MY MEDITATION STORY
Soothe your mental-emotional state and grow genuine happiness
in minutes instead of hours.
MY MEDITATION STORY
Yoga and meditation are a regular practice of mine. I'd taken many yoga classes, but I took my first kundalini yoga class on January 1, 2000, just over a year into my healing journey from a high-impact, head-on collision...and I never looked back.
I know from experience the incredible healing difference this practice makes on all levels of being: how it opens, strengthens and nourishes me physically; brings clarity, confidence, and peace mentally and emotionally; gets my energy balanced and flowing; and settles me into my truth and sovereign self. I know it is essential to living a life of joy and powerful purpose because today I see it reflected in my life every day.
This was not the case before. Before, I had a tendency toward negative thinking and depression. Everything felt like a struggle. Growing up, I did what society told me would lead to happiness. But since it was based on things going or being a certain way, it was fragile, not sustainable, and not genuine happiness. It was circumstantial and subject to change as circumstances changed...and circumstances always change.
Genuine happiness is born within and is not susceptible to external conditions.
The thing is that most of my coaching clients aren’t meditators. When I speak to them about meditating, they say something like, Meditation doesn't work for me. I've tried it. I don’t like it. I can't sit still. I don't have time. My mind is too busy. I can't quiet my thoughts, or whatever. That's right—most of us can't sit still, don't have time, and have a mind that's way too busy.
I tell them first, that’s the whole point! We live in a society that perpetuates mental-emotional over-stimulation and nervous system overload. We over-empower our conditioned ego mind and slog around in subconscious mental garbage that perpetuates our suffering without realizing it. We ignore the things that genuinely nourish, sustain, and fulfill us, the very things that bring us home to ourselves—our real selves—and instead, inadvertently create a life of suffering by focusing our attention on technological distractions and external conditions like how we look, how nice of a house we live in, how expensive our car is, how perfect our relationship is, or what our job title is.
There’s nothing wrong with attending to such things. Yet we must recognize that these are transient things, which means that the sense of happiness we get from them is also transient. These things will change, and when they do, the feeling of happiness they give us will vanish. These things do not lead us to genuine happiness.
Second, I tell my coaching clients that kundalini meditation is different. Either they haven’t tried this tradition, or if they have, they gave in to their conditioned mind too soon to experience the great benefits kundalini meditations offer. In over 20 years of practicing them, I clearly see how they guide us to that hidden door inside, the one that leads to genuine happiness.
Another reason why I love the kundalini tradition is that I can hand-pick a specific meditation for coaching clients and they can begin practicing it right away to create change in their lives. There are hundreds of kundalini meditations to choose from, each with a specific purpose. We can find at least one for whatever it is you struggle with.
For most of my coaching clients, change is noticeable within days of practicing, not months. The shifts from these kundalini meditations are subtle rather than dramatic. Yet they have a deep, more positive and powerful impact on our quality of life than just about anything else I've tried over the past three decades. And they are easy to do....all more reasons why I love them.
Transformation takes devotion, yet being devoted to inner healing and spiritual growth is much easier than being devoted to unconscious habits
that create a life of inner pain, struggle, and suffering.
I want the specific meditation to help me most right now...
BEGINNER TIPS
A life-changing kundalini meditation practice can be very simple. It is designed to bring our attention present (out of endless mental streams of past and future), which centers us in this moment with what is. And this moment is where our power resides.
Kundalini meditation can be as simple as sitting in a chair or in easy pose with your hands comfortably resting on the knees or in your lap. You can focus on the flow of your breath or chant a sacred mantra to yourself or aloud if you need help redirecting your thinking mind away from its endless thought streams while meditating. Most people do, at first.
Be aware that it's normal for new kundalini meditators to pretty quickly slip into a state of psychic discomfort and get fidgety, restless, or otherwise uncomfortable. When we stimulate our pranic energy body, the subconscious mind stirs. Being physically still yet pranically active creates the space for subtle psychic habits to activate, which is what we want when our intent is to empty out the hidden garbage in there and give the reigns of our life back to our highest self. But it's hard to sit still and be quiet when the mind takes off on a rant as soon as we do. Believe me, I know. This does ease with practice.
But that's exactly why clients don't get it at first. They give in to their thinking mind, give up, and fall off the kundalini meditation wagon way too soon to experience the powerful benefits of such a practice in their lives. I challenge my coaching clients to stick with the same kundalini meditation—one hand-selected just for them—for 40 days to see what arises and push past it into a deeper experience of awareness.