Or I don't know whether there's solar flares happening.

But if you really want to heal something deeply,

Then you choose one Kriya.

A Kriya is just a set of exercises,

And you do it every day for 40 days.

And the best thing is to choose a Kriya that you don't want to do,

Because it's the Kriyas that you don't want to do that hold the triggers.

That's why we don't want to do it.

So one of the first Kriyas I ever did as a 40-day sadhana was something called Nabi Kriya.

And Nabi Kriya is a lot of leg lifts.

Well,

Ever since I had my babies,

I had two C-sections.

I can't raise my legs.

I mean,

My muscles were literally cut through,

Right,

To have a baby come in.

I remember the first time I ever did Nabi Kriya at my yoga teacher training that I took.

Oh,

I was mad.

I was so mad.

I hated the teachers.

I hated this yoga.

I hated that I was called to do this yoga.

I hated everything about it.

I was so mad.

And that night,

I was in the ashram that I was staying in with the facilitator.

And oh,

I was just so mad.

I was just spit and tacks.

I was just so mad.

And then the funny thing is,

And I know this is not what you're supposed to do in a yoga teacher training living in an ashram,

But weirdly enough,

A bottle of red wine appeared.

So here we are,

And we're drinking this red wine.

And I am getting madder and madder and madder.

And then all of a sudden,

All this trauma came flying out of me from the births of my children.

I had no idea.

And I'm not going to tell you the whole story,

But long story short,

My body doesn't do anesthetic properly.

And so during both surgeries,

The anesthetic was gone,

And it was extremely traumatic.

I had no idea what was stored in my belly.

It became a journey,

An insane journey of healing,

Because it wasn't just the trauma of the births.

It was,

The doctors didn't listen to me.

I told them that I could feel everything,

And they didn't listen,

And they kept going.

And I just kept crying and vomiting.

My husband kept screaming at them.

But I kept believing them that somehow I was wrong,

Which of course goes back into my whole life as a,

I mean,

I was only 25,

But my life as a people pleaser,

And I'm not good enough,

And my opinion doesn't matter,

And everyone else's opinion matters more than I am,

And who am I really,

And I'm just a nothing.

All of this stuff started flowing out of me.

And it took probably a couple more years before all of that was released.

And one of the things I did was probably about a year later,

Is I chose to do Nabi Kriya every day for 40 days.

And it just about killed me.

But I'll never forget,

Like it was around like day 20,

That I was doing this Kriya,

And all of a sudden,

That transformation started.

Up until then,

I was fighting it,

And I was arguing with it,

And I was mad,

And I was all this.

And all of a sudden,

Something shifted.

And those are the shifts we can't explain.

This is why the Tantric journey is so ineffable,

Indescribable.

It's so difficult to explain,

Because you can talk about it all you want,

But it's only through doing it that the shift happens.

And then you say to someone,

And someone says,

Wow,

I can't believe this about you.

And you're like,

Yeah,

But you can't explain it,

Because a transformation happened.

You're not the same person you were before.

You're not just fitter,

Or happier,

Or happier,

Or more emotionally stable.

You're different.

I've never experienced it in any other practice besides this.

It's just phenomenal.

It just blows my mind.

And what's interesting,

Too,

About the 40 days is we've all heard of neuroplasticity,

The ability for our brains to change,

The ability for our brains to learn something new.

You know,

My favorite book on neuroplasticity is The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge.

But there's been many,

Many books written about it.

I don't know if it was in that book,

But somewhere I read about a study done by NASA,

Where they were concerned that human beings would go crazy if they were in a suspended,

Upside-down,

Zero-gravity state for X number of days.

So they did an experiment where they took glasses.

They flipped the lenses so that when you looked,

Everything was upside down.

And so the astronauts,

Or the control group,

Or whatever,

Every morning while they were on Earth,

They had to wake up in the morning and put these glasses on and walk around.

And they did it every day.

And of course,

At the beginning,

They were frustrated,

And it was annoying,

And it was so difficult,

And blah,

Blah,

Blah.

And then there was a magic day.

I don't remember what the day was,

Whether it was the 30th day or something,

Or the 21st day,

I don't know.

But there was a day that all of a sudden,

One guy woke up,

Put the glasses on,

And the world was right side up.

His brain had completely reoriented to this new reality.

And this is so interesting to me.

The idea that you could do a practice,

And again,

That's why it's interesting to do a Kriya that bugs you,

That you don't really want to do.

Not that it's going to hurt you,

But you don't want to do it,

Because you know that's where the edge of the transformation is.

That's where the bogeys are living.

To actually imagine that we can heal,

That we can change,

That we can transform,

Because that's the journey of Tantra.

Tantra is not about learning techniques,

Learning philosophy.

Whatever you're doing on your Tantric journey,

It has to change you.

It has to shift us into a different consciousness,

Or else it's not Tantra.

Very,

Very interesting.

Very,

Very interesting.

Another big thing that connects these two worlds is becoming meditative.

So when we're practicing the yoga,

It's really interesting.

One of the exercises in the Kriya we did this week,

We did a Kriya for kidneys.

And we were sitting with our legs straight out in front,

And our arms were straight out,

And our thumbs were up like this.

And we're sort of inhaling up,

And then we're exhaling forward,

And inhaling up,

And exhaling forward.

Very strange exercise.

And you have to keep your arms straight,

And you have to keep your legs straight with your feet flexed.

And you do this for like five minutes.

Well of course in the meantime,

A million thoughts are coming into your head.

You know,

Maybe your arms are sore,

Maybe your shoulders hurt,

Maybe I don't know why I'm still doing this,

This is dumb,

I can't believe it,

And how come that person can keep their arms up?

Normally our eyes are closed,

But as soon as our thoughts pop in,

We often will start looking around the room.

What's interesting is the practice is to come back to the breath.

Come back to the breath.

Maybe inhale sat,

Exhale nam.

Come back to the breath,

Come back to the breath,

No matter what,

Just come back to the breath.

And so what we're doing is we're actually training ourselves to stay still mentally while we're doing something.

And often,

Because the exercises are stimulating meridians,

Nadis,

Even stored emotions in our kidneys or our liver and things like that,

So there are things being brought up inside of us.

But all we're doing is staying within and breathing deeply and staying in our body and not letting ourselves be distracted from what we're doing by all the thoughts that are rising.

And of course this is what torments us all day long.

You go to a family gathering,

Someone says something,

Bam,

We're triggered,

Emotions are flying,

And we're not in ourselves anymore.

You know,

Maybe we've been transported to some trauma that happened when we were 10 years old,

Or maybe,

Oh,

They're doing it again,

And our brain has completely taken us out of our bodies.

But what if you're used to being traumatized in a controlled way?

It's not trauma.

But what if you're used to being triggered in a controlled environment that's completely safe and stuff comes up and no matter what,

You keep breathing,

And you keep breathing,

And you keep breathing.

And now the next time,

And maybe you do this for 40 days,

And then you go home for Christmas and you're sitting there and someone says something and you just breathe and there's no reaction.

They don't throw us out of our center.

We might not like what they said,

We might say something different,

We might leave the room,

We might do all kinds of things,

But we don't get thrown,

They don't own us.

They don't get to trigger us for an expected response because we've created a visceral memory inside of us,

Kind of like Pavlov's dogs that says,

When I get triggered,

I breathe deeper.

And if I get triggered,

I'm going to pay attention,

And I'm going to breathe deeper.

And it just happens naturally.

So then all of a sudden,

Everywhere we go in life,

Whether we're driving in traffic or we're making meals or we're playing with kids or we're walking the dog or we're making love,

We always have this interesting consciousness inside playing.

And so now again,

If we fly more into the sexual part,

Because as much as Tantra is 100% spiritual,

I mean,

Totally,

I mean,

That is the path.

I wrote a book called Tantric Intimacy,

Because that is one of the most beautiful ways to merge and explore what it is to be human.

And so to be able to bring that into intimacy,

That's beautiful.

It's only the churches perhaps that say that sex and spirituality don't go together,

Keep them as far away from each other as possible.

So now all of a sudden,

If I am teaching you how to make love in a tantric way,

We have to have a meditative mind.

And it's not that we're with our eyes rolled up and not paying attention.

But when we have a meditative mind,

We're able to be fully present.

We're able to hear our intuition,

We're able to move empathetically,

According to our partner.

Suddenly,

This is what allows us to actually be here in the moment,

And hear the guidance that we need.

And when we hear intuitive guidance,

When we're making love,

We go to places we've never been before.

When we hear guidance in our day to day life,

And we follow it,

We go to places we've never been before.

This is our true path.

This is our true human experience.

Tantra isn't just some thing that you study.

It's Tantra just going to mean,

Well actually means book or story or study.

It also means loom and it's Sanskrit,

It has a million meanings.

But it isn't just some kind of sexy thing.

It's just living in this expansive way all the time.

So the other really important thing is to include the divine.

Because Tantra is a spiritual practice.

It's a spiritual practice that is not just about spiritual practice.

If we're studying Tantra,

And there's no God in it,

There's no deities,

There's no sense of a greater something,

It's maybe something amazing,

But it's not Tantra.

And what's interesting about that is,

Again,

It's not something that can be explained,

Even all of the words I'm saying are going to be triggers for somebody.

Because that's what we've been raised in.

We've been raised in a world where God is a jealous God and a punishing God and it's been used to control us and it's been used to put us in fear,

It's been used to do all these things.

There's a lot of unprogramming there.

And even the very idea that we have any idea what we're talking about,

That we have any idea that we can even conceptualize what that is,

Is nonsense.

Every religion in the world says,

You can't define this.

And yet we do,

And then get in trouble.

But again,

This is why the experience is important.

The transformation is important.

Because if we are sitting in this kind of scared,

Limited place,

There's no way we can even begin to ponder such a thing.

Outside of all the definitions we've ever heard,

To imagine that kind of expansive reality is impossible.

So again,

This is where we just begin the journey.

And we begin the healing.

And then all of a sudden,

One day we kind of go,

Oh,

I get it.

But it's impossible to describe it.

And every one of us will have a completely different journey.

And even in the end,

There is no end,

But in the end,

We'd probably still describe it differently.

And that's awesome.

What's interesting in kundalini yoga,

For example,

Is if we do it with this intention of transformation,

You know,

Some people do yoga because we just need to exercise,

Or we need to stretch,

Or we need to,

We're very sedentary.

So we often,

If we're going to do a practice,

We want to make sure it's physically working us out,

Which isn't really great.

Sometimes that happens in kundalini yoga,

But it's not really the point.

But if we're doing it with the intention of transformation,

Then we come into it with a real curiosity.

Kundalini yoga is famous for having our arms up in the air for a long time,

Sometimes,

Which we don't like,

Because it starts to hurt our shoulders.

But of course,

We've got huge energy meridians going through our shoulders from our liver and from the organs and things like that,

Which of course,

Have all kinds of blockages in them.

So when we keep our arms up like this,

And again,

Not if you've got rotator cuff issues and broken shoulders or something,

We never exacerbate an injury.

But most of the time,

If our arms are up,

We just don't like it,

Because our thoughts are being triggered,

And emotions are coming up,

And self worth issues are coming up,

And all these things are coming up for us.

And we want to put those arms down.

This yoga is stupid.

I hate this.

When you're teaching kundalini yoga,

You have to really get used to people scowling at you,

Because if it's working,

It's bringing up the junk.

Well,

What's interesting is one of the things Yogi Bhajan used to say,

Was he would say,

Keep up,

And you'll be kept up.

And that's an interesting thing to believe,

That if I keep up,

If I have faith,

If I really want to have this transformation,

If I believe in me,

This is not to be faith in something else,

This can be just faith in me and my journey.

That if I have faith,

And I stay here,

And I keep breathing,

And I listen to my teacher within,

And I let the thoughts go by,

And I have faith in me,

And I continue,

And I continue,

Then you'll be kept up.

And I recognize this sounds super religious and stuff,

But it happens.

Anyone who's ever done kundalini yoga and had your arms in the air for a million hours,

It's not really a million hours,

But it feels like that.

When we get to that place where we actually say,

No,

I'm going to stay here this time for the whole three minutes,

Whatever it is,

You do it once.

And by the second time you're doing the Kriya,

And you can't believe it's over.

You just got through it.

And it's over.

It doesn't bother you again.

It feels like a miracle.

Like it literally feels like I had no idea I was going to be able to do that.

I had no idea I was capable of doing that.

I didn't know.

This is the miraculous life.

This is what happens.

And I'm not talking about just kundalini yoga,

Or sex,

Or anything like that.

I remember like back in 1999,

Lots of you guys know this story,

I had breast lumps growing,

And my mom had just died of breast cancer,

And this became my journey.

This is where it had to hit the road for me.

I was 29.

And the whole story is in my book,

What If You Could Skip the Cancer.

But the point of that book is about how to listen to your intuition,

How to break through the patterns that tell us that our intuition isn't right.

And how to listen to God.

These are my words.

This is my internal process.

But for me to listen to something greater than my brain,

Because my brain holds my fears,

It holds my ego,

It holds all that stuff.

And that became my journey,

Was to no matter what,

Listen within,

Trust it,

Take action,

And do it.

And that became the beginning of a very miraculous life.

To the point that my kids and my husband would just joke about it.

Because miracles would just happen all the time.

Things,

There's no way,

I couldn't have planned them.

And I don't believe it's like this manifestation thing.

I don't believe it's like,

I willed it to happen because my will is so strong,

Or something like that.

I believe the universe is a miraculous place.

I believe we live in a multi-dimensional reality where anything is possible.

Like even just yesterday.

So this week,

I'm starting to teach belly dance again,

Which is super fun in person and online and everything.

Well,

Of course,

I gave everything away years ago when I started traveling.

So I obviously don't have any belly dancing gear.

And I'm not very good at going shopping and going out and getting anything.

I tend to just not do that.

But anyway,

So I start teaching tonight.

And I don't even have a shimmy belt.

I don't have anything.

I'm literally going to teach probably in similar clothes that I'm wearing right now.

I just don't have anything and I haven't gone to find anything.

So do I get a message on Facebook a couple days ago from a woman who used to take belly dancing with me like 15 years ago.

And I used to sell shimmy belts because I had a studio.

I had a dance studio at one point.

And I sold shimmy belts.

I sold shimmy belts in the train station.

Well,

This lady loved shimmy belts.

So she would always be buying all these different colors of shimmy belts.

And she was a seamstress.

So she used to make costumes.

So she messaged me a couple days ago and said,

Hey,

Katrina,

I've got a bunch of belly dance gear here.

I'm decluttering.

I want to just give it all to you.

And I'm like,

Really?

That's awesome.

And so I went over last night to pick it up.

It was a huge basket of belly dance,

Shimmy belts and costumes and music and DVDs and a cane and all this stuff.

Like it's literally belly dance in a box.

I couldn't believe it.

What if we believe in that kind of world?

Like what if we believe that that's what's actually possible?

Can you imagine?

Like what if that's not just for the lucky people?

That's actually the human condition.

So the last thing I want to mention is I actually believe that there's a reason that Tantra is rising right now.

There's a reason that I'm feeling called to teach it again.

Because obviously I'd stopped teaching it while I was traveling and after I sold my train station.

There's something in me that just feels like that journey of transformation.

However you do it,

It doesn't have to be through Kundalini Yoga.

Whatever that journey is,

And to believe in transformation is so important right now.

Yogi Bhajan used to say used to say that we were doing this to prepare for the age of Aquarius.

Because in the coming time,

We would be inundated with facts and information.

And we needed to have that Sat Naam.

We needed to be able to hear our truth.

We needed to be able to sort through what was nonsense and what was real.

And the only way we could do that is from within.

And I'm sure we can feel that all of us,

How important that is today.

To really be able to have that deep center and that deep connection with our truth.

And then to be able to stand in that conviction.

It's so powerful.

It's so important.

So as my two loves come together,

Kundalini Yoga and Tantra,

It's very exciting.

And they seem to be coming more and more joined as the years continue.

Thank you so much for being here.

And I hope you have a wonderful day.

Reviews

This was so interesting I am very keen to learn more and experience this myself. Thank you

I love everything about this. It's so important and necessary. Thank you!! 🙏🏼💞

Amazing talk, and you have an amazing especially soothing voice. Can really tell you practice and been living what you speak.

I recognised my own mindset, while learning new concepts, laughed and cried. Thank you.

Thank you so kindly Katrina❣️♾️☮️☯️⚛️⚘️☄️
Yours series & topics mean so much❣️⚛️
Thank you❣️⚛️Namaste🙏🏼✨️🌸🪔🕯💫

Thank you for sharing your experience about how the practice can slowly help us shed whatever is in the way of experiencing God within. I am more and more aware of my own practices that work for me. Gratitude for the resonance I experience listening to your teaching.

Thank you for shedding some clarity on a rather obscure subject that is often riddled with misconceptions.

Interesting as always. Glad I could come back and hear it all