This is a Part 2 of a two part interview with Param Jap Kaur. Click here to go to part 1!
MY: Do you have any favourite Kundalini yoga music?
PK: Oh I have a hard time answering that because I love music so much. Yes there are certain tracks I really, really love. There’s a couple Jai Jagadeesh tracks and of course Snatam Kaurs “In the Light of the Naam” the new one for Sadhana is just so peaceful and has such a high vibration. Krishna Kaur’s “Rakhe Rakhanhaar” is one of my favourites too. Its a good one to get people moving. The hard part is just saying one or two! It’s the mantra I fell in love with. I like Simrit Kaur’s Ardass Bahee, Ram Singh’s Suniai – the part of the Japji about listening.
MY: I’ve never heard of that one.
PK: Here, maybe I can play you a little bit. {music starts} Can you hear that?
MY: Yeah, I can.
{Pause a moment}
Oh, I’ve totally heard that before! I like it!
{Music is turned off}
PK: He’s singing part of the Japji.
MY: Thanks for sharing that. Do you make any Kundalini music?
PK: No I don’t know that I am that musically inclined though I do enjoy chanting. I think I’m built more for chanting than singing. I certainly have a great appreciation for it, that’s for sure.
MY: I can really tell you love it. Your whole voice changes when you talk about the music.
PK: Well, I tell you, the mantra gets me through, whenever I’m having a difficult time. Like Snatam’s Chattr Chakkr Vartee; when I was having a rough time I just kept playing it, playing it, and playing it. It helped. Mul Mantra from Sada Sat Kaur is a good one. Sat Kirin’s tracks are good too.
Mantra can get you through so much. I used, like a lot of people out there, got very angry and impatient when I drove. Once, my friend and I were going to see the Dalai Lama and I was getting very irate and swearing at someone who cut me off. She was just laughing, and she said “It’s so funny because we are going to see the Dali Lama, one of the most peaceful people on the planet, and you’re swearing.” so I started playing more mantra when I drove and now I’m perfectly calm when I drive and I don’t get mad any more. {Laughter}
MY: That’s awesome.
PK: For whatever ails you mantra will help!
MY: I never thought of mantra that way.
PK: Yeah, when I’m working too, especially given that I know that my current job isn’t really where my heart is and what I need to be doing in this world to express my soul, the mantra keeps me grounded and calm. It’s so funny how many people will to come to my office and just want relax and sit and listen to the music.
We are really blessed in Calgary because we have a pretty good chant community going on. Sat Sangeet I’m pretty sure you know – Tracy Gawley and the musicians she plays with – they do chant circles every month. We have other people from other cultural backgrounds who do different types of chanting. Its really nice there’s so much out there and it seems to be getting a bigger and bigger following all the time. I think people really need these tools.
MY: I agree with you. It seems like people can really feel the power of the mantra. I definitely can feel it for sure and I notice I’ve definitely fallen in love with it. When I first started Kundalini Yoga I never ever would be caught chanting. Now I’m the first one to chant. It’s weird. I go into the Kundalini yoga classes sometimes and I joke around with people because you can always tell who’s experienced Kundalini yoga before because there are always some who are so loud and so into it, and those are the ones who studied Kundalini yoga. Yup, they totally get it. Everyone else is just so quiet and tentative.
{Laughter}
PK: Yeah, some people I know when they first start find the mantra to be very intimidating. But once you have that experience and start meditating and chanting it just opens up so much.
MY: Yes, it does. I love how it changes everything through sound. When your meditating you can actually feel it going through you changing things. I love that feeling.
PK: It’s amazing how it has different effects on different parts of your body. You can feel how the meditation is designed to work on certain things. Some of the ones, especially the ones to open up the frontal lobe and work on the brain it can be a weird feeling at first. You can feel the shift and the opening. It’s very unusual and very cool.
MY: What would you say is the meditation that most powerfully affected you?
PK: That’s a tough one. Having done the 21 stages of meditation we do Sordarshan Chakra Kriya. That was incredibly powerful.
MY: I know it’s a tough question because they all affect you.
PK: Its very tough. I’ve had experiences like for Conscious Communication where we do the Breaking the Mask meditation, and I tell you, it was very interesting to see how many people hated that meditation. It was such a struggle for so many people to get to the 90 days. I know it did have an incredible affect. You do have a recognition of the different masks you wear in different situations and how you put up a front and how you don’t need to allow that to fall away. That was a very powerful experience.
Like you say, its very difficult to choose one. I love the meditations and I find I just love doing the practices. I usually do a 90 day or longer practice with a meditation.
I’d say one of the most powerful experiences I think I’ve had was at summer solstice when on the full moon we did the Healing Ring of Tantra. We had around 80 people in the circle and about 40 or 50 people lying in the middle and that was amazingly powerful. It was beautiful.
MY: That just gave me chills!
PK: If you ever get the opportunity go for it!
MY: I would love to! Right now I’m just getting my feet on the ground and taking care of physicality. I just want to back track a bit. I noticed a couple of times you’ve said something along the lines of “as long as we allow the meditations to affect us”. Can people do a meditation with the intention of changing yet not allow the changes to happen?
PK: Yes, I think, sometimes our resistance is stronger than our intentions. The more open we can be… Its almost better if we don’t intend necessarily but to be open and allow – it better than to intend. Sometimes when you intend you engage your mind and you have expectation but when you just allow whatever may be to happen and be open to it you will have a deeper experience. That’s one thing we don’t tend to talk a lot about in yoga at all is how much it can bring up stuff, right?
And when things come up for release, especially when its an emotional release, sometimes we shut it down because we are too embarrassed, we don’t want to start crying in class, or however the release comes. I’ve seen some people release by laughing too, they will start to laugh out loud, however it comes. Sometimes we shut it down instead of letting it happen. The more you can be open and neutral to what is happening and just trust in that process the more you release and change and the greater the possibilities for shifts to happen.
MY: I actually remember my first year of doing kundalini yoga every day. I would pick the meditation that had a title that matched what I wanted. So I would end up doing these meditations with the expectation that they would do what they said they would do. There is not a single one that did exactly what it said it was doing in a way I could perceive.
So I would get to the end of the 90 days – like if I did So Purkh and be like “well my mates not here!” this didn’t work. {Laughter}
I got really, really mad, and I went through a phase of not having any intention at all. I ended up feeling lost because I was like “I don’t know what to pick, I don’t know which meditation I want to do, I just want to do one.”. It was an interesting shift.
PK: Well it would be interesting to see if you asked yourself what you need – not what you want – what would happen, which meditation you would end up doing and what the change would be.
MY: That’s a good point.
PK: So often our mind wants so much but its not necessarily what we need.
MY: Yes, that’s very, very true. Wise words.
PK: And another thing I was going to mention when things come up, and things will come up a lot, because we store a lot of emotion and trauma in our bodies. As we work with them these things come up for release too. A lot of people get scared as well; it’s sometimes hard to go through these things again. The joy of it is once you’re through, you’re through it right?
You learn to be different with whatever it is coming up.
MY: That’s part of the power of Kundalini yoga and why so many people seem to love it. It really does make transformation happen in people’s lives. It takes a lot of strength to allow the transformation to happen.
PK: It takes a lot of dedication to the practice and an openness and willingness.
MY: Truth. I don’t have anymore questions for you. Is there anything else you’d like to share or talk about?
PK: One of the biggest joys of Kundalini is that it is such a rich, rich practice and the teachings go so deep. You can visit them again and again and see something new in it. It’s amazing to see some of his original students too and have that experience with them because they’ve all taken different aspects of his teachings and run in different directions with them.
It’s truly a joy to behold how much diversity there is in our community. That was one of the things I enjoyed most at Solstice was talking to some of the old timers and hearing their experiences.
MY: They can tell some pretty good stories.
PK: Oh yeah, some wonderful wonderful stories. And that’s one of our strengths too. I think Calgary is just starting to become more cohesive as a community for Kundalini yoga and I think that’s going to spread through Alberta as there’s more people living here who have gone through the teacher training and are teaching and there is a lot more exposure, especially with Sat Sangeet bringing in some of the chant artists and having the chanting circles. People are coming at it from different angles as well, not just the yoga but from the chanting.
Community, I think, is really important as well. We are such good support for each other. We’re just so much stronger with each other and help each other go through things and heal better when we do it in a group. It’s really nice to see community growing in Calgary.
MY: When you were talking about that I had the thought that Kundalini Yoga is taking over Canada. It’s starting to show up everywhere even the oil fields. {Laughter}
PK: It is really wonderful if people have some ways to help themselves. That’s the main thing. You have to invest the time and effort into it, which is the time and effort you invest into yourself. You have to be willing to do that though. Some people in our busy hectic lifestyles have forgotten how. As Yogi Bhajan said its stress and depression are the biggest health issues we are facing in this new age. You can see it with so many people.
MY: Yes, it’s pretty prevalent.
PK: People don’t know how to take a break anymore and just relax. They just go, go, go.
MY: Its true, and I think our culture is set up that way too, whereas in other cultures there’s more space for people to just be and relax. Kundalini Yoga allows us to remember and create that space.
PK: Yes.
MY: Thank you so much for taking time with me for this interview! I really enjoyed it!
Through the teachings of Yogi Bhajan and the practice of Kundalini Yoga I have experienced a dramatic shift in my own physical health, mental balance and spiritual awakening. I believe that this ancient technology has the ability to help anyone open to experiencing it. It works one many different levels and as an intuitive energetic healer who has studied many different modalities, I have never found one before that is so complete. A blend of physical movement, breath work, sound current and meditation work for total mind, body, spirit balance. Time and effort put into yoga is an investment in one’s self; it is a practice of love. She currently teaches at Prema Health.
