Healing with Kundalini Yoga

by Karen Jones

For the first thirty years of my life, I thought that life was pretty ok. I had a fun life – I have an international family and was blessed to have traveled my whole life, my sister and I went to Ivy League schools, our brother is a top model and brought me to shows and shoots in Paris. I went to business school in London, and worked on a specialty team that worked with movie studios, and my work even took me to yachts in Cannes. Outwardly, I would say my life was very enviable, but inside I was just going through the motions.

I was so exhausted from work that once I woke up on a weekday morning with a takeaway curry and a cigarette butt in my bed, the television still on having fell asleep in front of it the night before. That should have been a clue that that’s not exactly living to my greatest potential as a human being, but it didn’t really occur to me.

At work, I was so bored – I was surrounded by men – most of them decent people- but all of them caught in a labyrinth of their own egos. We worked a lot, but free time was spent looking up BMWs or Cartier watches on the web, and socializing was primarily alcohol based. Basically, it was a means to an end to get money into my own personal account to eat out and shop, and of course “security.” If you asked me what the primary emotions I would be feeling were, I would have said exhaustion and oddly, satisfaction at all that I thought I had achieved in life.

The irony of this whole biography was that I thought I was the greatest living yogi. A ballet dancer since I was a small child, I picked up yoga in my teens as an adjunct to my dance training. I got hooked, and started a regular practice when I was 17 or 18, so by the time I was thirty I was a regular practitioner, sometimes practicing yoga ten hours a week. Ashtanga, Baptiste, Bikram, I did it all - always the awe of everyone in my classes. I really enjoyed my practices, and found that they made me feel relaxed, happy, and an all-around nicer person, but I had no idea of what awaited me: the experience or elevating my consciousness and healing through Kundalini yoga.

One day in July of 2007 on the way to work, I was on the Tube (London’s subway system) when the lights went out and the train shook abruptly. The Tube service was stopped, and everyone on the train was rushed out of the station. The streets were chaos, with confused people pouring out of the Tube station exits. As I started walking from the Tube station to my work building, I passed men in hazmat suits pulling out bodies.

For the next weeks, I read the papers every day, pouring over the personal profiles of the people who were killed or injured. I felt magnetized to the stories of these people’s lives – the girl who had a prosthetic leg and walked down the aisle, an accountant from Poland who had graduated from music school, a drama school graduate that was working as a finance officer. I picked up on this pattern that people had passions for their hobbies, or what they had studied, but not for their jobs. All of the obituaries were like: She was a lawyer, but she loved to sing in her local choir. She worked in an office, but was a talented artist. He was an engineer for British Telecom, but a passionate human rights campaigner in his spare time. Fifty-two people were killed that morning on the Tube, most of them going to jobs they probably did not like.

Every time I got on the Tube, my pulse raced, and the apathy that I felt about my job amplified. At work, my boss once went on a tirade that I put the wrong date on a document – a detail that had no impact at all, and I simply couldn’t believe that this was an adult life that I had signed up for voluntarily – to be an adult in a theoretically civilized place of employment, whilst a man who I had worked long hours to enrich made obnoxious sneers about my education and supposed intelligence. I should have quit on the spot, but the lure of my annual bonus shackled me to just sit there and take it.

A few months later I was in Washington DC, when my heart stopped suddenly in a restaurant in Georgetown. I didn’t realize it then, but that event was my “out” to the life that I had been leading. I revived. An hour later, my heart’s electrical patterns were recorded by a machine at the hospital - “Nothing exotic here,” the technician said with a smile, but five minutes later a very serious looking doctor walked in the room.

Six months later, I was having a pacemaker implanted when the procedure went horribly awry. During the implantation, my atrium was sliced and my heart and lungs collapsed from the bleeding. I had no pulse, nor was I breathing. Clinically, I had a so-called death experience.

Miraculously, I survived after three heart surgeries (including open-heart), multiple lung surgeries, and a medically induced coma. My ribcage was broken, and I had six inch-long punctures in my lungs. Nerves and muscles around the heart were torn to, and my atrium was lacerated. Whilst I was in the hospital or in deep, deep states of pain where I was barely conscious, a light would come into my front cortex and start to heal me. I could send it around my body, deep into my cells and would will this light to repair my collapsed lung. Sometimes, when the respiratory therapists would come in to force me to take deeper breaths, the light would again fill my mind and send me encouragement. Sometimes Jesus was there, other times it was Mamma Mary.

As I healed, scar tissue started to form inside and outside. The pain and agony were indescribable; I could not stand for even my hair to be touched. I could not sleep – I was like a newborn baby, sleeping one hour on, one hour off for months, and when I woke up I would be on fire with pain. The itching was unbearable – it felt as though worms were crawling underneath my skin.

The nerves around the heart had been cut, and the doctors say it’s one of the most physically painful things that someone can endure. Whilst I slept, the anesthesia would start to detox from my body, and every morning I was gripped with wrenching nausea, which made the pain in my chest only worse. I was told I should never have children, and that I might have to take immune-system depressing steroid shots in my bones for the rest of my life. Walking down the street felt like scaling Mt Everest, and I was only 30. I had constant lung infections, measles, shingles, mouth sores for over a year. It was a living hell.

I continued to call upon the Light, but now that I had returned to a more earthly awareness, I couldn’t access It as easily. I wanted to commit suicide but a very deep seed inside of me held the belief that I must have survived for a reason. What I didn’t realize at the time though was this idea that I had – no matter how fleeting it had been, had taken hold and as my body failed to heal, it started to become more and more toxic, in different forms of beliefs that I had about myself and what I was told to believe.

The first months after my surgery, I was kind of ok, mentally. People would say to me “you’ll be fine in six months,” and I believed it. But when the six month mark hit and I wasn’t in perfect health yet, I began to feel depressed. The more doctors I went to, the more they confirmed that I was in poor health. The number of limitations my life was under started to pile up: don’t go to movie theaters, don’t go to the mall, don’t ride a bike, don’t swim. At one point, I was seeing 24 doctors on a regular basis and I knew that none of them could help me. So I began to do something I hadn’t done since I was a small child; I prayed for help and to be healed. I prayed and I prayed and I prayed and I started to get better incrementally, but I was still crying all the time; the kind of crying where you would wake up crying. I obsessed over my limitations and the dissolution of the illusion of security in my life. Obviously, I had tried many paths to heal: I had the world’s most useless psychiatrist, physical (cardio and respiratory) therapy was slow and agony, I read every healing book I could get my hands on. I kept fresh flowers every week and started eating close to 100% organic food, but it still wasn’t enough.

One night, I had a vivid dream in which Jesus visited me. We were in a desert, rocky place – the kind of place you might imagine Jesus might hang out in, and he was wearing red and white robes. “I am sending someone to help you,” He told me.

Shortly after, I was visiting my sister in Los Angeles when she brought my to Golden Bridge Yoga, a yoga and spiritual community upheld by the original devotees of Yogi Bhajan who have become master teachers of Kundalini Yoga. Her favorite teacher is a woman called Tej, and she said, "Tej will help you. I don’t know what else to tell you to do. Move here and just do Kundalini forty days in a row." When I first went to Tej’s class, my sister cried when she saw me because she said I was such a shell of my former self. I had not gone to yoga since before my accident, and this was my first time back. My shoulders were permanently hunched to protect my chest, and I must have stopped 20 times during the class because I was out of breath, but I kept coming back because I did not know what else to do.

After a few days, strange things started to happen. During the classes, I would feel intense pressure in localized parts of my body, and then it would release. Like through an ear canal, or a knee. We worked on different themes, like clearing anger and all of the anger I had been holding against my doctors left my bodies – spiritual, emotional, and physical in a cloud of black smoke that came through my mouth.

But most amazing, the Light came back, and not in a subtle way. In Kundalini, we use different vocal tones to call in the healing light of the gurus and the angels, and their love and assistance cleaned my body of any toxic emotions that were causing the cells and nerves of my body to still feel pain. I cried almost every day of those forty days, but not out of despair, but cleansing, relief, joy and beauty.

I learned specific meditations, breathing patterns, and yogic postures to work on my specific issues. This is a precise science. By the end of the 40 days, my scars faded from an angry pink to being the exact same color as my regular skin – alabaster white. I can only imagine that the scar tissue inside dissolved as well, as I started to feel immensely better emotionally and physically.

Kundalini is different from what most people think of as yoga in America today. It’s not a workout, but an ancient technology of angles and vocal vibrations that vibrate the water and cells in your body to alter your state of consciousness to feel the Divine within you, or to alter your consciousness into another dimension where deep, deep healing can take place. It is a motor system that creates neuron reactions, just like the sun bursts. Along with the Light, came many beautiful and psychic dreams and visions during meditation, some confusing but most healing.

Kundalini yoga teaches you to access the ecstasy of love and the security of being one with God, so you don’t exercise strange behaviors looking for it in other people or places, or feel depressed because you think that you don’t have something. When your energy field is open to bounty, prosperity will pour in. And if something is missing, you are at peace with the fact that you’re not meant to have it at this moment so that you can soul-search and elevate to match a higher energy in the future. You know this because you feel the connection to the Divine and you trust your Intuition that something good is definitely coming. It’s a sublime state.

There are many paths to healing; but in my opinion Kundalini can help every soul. What I have learned is that there is not one person on this earth who is immune to a complete nervous breakdown at some point in their life. The majority of us weren’t raised in a Buddhist monastery, and even those guys have issues.

We all need to learn how to connect and ground, and feel a love that heals. Not love from our parents, friends, or romantic relationships that can kind of be love-hate relationships where we work out our issues, but a steady pulse of love through the nerve channels in our body. The kind of love that never hates, or gets annoyed with you like friends, family or lovers will. It is a love that has no judgment. Yogi Bhajan said: “It is a love that has no judgment, it hears nothing but love. It is the light in your eyes when you see the light in other’s eyes. Receiving pure prana into your body through Kundalini yoga stimulates the love syndrome in the subconscious, and we will experience a multiple universe of what we call love.” It is in the beat of every heart, but sometimes we just forget.

When I have extreme moments of grace while practicing Kundalini, I record them in my subconscious, and I call upon this experience during hard times. Today, a year after starting Kundalini, I feel so much passion to share this technology with others that I became a teacher. My body is healed, and my doctors are flummoxed by my consistently normal heartwaves. I have developed a very strong intuitive state by entering a space of complete neutrality, and listening to other people’s souls or messages from angels or God. My hands can pour Light and space into the bodies of others, to remove blockages and awaken them to ecstasy of the Love that comes from Kundalini. Whatever your problem in life is, integrate aspects of this practice into your life. Not everybody is called to go deep in this work, but anybody can benefit from having a toolbox to anchor you through challenging times.

(Editor's Note: I was in Kundalini Yoga teacher training along with Karen and was always struck by her strength and grace. She never projected any kind of "poor me" vibe and seemed the image of powerful shakti. She teaches with her presence, and her life and commitment to Kundalini Yoga will heal and empower many. Karen told me to recommend the beautiful, empowering mantra Chattra Chakkra Vartee to help you through hard times.)
Karen Jones recovered from a near-death experience and open-heart surgery at the age of 30 to become a healer and help others. She studied with Gurmukh, Tej, and Gurushabad – some of the greatest living masters of Kundalini Yoga & Meditation in Rishikesh India as part of Golden Bridge’s Level 1 Teacher Training. In the foothills of the Himalayas, she refined her ability to channel healing energy. She also studied Sat Nam Rasayan healing with Guru Dev Singh, and energy healing with David Elliott. She is a graduate of Cornell University and London Business School. She and health guru James John have an upcoming retreat at Blue Spirit Retreat Center in Costa Rica Nov 13-20, 2010. Karen is available for private consultations, and also teaches at Upstairs at Juicy Naam in Sag Harbor, New York.

Karen@neotaolife.com
www.neotaolife.com