I teach from my own experience and my own deep love and respect for the technology, it has changed my life, it has made me a stronger, calmer, healthier, happier, more abundant person.
I love this technology and I will never stop practicing it and as long as there are students who step onto their mats and look to me as the bridge between the teachings and them I will continue to teach. How do I feel about Yogi Bhajan? I am grateful to him every day for introducing Kundalini Yoga to the West. Some people consider 2020 as the real dawn of the Aquarian Age and I wonder how people are going to survive without a proper tool kit for the Aquarian Age! Yogi Bhajan prepared us for the Aquarian Age by sharing the Kundalini technology as a tool for us to navigate and integrate this incredible shift which began when hierarchies began crumbling, society started to shift, the digital age brought knowledge to our finger tips, made the world a smaller, more connected yet disconnected place and we have had to accept this age of self-mastery, fortify ourselves against new threats, specifically to our nervous systems and immune systems. It was the Piscean Age and the patriarchal society was entrenched with various hedonistic, narcissistic leaders.
America in the 70’s was a different time – when he arrived in Los Angeles he apparently saw people searching for meaning and a leader, practicing free love, free sex, a rampant drug culture and many suffering from drug addiction, he quickly gained a following, established ashrams, converted followers to Sikhism and trained teachers to share the lifestyle and teachings. Yogi Bhajan became very powerful, very rich and created an empire after introducing the teachings to the West. I have taken from the practice what serves me and teach the kriyas and meditations as prescribed, to honour them, to experience them and deliver their essence. I chant mantra because I love generating the sound current and the essence of the mantra infiltrating my aura and my psyche. I wear mostly white and cover my head because I benefit from the feeling. I love a two and half hour daily practice but I don’t practice the Aquarian Sadhana with the Japji Sahib the Japji Sahib is a beautiful text and there are certain Pauris that have deeply touched me, but I am not Sikh.
I was never personally heart broken, crippled or devastated to learn of the sexual abuse though I condemn abuse and misuse of power. I never revered him, he was a human being and what I know about human beings is they will be human, flawed, in all their realness. Soon I heard stories of sexual abuse and misconduct but it never influenced my personal practice or my experience of Kundalini Yoga. Over the years I read quotes and lectures, watched videos of him and some of the material touched me and I thought some of it brilliant, some of the lectures difficult to follow and videos of him obese and rude, mumbling incoherently baffled me. I knew of Yogi Bhajan, that he had introduced the teachings to the west from India in the late 1960’s and that he had died in 2004.
I fell deeply in love with the technology as soon as I started practicing it and experienced real results fast. I earned my certification as a Kundalini Yoga teacher in 2018 after I began practicing it in 2014. So, with the possibility of a new student wishing they would be made aware of it and having the opportunity to discuss it up front I am sharing my views. As I continue to share Kundalini Yoga and introduce more people to the beauty, madness and magic of Kundalini yoga and meditation and they start to research and practice this technology more deeply I know they will soon stumble across the sexual abuse scandal, so do I have a duty to forewarn them or is it up to them to discover it on their own? I have put myself in the position of somebody new to Kundalini yoga and wondered if I would appreciate the forewarning and the opportunity to have the discussion, and possibly “yes”. I have been asked a few times by peers what my thoughts and feelings are on the Yogi Bhajan sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Kundalini Yoga community in 2019 with the release of the book Premka but I haven’t publicly shared my views until now.