Me and my life…

I am a Kundalini Global yoga teacher based in Wolverhampton, West Midlands who also teaches online. 

Kundalini Global classes are pretty cool. Why? In the simplest terms, they can gift you with tools to reset your stress system very quickly, bringing you to a, perhaps unfamiliar, place of gentleness, stillness. And safety. 

That is perhaps an odd word to add isn’t it? Safety. It’s the most important, to me. 

I had no idea what Kundalini Yoga was when I first stumbled into a Kundalini Yoga as Taught By Yogi Bhajan class several years ago as a highly-dysfunctional thirty something clad entirely in black lycra.  

I joined expecting exercise and, instead, found an unhealthy obsession. It was all a bit odd, but I loved it. I have always loved weird. 

I wasn’t sure, at first, of how it worked, but I was immediately hooked. I’d never felt how I did after a class. The only problem was that, so beguiled was I by how different I felt after a Kundalini class, I bought in to a huge amount of cult thought about what I should do and be in order to deserve and benefit from the practise. 

Over a few years I changed most aspects of my life: how I slept, how I ate, what I wore, what I read, listened to… how I interacted with the world. I became terrified that if I got things wrong, if I missed a daily Sadhana, it would all fall away and I’d be back where I began: anxious, stressed, small, scared, ‘unholy’.

I kept going, and going, and going. The more I benefited from all the 40 day Kriyas and punishing meditation practises, the more I was seduced into believing I should share the practise on with others. “I should become a teacher!” I decided. But something always held me back.

The cognitive dissonance I experienced when I sat alone at night and reflected on the teachings, on how thin and exhausted I was, how my family thought I had joined a cult, how my love of leopard print, synthetic, clothing had become hidden under a mountain of white, organic, cotton, and how I felt compelled to lie about ever allowing my children to eat sugar, or that I ever ate none-organic apples or drank tap water, to anyone else who taught it, always stopped me from pursuing what, in my deluded state back then, felt like ‘a calling’.

And then, mindlessly scrolling instagram one day as I waited at the school gates, I came across Carolyn Cowan and something she was starting called Kundalini Global. Thank fuck for that.

I have changed as a result. I am more real. More adult. I am calmer, more present to my life, and more accepting (damn, even proud) of my many, many, imperfections.

I owe Carolyn for much. I hope that I can share on all I have learnt in a way that does her teaching and generosity justice, by being myself and staying in my lane in terms of having integrity, boundaries and my head screwed on straight as a teacher.

Away from yoga, I am a mother of three amazing children. They have no interest in yoga at all. I have a truly fascinating career in publishing where I have taken on roles that have varied from being a Digital Manager for an education publisher to the Managing Editor for a collection of lifestyle titles. Most of that online. I love the Internet. I know. Weird! These days I mostly do freelance work to fund my yoga habit and help pay the bills.

People often ask about how I manage to do ‘so much’. The only answer to that is that I work hard. Too hard, often. I ‘manifest’ my life via extremely long days, late nights and too much coffee. I get headaches quite often. I know, it’s terrible. I need to stay better hydrated. I’m bad at that. Still working on the adulting thing!

I love to run, to walk in nature, to climb trees. I play the flute, write (I bloody love to write), spend far too much money on books, where I lack any form of self control, so they pile up around my life like mountain ranges. Most of them get read. I love to create things. Music, stories, blogs, candles, art. I do like to keep my hands and mind busy.

More and more, though, I am finding that I have landed into a way of being that allows me to be extremely present to my life. Where I have extended periods of calm and of stillness in my body and mind. I do not attribute this solely to yoga, but it has definitely helped me to get here. So has spending less time on my phone.

I am sober. 4 years at the time of writing.

I don’t like to be put into boxes. I have never felt like I fit in, never had a label that felt like it fit, not in any aspect of my life. What I know now is that such an experience is not only far from unique but also, guess what? It doesn’t matter. As soon as I realised it was how ‘not fitting in’ made me feel that was the problem, not the not-fitting-in itself, things began to unfurl. In the best way. 

I am not sure what else you might need to know about me. I get asked most often about the tigers and the art. “How do you make them?” … “Why tigers?”… I will never have a satisfactory answer for either. I enjoy making them, I think tigers are cool and beautiful. I don’t think the art I create is a sign of any awakened Kundalini energy or special skill. It’s just basic digital collage made by someone with a pretty weird brain, bizarre ways of working, and a vivid imagination.

I love fancy dress, I love Diet Coke (shhh, don’t tell the spiritual police) … I am upfront about the fact that my life is really unglamorous, messy, and too often fulfilled by Amazon. But it is also, very often, a lot of fun.

I live in Wolverhampton, usually voted the most depressing place in the UK to live. I like it here. Perhaps, I could even propose, it is somewhere I do feel like I fit in.

I’m just a human being with some tools to share and a desire to do that creatively.

It did take me a long time to realise how much of my life was spent in a state of constant hyper vigilance and anxiety. It was that state that brought me to yoga. And it was that vulnerability that allowed me to fall into this world in an extremely unhealthy way, initially.

My commitment is to never take a position, a role, that would mean that happened to someone else.