People will sometimes ask me when I first met Kundalini Yoga.
It’s a bit of a hallmark of some extremeness in my character that my first encounter with Kundalini Yoga was in 2001 at the Kundalini Yoga Festival in France. I went with my German partner (and husband to be). He had gone every year for years already, so the scene to him was akin to coming home. For me, on the other hand…
I arrive there to see a sea of white-clad people, many with turbans on their heads. I’m 27 at that stage. I’ve been travelling for the past year in Asia, looking for my vocation, looking for my self, looking for a spiritual practice and my Teacher. I had had a dream while still back in Perth.. a story for another day.
So I get out of the car to see this sea of white and my mind says “Uh oh”. However, I am at one of those major thresholds in life - the kind where you know that disbelief MUST be suspended for long enough to allow the sharp 180 degree turns that are necessary to get on course. I knew enough to know that I didn’t know much at all, if anything.
So, I firmly told my mind “shoosh” and resolved to be open, honestly open. Open was not my default position. Skeptical was much firmer or at least familiar ground. So I felt I almost had to pretend to be someone else for long enough that the message could make its way to where it needed to land: in my heart.
My heart received the message - yes. And through its feelings conveyed that to my mind. My heart, dear heart, was the messenger for my soul. Yes. This. Here. Now. And I listened.
My first Kundalini Yoga experience proper was then White Tantra. If you know White Tantra you will likely be thinking “whoah”. If you don’t, White Tantra is an exceptionally powerful practice in which you sit in pairs, facing each other in rows, and do meditation practices for a total of 6 hours a day, in these pairs. At the European Festival you do that for 3 days. It cleans the subconscious out in a radical way. And it’s HARD. Challenging. I thought I had a pretty good pain threshold and command of my body, but I was humbled to realise that what had gotten me through thus far was of not much use to me here. This required something else. A strength of spirit? Largely, in retrospect, trust.
Anyway, I made it through — did I mention I was also about 10 weeks pregnant at the time and feeling almost constantly nauseous? And I learned only years later how good it was for the baby to come, for my own subconscious cleansing in preparation for receiving a soul, and for my partnership.
At these festivals there is always a marketplace - a bazaar. Alongside all the yoga and meditation, with early morning practice (Aquarian sadhana) every morning, workshops on offer, yogic diet and seva (selfless service) jobs, was the fun of yogic browzing and hanging out with beautiful souls. Here, wandering through the marketplace one early evening, I met my Teacher. I remember clearly telling him I was not surprised to be pregnant (that was so “unplanned”), but surprised at how happy I was about it.
This story of meeting my Teacher, as I said, deserves its own space, so I’ll save that for later, but truly this meeting is what cemented it for me. The something that was happening, that I intuited was going to happen here, in this place, now, turned my life upside down and inside out. It was more real than any appearance. More true than any shallow judgement It was a victory for true sight, breaking through the protective, defensive shields of the super ego.
I’m so grateful for the radical, now or never atmosphere of those times, or the voice of God that is actually my own true voice, that was so loud then. So loud that it silenced all the rest.
Me in my first ever turban. It felt so natural.