by Shanti Shanti Khalsa, PhD, C-IAYT, Guru Ram Das Center for Medicine & Humanology Founder

I took my Kundalini Yoga teacher training in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1971. The first class I taught after graduating was in the Social Learning Unit of the Arizona State mental hospital. The folks in this unit were preparing to be discharged and the medical director wanted them to have a way to return to calm when their emotions were activated. Today we call this self-regulation.

Right away I saw that I could not teach them in the way I had learned. They needed smaller steps and a slower pace. They needed repetition, not new kriyas each week.

I didn’t recognize it at the time, but these were the first seeds of therapeutic Kundalini Yoga being planted, and the start of bringing Kundalini Yoga into healthcare.

Fifteen years later I’m in Los Angeles and the AIDS epidemic has erupted. Students with orange fungus growing in the creases of their skin started coming to class. They had long white tendrils growing out of their tongue. Their lymph nodes were so congested, so swollen, that it was painful to lift their arms. They had fevers that could not be explained. They had wasting syndrome. At this point I had no experience working with anybody who was sick, let alone those with a life-threatening illness.

Like many Kundalini Yoga teachers, I first went to the manuals for something to teach them that they could actually do. The kriyas for the immune system were way too vigorous for someone in that condition. I was really at a loss and humbled by the fact that they came and wanted to learn. This was in the time when there was no medical treatment for HIV disease, and people were greatly afraid. Still, they had hope that perhaps yoga would help them feel better, if not actually get better.

Then I had a key realization: we teach Kundalini Yoga to the person, not to the diagnosis. So, if I’m looking through the yoga manuals thinking, ‘I have got this student with diabetes, where are the kriyas for diabetes?’– I won’t find them. I won’t find them because Kundalini Yoga does not teach to an illness. It teaches to the person with that illness.

Therapeutic Kundalini Yoga Teaching Tip #1:

Teach to the person, not to the diagnosis.

Then I had another profound realization: There’s a difference between prevention and treatment. When the manual says a kriya is “for something” it usually means it is for prevention and health maintenance. It is not for treatment of that something. As Kundalini Yoga teachers, we are trained to teach healthy people to reach their excellence. We are not trained to teach Kundalini Yoga to people with health conditions.

Therapeutic Kundalini Yoga Teaching Tip #2:

Teaching a person to recover from an illness requires a separate set of skills and a different way of thinking than teaching for prevention.

When I taught to the persons with HIV/AIDs, not to the diagnosis–when I brought a different way of thinking and taught yoga they could do within their physical and energetic ability—they began to feel better. Lymph nodes returned to normal size, current infections reversed, pain was reduced.

Therapeutic Kundalini Yoga Teaching Tip #3:

Match the yoga to the student, instead of attempting to match the student to the yoga. Meet your students right where they are, with a yoga practice that matches their current circumstances. From here they can build their resources, raise their vitality, and expand their capacity for self-healing.

Once you apply them, these three tips are powerful and effective, more than you might imagine.

And they work across all manner of conditions. All forms of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, even anxiety and depression.

These are some of the best kept secrets in Kundalini Yoga and I am happy to share them with you.

As we continue our 40-year celebration next month, I’ll share the next part of the story – with more therapeutic teaching tips and how the psychology of health recovery entered the picture and its importance for teaching therapeutic Kundalini Yoga.

If our story has you curious about bringing the effectiveness of therapeutic Kundalini Yoga into your teaching, we invite you to browse our website and explore first steps with our Foundations of Kundalini Yoga Therapy course, learn about our 300-hour certificate training, Bringing Kundalini Into Healthcare, and more.

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