Art and Yoga: Kundalini Awakening in Everyday Life

By Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa

Learn to express your soul's longing, delve into images that awaken your imagination, and speak of a truth yet unexplored. Allow Art & Yoga to take you on a journey to your intuitive, creative and authentic self! Yogis will find creative exercises to deepen their experience of yoga, while artists will discover simple, yet profound yoga and m

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kundalini Research Institute
• Release date: Aug 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940837598

Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa

Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa is an artist and teacher dedicated to healing through yoga and art. She teaches at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, the Antrim Girls Shelter, Omega Institute for Holistic Health and venues throughout the Us and Europe. Hari Kirin is currently exhibiting an installation called Wherever You Are is the Center of the World at the Brattleboro Museum.Hari Kirin (b. Joan Hanley in Queens, NY 1955) has been a professional artist since finishing her BFA at Hartford Art School in 1976. Her twenties were spent between NY, at the School of Visual Arts or Columbia University, and Hartford, CT, where she participated in Real Art Ways. During this time she met her spiritual mentor, Mahan Tantric, Yogi Bhajan. In 1986 she moved to Cambridge MA to pursue her interest in art, healing and spirituality.

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Introduction

The sole purpose of life is the soul.²

Yogi Bhajan

The world needs our creativity, compassion, and intuitive intelligence. Today, it is essential that we sense the interconnectedness of our world. Whatever happens to any one of us—human, animal, plant, or ecosystem—happens to all of us. This sense of connection requires a departure from the individualistic, introverted, and competitive approach often found in the practice of art or yoga in the past. With more awareness of the world in which we live, we can shift away from this way of doing things. We can move away from seeing yoga as gymnastics and return to seeing it as being full of compassion, community and awareness—the main concerns of yoga. Similarly, in this most recent generation of artists, we see more community involvement and an awareness of the impact of art on the environment and community. These artists address the larger social issues facing humankind.

You have to find, as an individual, your dharma within you, so that the karma of action and reaction can leave you.³

Yogi Bhajan

A generation ago a small handful of people produced the images we all knew. Today we all have many opportunities to produce images and to have them seen. But many of us are inhibited. We grew up when only professionals made the images we knew. I want to offer a process in which you can make art that is meaningful to you. Kundalini Yoga can help you realize your full creative potential.

We can heal our blocks to creativity and life through yoga and by cultivating an artistic approach to life. We can shift from polarized opinions to deep ethics, from isolation to connection, from narcissism to compassion. There is much speculation about the changes we face at this time in history. The world is changing, and humanity needs to change. What will we let go of and what will we develop? My teacher Yogi Bhajan, commenting on the Aquarian Age, which begins in 2011, said, Our creativity will be our sensory system.⁴ Only a strong and lively imagination will enable us to deal effectively with this fluid, changing reality.

The practice of art encourages intuition, openness, discipline, and endurance. Art is not just a matter of expressing in an outer form what we already know. Like yoga, art is a union of the known with the unknown. Although we may begin an artwork from a feeling or thought we know, art is not just expressing that feeling or thought. It is not just illustrating something we understand; instead, it is an exploration that steps off the known and moves out to what is beyond.

Encountering the unknown through the making of art is an ancient practice that has always been a part of the human experience. Tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors—men and women—would retreat into the darkness of caves⁵ to paint images that are still alive for us today. For millennia, the greatest art has been found in places of spirit. Similarly, visual images, music, poetry, and dance all play key roles in most indigenous worship. Throughout our history, art has allowed spirit to be embedded in worldly life.

In today's world, we sense the need to integrate art, spirit, and ordinary life. I recently heard Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of Love, Medicine, and Miracles, give a talk on his experiences in medicine. I was delighted when he showed drawings made by his patients that he considered essential to their healing. In the past century, we separated medicine and art, putting facts in one corner and creativity in another. Rational analysis guided our work and shaped important decisions. We left the sacred and the artistic for Sunday morning worship or Saturday night social events. Today, many of us still hold onto this twentieth-century bias, placing more emphasis on math and science in schools, cutting arts programming, and omitting theology altogether. But recently, many creative people have begun integrating art, science, and spirituality. Major medical centers are now bringing both spirituality and the arts back into the healing environment, discovering that the combination improves the chances of getting better. Now you may want to use both spirituality and the arts to heal yourself and your community.

The complementary practices of yoga and art create a place where both the rational and the mystical can work together. A regular practice of yoga and art allows us to be creative, and that creativity gives us a degree of objectivity. We can't make good judgments if we're not objective. Good judgment combined with forgiveness expands the self to become what Yogi Bhajan calls bilingual—speaking the languages of both rational analysis and creative intuition.

PERFECTLY IMPERFECT

As you begin practicing yoga and art, know that your efforts will not be perfect. And they don't have to be. You will make certain choices and learn from them. Some of these choices may be disappointing, while others may bring joy and satisfaction. Yoga and art, like human life in general, is a complex mix, a dance between karma and dharma. Let me explain.

We are all born with a dharma—the path for our own soul. Only the individual person can discover this path. The soul keeps sending opportunities until we find the path. When we lose our way, our dharma follows us until we get back on track. Sometimes it isn't easy to see our dharma, especially in the tougher moments of seemingly being locked into our karmas. If we look back on a rough time, however, we might see the dharma's influence and realize that it never left us. It was there all along.

LOOKING BACK

In ancient times, artists understood that creative ideas come from a muse. In ancient Greece, for example, the mother of the Nine Muses was Memory. Let's take a moment to explore this idea of memory in art and to invite the mother of the muses along on our journey.

If you have spent any time with children, you have most likely witnessed their natural creative ability. That ability doesn't disappear in adulthood. You, too, have an innate capacity to create images. Recall your childhood. Didn't you create things quite naturally? Stir your memory a little further:

•  What is your oldest memory of being creative?

•  Was anyone else with you?

•  How did others respond to your creative expression?

•  Did any objects in particular inspire you as a young artist?

Perhaps you grew up in an environment that nurtured your creative unfolding, or maybe you are only now giving yourself the time and materials to discover that creativity. Perhaps you were creative at one time but lost touch with that essential part of you. It's never too late to begin or to return. Don't worry. You have everything you need, and you are perfectly prepared for the experience ahead. You have the right body, the right mind, and a limitless, beautiful soul.

MY STORY

Contemplatively remembering the past nurtures the soul.⁶

Thomas Moore

My math and language skills were slow to develop, but I was always good at art. In grade school, my book report covers were the ones the teacher would hang up and praise. I enjoyed the attention, but I knew that the praise wasn't what art was about. I clearly remember wishing I could concentrate on the painting rather than on what others would think of my painting.

I was 15 years old and studying art in a high school in Queens, New York, when I took my first yoga class. The teacher was a Catholic monk who had come to the Northeast from a Midwestern monastery to study with the yogis arriving in New York City. We took all the desks out of our classroom and sat in a circle on the floor, chanting, meditating, and practicing pranayama (breath control). With the other students, I painted a tree that covered the entire wall of that room.

Later, in my 20s, while trying to establish a career as an artist, I took my first Kundalini Yoga class. I loved the movement, meditation, and study. The class read the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and we talked about yoga as a lifestyle. One week, the teacher announced a women's yoga camp in New Mexico. I signed up and soon found myself with the Master of Kundalini Yoga, Yogi Bhajan. That summer, something happened that is hard to explain. I experienced myself as one with the source of everything. I wasn't afraid; I didn't need anything. For the first time in my memory, I felt fine just the way I was.

Although those feelings beneath the campground's cottonwoods were real, I wasn't able to sustain them. When I returned home to New England, I swung between a new sense of peace and old anxieties. Sometimes I completely forgot the things I had learned in New Mexico and grasped for something that I needed to do, be, or possess in order to feel that peace again—the right graduate school, the right turban, the right sadhana (personal practice), the right boyfriend.

In 1985, while in graduate school for creative art therapies, I took Kundalini Yoga teacher training in Massachusetts. Gurucharan Singh, a master of Kundalini Yoga and one of Yogi Bhajan's first students, was a trainer for the course. He invited me to teach art as part of a weekend Kundalini Yoga retreat he was offering on the equinox. At the retreat, he offered me a carnelian mala (prayer beads that Yogi Bhajan had given to him) to wear for the weekend. Art and Kundalini Yoga was launched in that generous moment. Many teachers all over the world have stories like this one about Gurucharan's kindness and encouragement.

I started to run Art and Yoga groups at our yoga center and did individual sessions with clay and drawing. Those early years were wonderful, but they were also difficult. I had to sort out my new identity. How to be a yogi, an artist, and a psychologist; how to be a student and a teacher of yoga; and how to be a wife and a mother—all at the same time. I lost my way more than once. By some grace, I kept practicing and studying with Yogi Bhajan in New Mexico and Florida, as well as in the Northeast when he came here to teach. In between those encounters, I wrote to him. He was a generous teacher and always answered his students' letters. He gave me the name Hari Kirin. Hari means the divine creative feminine, and Kirin is a beam of light that can cut through the darkness. I understand this name to be my job description.

Yogi Bhajan was the Mahan Tantric (Master of White Tantric Yoga) and was named a Master of Kundalini Yoga by age 16. He himself drew, painted, wrote poetry, and was a remarkable storyteller. Being creative was a natural part of his practice and his teaching. From 1969 to 2004, Yogi Bhajan taught all over the world, delivering kriyas (a set of exercises) exactly as he had received them. He asked his students to teach even the most esoteric techniques openly so that everyone could benefit from them.

The work I do is possible only because I am his student. All the yoga and meditation presented in this book came from Yogi Bhajan. I have not added or changed anything about this extraordinary spiritual technology; instead, I present each series of exercises to you as he gave them to his students. I hope you will take the yoga and art in this book and practice it and share