Brain Health: Kundalini Yoga
My interviews have all shifted towards practices directed at mental health. People call it self-health, or self-care or self-initiated healthcare. No matter what you call it, it’s important to begin a practice aimed at taking care of your brain. 100% of 28-year old men show cognitive decline and brain lesions on brain scans. If you don’t use it, you lose it!
Dr. Kirk: Hi Steve, let’s get right to it. You started doing Kundalini to support your mental health back in May.
Steve: Yes. I originally started Kundalini because I was reading Timothy Leary’s breakdown of the human psyche, called the 8 Circuit Model of Consciousness. He breaks down the levels of consciousness, the first level is basic nurturing and he talk about people lacking that nurturing end up on opioids. The final 8th level of consciousness he equates with experiences on DMT, Ketamine, and high doses of LSD. These are the drugs that I personally resonated with back during my drug consumption days. According to Leary, each circuit can be accessed with a different meditation. Kundalini meditation is the one that Leary says allows you to access the 8th circuit of consciousness. I had to give it a try.
Dr. Kirk: Basically you resonated with psychedelics in the past, and you were looking for something that would get you there without the chemicals.
Steve: Essentially.
Dr. Kirk: Very interesting. Can you tell me more about the practice?
Steve: I go to a place that’s in essence a yoga studio. It’s a group of 2-15 people, depending on the day. There’s rugs on the floor, and I sit down. We do some deep breathing, and get into a cross-legged pose and warm up our hands, and chant the opening prayer three times. The opening prayer is to the divine teacher within each of us. And then the class begins, there’s both breath work and body work. It’s basically sets of Kundalini exercises. There’s a bunch of different ones, most classes are completely different from each other.
Dr. Kirk: What kind of body exercises?
Steve: For example we will lie on our backs hold our feet 6 inches off the floor and hold that for 3 minutes, and then bicycle legs for 7 minutes, and then sit and hold your arms above your head and chant a mantra for 11 minutes. Its not like Hatha Yoga where you repeat the same positions every single day. It’s different. They change it up to keep it interesting. I really like the breath of fire. That’s where we inhale and exhale for equal amounts of time, but we pump our navels as we do it, for 3, 7, or 11 minutes, and we do that in different postures. We sit with our thumb and forefingers connected, of else sit on your shoulders with your legs above your head, or with your feet by your back, or cobra pose, all with the breath of fire.
Dr. Kirk: Basically body work mixed with breath work, and everybody does it together. Does it last 45 minutes, like a typical yoga practice?
Steve: No, usually it’s 1.5 hours, some longer special meditations are 2.5 hours. The special ones are more intense. Like breathing through your right nostril, and pumping your navel 48 times, while chanting a mantra. Mantras are a huge part of it. You’re sitting on your heels, along with this one mantra. Or there’s this one where you hold your hands above your head for 31 minutes. It’s incredibly physically strenuous.
Dr. Kirk: I’m tired just thinking about holding my arms above my head for 31 minutes.
Steve: Yeah I learned really quickly to stop paying attention to time while I’m there. If you’re staring at the time, it always seems to be so much longer and more painful. Kinda like “a watched pot never boils.” But when you stop paying attention, you move past the pain quicker.
Dr. Kirk: So far it all sounds pretty intense and exhausting. What’s the benefit?
Steve: After going through the pain, I get an afterglow. During the meditation, when I’m in it, I lose touch with time and space. It works for me, because when I’m not meditating, when I’m just going through everyday life, my brain is like on fast forward all the time. It literally doesn’t turn off. But with this, there’s so much stuff going on, there’s breathing exercises, postures, hand positions, chanting, there’s a lot of activity going on that it helps to focus my mind. It works for me. Regular mental-ness can be a chore for me, because my brain is so active, but this works for me.
Dr. Kirk: Can you tell our listeners more about the background? Like where the heck did Kundalini come from?
Steve: It’s from India. It’s essentially guru-based dogma. It’s kind of a cult. It’s a “my mind’s telling me no, but my body is telling me yes” situation. It just feel right. Yogi Bajan was Sikh. He claims to have come from a golden chain of teachers. Some people call him a scam artist. Despite the dogma that goes with it, and the guru system, which is antithetical to what I believe in, there’s a practicality to it which is why I do it. They read direct verbatim from Yogi Bajan at each practice. It used to be a private thing only for the elite, but one guy brought it to the West. He became an official position in the Sikh religion. During the class, they say, Yogi Bajan says to do it this way, there was one particular kria where he had a vision and guru ramdass gave him a position to do, so there’s some of that in there.
Dr. Kirk: Thanks for the history lesson. Can you expand more about why you do it? You mentioned something about practicality.
Steve: At some point yoga comes from people that have figured out how to be healthy. It becomes an intuitive thing. At the end of the day, you’re praying and working your body. Practices that can naturally decrease your cortisol, decrease the firing of the amygdala, and increase the firing of the frontal cortex, that’s what all meditation does. I sometimes do the meditation at home, but those are just chanting, no physical pain, just the chanting and breathing. Kundalini makes me feel better and alive. It gets rid of anxiety for me, the same way psychedelics did. I don’t get to that psychedelic level where I see shit, but I get the same kind of calmness that I got from psychedelics. Certain postures are meant to work different parts of your body. They say this is for your pituitary, this is for your kidneys or liver, etc. I assume it’s borderline pseudoscience.
Dr. Kirk: It sounds like its working more than just your brain. Like its also helping your emunctories, your drainage glands as well How quickly did you notice a change after starting? I’m assuming that you had to do Kundalini for a month or so to notice any difference.
Steve: I noticed effects from Kundalini almost the first time I did it, it was really profound. The first time I heard the closing mantra, it’s a long-time sun prayer, “may the long time sun shine upon you and the pure light within you guide you along.” I felt a loving presence. It was kind of overwhelming. The first few times I did it I felt like I was coming home. I knew I wouldn’t be a drug addict the rest of my life. I was in a vulnerable place, I tried everything, and it made me feel better instantly. I had a window to live.
Dr. Kirk: So this helped you to combat addiction. Did you get high from doing Kundalini?
Steve: At first I got blissful, like you just worked out really hard and you feel really good after feeling the pain. It went from being an ultimate blissful salvation, to having my entire life be normalized, and now it’s less bliss and more peace. I’m not looking for bliss. The feeling changed from bliss to peace within a couple weeks. The first month or so was very painful on my body. My legs hurt, I couldn’t complete the exercises, you have to hold your arms above your head for 10 minutes, but now my muscles are adapted, and so none of it is hard. I don’t have the extreme pain, so I don’t get the bliss as much.
Dr. Kirk: I see. Can you tell me a bit more about the beginning?
Steve: When I first started in May, I was doing it, and I kept thinking about all the bad things I had done in my life. And they had me doing all this weird shit like walking around on my knees and elbows. And I was like fuck this shit. But I pushed through, and finally I gave in. I was doing one of the special meditations, the 2.5 hour session, and I had my breakthrough. That particular one was 5 31-minute sets. During that, I had a revelation I need to forgive myself. I did. And I had this emotional positivity, and from that moment on I was able to live again. It took me about a month to get to that point.
Dr. Kirk: It sounds like you’re in a really good place right now. How long will you continue?
Steve: I’ll do it forever, its a source of peace. I look forward to it, the same way I used to look forward to drugs. I don’t want to do drugs now because it will upset my practice.
Dr. Kirk: I understand. Can you give our listeners some advice for finding a mental health practice?
Steve: My advice is, anything you can do where you’re focusing on your breath and being present, do that. A single point of focus, whether its counting, looking at the light, repeating a mantra, listening to music, focusing on body position, yoga, some sort of self awareness presence-based meditation, you will find peace of life that you can’t find peace in material things or substances, you can only find it through mindfulness. For me, and my very active mind, Kundalini is conducive to finding that. I dig Kundalini because it’s the weirdest of all the meditation practices, and it’s the most hardcore. It’s intense. Kundalini chooses people, you don’t choose it. It doesn’t work for everybody. For me, it gets rid of my inhibition, and it goes beyond the science of what is happening in my body. There’s something more that can’t be explained.
