Kundalini Yoga for 40 Days

My dad and I went to a Kundalini yoga class together when I was seventeen.

Now, I'm twenty-eight, and I still love this great blessing in my life.  Even though I've practiced yoga in varying styles and schools (Iyengar, Vinyasa, Ashtanga, etc), Kundalini yoga is the home I always come back to, a palace for my body, mind, & spirit that reminds me who I am and why I am here on this earth.

Of course, I haven't consistently stoked the fire of Kundalini or of yoga in my life consistently for the last decade.  I frequently abandon my passions, my heart practices, then get lost in the woods, and come back to them in periods of subtle desperation.  Over the last year, I've tried to keep a little bit of yoga, meditation, and writing in my life more consistenly, especially as these practices are so important for me to engage in for my sustainability at work.  "The healers need healing, too," my new friend Hugo reminded me just yesterday.

Over the next 38 days, I will be practicing Kundalini, the mother of all yoga, as part of a "40 day challenge." 

I've never done yoga, much less Kundalini, daily, for even two weeks.  So, this will be a process of discovery for me.

Part of what I love about Kundalini is that my mind, body, and spirit feel like they get to breathe and take a short reprieve from my incessant thoughts around systems of oppression.  More on this later.  But, even as I hold some criticism of yoga and the ways it's been appropriated by white, middle class North Americans, there is still an undying, unquenchable, healing medicine inherent in the practice - something that cannot be stifled by capitalism or fads or mis-appropriation.

It's that medicine that I trust, the healing qualities spiraling through generations, still beating with the hearts of my ancestors. 

Yoga might be said to be a "white" thing, or said to be only for those who have money to do it, much in the way eating a healing, plant-based diet is said to be for the few who can afford it.

I  wish to complicate both of these statements, and instead choose to embrace the fact that my ancestors very much knew how to take care of themselves, and I am trying to remember how to do the same, on a tight budget:)

Cheers to 40 days of healing.

Stay tuned for new, cleansing, yogic recipes!