Kundalini Yoga & Vitality

Kundalini Yoga is an ancient science that works with the creative potential of a human being. So the Kundalini energy essentially rests in the perineum at the base of the spine and when it's activated through different kriyas, mantras and pranayams and meditations, it rises up the spine. It clears the energy center so what's no longer needed in the chakras and it opens up certain areas of the brain that really spark a new reality essentially, creativity, a deepened sense of intuition. A daily practice in Kundalini Yoga is called sadhana. Every spiritual practice on the planet, the heart of it is the sadhana.

In order to transform any repetitive patterns, and we're all just creatures of habits, right? This is who we are, whether they're negative habits or positive habits, we have to put a daily practice in place in order to be able to break through those patterns that are again stored in the mind, in the psyche, in the subconscious and stored in the body and the emotions. So the daily practice allows us to cut through those ancient programmings that really we're no longer feeling in alignment with, but in order to transform them, we need that consistency, we need that repetition, we need on a neuroscience level, we need that new neural network to establish itself in the brain in order to fire those new habits. Well we're living in a time where we've been so conditioned, I think especially in America, that you have to work hard, you have to go, go, go, but then you're really missing the enjoyment of life. We're actually much more powerful when we relax.

So in Kundalini Yoga, we look at it in two ways. You can relax and attract, or you can hustle and hassle. And the way of relaxing and attracting is that we're by nature designed to attract the things that we want through the space of joy and lightheartedness and happiness. And the hustle and hassle mode wears us out and it taxes our nervous system. And so when we can balance our life with more of that relax and attract mode, we naturally have more vitality.

That's a byproduct. We naturally want to go out and be in nature and touch the earth and eat whole foods and be connected to one another. When we're in the hustle and hassle mode and thinking about only work and making money, then we're just taxing the whole idea of what it is to be a sound human being. So the techniques of Kundalini Yoga are so effective to help us release stress because you're not working with just, let's say, meditation and being completely still. You're working with movement, breath, and mantra at the same time.

So there's no time to get into your mind and you're activating the different glands in the brain. You're activating the three nervous systems through these strong, powerful movements we called Kriya's series of movements and breath work and mantras, we're totally invigorating at a cellular level. We are made up of 30,000 trillion cells. And when you activate those cells through the movements, the pranayams, the powerful breaths and the mantras, you're completely regulating what it is to be a sound human being. Sustainable energy is knowing when to go and knowing when to relax.

And when you need to go, you have the energy that it takes to show up. Without vitality, your aura kind of shrinks and you don't have the capacity to handle the stress of your life. Life is stress. There's no avoiding that. But when you have sustainable energy, you have the energy it takes to deal with your stress in an effective, intuitive, and graceful manner rather than being taken down by it.

Vitality for me as a personal experience in my physical and energetic body is a culmination of taking the time every single day to take care of myself. To get physical exercise, for me that's through kundalini yoga, to make sure that I break a sweat, to take care of my mental body through meditation, and to take care of my emotional body as well as my physical body through my lifestyle and the way that I eat, getting enough rest, all of those things make up what allow me to live a vital life. So as women, we're going to age and it's a natural occurrence and there's something in the indigenous cultures, age was revered. So it's really about learning how to work with where we're at physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In this modern culture, youth is pushed onto every woman and it makes us feel a certain way about our aging and the kind of energy that we might have, but the more that we can relax into aging and really accept how we're transforming, there are so many gifts and so much wisdom with growing into our goddesshood and growing into our eldership that they are not missed if we focus on staying youthful, the way that we can stay vibrant, healthy, and connected to ourselves and others is through the daily practice, is through making sure we get our exercise, making sure we eat whole foods, we meditate, we take care of all aspects of ourselves and not deny that there are some days and sometimes where we'll be low energy and we'll need to rest more and we'll need to nap in the middle of the day and it's totally okay.

Unleashing my own creativity on a cellular level feels like I need to do my daily sadhana to activate this calm, sober, but vibrant energy and when I find that space, my intuition is enlivened, I feel well, my breath is deep and I'm totally connected to the creative power that is within me and really which comes from the Kundalini energy being awakened and when you're creative as a human being, there's no greater joy, there's no greater satisfaction. My hope for this seven-day vitality reboot challenge is that you discover the storehouse of vitality that you are, that you know how to manipulate and work with your nervous system, your glandular system, your endocrine system, your mind, your emotions, your prana and fuel it and direct it in such a way so that you can be enlivened and radiant and present and energized to handle the stress and the stress of your life because we all have stress and we all got things to deal with and so to have enough energy to be able to meet your life with grace.