Kundalini Yoga Teacher Training - The Start of a new chapter

THE START OF A NEW CHAPTER

Last weekend, I took the first steps in a 9-month-long Kundalini Yoga Teacher Training at Northern Light Yoga in Oslo. Divided into 9 long weekends from September 2022 until May 2023.

And for those of you that find numerology a purposeful mirroring tool: the day I drove to Oslo, the 22nd of September 2022, was a 1-day. September is a 9-month.

And I am in my personal 9-year. Marking the transition into a whole new life spiral even more clearly.

The timing of the first chapter of this journey could not be any more intentional and

symbolic. Right between the autumn solstice and the new moon.

AUTUMN SOLSTICE

From the night of the 22nd to the 23rd of September, the autumn equinox portal was open. A yearly return that knocks the soil from under my feet. The impact of this energetic event has always been far greater than any other equinox, date or returning event in a year.

The autumn equinox is a time of transition between light and dark, inner and outer. It is a time when both sides are in balance, where contrast momentarily seizes to exist. And as life is the experience and reaction to contrast, a portal between our earthly life and our higher life is created.

Many cultures speak about the thinning of the veil. With the right intention, it gives you the perfect energetic invitation to put your earth experience in perspective when making a connection with the higher part of yourself. It is a portal to personal truth. If you are willing to work with honesty towards yourself.

But the portal works both ways. You will feel energetically connected with the outer world. It feels like mental floating, connection and disconnection at the same time. The feeling of being grounded to the earth falls away and can result in feeling lost. At the same time, it shifts the grounding to your own centre point. Or better, it shows you just how grounded you are, or are not, to your own centre point.

These forces make you work with self-trust, and even more, with self-responsibility.

The autumn equinox is the door to the dark, to the inner. It is time to work internally on outer changes. After having done the opposite for the past half year. The Norwegian word dør both means door and dying. Isn’t that fitting? As we give our absolute attention to willingly and intentionally letting parts of ourselves die. But can we accept death as it is? Both the colourful beauty of it, and the fact that it is rotting and ugly.

EGO

All these parts of ourselves, all the facets of our ego, get shaken as the autumn wind blows through. Ego isn’t necessarily a bad thing, despite its connotation in the spiritual community.

Isn’t ego just an association with something? An identification? A point on a spectrum line where we put up a boundary? Isn’t it an absolutely necessary part of us humans?

There is a lesson in exploring these boundaries, to leaning into them. To express and live them. That is why we are here! But imagine a leaf that rots in autumn and doesn’t fall from the tree. There will be no room for a new leave next spring. There is nothing wrong with the leave or the tree or the season, but the tree will receive less sunlight for photosynthesis than it would have had with a new leave. Can you see how the circle of life is a bit out of rhythm here?

Learning to let go is so important. Feeling safe to let go is even more important. Being able to ground into yourself, having your anchor into your own centre point, instead of in your leaves. Self-trust. Trust that you, and all that is, carry yourself. And at the same time experiencing the contrast of life, good and bad.

Spirituality can be just another thing we escape to. Which we use to run away from our life and experience. Something else we can anchor our “I” into. But spirituality is just the fabric of life, it is a way to describe all that is. Someone can have never heard of anything spiritual ever, and still, live a more aligned life with their soul than someone who is into yoga or tarot.

Life will never be without contrasts, never without ever moving boundaries. Can we let ourselves be taken by the wind, and gracefully experience? Can we be part of humanity?

Admitting we are human, implies admitting to the whole of the human potential, including all the terrible ugly things some humans do. It is to admit that it is part of our potential too. Isn’t it easy to protect our own ‘I’, by withdrawing from parts of us? To not want anything to do with those destroying the planet for money, from those hurting others, from those abusing animals? Isn’t it easy to get carried along by the division between good and bad? Is this something that will create unity?

I think it is wise to keep this in mind. Spirituality with the connotation we are used to can be used in every single aspect of your life. From the way you care for yourself, to navigating relationships and doing laundry.

EMBODIMENT

As we explored the very basics and definitions of kundalini yoga in the first teacher training weekend, there was a lot of talk about embodiment. About having as much respect and honouring for our body and mundane life here, as for the higher aspects of ourselves and the very universe itself. It is a reflection of each other, a compaction of the one into the other.

What message do we give ourselves if we long for an escape from the physical? Our body is not just a vessel, our life is not just a test. How do we care about each other? How do we see the divine in the mundane? That is yoga. Uniting.

You don’t heal the fear of heights by forever staying on the ground. Just like you don’t heal the way you handle relationships (or the way you are responsible for your reaction to other people, hint hint), by moving to the middle of nowhere and limiting human contact. As has been my personal lesson. Can you be trustworthy and reliable to yourself and even more, towards others?

How do embody change, and transformation? It starts with a key, to put you on this line of contrast, this spectrum of interest. Like dialling a number on the phone. The number you dial can be an intention, a question, or a want. You use your body and mind, your very life, as the phone. But it is the physical step you take after that, here on earth, in your daily life, that will change your environment. Which in turn will evoke the unseen energies in your life. You open up the phone line and it is your job to keep it open.

WHAT IS A TEACHER?

First, to all the people that are on this shared journey, the beautiful souls that are with me in the Kundalini Yoga Teacher training this year and to the teachers, thank you for existing! It can be so powerful to experience that we are not alone.

I noticed that many of you are, or have been, in difficult places, both in life and internally.

Many of us, sensitives who struggle with unhappy pasts and confusing inner worlds, try to find healing everywhere. We are on an eternal quest. Many of us find their path leading to the sides of life that are spiritual.

We are here to be brave and use honesty as one of the tools to clear away our own mud on the path of connection. The path between the seen and the unseen. Between earth and out there.

It is by healing ourselves, by opening up our own channel, that we will attract others who need the same. By opening your own channel, we will bring forth this channel in others too. We set the intention to learn how to trust ourselves and how to anchor into ourselves, instead of holding on for dear life to leaves blowing in the wind.

When life gets difficult, when we are standing in an autumn storm, it is difficult to have perspective. We can get so focussed on everything that is blowing in our faces. We can lose balance and connection with ourselves. All our parts start reflecting back onto each other, creating a mirror labyrinth of confusion and desperation.

A teacher is a channel. It is someone who can hold space and a mirror so that the student finds direction and can open up his own channel.

INTEGRATION

The last class ended on the new moon, the archetype of intentions.

And as I’m integrating the past weekend, I can’t help thinking back to my first encounter with Kundalini yoga. It was at the beginning of April 2020, right after Covid-19 shut society down. I had gotten myself a subscription to an online yoga platform as a replacement. One of the yoga styles they offered was kundalini yoga. Now, should I have not known the term, I would have scrolled right past it. But instead, it made me remember an article I once read and had since forgotten about. It handled about a woman being in yoga for a long time but really finding it after joining a kundalini class. I remember finding it a weird but intriguing story.

Thus, I tried out a random class on this online platform. I don’t even remember exactly what we did, but it was a combination of weird exercises, with weird poses, sounds and movements. I’ve never done anything seemingly so random and weird. But the things I felt after this class... such a release of emotion, energy and an enormous feeling of release. It was the weirdest and most intriguing magic I had ever encountered.

Establishing an understanding, however, is a sign of love. The way we express love is often a reflection of how we experience love. However, not everyone feels loved the same way.

Therefor the phrase stop trying to love, start to understand, has true wisdom. By investing energy to truly understand and see something as it is, without imposing our own personality on it, we can really see the needs and therefore how to love.

Somehow, understanding the science of Kundalini yoga is about learning how to understand yourself. So that you can love yourself better. And by loving yourself and feeling loved by yourself, we embody our true essence, you guessed it: love.

Written by Ellen Wild (Kundalini Yoga Teacher in training 2022/2023)