STUDENT STORIES

Shri Kali was a very intense journey for many reasons. Previously, I had a chance to discover different lineages and a chance to stay in different ashrams. The experiences that I had were very interesting, yes, but some of them were painful, mentally and physically. This was leading others and me into forcing ourselves to go in a particular direction. Before Shri Kali and the Kaula system, I never had experienced a system that truly led me to listen to myself; go deep inside and open myself to others and the universe around. My heightened awareness is what occurred in the ashram. This is sometimes difficult, because as you are birthed in to a new way of being, it can be shocking, and that’s what happened to me. Some of the things about myself were really difficult to accept and to face. However, the next question after I accepted who I was, was then to figure out what I was going to do with that. In my first six months at Shri Kali, I found the answers to these two questions. Ever since, I have been answering the second question, ‘what am I going to do with this person’ with absolute respect and no compromise. I am not a nun and I live in a busy city. There is a reality to that and now I focus on finding a good balance with my reality here in Paris; a balance between the life that one has to build and my will to live this system. I am still working on this but it has been a very nice journey. I didn’t have the chance before Shri Kali to learn about my true self through listening and respecting, nor did I have a lot of love and compassion around this. As a journalist, I had the opportunity to interview a lot of people, like French Tantrikas and famous yogis who are very well known and write many books on the subject. Two of them spoke of something similar to the Kaula system and when I read their books and interviewed them, I knew that I wanted to know more. They were talking about non-duality, balance and boundaries. I was interested in getting to know the system by experiencing it, not reading it. As a journalist, I read a lot, but experiencing it is one of the most important things you can do. When I discovered the website for Shri Kali, I was really surprised. I remembered four years before, looking for some ashram where you could learn about Tantra, and I remember even typing in Goa, as I also wanted a change from the North. I wanted to study for a long time, and I wanted to be by the sea for that. This time, when I typed in Goa and Tantra, it came right up, whereas four years ago, it did not. I suppose that was not my time and now it is. The main thing that changed about me after Shri Kali was my ability to be decisive and trust what I wanted. Still, sometimes I am searching for the answer, but it is not like how I was before, where I would find one answer and then the next day have doubts again and have to look for something else. To reach a decision is very easy now. Even in a restaurant it used to be ten minutes just to decide what I wanted. It was hard to make my mind up on just about anything. Obviously, that came from a lack of self-confidence, love and trust of self. I have done a lot of therapy and work on myself over the years but like this book that Bhagavan advises us to read, The Turning Point, like that, for me, Shri Kali has been a ‘Turning Point.’ I had others in my life but this one was profound. I found my true self. I found it within myself, through the āsana, the prāṇāyāma, the lectures and all the work that we did there. I found it in my bones, my true self, so I didn’t need to be scared anymore. I just naturally embraced who I was without fear and that was a major turning point! Even though my reality wasn’t something I could dream of, I was content with it. I was embracing what life was giving me at the present moment in the now. I will be endlessly grateful for this system. Before I came, my knowledge of Tantra was mostly what we call Neo-Tantra. However, I could never judge that, because it brought me to Shri Kali. As for yoga, I had done hatha yoga. I would stay for six months in this ashram and six months in that ashram but my experiences were usually painful because I was in to ‘no pain no gain.’. I was on that train for at least five years. I was in touch with people that talked about Tantra but it was so New Age that I wasn’t in tune with it. For six months I stayed in Pune, in Osho’s ashram and everybody was talking about Tantra but for me it didn’t vibrate in myself. I didn’t know anything about Tantra but I could feel that what the people were giving me, as far as information, was not what I was looking for, so whatever the name, I didn’t want to know more. I was looking for something deep and also something that was simple, where life is what it is about, in the now, and compassion and love are everywhere. I am not a flower power girl or a hippie. I didn’t want to live in this town in India where everyone lives together. I wasn’t looking for something crazy. I was looking for the truth, for the true self. It took a while because I have been searching since I was twenty. It has been fifteen years now. I don’t regret anything because without my prior journey, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to receive the Shri Kali information when I discovered it. To me, Tantra and Yoga are definitely the systems that drive my life, without rules. I didn’t decide to live by Tantra rules. In a sense, I was already living by Tantra before, without understanding it. I was living it and then when I met Bhagavan and Ma, I thought okay, that is what I am trying to live by myself. At the very beginning, I thought how easy this is to live without fears, but I was laughing when I was saying it because my life before that was the opposite. I was fearful and doubtful. To me, Tantra is my life; fearless, doubt-free and full of love. Recently during a challenging situation, I experienced the difference of how I respond now versus the old me. Before, my answer to the struggle would have been to maintain the anger I felt inside. I would have played the victim; that was my favorite profile of myself. It’s so easy to be a victim. With this instance though, it hasn’t been easy, of course, but I could observe myself react in a totally different way. I have learned a lot and just after my stay in the ashram, I was full of very powerful energy. Everything that happened was very intense. When I arrived back in France, I was in France and doing my thing. I was full of everything that I had left. I wasn’t in my past; I was in the present. The capacity to not worry about the past and wonder about the future came from Shri Kali. I remember that Bhagavan told me once, that when I was on my path, everything would be so easy, and it is. I am still working on things but it’s not an issue anymore. Life is really easy. I feel so grateful. Bhagavan told me the very first day that I arrived in Shri Kali, as I was asking a lot of questions and doubting all the things that were being said to us; he looked inside my eyes and said, “You said six months and in six months you will know; I promise you, you will know.” And he was right, I do know. I was asking a lot of questions about everything, how do you know this, and that, how can you be so sure about it; the researchers say that and you say this and you say the Tantra way and why, etc. But Bhagavan was right in the end, I no longer had any doubts, I had my answers and more. I have read the books but I haven’t read them again. I used to be very in to books, but to me, the main thing was the personal experience. Before, a noun was a noun and everything had a word, you couldn’t mix it, you had to be precise. Now it is the opposite. A noun could be something else now and a word could be something else. It doesn’t have to be so precise anymore verbally. I found myself in this system through the prāṇāyāma, the āsana and the meditation. I found myself being peaceful and incredibly focused when I do śavāsana. I remember two years ago, I was in another ashram where this other guy was telling me that it is important to do śavāsana because it is like a nap. Now, for me, it is the most profound experience I have when I do my practice. I can see myself clearly and can relate to myself. I don’t do a lot of meditation or mantra but I feel that I meditate when I do śavāsana. At the end of my śavāsana, I can be in my backyard looking at my flowers, as I have a lot of plants, and I can feel myself in my śavāsana. So I don’t know if it’s Tantra, if it’s yoga or if it’s how one should describe the teachings but it is how I live. To teach the āsanas and the walking massage, with no exception, led me to a feeling of security. Since there is no teaching with force my students also feel secure so that they can let go of fear. I had an experience with one woman in particular. She was trying to get pregnant and she couldn’t. She had not had her period for an entire year. She was stressed and had a lot of doubts about her husband. She was really tired. We started by doing some classes, which were each very intense. She once cried, and then in the next one, she was very angry and in the last one, she was happy and loving. After three or four days she had her period and was so excited. During a dinner party, she came to us and showed us that she had blood on her pants with so much joy. It’s a beautiful feeling and a beautiful experience to witness such benefits in my students as well. Teaching nourishes me and I feel very comfortable teaching this system, for as I said before, I have no doubts. To experience this system, by itself, it’s complete. However, it is easy for us to receive it through other human beings but not a lot of us are able to receive it by ourselves. Bhagavan is a sincere and beautiful messenger and to me, he made the difference. I have met a lot of masters but Bhagavan has made my stay bigger and my being bigger.

I came to find solutions; answers. I had studied a lot of science up until PhD level but it was always missing something. It always felt like I was on one side of the coin. Here at Shri Kali, I found a beautiful system that gives me the spiritual part of life. There are mobile phones, computers and such but that is all matter and we are all living, spiritual beings. This part is not explained in modern western science, even if you study biology or chemistry or even if you go to a psychologist. These sciences are just looking at you as though you are machine, like in the Newtonian/Cartesian worldview. I have suffered from a personal autoimmune sickness that has attacked my eyes since I was only 3 years old. I have a lot of injuries and scars on my retina and it was pretty disturbing while I was studying or using the computer for work. But here I found a system that helps me reduce my stress levels and see life and the whole world in a holistic view. This, ultimately, helped me relax about the pain and frustration around the issues with my eyes. Originally I came to India to improve this health problem and to understand life. I never came here to become a yogi but now I am becoming a yogi through the process of being here. There is not one part of the system that I love more, it all works together. I love the āsanas. They bring your body and your skeleton back to health in a very nice way over time. They also balance your inner health. You drop your issues and all your ‘funny programming’ that you get from your parents, neighbors, TV and so on so that you can find your inner core and your true self. The philosophy gives you true information and a foundation to base your life on so that you can walk through your life with an understanding. The mantras and puja work to bring you deeper and deeper into your true self so that you can express from a place of honesty with yourself and everyone else. I left Vienna in 2012. I was unhappy. I had a well-paying job and success but that was not happiness. Nothing made sense. Everything felt ridiculous. I went to India, traveled a bit around and then came to Shri Kali. Here I found inner peace, relaxation, and patience with everything around me and with myself. I don’t have that hassle anymore that I have to achieve something. I just go and do and try to relax. This is nice. I can grow with this. I am very successful with this because I am no longer stressed when I start something. I just go in, think and then act, much more intelligently. I also realized that my tolerance level for my eye condition has gone up. I can read or be on the computer much longer because I am relaxed. I no longer internally emphasize so much on this problem. My nature is already non-linear so I love that about the structure here. I was doing management for a job back home and I always had a big problem personally with getting somewhere on time. It is still a process coming from a very linear culture, where you think things have to happen at a certain time or in a certain way. However, if you understand a little bit more of the philosophy here and also when you look to modern physics you can see that time is not really a linear thing. Slowly you integrate and go deeper and deeper. I came to understand this more as I read the philosophy. You cannot understand everything by reading it the first time so you read and read again. Later everything begins to make sense. There is no linear growth in the knowledge. The knowledge, experience and integration come like a spider web and eventually it all connects. Before I came to Shri Kali, I didn’t care too much about yoga. I had done some classes in Vienna but even then, I realized that it wasn’t really connected to the traditional understanding. It was gymnastics. The wholeness of ‘real yoga’ is a much more holistic system. It cares for more than the muscles and bones. It is more subtle than just going jogging, for example. I always knew that if I did yoga in the right system as we do here, that it would be so much more. I personally never had that need for competition that is so prevalent in modern-day yoga. I never understood why people wanted to play competitive sports, even as a child. I was more interested in playing in the treetops and building funny things with my friends, where everyone wins. School, also, was never understood from a point of competition for me, but from a point of interest and curiosity. I did it from a place of desire: I wanted to understand; I wanted to learn; I wanted to be able to build a robot; I wanted to be able to calculate all those funny things like planes flying and to understand the math and the physics. I wanted to culture my knowledge. Like many western people, we all have this neo-Tantric view. I am probably similar to many people who came here. I read a couple of books before I came but I had a very limited view. At Shri Kali, Tantra is portrayed very differently. It’s a very deep system here. You slowly grow yourself and your self-love, and from there, everything else comes naturally. I love the place. This place rescued my life. I love being here. I am happy to study with all these wonderful people. I enjoy watching people come and seeing how wonderfully they evolve. I am very happy to support and be a part of Shri Kali.

The first time I came, I came for only ten days and I felt it was such a very magical place. When I am came back here it felt like returning home. I just feel so relaxed. I don’t even miss anyone from home when I am here (laughter). I feel happy here. However, there are a lot of ups and downs with the inner work. I see the difference in how I was communicating at home versus here, because I am aware of so much more here. I am more aware of my feelings and how I communicate with others, the words that I am using and the games that I was playing before. Also, the yoga makes me more relaxed not just on the mat but also in general life. I am still struggling with my thoughts. I think too much. That I am still working on. Of course I would recommend Shri Kali to others! It is good for building yourself and exploring who you really are. Sometimes it is hard and you don’t want to face yourself, you want to leave the ashram, but this makes you stronger for the world outside of Shri Kali. This creates stability in who you are, and you begin to know who you are. I love the unstructured environment here because I also have to learn about being more flexible. Just to be in the flow is really good. The lectures with Whitney are my favorite. All the time I am hearing something new and even though I hear each lecture again each month, I still enjoy them. I even started to really enjoy Sanskrit and as I build words it gets more interesting. At first, for the first few classes it was difficult to get so I was bored but when I hung in there, it became really interesting. Before I came I didn’t really have a picture of what Tantra was about and as far as yoga goes, I have only done this system of yoga and I can just feel even though it is the only one I have done, that it is my system. I like that it has the relaxation and meditation aspects. I learn to just relax through this system and I don’t feel like I have to be any ‘better’ than I naturally am. I just relax and be me! I really love the conversations that I get in to here with people from all around the world. Almost every day I have some little conversation where I think, that really made my day! I love to hear other people’s experiences about being here. I love the weather and the nature in Galgibaga. I love the whole place! I love that we become aware of the fact that we don’t need so much stuff here, like a big car or a TV, or a lot of money. Life is simple here at Shri Kali. I will take this lesson back home with me. I will definitely be back!

When I met Bhagavan, I was twenty-six years old and I had a one-year-old child. I was mostly at home alone with a small baby and I had only been in Goa for a year. I wanted to experience my body and āsana seemed like a great place to start. I loved yoga but at the time, yoga and meditation were separate from one another for me. Before that, I was practicing kuṇḍalinī yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan. We didn’t have much choice in Russia at that time. There was Hatha yoga also but to tell you the truth, I was a very dynamic character and so I found it a little bit boring. Once I had an experience with kuṇḍalinī yoga, I thought I had found my path. Now I understand that instead of calming me down, this type of yoga made me more exaggerated and more emotional. At the time, I was young and always working with the body but then after having my baby, I just stopped. I didn’t know what to do. So when I met Bhagavan, I started to do āsana. I didn’t know much about the system. I had visited a few New Age Tantric workshops in Russia and it was always some practice in couples like couple meditation. When I started to do the Tri-doṣa āsana series of Shri Kali, I knew this was true classical Tantra. After our first session of Tri-doṣa, I understood this was about meditation. In the beginning, I found that it was very difficult for me to be there with closed eyes and for the whole three hours each afternoon. At this point, I realized that this must be something I needed to work on. For one year I practiced 3-4 times a week and slowly I started to understand what relaxation is after a year of this. After a year and a half, I started to be interested in philosophy. I started to read about quantum physics and I began reading all the modern texts that Bhagavan suggested. For me āsana was an introduction and afterwards I became more interested in the traditional texts and Bhagavan’s masterpiece, Divine Initiation. The change comes slowly, first you start with the āsana, then you begin doing mantras, the pūjā, and study the philosophy and then it becomes a really nice combination. When I started to study full-time in Malaysia for a whole summer without my daughter, I never left my room other than for 3:30 PM āsana. I was just studying. Now I am ready for the philosophy. It gives me strength and it clarifies my thoughts and my brain. One of the things about Tantra is that without any imagination, you just see clearly. When you feel confident, are practicing āsana for a while and all of your thoughts are going in the right direction, then the rest follows. It took time to understand this system and how it works, as it is a holistic and integrated system. It was difficult to understand how all of this comes together but after 6 months I understood that all the traditional schools work, but only after some time. You gain some inner experience and this inner experience is not going anywhere, it’s there all the time. All of the practices that I had been practicing before instead of giving benefits to my body were actually breaking me. They made my emotions high. Many kinds of yoga now seem to be about making you high, but yoga should be a much deeper process than that. It’s about understanding yourself and your inner reality and this takes time. This system slowly built me from the inside. Now there is a solid foundation in me. Once I saw this solid foundation inside of myself, I started interacting with life differently. Of course there are good and bad things in life but now I just react normally from a place of strength from within. This is the main thing Shri Kali gave me, this solid foundation of my inner world. In gaining this, I lost my weakness; I was no longer reacting to situations. Many things have changed about me after studying and practicing in this system. I am still learning how to be a good human being but many things have changed. I had a lot of neurosis. We don’t really speak about all the problems that we drop here, but all of a sudden one day you just notice that the problems disappear. I used to have a lot of fears but most of these fears are gone along with my conditionings and limitations. Before, it is as if I was living in a box and I just kept putting one condition in after another but then I stepped out of the box and the conditions no longer have a box to be put in to. For Tantric people, there are no limitations; it is all possible. When I speak to Bhagavan and I hear about his life experience, I am amazed, as he has done so many things in his life. I always notice when he speaks he has no sort of limitations or conditionings in his brain. He is open to everything. Psychologically speaking, just from practicing āsana for one year here, it had deep changes in me that I didn’t even realize. I stopped being so neurotic and I started being more relaxed. These basic things can change your whole life. Slowly many fears subsided. You build yourself and you start to see the world more clearly all the time. I started to attract good people in my life. I began to understand what I wanted in life as my confusion disappeared. I started to do new things for work, trying this business or that business, things I wouldn’t have done before. I started to have more courage. I began to really live my life. It has a lot to do with the hormones actually. Once you balance your hormone system you don’t have ups and downs any more. My emotions used to be so up and down and I thought this was normal because so many others were like this. I thought happiness was only momentary and that you couldn’t be happy all the time. But when I met Bhagavan and started practicing, after one year, I forgot about depression. From time to time I can be sad because I am human and situations happen but more or less, I am happy inside all the time now, I am quiet inside. Before, I remember when I would start to have depression that all of a sudden the world didn’t have any colors. I don’t allow this anymore. I can be sad for two hours maximum but then that’s it. Once I started to spend time with Bhagavan, he would energize me like a battery. In the beginning, I would have little bits of happiness but what was surprising is that over time this happiness took over the whole day. I didn’t believe Bhagavan when he said that I would be happy all the time. But I slowly realized the happiness wasn’t going anyway. Last year my father died very suddenly from cancer. He found out a month before he died that he had cancer. Shri Kali Ashram helped me a lot in understanding what death is and after that I also dropped one of my strongest fears, to lose my parents. Even when I saw my father dying, I was not crying. Inside, I actually was at peace. I flew in to Moscow from India and in the same day, I went to visit him in the hospital. He saw me, he lost his vision within 10 minutes and then he died within three hours of seeing me. In our Russian culture, when someone is dying it is a big drama. For me, it was like a ceremony. In traditional cultures, there are ceremonies and mantras for many things in life, such as death, and in fact it is actually even a celebration. It was more painful to accept death before I came to see my father but then when I came I just saw it for what it was. Some people keep the pain inside until they become ill. To get rid of any kind of pain inside, you need to have knowledge. When you have knowledge, you understand there is nothing we can do. Even with death, I too will die soon. I met his death without drama as a celebration. This system is complete: Not one aspect do I love more than the other. I really look forward to translating Divine Initiation in to Russian and I am continuing to enjoy the philosophy. I like that this system opened my eyes to such quality. What we have in the western world for yoga actually causes more distraction and sensitivity. You need to also develop your brain through meditation. What modern schools are doing is trying to shut down your brain so that you only follow your heart, but they don’t know what the heart is exactly so then it is only emotions and when you follow your emotions, you become more confused. Awareness is when your whole body is functioning and when your mental state is calm but also functioning. In the West now they are also beginning to teach some philosophy of yoga but all I see is a lot of aggression because it comes from a place of competition. You have to relax. Once you are relaxed, then you can start analyzing yourself just enough but not enough to beat yourself up. You have to understand sometimes that you are wearing a mask. It is like the lotus flower, you slowly open for yourself. You can’t just shut down your mind; you have to work with everything. That is what makes this system so beautiful, that it is integrated. Now I have a practice for a lifetime that gives me happiness and balance. I have a steady philosophy that I don’t need to believe any more. It has become factual inside of me. What else do I need?

Sinem is a Turkish clinical psychologist exploring how the Tantric tradition and yoga can improve peoples lives.

Always being fascinated by nature, I now find myself as a professor of geology at the University of Tübingen/Germany. Having followed a Hatha yoga teacher training before in Germany and giving seminars on stress management and yoga, I wanted to progress and learn about traditional yoga. So I went to the Shri Kali Ashram. And yes, what I found there was authentic, traditional yoga, but much more than that. Much more than I dared to expect ! What a fantastic, complete system for self-development and transformation, integrating body, mind and soul! Answers to fundamental questions about existence and the purpose of life. An awesome, mind-boggling, truly life-changing experience ! Embedded in a lively community of wonderful people, a very special atmosphere and a beautiful natural setting. I have changed my yoga class at the university to the Shri Kali system and started to teach this type of yoga also in public courses, with great enthusiasm and feelings of deep fulfillment. Many aspects of my life develop into an exiting state of flow. Sure I will be back at Shri Kali and I am very grateful for this unique opportunity to continue to study and discover......

My name is Melania. I was born in Misiones, Argentina. I am a human being who graduated from the University with a Bachelor in Social Communication and Journalism specialized in Corporate Image & Corporate Social Responsibility; I’m an actress; a Bodily Integrating Process facilitator, a Traditional Tantra Yoga certified teacher; and Catalina (15 ) and Teo’s ( 10) happy mother. I have lived in Spain for more than a decade. During my training in Bodily Integrating Process, having left my last job as a Press Manager for a fashion company, and after an event that was a challenge for my entire family (the kind that makes you reflect on life and death) , I decided to look for a school in India where I could deepen my knowledge of yoga and myself. So, one day I Googled “Ashrams in India” and then I added "Goa", because this place was very important for me during my first trip to the East and because I love warm weather!. As a result, many schools appeared and my heart choose Shri Kali Ashram. I went there for a month -not really for the 200 hs certificate, to be honest- with great enthusiasm and almost non expectations. It was a so noble, so deep and so powerful experience for me that I decided to return a few months later with my entire family . We live in the ashram in India for another 6 months, all together, each of us having their own unique experience at the ashram´s daily life. We share with groups of people that changed every month. Small groups of 12 people, huge groups of 90. Heterogeneous, multicultural, full of diversity. Most of them seeking the same thing: happiness. In the process, my whole being was opening to understand what was this about to meditate with the whole body, how as I relax the body allows it, who I am and what is freedom about ; what is human and how is to share humanity intimately. What am I doing here studying Tantra!? It was a smooth and powerful learning process in which I internalized the concepts of tantric science. Dharma, Artha , Kama , Moshka, those kinds of concepts were integrated into me with unusual rapidity. The daily practice of tri doshas balancing series, Ayurvedic walking massage , yoga viayama , Sanskrit , chants, night lectures , weekly pujas, the reading of several books (including for my surprise and curiosity, Vedic mathematics) , the infinite reading of The Divine Initiation , talks with Bhagavan and teachers , meetings with every human being, unlearning and learning , sharing love and expanding it ... I looked into tantra with great ignorance and suddenly the tantra- that monistic universal science - unknown to me settled into my life as a tool to clearly see, to devote myself to this divine human experience , to understand the value of life, of love. Shri Kali Ashram is a place where you can, if you let it, remap yourself , let your intuitive knowledge emerge and begin a process of learning that lasts a lifetime ; a process sustained by strong universal values and accompanied by the presence of Shri Bhagavan Shanmuka Anantha Natha who lived and learned the traditional tantra through his grandparents and his guruji first hand and welcomes every human being with simplicity and unconditional love. Back in Spain, I just honor myself and I celebrate life. I honor the divine in me which is to honor the divine itself. I see the world as huge, generous, abundant and I enjoy being human with others, in the others. I take every moment, every fact and especially, every encounter with another being, to get better myself. I live a happy normal simple amazing life! Mine! I started to share regular Traditional Tantra Yoga session in Northwest Madrid and offer seminars, workshops and retreats in Spain. I´m also working on some projects in order to bring the teachings and practice of traditional tantra yoga through retreats and workshops to Argentina and another Latin American countries this year. As a part of my commitment with Shri Kali, I volunteer as a bridge to facilitate access in Spanish language to people who do not speak English and who still wish to have access to the on line material published by the ashram or move to India or Malasya to study and understand the traditional Tantric Science and its system of timeless formulas. Inspired by the love and wisdom of Bhagavan Shanmukha and Shri Ma Kristina , I founded Shri Kali Spain with the aim of contributing to the dissemination of the teachings of my master and expand the practice of Tantra Yoga traditional in Spanish-speaking countries as a contribution to the happiness of all human beings.

I arrived at Shri Kali at the beginning of March 2014, intending to stay for one month only. After one month, I decided to stay on for another 2 months and complete the 500 hours teacher training qualification. I have found this to be a greatly beneficial, wholesome system that helped me understand myself . I have effortlessly quit smoking, by naturally seeing how it affected me. I have become more aware of myself and other people around me. I have stopped fearing life. This system has helped me to see my true potential and live my life to the fullest. I am forever grateful to the school for providing me with such a wholesome system that I can take home and share with others. The more people get to know this system, the better, as they will get to know themselves. I will be returning to the school to learn more. I see it as a life-long study. This course is an all-round, self-sustainable and self-sufficient program that brings the best out of the students and lets them see their true potential. Happiness and freedom are the fruits of knowledge. If you require more information, please do not hesitate to contact me via email.

I am a trained psychiatrist, integrative body psychotherapist and reconnective healing practitioner in Switzerland. Since many years i practice on and off different styles of Yoga including Asthanga Yoga. Following my longing for a deeper relaxation, embodiment and inner connection to my essence through the body I found and choosed Shri Kali Ashram for a stay and Yoga teacher training. After having Seen the Homepage and got a taste of the meditative approach by watching the Short Film I was convinced it was a place to go for me. And. . . I found what i was Looking for! I enjoyed many things: the beautiful location in the nature of Goa, the gentle Start in the day with the Siddhi Massage, the meditative and highly effective Yoga asana Serie, the gentleness of the teaching. For me it was a experience of learning which was opposite to my conditioning and my previous experiences: progression happens through being and letting go of tensions and not through pushing and being hard with oneself. Mentally I knew this before but the cellular experience I got here in my prestigious time in the Ashram. I feel this approach is a helpful way for individuals of our mental western culture. I hope this Ashram continues to be a place for reconnection with the essence and healing in the Future for many others!

My experience overall at Shri Kali has been positive. It is a good place that has a nice dynamic structure… a bit of a foundation that there is enough of regularity but yet you’re still in charge of your own path or what you are doing. For me, it’s been a really nice place, providing a stability that allows one to explore oneself. I originally came because I needed to reset myself. I had lived the first 40 years of my life “successfully”. I had done really well in my life in terms of the way that many people define “doing well in life”, but ultimately I wasn’t happy. I had run away from self-exploration before, so I decided at 40, after trying out that ‘normal’ path that wasn’t working for me for long enough, that it was time to try something different. I knew about this place from a friend so I thought it might be a good place to start the journey. Since I came, there have been many changes in me. My body has slowed down a lot, but not on a physiological level so much. The nervous energy that one may not even realize they tap in to, in order to propel you through life, that high frequency… that has now turned in to a lower frequency energy. On the physio-psychological aspect of things, I am really at home in my body in a non-physical way. I think before I had a real divide between my mind and body and whereas I am still trying to get a better understanding of who I am from a consciousness [unconscious] perspective, my body has slowed down and has sort of called me home. It sounds physical but it’s not. For example, I was riding my motorcycle at night, the lights were dimming and I had this anxiety. I asked myself what is this feeling, and I said, “oh, it’s anxiety and you haven’t had that for a long time”. The difference was, the anxiety I felt in this situation was purely situational and it was needed in order to be hyper aware for the situation at hand but this situational anxiety wasn’t piled on top of that base level of anxiety that is usually always there for many of us living in the modern world. I think that overwhelming anxiety I felt before was from always living on a mountain of anxiety. I would recommend this school for specifically a 300 hour program because it rounds out a person to teach but more importantly I would recommend it for a self-exploration that one needs to do in life. There are a lot of resources here. I think the āsanas are a great way to help the body get to where it needs to be, not in a physical way, but in a psycho-energetic way. You can read and do āsanas and all on your own but it’s a nice community and there are a lot of resources, so in that way, it is really nice to be here. I do think you need to have your own sense of self or at least find it quickly because you have to be really self-motivated to be here. I remember some people coming that just weren’t ready for it who would say things like “oh, I would stay longer if I had a better room or if it wasn’t so hot, or so cold”. When people aren’t ready for it, they will find a way out because nobody, in a sense, fixes your bike for you. You have to do it on your own. If you’re discouraged, you can talk to someone and they will help you, but if you don’t really want to do it, nobody says you need to, nobody is your mother or your father, so in that sense it is really up to you. I had to adapt to the organic non-linear approach to the school. The underlying aspects to the schedule don’t change much but the pieces change often. I like a schedule and so to have it change often has lead me to change the way I approach the life around me as well. It is more serendipitous. Things happen or they don’t. I have never had the feeling like ‘this isn’t going to get done’ so if something moves or changes it’s not like you are missing it… if it’s not on Saturday, it’s on Sunday. It has helped me live a more free flowing life and that has been wonderful. My body enjoys studying the āsanas. There is an intuitive aspect to studying Tantra that I still don’t have and I believe it is through the āsanas that I will get there, in that space that opens up when I allow it. Reading the texts like Parātrīśikā-Vivaraṇa and the supporting texts that go in to modern science, I have really enjoyed this aspect because it requires a lot of the mind and I have always enjoyed studying. Trying to get beyond just knowing the facts and actually having an understanding is not so easy but I enjoy this. Learning some of the principles has been really illuminating for me and I think that it has led to an increased ability to intuitively grasp. Right now it is jñāna primarily but I am hoping there is more bhakti brought in. It is the self-study, self-inquiry that comes from these books that I love so much. I think I have gotten a much more complete picture of yoga in all its aspects although I still don’t understand bandhas and before I had dismissed prāṇāyāma. I was so out of touch with my body when I first came that I couldn’t really tell what the merits were from prāṇāyāma but now I can tell if I haven’t done prāṇāyāma in just a couple of days. Within the āsanas, I really get more of a sense of that feeling of where I am and who I am versus a position that needs to be perfected from looking at something from the outside. That has changed for me dramatically because I used to see the āsanas as positions that you were only really ‘doing’ when they were physically perfected. Tantra has changed for me in the sense that I see it more from the logical side now. In the same way that the Vedas are formulae, this aspect of the philosophy is so much more, such as the tattvas and understanding how our expression logically comes all the way down from the Absolute. I have gained more of a comfort in the logic so to speak.

I'm Mayara, dreamer, lover and eternal learner. I always had everything I needed thanks to the efforts of my parents. One day when I was pretty young I learned the meaning of the word saudade, which does not exist in all language, but that is quite common in the Portuguese-Brazilian, we use when we feel the absence of something or someone. What I learned from saudade was that more than the possibility of losing someone what is more important is to keep looking for: Look the meaning of life, trying to understand who we are and why we are so, why we live, where we came from and where we go. Search for these responses is not straightforward, so for a while I got used to blame others while I found no answers. In 2007 I had my first contact with Hatha Yoga, after a few years, I met Tattwaratnanda Saraswati, my yoga master who gave me wonderful energy and encouraged me to go ahead with my yoga practices and who deeply helped me discover one of my passions. Knowing Art of living was also important to evolve my pranayamas’ practices and especially meditation. Through Yoga I know every day a beautiful part of me. Fortunately I had the opportunity to study at the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities- University of São Paulo where I met people and ideas, that somehow I was asked to reflect about the relationship between human and nature and then seek fairer ways of living thinking society, environment and economic system, that’s why I'm increasingly curious and passionate about Permaculture. I’ve discovered passions in my life - dance, swim in the silence of the ocean, the smell of the beach, studying, cooking, Sundays with family, sharing smiles, friendship and travel. For 1 year and almost 3 months I’m traveling the world alongside with an amazing person, what makes this experience more beautiful. I've been absorbing information and watching people from all places and cultures. Everything I'm learning makes me grateful to live every second of this adventure. When I arrived at Shri Kali Ashram I was seeking for practice yoga and after some intense months I became a certificated yoga teacher and student of traditional Tantra. My experience and others who lived there made e want to share the Kaula system wherever I am. Asanas, paranayamas, deep meditation, bandhas and pujas provide a spiritual path full of freedom in which our individual essence blooms naturally through relaxation of body, mind and soul. Some curves of life lead us to places where we never wondered going but that change our course forever for the better. Thank you so much for Bhagavan Shri Shanmukha Anantha for bringing the Kaula tradition to us through Shri Kali Ashram. I am grateful for so young to have discovered so many passions and to have the chance to live them, because each one of them teach me a bit of myself and the principles I want to base my life: joy, simplicity, dedication and truth.

I came originally to study traditional Tantra. Before coming here I had studied with a Śrī Vidyā teacher in southern India. At the time, it felt amazing, but there was still something missing. Then, by a friend’s recommendation I was told about Shri Kali Ashram. I assumed it was going to be superficial without any real depth in knowledge, but when I came here… whew… it was amazing. When I started reading the books, it brought all the spiritual concepts, all the knowledge, together. The questions, they really quieted down through doing the yoga, reading the books, and being with the community. Shri Kali, for me, has been… amazing. The whole system is complete in itself, and for me, the knowledge, the understanding from the source, from The Vedas, really is the glue of every spiritual philosophy. It’s all there for yourself, when you read this book [Divine Initiation], it’s there, and you can really read and interpret for yourself what is really going on, and understand from the bottom up, from the center. The teachers I had met before knew the stories, the knowledge, but they didn’t really know the science behind it. That’s what Shri Kali has, the science. The science is really simple. But if you don’t see it, then the books [Divine Initiation and Third Eye of the Buddhist] are basically written in a language that is impossible to understand if you don’t have the science behind it. So that is what is here – the code. It takes the mysticism out of it. The magic, there really is no magic… I mean it is magic but really simple magic… it’s accessible. There is no magical experience that you have to have. I really love the whole system. We are being taught here, not to see the world as separate but as the whole so I could never say that I have a favorite part to this system. The āsanas are a good base to turn your attention from the outside to the inside and then on that journey to the inside, you complement it with both the pūjā and the reading. It is all there. If you take one thing out, or if you just choose one thing and take it out, it’s no longer complete. I think coming here has really made me clearer in the philosophy of Tantra… it has really made it a conviction for me. I might have an idea about the Absolute or an idea about some people in the past who had this knowledge but coming here has really brought it home. It’s not just a way of life, it’s real, it is a principle, it’s living consciously. It has also made me more secure, a lot more. It has made me more peaceful, at least here, but when you take this outside, that’s a different story, that’s more difficult, to embody the Essence when the world is really going in a completely different direction and when people are really coming from a completely different mindset. I get sensitive… rrrrrrrr! I think the non-linear structure at Shri Kali is amazing. It is really what I have been trying to get out of my whole life, when people are trying to impose this way of living on us… to get a certain job, to go to college, etc. I have always been fighting against this. I was really fighting with myself too because I was really just reacting. Since I wasn’t really adhering to what others imposed on me, I just reacted to this imposition. For me, this dynamism, is really the way of living, you can’t put it in a box. You have your penguin, and you want to walk your penguin but people keep telling you take your penguin to the zoo, but your real self, that dynamic part of you, doesn’t want to be put in a box where all the other penguins are. The āsana practice I originally wasn’t really interested in. I was more in to the philosophy side of things, and I was like, I don’t really want to do yoga, but then I started doing the āsana and I… I fell in love with it. I really appreciate it now; my afternoon āsana time is really sacred to me now. I don’t think I really had any ideas of yoga at first. I just thought it was exercise. This āsana series has really shown me yoga from its wholesome perspective, not separate from the philosophy at all. I really was looking for the traditional view. I had an idea that neo-Tantra was not really what Tantra was about so coming here it has thrown a light on what Tantra really is. It’s amazing. Tantra is not an Indian idea or a system of thought; it is principles that can be applied to any spiritual philosophy or religion around the world. For example, in Columbia you have these Cogis, a traditional culture, and they have the same understanding of the symbol of water. And they don’t see it, they don’t have the science behind it but when you know the science and you see them, you see it’s the same! They worship the dissolution aspect as well, the water, the flowers, etc. You can see Tantra as an understanding of the whole of Humanity; it’s as deep as you can go. It’s not like something that is Indian. Tantra is really human culture. I love the teachers, the knowledge, and the community of Shri Kali. You always have people coming and going but you have a nice nucleus of people who stay. Shri Kali is amazing.

My experience here at Shri Kali has been wonderful, both times that I have been here. Last time it was really about the yoga and experimenting with the āsana practice. This was wonderful for me… something very new and very transformative. From the first day it was amazing! Then I came back to Paris where I experimented with teaching this system and it was very easy. After three months of big and nice energy, I felt I got a little bit away from myself and that I needed to come back. This time for me it has been a bit like a mountain of energy. At the beginning it was very challenging because of my difficulty in interacting with people. There were also a lot of people here so I was a little bit surprised. It was not the same thing I was finding the first time, but little by little, I felt clean inside… clean in my body, clean in my fears, clean in my bad ways of thinking. Yes… I think this system might be very long in its scope and I know it is very deep but it is really good. I am sure that the things we do here at Shri Kali will change my life… I am sure of that. But now I have to be patient and I want to come here again and again, experiment, read, practice and share with people. It is so whole, this system. Originally I came to Shri Kali when the ashram was in Malaysia for the monsoon and at first for the yoga, this sort of healing, soft yoga. I was looking for something very soft after a lot of pain I received from years of Vinyasa yoga. It was very painful and I wanted to find something to take care of me in a different way. I think I found it here. This was my first expectation. Now I feel very much at peace within myself, which was not the case before I started. Before, I was thinking about a lot of things. Whitney helped me make a big decision when I was in Malaysia and between the yoga and the conversations I had with the teachers here, I was able to make a very good decision. I think, little by little, for all of the different perspectives of my life, that this system helped me. Now I can think more clearly about where I want to go and what I need to do. I feel clean… in peace… but in my own way, I know I still have a lot to learn. I would recommend this school because this system has really changed my life. I really want to share that. I want to come here with my children and my friends and I want to share it with my students in Paris because many people need to understand life. I am not so structured so the more organic [non-linear] approach of the school works great for me. Whitney’s lectures are my favorite thing to study, all of them, and I think I could hear them a thousand times, especially because of my English. I also study Sanskrit and I would like to do more of it because of the link between studying Sanskrit and the neuro-plasticity of our minds. I would also love to study even more about ahamkāra/identity. My idea on yoga has changed because it used to be more about strength and muscular contraction and now it is more about being really relaxed. Now the best moment of the āsana for me is śavāsana and exploring my breath. After the āsana, my breath and my heart are really pumping and now just after the second held breath in the āsana, I know how to be quiet. In this state of being nowhere but just aware, I really love that.”

I have for several years been practicing, studying and looking into different kinds of yoga,

Overall my experience at Shri Kali has been very grounding. I came thinking I might have some kind of enlightening experience, but if anything it has been more of an undoing. My experience with the teachings and the practices here have felt really natural, like I am getting rid of anything superfluous. I went through a very specific time in the second month where I felt like the stories of my life were dying, the stories about myself that I realized were irrelevant. This was incredibly freeing, which is why I relate to Tantra being a path of freedom. My most recent professional background was as a health professional and I was trained as an Acupuncturist. I had chosen to study Traditional Chinese Medicine as was in love with the fact that I could apply the principles of Chinese Medicine to anything I had observed or experienced in my life and also to metaphysics. This was very satisfying to me because it was both philosophy and medicine. Taking that out of the study context, where you are interacting with people and teachers who are living this lifestyle and then going in to the workforce again, I underestimated how difficult it would be to integrate these teachings while in the rat race. I started to feel like a fraud because I was working at these incredible places, doing a job that I loved yet I was not practicing what I was sharing. In my heart, I didn’t feel right with this. So I decided to come to Shri Kali after reading some of the long-term students stories, as it looked like a place where I could really integrate these teachings. At this point I could see that the teachings of Chinese medicine were very universal and I saw that there was a strong connection to Tantra. I absolutely would recommend this school to others, as I have never come across teachings with a breadth, depth and inclusiveness quite like this. To me, the teachings has deepened my understanding of the different pathways I have gone down in the past and through the practices, really experience this philosophy that we are All One. In the practices, this idea of All One is really being integrated; it’s not just a theory. Shri Kali has been invaluable to me for that reason because I don’t see any other quest more valuable. I think there really is a structure here to the way the school operates but within that there is that capacity for flexibility and there is that non-linear make up. For me, if anything, I am hyper flexible and I am quite comfortable in that realm so I haven’t experienced here a huge need to control. I enjoy it. We have been trained in our culture and in our schooling to value controlling every situation. It’s actually really lovely to see here when anomalies take place such as the power going out, or accidents happening, there is such a sense of flow, that if things don’t go as planned, you move and do as needed to make things work and if it doesn’t look like a particular structure, that doesn’t matter, because you are always working towards the essence of what you’re trying to do at any point in any time. True action when action is called for, rather than constant activity and stress. So it is quite joyful to see that flow happen. But at other times, you can see it is really a struggle especially for people around you because the guidelines don’t seem so clear. I wonder if there needs to be a balance? I loved the Dharma, Artha, and Kāma and the Identity lectures by Whitney because to me that is true romance for sure. I actually find it really grounding that there are principles behind relationships. Our identity gets so wrapped up in relationships, and it is a massive topic for most of us. Within relationships there is a lot of freedom these days but there is still a lot of conflict and a lot of pain. Our cultural understanding and experience of our love and family relationships must still be missing something. To me, those lectures were incredible because I had a lot of questions and conflicts around those questions of what am I doing with my life and also around relationships and what it means to be in a good long-term love relationship or a marriage, so these lectures have put my heart at peace. I am a big fan of the āsanas! It is really incredible how balancing they are for our bodies but how they work on the subconscious allowing any limiting emotions or patterns to dissipate. In the past I had spent so much time interpreting my dreams and analysing beliefs and while there is value in this, there is also great relief in allowing these things to move through your body and release, you don’t need to intellectualize the why’s all the time. You can just let it go because there is nothing else to do and there is nothing to fix. I have really enjoyed cultivating the ability to really be in my body and meditate. I have been practicing a wide variety of yoga for about 12 years now but never really considered deepening in one fully. I percieved that there were many kinds of yoga to play around with – at different times I practiced Haṭha, Ashtanga, Kuṇḍalinī, Bikram, Vinyasa, Anusara and I enjoyed the variety. As much as I saw the relaxation benefits, I primarily practised to stay in shape and stay healthy. It was really incredible and therapeutic for some body and alignment issues I had. However in coming to Shri Kali, I have experienced yoga as a deep meditation, as a very symbolic path where I could continually deepen throughout my life. Yoga is for physical and mental health but it is also much more than that. You could say that my relationship to yoga has changed greatly. It made me realize how the culture of yoga in Australasia in many ways had become aerobicised and was often just another way, women especially, could control their bodies in a forum that was sanctioned as being spiritual. I really love that here at Shri Kali that the long-term student’s bodies are strong and supple but yet have a curviness and softness. I come from a family of curvy and soft people so for me that has always been a nice thing even if society likes to tell us otherwise! Before I came here I had read a few things on Tantra but it was honestly pretty new to me and I didn’t know anyone who had explored it past reading a book or two. When studying Gnosticism and Taoism, I had seen the connections to what I knew of Tantra in the sexual practices, but was aware it was just a part within a holistic lifestyle science. One of the things I most enjoy here is experiencing a community based on these principles, because this is a living science. I also love the variety of things we learned from Thai Massage to the traditional Indian dance with Monica, to all the lectures, to Ayurveda.

Overall my experience here at Shri Kali has been amazing. Of course, along the journey it has been up and down and that was kind of all me. It really had nothing to do with the school. Overall, the experience was really magical. Looking back after six months of being here I realize how much I have shifted. From the outside the changes I see are immense and now I can really feel myself from inside as well. My whole perspective has changed of myself, the world, other people and it is still a growing process. I still have so much work to do. Reality, in a sense, is so much clearer to me. The idea of love, the essence of who I am, my views on Tantra, have all changed. Even the idea of what is Tantra has changed each month. The messages here intertwined in the lectures, the yoga and silly conversations sink in further over time always reminding me to love myself and honor myself once and for all, and mainly to relax. At first, I really wanted to learn but because of my conditionings and other experiences with yoga, it was very hard for me to accept that relaxing in itself is the answer; to accept that really if I do just relax, my heart will open, I will be able to love, I will be able to see other people like me, without judgment, and I will see myself without judgment. My whole perspective on everything has changed! This to me, is so beautiful as I have been in really dark places. Now, knowing that I am not the one who is dark, that I am light; knowing that I can share this and knowing that everyone else is light and that ‘the problem is the problem and the person is the person’ (that Gandhi quote we are reminded of over and over again) is so beautiful and I learned this here. When I came to Whitney originally I said, ‘there is a devil in me, I’m haunted’. He said that it was not me and it took me five months to really understand this and see the shift. I stopped feeling guilty and I started feeling love for myself in every moment, with my bullshit and without it. I can love myself and I can love others. It’s really truly amazing what this place does. I am not sure really how it all works, but it just does somehow. I think, if you stay long enough, it gets you deeper and deeper and deeper. It is not always easy. Some days I felt like I wanted to live here forever and some days I hated this place. But I didn’t really hate it, I hated the space I was in, the emotions that were coming up, the conditionings, the things I was realizing about myself that were coming up. They were hard sometimes and so it is easy to blame someone else when you see them. At the end of the day … wow… this place is magical and they really are teaching Love. It’s beautiful! Originally I came because I really wanted to study the roots of yoga. I have more of a fitness yoga background, teaching and practicing power-vinyasa, but I knew it was not all I wanted. I wanted the philosophy. I wanted the science. Somehow the word Tantra popped up in my mind and I didn’t really know much about it but I had read somewhere that Tantra was the root of yoga and so I looked up the word Tantra and the word Goa—both were like light bulbs in my head—and I found this place. I suppose my subconscious led me here. I saw that Sanskrit was taught here and that was huge for me because learning this has always been one of my high goals. So I have been here about six months. There has been a complete shift of how I see myself and how I then see the world. It is like looking in a big mirror and everything around me is my projection. The fact that they are teaching us here about ourselves and how to love ourselves kind of in a subliminal fashion really seems to work. They just keep saying relax, love yourself, honor yourself, relax, love yourself, honor yourself. All of a sudden, I said to myself, I am divine and you are divine, I am God, you are God and we are all God who have made this creation together. This realization to me has changed everything, because I realize as a human being, as an expression of the divine, I am powerful and that we can all create good and we can all create beauty and if we can all just see the good and the beauty, rather than all the suffering, then we can spread more of that. I would definitely recommend this school to everyone but I would let them know what it is like first. I think it is really easy to reject if you are not in to studying and going deep into complicated texts because all the teachers just keep saying you have to read, you have to read; and the yoga is very slow amidst a modern culture of yoga which is all about fitness and go go go, so the difference may be difficult for some at first. I think about recommending this place all the time to people I love and want to see bloom, like my parents and friends, I think, they should be here. If you stay long enough and you don’t reject the teachings then you will have an amazing reward. Of course on the other hand some people love it right away, but I can see that at first it is also easy to reject something so different than you have ever known or ever been taught. It is hard to hear that everything you have learned in the past may be bullshit and that you are extremely conditioned from your past. It is hard to accept that you may be just at the very beginning of understanding anything about your true self and the world. So, I would recommend this school to people because it completely shifted my mind, it’s like my brain has been cleaned. To bring people here to be reminded that they are Love and that their issues are not them is huge. We get so stuck on feeling like we are sinners and feeling like we will never change, but then to be able to realize that that is not you and that society has made this up for you is groundbreaking. I mean, we should be teaching this to our kindergartners! I think that is how it is in Africa. For example, if someone feels really bad, they all come together and get the person to dance and they party and they shake the devils and the sadness away and that’s how life should be, because it is not you, you are the person and the problem is only that, the problem. Speaking about the classes, I enjoy Sanskrit a lot. I also love all of the readings recommended here. All these different books written by numerous scholars bring you to Tantra and explain Tantra in their own way, like physics books, psychology books, and of course the Tantric texts themselves. I enjoy the self-study and that’s what made me really love this place. I love the classes but also what they tell you, that ‘we can’t do this for you, you have to do this yourself’ is the real deal. So being here and having the classes, having the community, is all wonderful but for me the joy really has a lot to do with going home to my room and studying myself. I made the schedule more organic for me because being here for so long, I decided I am not going to go to everything all the time. When I do that, I don’t feel like I am living authentically for me. If I keep going to āsana, for example, but I am really tired or I go to lecture but I really want the time for self-study, that isn’t really me. I want to be more in the flow with what feels right, and in doing so after some time that has really helped me flourish here. I always remember Bhagavan’s words about Tantrics; they have no time, no schedule, and follow no one else’s rules. In this way, I have made this my home where there is a beautiful community around me, yoga asana classes everyday and the choice to live how I want and that feels right to me. The organic nature here is a choice. You have to choose that and in a way I felt really guilty at first if I didn’t come to a class, but that was actually another issue that I had to get through. I wondered what the other students felt about it or if the teachers judged me but with Bhagavan’s help I became clear. He asked me, ‘why do you feel guilty’? ‘Number one, if you learn anything from this school, learn to never feel guilty.’ I thought wow, I can take a long shower, massage myself, ‘honor myself’, like Whitney in lecture is always saying. I can spend time alone. I can spend time in the community. I can be at class or I can be off on the beach. For me it is all about love so don’t study, for example, if you don’t love it in that moment because if you are then you are just conditioning the opposite of love. I used to think of yoga as a lot more work. I enjoyed the work in many ways because I am a go-getter but I used to push myself through it to be the best. However, naturally, before I even came here, my practice changed and I started getting tired of my old power-vinyasa ways and as I practiced I would do a single pose and then spend time in śavāsana resting before going to the next (coincidentally extremely similar to the practice here). Sometimes just lying in śavāsana was my whole practice and that started to become my thing, but I felt lazy. When I came here, my perspective of yoga changed. It did not feel like, or have to be, a workout anymore. It feels like a meditation; you are giving your body a chance to hold each pose and adjust rather than speedily going to the next posture. I feel it is more directed to the energy in my body and actually shifting energy and opening me up. I can feel the difference, I feel open and at peace and contently perfect afterwards, not tired or stressed in any way. For years I knew that the meaning of yoga is union and I would say this to my students when I taught but I don’t think I really understood what it meant. But now I see that I am divine and the union is with myself. I see that in my practice I have to be compassionate with myself rather than getting in to some crazy stretch and yanking myself around. So now, I relax. The external practice is gone. Yoga is the union of yourself with yourself, with the divine and with love in every moment. Before, it was about getting fit, about how my body would be strong and about being healthy. But now, I am actually feeling the essence that I am through my yoga practice, I am allowing myself to express, to feel and to love myself. I love the āsana practice, especially the afternoon practice that goes really deep. I imagine that I will practice it forever and teach it to many. I love learning the bandhas and the pranyama and all the teachings that are shared. At times, I would get upset about something here at the school but then in the end I realized that these were always my own issues that were coming up and with the support of the community, I was able to work on them. Living in a community, practicing energy-shifting yoga and looking at yourself day in and day out will of course lead to some uproar and that is when the work can be done. That is when we really see ourselves and are able to change and shift to be the people we want to be, and more that that, to be the person that we already are in essence without all the layerings of bullshit and conditionings that veil us. My motto for life now tends to be, cut the bullshit! Shri Kali is truly a magical place. The whole essence of love that this place holds is beautiful.”

Sandra is a Kaula (Tantra Yoga) teacher from Dublin.

My friend who had suggested this place was very cryptic with me. I was going to come for a week and she said, “No, just… you know, try staying for a month”. Now I know why she said that! People are friendly here and even though there is a structure, there is also a lot of freedom here to do what you want, to read, to study, to attend class or not. I liked that. It was very appealing to me. Why did I come here? That answer is always changing. I guess originally I came here just to have some time to explore myself. I was working in a corporate job and it was full on, 12 hours a day, and so there was no time to sit and contemplate, to examine my life. That was one aspect. The other aspect of why I came was yoga. You could say that my curiosity for spirituality was really triggered with yoga, by that meditative state you can really get in to in some yoga classes. So I guess I originally came to practice yoga and go deeper within myself. I have a lot more clarity about life and myself since I came. In a way I came searching for the right answers but I didn’t really know what questions to ask. Over the years, I have read many books about traditional practices but each of them seemed too far out there for me, like it was all on some pseudo-psychic realm, like magic or something that didn’t apply to my daily life. What this place did, more than anything, was simplify existence. It presented those big questions about the world in such a human way, that I was very quickly able to relate to it. In the lectures with Whitney, everything became very obvious, very simple. I am clearer about who I am and about what I am here to do in the larger context of humanity. There are so many layers of confusion that pile up over the years due to our lives and the modern culture that we live in, but this with this system, I am able to sift through that and get back to my true humanity. I would recommend Shri Kali strongly for whoever asks. When I go back home I probably won’t talk to anyone about this school unless I am asked and if I feel like that person is asking the right questions. If it seems like they want to learn about themselves, then I would tell them about it. This is a school about life. Shi Kali is not just a yoga school or really about the teacher training. There are a million and one places you can go to get your certificate and learn about the āsanas or just the physical practices but to learn to be a true yogi, you need this type of atmosphere. My wife “to be” and I, plan on coming back here many times because we think it is an amazing foundation to build life on. Someday I would like to teach my kids as well and bring them here. I love the unstructured atmosphere of this school because it is structured enough. You know which hour a class is at for the most part and that is enough. Teachers never tell you that you have to be at this class unless you have to complete your hours and then that is a Yoga Alliance criterion. Divine Initiation and the lectures that Whitney gives are my favorite here. There is so much information at each lecture. I am actually going back and compiling my notes now and expanding it in to a big document because Whitney references so many historical figures that there is so much to learn. From there, you can understand Bhagavan’s book, Divine Initiation better. I read the books here as my morning puja to get these ideas in my head before I do anything else. I like waking up that way. If I could study in more depth something here, it would be quantum physics because in the modern culture, in many ways, physics and science are seen as the Ultimate Truth. The scientists are all considered truth seekers and seen as though they have the facts. Science is the cutting edge of human thought and knowledge in the modern context. Even though in many quantum physics circles the connection with Eastern religion and traditional systems has already been established long ago, it would be nice to know more. If you want to talk to anyone outside of this ashram and they don’t have any traditional practices or relationship to a traditional system but instead they are just living their lives, to them they see science as their way to understand the world. So we could bring what we learn here together with what they know of physics or science as a way to relate to them. This brings the traditional metaphysical sciences in to the modern world, so that people can more easily relate. Yoga has changed for me in the fact that it has become so much more than just a physical practice. I see now the relation to the internal systems like the prāṇa system. What is happening within the āsanas in yoga, I have such a much richer understanding of: now I see each of my cells as a living breathing entity. I love the focus on the internal realities versus the external realities like whether or not you can go in to full dhanurāsana or not. This doesn’t matter. It’s about relaxing and letting your prāṇa flow. Someone will actually get way more benefits by just fully relaxing in to where they really are rather than someone who can do a full āsana but isn’t relaxed. Tantra is not just about sex. It is not about sex at all. It’s about life. When you have a Tantric understanding of something, then you really go in to the Essence of something and I didn’t know about that at all. When I googled Tantra, all this stuff came up about sex. My fiancé was worried since I was coming to a Tantric ashram, so I emailed my friend who suggested this place to me and asked her if there was going to be a bunch of massive orgies and she assured me that there was not. I learned that there is Tantra in many religions and cultures around the world like Tantric Buddhism, for example. That was mind opening for me. I will continue on with my Tantric studies because now I am so peaked. I love the people that you meet here from all different backgrounds. There are so many special people that come through this place. Everyone here is so nice and you can really connect with one another. Just the fact that people are here and they have stayed and are curious and are asking these questions says something about them. Most people extend their stay because they find something they can relate to here. Because we are always talking here about acting and relating from your true nature, your interactions here are so beautiful. You become more than friends. You open up about so many things even your friends and family back home may not know about you because there is this culture of being open and honest with ourselves.”

My experience here at Shri Kali has been the experience of a lifetime. It has been like being given a second chance at this life, like I am having the opportunity to rebirth again as a human being, as a mom, as a foreigner, a daughter, and everyone I have ever been in my life. I am learning to be who I really am and to see myself honestly. I came here after a personal experience with an illness. I wanted to change my life and teach people with love and so I tried yoga but I found it was only performance. I actually googled, how to teach yoga with love, and I found Tantra. I was really lucky because I didn’t really get all the sexual aspects coming up that you often get when you type in Tantra. I found all the aspects about love instead. So I typed in again Tantra yoga in India and Shri Kali was the first one that came up. Immediately I typed a letter to Ma Kristina and within days I was on my way. I came here to find something different, a way to show people how they can be really happy in this life, in a beautiful way with yoga. The way in which I have changed is complex. In the āsanas I have been training my body; through the lectures, my mind; and through my meetings with Bhagavan, my soul. Through my teachers like Whitney, I changed the way I see myself. So I think with every different aspect of this ashram, I am shown a different part of who I am, but at the end, it is who I am. It is nothing specific and I think that is one of the beautiful things at this ashram is that you can change from all different levels but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter because you are all going back to the same place, back to your True Self. I have been recommending this school for people who want to be a different type of yoga instructor, who want to teach from the heart and with knowledge. When people ask me about the ashram here, I talk to them about my life and I show them how it has changed my life. This ashram has showed me that to teach is more than just that, it is about sharing your life from your heart, from your own experience and from a place of meditation. This is a gift. So I really recommend this to those who really want to learn how to love themselves, not only to come to a yoga teacher training. From Bhagavan, I know that he is providing the teacher training for people as a way of life but from him, I know that this is really more about your heart and going back to your true self. The non-linear, organic structure of the school has taught me how to flow in life with the situations that we have to deal with every day, and to not have any expectations and to not have any rules or to live in a box but just to flow. It’s good to learn flow here so that we suffer less in our own life when problems arise because we have learned how to flow. In my āsanas, I am integrating all that I learn in the lectures with Whitney. When I am chanting, it is like another connection with myself that is so beautiful. I also love Whitney’s lectures and if I have to choose one individual aspect of the system, I would say that I would keep my āsanas... and Whitney’s lectures! In my āsanas, when I close my eyes, I can be with myself. I would love to study even more about ‘Identity’ or ‘Ahaṃkāra’ because when you have your identity really clear, then you can flow with yourself. Everything you do in your life feels right because you know who you are and why you are here. I had no expectations about Tantra, I just knew that people said it was about love and now I am learning that it is not about love with others or about what others can give to me. It is about loving myself. Tantra is a big word for me. Through the Tantra yoga here, I now I feel more stable in my expression and in my true self and in life. I think the Ashram is doing really well, and still as quite a new school, we are doing beautiful things.”

My experience at Shri Kali has been one of real life. It is funny how when people come here, they refer often to what they will do when they go back to real life. I suppose they are referring to a place without palm trees or a beach but an office building and a work schedule in its place. But life is what we make of it. We create our experiences. Life is still in full motion here. Every moment feels like part of my sādhanā, or better yet, my life whether here or there is the ultimate sādhanā. That being said, I have really high days, some lower days and many, just regular old days. Some days I feel like I am really starting to see myself and other days I feel like I am on automatic pilot with my conditionings, just riding along. But when I really inspect, look back and reflect, I see a very subtle slow unveiling occurring. Before, without really noticing, there was still a part of me that was always trying, trying to be a good person, trying to be helpful, trying to say the right thing or do the right thing and now I am more along the lines, or closer, to a place of just Being. Paradoxically the more I just experience life from this place of Being Me and acting from the core of my expression, the more I really am saying the ‘right’ thing and being the ‘good’ person because it is real and only that which is true and real is part of our Dharma. My experience here has been like a subtle stripping away of excess baggage and conditionings, and in doing so, coming to a place of serene contentment. The more I live this Tantra Yoga system, the less I feel I need to be anything or succeed in anything other than just enjoying being me and enjoying the experience of life around me. I always had wanted to get to a place where I no longer felt like I had my practice and then life as two separate occurrences. I have arrived. Now I know, I experience this reality, the practice is life, in every moment there is the Divine expressing and we are all here to play in this exquisite existence. When I feel this more and more, little by little, I feel in complete peace, in joy, in a place where nothing else could possibly be added. My experience here, you can say then, has been about coming home. I originally came to Shri Kali in a process of working my way back to the source, if you will. I feel like I have been in that process for most of my life. I kept trying to find the origin. I studied and explored many spiritual avenues and kept looking in all these places noticing the thread between them but seeing that most of them along the way had become incomplete. After years of practicing Tibetan Buddhism, I realized a whole half of the equation felt missing, everything felt dry and lacking in expression. In Kuṇḍalinī Yoga I came away feeling amazing and I saw improvements in my students but I knew that there was science behind it missing, something lacking integrity and the root of truth. It was too ungrounded. I wanted the science, the deeper wisdom and I wanted a feeling of completion in this science, Shakti with Shiva. Well, I found myself at the fountainhead. Here is Bhagavan, a man who has decoded the Vedas, the most ancient scripture of the world, that which all comes from, and from a Tantric perspective. Tantra is the most whole perspective I know! In viewing things through this lense, it gave me the truth about other religions; it striped them back down to their Essence just as we are all being stripped back down to our Essence. This knowledge gave me back my appreciation for Tibetan Buddhism and a more grounded and connected understanding of Devī Kuṇḍalinī. I cannot really say that I have a favorite aspect to this system, or what I could say is that it’s all my favorite. You cannot take one from the other or it wouldn’t be what it is. The philosophy brings us back to the true wisdom principle; the āsanas, prāṇāyāmas and bandhas clean the subconscious mind; and the pūjā becomes a celebration and actualization of truth. Together as one, this system works to create a whole new blueprint of yourself and the world around you, of the other, of the cosmos. I always knew yoga was not about performance and was about your personal relation to the Divine. I understood that before coming here, as a practitioner and teacher, but I longed to really experience this fully, to fall in to what asana really is, a moving meditation. It was as if my prior practice had really delivered me to a certain point where my desire opened to the fullest experience of yoga, union. After months of doing this same asana series almost every day, something many at first brush off as boring (believe me, it is worth the wait and integration), I really feel the essence of yoga, of union. I see the way it washes my subconscious clean. However, it is only now that I really feel it is possible, the fullness of being with oneself. I trusted Tantra was so much more than the modern circus it had become and I was so hungry for that truth and integrity behind Tantra. However, it felt like I might have to go to the end of the world to find authentic teachings yet it only took coming to Shri Kali Ashram and meeting Bhagavan! Now, I really get to experience the kaleidoscope of Tantra. I realize The Essence is boundless and one without real description, it is a way of being and a way of life that far surpasses any word or picture. Tantra is Wholeness and Truth, Life blood and Absolute Consciousness. It is everything because it is the reminder to be Love, express from Love, live Love. It is through the community here, in living day to day with people that this whole dynamic system is integrated, is felt. In many ways, I wonder if I will ever be able to look back and feel what it felt like before this wisdom came in through my heart. Thank you to this home and this family for your devotion to truth and the sharing of this Truth.”

After four months in Shri Kali it has gone from good to better! I came to Shri Kali without any expectations. I had just visited the website and heard from people who had been there before, how this whole system had helped them. Overall, I feel much more calm and relaxed now, and open to learning and receiving more. It was a 180 degrees change for me because everything that I thought existed or was real, one by one, I realized was far from it. Growing up in India, I had too many preconceived ideas about religion, morality etc. A lot of things were explained at Shri Kali, and one by one, lecture after lecture, peel by peel, I gained more insight and clarity into them through the science here. Everywhere else I had been earlier, nobody had ever explained the deeper understanding of religious practices, which eventually lead to the culture. Besides, my biggest attraction to Shri Kali was that the foundation of its teaching was the Vedas, nowhere else in India could I find another school that was not only based on the Vedas, but also taught the basic Vedic principles. Everything I learnt earlier, left me more confused than before, but, at Shri Kali, lecture by lecture, everything is explained with the complete science and philosophy that you are not confused. For now I want to keep learning without any limitations here. I was looking for places in the south to be more relaxed and not to have to worry about work, family or relationships; not be distracted by them. I was new to yoga with about a month learning in a local school in Delhi. It turns out that not having prior experience could be an advantage, from older students’ experiences: less experience, less confusions. I wasn’t really looking at an ashram for āsanas but when I read this website I realized it was about more than just āsanas. It was about the philosophy, Sanskrit, the culture and so much more, it was a whole system; a traditional Gurukul system that imparts true Vedic knowledge. This is what every seeker of the Divine should look for. So when I was looking for a sojourn, I heard about Shri Kali, and I realized that this was a whole system. You find what you’re truly looking for, consciously, or, subconsciously. My education growing up did not really give me the answers I was looking for; it merely groomed me, not shaped me. It did not give me any real life solutions to build up my inner strength and values. Divine Initiation is the core of this system. Divine Initiation helped me demystify the preconceived notions about many Vedic beliefs and practices. I can’t help it; I want to go back again and again and reread sections because every time I read it, I learn something new. You read any other book and you learn something, but you read Divine Initiation and you realize something. That is the difference. It is going to be my Bible for the rest of my life. I feel sad that so many people within India and around the world, the way that they think about their religion and about God or what’s right and what isn’t, is so often off the mark. Everything is explained with formulae in Divine Initiation. I think that this book is really the gateway to freedom. When I look at religion, when I look at what is right and wrong, all that I believed growing up, is dropped every time I read Divine Initiation. I look forward to reading it more and more. I think that I will read it all my life. Before I came here, I was so disappointed with spiritual practices that were for the convenience that I looked at every situation as hopeless and that had made me quite cynical. In Tantra, I finally found a system that teaches that the internal and the external can coexist, and that, we do not have to chose one over the other, so it helps everyone in having a guilt free existence by reflecting that we are okay as we are; that, for me is true liberation. Most other systems I’ve known are looking to reform people, but Tantra asks you to free yourself by not looking at yourself as a project, but as a sacred being. This changes every thought that existed or will exist in the future. This knowledge brings me hope that there is a system, which, if truly followed, can free you from all confusions. That has never happened to me before with any other school, any temple, or place of worship. Here I connect with the answers, so I have decided to be here long enough to culture myself from this spiritual system. I was already part of a non-linear culture so I did not really have to ‘deal’ with the non-linear aspect of this system. Ironically, even though I am part of an original non-linear culture, due to the hypocrisy, and maybe the British influence on Indian culture, the modern knowledge and education of India was so linear that now I am happy to get back to my roots. I feel more grounded and open, I feel like I am in the right place because of this non-linear structure. I never had much of a view on yoga. I mostly thought of it as a healthier substitute for other physical practices. I was looking for one system for physical health, and another one for spiritual depth, never understanding that one cultured the other. Tantra Yoga brought the two together for me. I had heard that yoga was more internal than external but I had barely experienced this. The first time I experienced this was a year ago when I was in Pondicherry, within one month of practicing with a group, I had a sense of relaxation. This was when my search for a yoga school began. It is due to the British cultural erosion in India that Tantra is highly misrepresented in India. It is either not spoken about, or spoken about condescendingly. Most Indians think that Tantra is black magic or voodoo. I had friends though that were practicing Tantrics and from what I heard from them, something made me want to try it. I started researching on the Internet and in books and I found that the whole world was interested in studying Tantra; there had to be something real about it. I decided that I must go and find out what it is. Within India this is the only school that really teaches Tantra as it should be taught. And now I realize why India is supposed to be the origin of such sacredness. I thought that they were all bullshitting when Indians were always saying, “India is the origin of this… of that”. But now after being a Tantra student, I know India really is the origin of so much, of the source. I had ideas and I was made to believe, believing in fact became a practice to me, but I am glad that I have more understanding of the practices of India now. One thing that I really like about Shri Kali is that it does not ask you to believe, rather, it asks you to understand. Here no one forces you to believe in their system, whereas in other systems, there seems to be a pressure to believe in whatever is being taught. Here, they just give you answers and if you relate to those answers great, and if you don’t, there is no pressure. As a student that is why I value my experience here with these teachings. The teachings here are so profound and beautiful that it seems hard to imagine why anyone wouldn’t relate to them, but even more than that, this is not just a system that I want to believe in; rather, this is a system that I want to live.

Tillie and Lela taught together in Seattle after each spending time at the ashram. Below you can read two articles where they were interviewed about their experience: What was your experience at Shri Kali like? Tillie: I was in Shri Kali in March 2014 and my experience was profound. I didn’t know what I was walking in to. My sister had been studying there for about 6 months. I had nothing but an amazing opening experience. A lot of that was because I had no expectations so everything was positive, as I had nothing to compare it to. I remember telling Whitney that I had walked in to something that I was pretty much born to do. Ever since I left I have been thinking about India and Shri Kali. I have been trying to spread the teachings as much as possible. Lela: I had the exact opposite experience from Tillie. I was just traveling through India and I wanted to come by and see a familiar face. I knew Whitney from the States. I was going to stay for a week and then after studying for that week, I decided to stay for a month. For the first three weeks I actually hated it is because I wouldn’t let it work for me. They were telling me to relax; I resisted this so much. But then something happened by the fourth week. I let go of everything and all my āsanas were perfect. I felt strong, self-empowered and I had endurance. I can’t explain it in words. It was like the veil was lifted and I could see from my true self. I wanted nothing more than to live from this place. When I came back to Seattle, I wanted to scream it from the rooftops, for people to find this true self. Now, we do that here with Shri Kali Seattle. What changed about you after your time at Shri Kali? Tillie: A lot came up in the training; a lot of limitations within me came up. The experience of myself has changed. I am a lot more accepting of who I am and a lot more forgiving. I no longer run into an excess of demeaning thoughts about myself. I am gentler on me, which means I am also gentler on others. As a social person, I realized when I got to Shri Kali that I had insecurities that I hadn’t dealt with. Now I am able to teach in front of 35 people without any problem, so maybe the biggest thing that I have noticed is that I am a lot more comfortable with who I am. LeLa: I feel more self-confident. I grew up with a lot of body issues because I have always been a ‘bigger” girl. I just never gave myself enough love, but these days, I am very relaxed and soft. I make it a point to be good to myself because when I am good to myself, everything else just falls in to place. I was a very stressed out and anxiety-ridden person with low self-esteem and low body image but now I just feel like I am on top of the world. Another Shri Kali student once told me that Bhagavan said, “If it doesn’t feel good, then why do it?” Here in America, we do a lot of things that don’t feel good, but that is no longer how I live. This has become my motto on life, “Do what makes you feel good”. It makes everything so much easier and softer which has made my life. How has your relationship to Tantra and Yoga changed since your time at Shri Kali? Tillie: The first thing I would say is that my relationship to yoga is a lot deeper. Before I came to Shri Kali, it was only about the āsana and now through teaching, my experience has gone deeper as well. I walked away from Shri Kali not caring about how I was doing in my āsanas. My āsanas cultured when I was no longer worried and when I stopped working so hard at trying to make them perfect. I just relaxed and gave them time. For me, yoga is no longer just about the āsanas. Yoga is a way of life. Yoga is about how you relate to the world around you and yourself; it is all-inclusive. My life is yoga. LeLa: I feel the exact same way. It is about love and living with your heart wide open. The āsanas are great but it is just a way to get to where we need to be, to get to know yourself. How has your experience been after leaving the ashram and going back in to the world? Tillie: When I first left Shri Kali, I had a hard time reintegrating. I got slapped in the face a few times by the world. Luckily, Whitney is a good friend of mine; my sister was there for a long time; and I made a lot of good friends there at the time, so I was able to work through it with them. However, it was really hard because I felt like I had put Shri Kali on a pedestal. It is almost as if we were living on the moon at the ashram, so separate from reality here in the states, so when I came back to the states, I had a hard time understanding who I was versus the culture around me. It took me a solid eight months to integrate and come back here to where I am. In February, I finally woke up one day feeling very different and I realized that there is no difference now with where I am and who I am versus when I was at Shri Kali. The environment changes but nothing else is different. My body is the same; my soul is the same. I was able to look at things and begin to enjoy my life here. LeLa: I truly believe that when you meditate and let go of things that you are holding on to, that you can look in to your future and see your path. I have always lived my life that way. While I was at Shri Kali that last week, when things began to click in to place, I knew exactly what I would do when I got back. It was within the first week that I met Tillie and that we started Shri Kali Seattle. It’s been non-stop! I knew exactly the steps I was going to take and how I was going to do it. In fact it wasn’t till a month later that I felt my jetlag set in, as I didn’t stop running from the time I touched the ground in Seattle. It has been just how I envisioned it happening. What aspects do you like most about the Kaula Tantra Yoga System? Tillie: I like that this it gets you out of your conscious mind, so that the monkey mind that is just running on a wheel all day long, relaxes. In the āsana, it is not so much focused on alignment but more on how you feel which is very simple, maybe hard up front but when you just focus on dropping in to yourself and become aware of yourself, not on a conscious level, but on a subconscious level, it is simple and it makes sense. The whole system completes itself. I think that is the most shocking thing to me. I can do the āsanas and be one moment in my monkey brain and then the rest of my day I am relaxed. LeLa: I like that you can do this system from whatever level you are at and at whatever pace you are at. It is simple. You can come in and just start with the āsana and that is enough. Later, if you decide to take it further, you can begin to study the philosophy. Why did you decide you wanted to share this system with others? Tillie: I left Shri Kali knowing that there is so much truth to this system that I felt like I needed to share it. So because of that, I was living it, practicing it, thinking about it. I have been studying this since I have been gone and it was very clear since my training that I had to go back and teach. It was an indescribable feeling; it was a shift in me and I knew I needed to teach yoga but I just didn’t know it was going to be this. This is my purpose. LeLa: I was teaching yoga in the states for a few years before coming to India but I was still searching for a style that fitted me. I had gone through every different kind of yoga that I could imagine and I finally landed on yin yoga but it still didn’t feel right. I was very disappointed with my experience of yoga in America. There was more focus on how hot the room was or how many crunches you could do. There was never any focus on meditation. I was done and I felt like India was my last love affair with yoga and that if I didn’t find what I was looking for, then it was over. That was sad because I loved to teach. However, once I learned this system and it started to work for me, I had no doubts. Whereas before, when I was teaching, I always felt like there was nothing but ego behind it. But with Tantra yoga, it’s not about my yoga or me. It’s about the student’s experience. There is that great saying that “the teacher will show you the path but the student must walk it”. With any other system I tried to teach, that was never the case but with this system, that is the case. The student has to walk it; they have to take responsibility for their own path and we are just there to show it to them. That just hit me hard, as I then knew this was the system I had to teach. It just jelled with me. I feel comfortable teaching now. How has your experience been teaching and how has your student’s experience been? Tillie: I had a man come in to my first Tantric workshop back in October. At the end of the two-hour workshop, he came up to me and was sobbing. He said to me, “I had a realization during this class that I have been working in the wrong profession my whole life and I need to change my life.” This realization was all his own. I had nothing to do with this. I created the space for it but Tantra did its work because he was ready. He was ready to see the world differently, he was ready to question his life; he was ready to see himself. From the time of that last workshop, I watched this man quit his job and make so many positive changes in his life. The other day, I had another student come up to me and say, “Tillie, I have been doing yoga for a long time, but this system has quietly affected me in a profound way. You have sunk in to my skin. You have done it very silently and I am forever changed. There is nothing like you and this āsana.” Those are just two different experiences but both amazing. I have nothing but good responses. I have between 18-20 people between each class and they are all dedicated. They love it and they miss it when it’s not being offered. I didn’t think that teaching would go as deep as it has, but with teaching, there are almost no words to describe. My relationship with Tantra, now that I have been teaching it and I have seen these changes within my students and within myself, has been incredible. I am able to do my practice while I teach. I never thought that I could meditate and teach at the same time, but I am. It’s amazing. I practice with my students. I can teach with my eyes closed. They trust me and I trust them. There is this mutual respect for me to trust them to take care of themselves and for them to trust me to guide them. LeLa: One of the spots that I teach at is in the park. I offer $5 yoga classes in the park as my karma yoga and for that we get a lot of people showing up. Just last week, I had 15 people. It’s nice that people come together because they are interested in it even though they don’t even know what it is. Students are always saying that Seattle is a stressful city. Both Amazon and Microsoft are here and there are a lot of people that work for them. It’s stressful and it’s a high cost living city. People are so thankful that they actually have space and time where they are given permission to relax. As far as teaching, I feel good when I am teaching. I feel like I am bringing a service to Seattle, like I am allowing them to relax and drop their ego even if it is just for an hour or an hour and a half. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ This following article about Tillie was published by Simona Trakiyska for Seattle Yoga News on Wednesday, April 30th, 2014 FROM INDIA TO SEATTLE: INSIGHTS FROM AN EARTHY YOGI PRACTITIONER Packing and leaving everything behind is something that many of us have experienced, but doing that so you can meet an Indian guru – now that is something unusual. Seattle yogi, Tillie Bennett described some of her more advanced yoga experiences at first through Forest Yoga “as a poetry.” Every class she took she felt like the instructor was “speaking a language to her soul that made her body flow” with coherence. After only one week of Forest Yoga practice, at the Kula Studio in the Ballard neighborhood, Bennett realized that this was the path she wanted to take in life and she was determined to learn. Through a family member Bennett found out about the Indian guru Shanmukha Anantha Natha, who has been teaching for over 40 years. The school, named Shri Kali Ashram, is in India where Natha teaches Tantra, a meditation focused practice. The training does not teach practitioners how to compete but how to work together and accept one another. Bennett was drawn to this philosophy and knew that this was where she wanted to be and learn while gaining a deeper understanding of the practice of yoga and life. She left Seattle earlier this year to travel to India and study under Natha for five weeks. The teaching philosophy of the program is that “yoga is a science, not a sport or a game,” and that “yoga by its nature never teaches competition. Competition means that one is always comparing and contrasting to external measures.” (shrikaliashram.org) The training took place in the Indian village Galgibaga, by the beach. The teaching program offers different hours of completion in order to become a certified instructor and part of the Yoga Alliance worldwide. The training teaches a variety of wisdoms, from the Tantra yoga practice itself, to how to balance your day-to-day life activities, how to listen to your body and mind, as well as how to learn to accept who you are without judgment. Trantra’s students mornings start by Ayurvedic (walking massage) at 8:30 a.m., and right after they do Asanas. The first meal of the day is about 11 a.m. and they have nutritious fruits and vegetable, such as fresh papaya and curd homemade yogurt – good for probiotics. Lunch is at 1 p.m., soon after breakfast to give them enough time to digest the food before their afternoon practice. Late in the day the students have a lecture about the physics of their body in addition to how to read, sing and write Sanskrit, the philosophical language of Hinduism. On the other side of the training: “I never though I was strong enough,” Bennett said but her longing to learn and teach yoga, from the Kula studio in Ballard through the Pacific Ocean to India, helped her to achieve inner peace, to gain courage and to stop worrying. In her practice today Bennett “visualizes exhaling her frustrations through her breath,” and she feels lighter. “I could see them leaving my body.” “I am no longer bothered about any preconceived notions and I just feel relaxed.” Bennett was able to transform herself and her vision of the world through her journey. She learned to let go. “I am not competing with myself anymore, I don’t hear negative thoughts in my mind,’’ and this, she said, has been amazing gift. 1. How often do you practice/teach? – Bennett practices about six times per week and teaches private and group sessions daily 2. What is your favorite yoga-clothing brand? “Athleta, it is comfortable and it allows me to move. I like it, but I definitely don’t need it.” 3. What is your favorite pose and why? – “Forearm Balance Pose is my favorite because it is an inversion in a way – you see the world from different perspective. It feels like things that I hold it my body or emotions that are suck somewhere are flowing.” 4. Where would you like to see the Seattle Yoga community in five years? “There is a revolution going on, I can see more people seeking a spiritual awakening, and much more people are doing it – Seattle is a city of open minds and hearts.” 5. If you have one advice for people who do not have the time to attend yoga practices very often what would you tell them? – “Find time to breathe, just try to relax for a second. Do not manipulate your breath in any way. Try not to be involved with anything, just be a human.” This article is part of the Yogi of the week series in which we highlight a yoga teacher or yoga practitioner in the Seattle area. If you know someone who you think we should write about, make sure to send us a note with the details. Don’t miss out on discovering new yogis in the Seattle area so make sure to subscribe for free to the Seattle Yoga News digital publication sent directly to your inbox each week.

The first couple of months after I came to Shri Kali for the first time were confusing, but I did have a feeling of what I was looking for What was trying to go in to me was met with suspicion and mistrust. I think because of previous experiences with other systems and as just a person of the modern day world, there was a big suspicion of religion. I am always checking, have I joined a religious cult? But then after 2 months or so, things started to fall in to place. When I was doing āsana, the concept of the world around me began to change. I had a sense of everything moving around me, yet I saw in a colorful-picture-kind-of-way, how this was tying in with the philosophy that we were learning about. I remember when I was in primary school, I wanted to be an astronaut and I wanted to know what was at the end of the universe. It really bothered me. I had got this book by Steven Hawking and there was this picture of the universe and the picture was in a square and the universe was this kind of egg-shaped thing lying on its side in a white background and I decided the universe was the white background but then I wondered what the white background was? This didn’t answer my question. This just gave me another question. I remember, every time I tried to ask a question, such as “what is this made of?” it just created more questions. Every time the question would be answered such as, “well that is made of atoms”, another question would arrive, “so then what are the atoms made of?” I always felt unsatisfied with all of the gaps in my picture of existence. However, in doing the āsana and being in this system, I felt myself in the picture and without any gaps. The brief experience that I had in those two months was starting to make things more complete. I was no longer dissatisfied with my understanding of life and the world around me. This was a really reassuring feeling. I was feeling that things around me were within my concept and that the gaps were being filled in. I felt more whole for having a more whole picture. So, I stayed a bit longer to try and fill in this picture a bit more. Yet, then I disappeared for two years and ten months! I always had it in my mind that the time wasn’t right to keep building more than just a little bit here and there. But now I have come back and things are falling in to place really quickly. More and more, I am losing that feeling of mistrust. That feeling of fear and suspicion is dissipating. Every day, I feel closer to letting things in and letting things happen in this system. It is not that I am under siege anyways (hahaha); I don’t need to put up my defenses. I can still take it or leave it and in ten years if I decide this doesn’t work for me, then I can leave it. However, I don’t think that is going to happen. Just last night at Bhajan things came together really quickly and although it was a really happy song, I had tears streaming down my face in a beautiful way. I realized, I didn’t have to learn the full Vedic sciences or all of Sanskrit, that there were lots of different ways in this system to have it sink in to me. If you like yoga and you like music, then you can reprogram yourself as well. You could simply do āsana and go to bhajan and receive the same benefits. Of course learning the meaning of what is being sung also really helped. In Sanskrit we learned the meaning of the mantras of what we were singing so that during Bhajan, I was able to understand. I was amazed as I realized, we are reprogramming ourselves by bringing the philosophy in to us, through music. Originally, I came to Shri Kali because I had been dissatisfied by the answers that I had gotten from a previous system, both in my questioning of existence and the world and in what was right for me. It didn’t work with my body or my psyche. And again I would end up with more questions than answers. It occurred to me that I should go back to the roots, something as traditional as possible and something that is as much from its origin as possible. That is how I found this place. It became apparent that that is what this is: If you are looking for the origin then it is hard to get any closer than here. The way that I look at the world around me is how I have changed the most. If you start to understand the way that the philosophy explains the world around you; and you start to have an understanding of subject and object; that everything is made up of everything and everything is different expressions of the same source, that it is not made and it is not destroyed, then there is a new feeling of permanence. I feel permanent as myself, and it changes the way that I look at my life. I no longer see my story as nothing, and then I was 80 years of existence, and then nothing again. I am part of a much wider system. My soul has no end. If you change the way that you relate to your life and your day, then you change the way that you relate to your idea of the whole world and of other people. I have a greater sense of how I am not just my 80 years in this version of my consciousness and this puts everything in to a much greater perspective. I relate to everything in a completely different way. Anything that I did come in to contact with previously to what I am studying now at Shri Kali seemed like merely a diluted version of what I study now. My relationship to yoga has changed, in that I am learning to be more of myself when I practice. It’s kind of tricky to leave behind the idea that I should do this and I should do that. However, I am leaving it behind more and more. Doing āsana ‘for exercise’ or even ‘because it is good for my psychology’, or the notion that ‘I am healing myself by doing āsana’, all of these ‘reasons to do āsana’ would also have to be dropped and then every time I would drop yet another ‘reason’ why I do āsana, something else would come up in its place again. But I think eventually I will get to a place where I am far closer to being rather than doing. It is a continual process of finding your habits that are not that helpful and then getting rid of those habits. In the grand scheme of things I am looking towards just having at least a brief moment of not ‘trying to be productive’ or ‘trying to work on myself’, etc… In a way, I am trying to work on myself but every time I catch myself noticing that, I have to remind myself to relax. When I first came here, I was like a little cat, in that every time you look at it, it jumps. I didn’t realize that I was in that sort of constant state of stress before I came. When we are lying on the floor upstairs, I just remind myself, relax, and that’s enough. I love the meditative feeling in yoga. The thing that I missed most since I have been away is that part of this yoga that you cannot find in other yoga systems when you are being guided by someone that you trust to guide you through the practice and you can relax so completely. That feeling is the experience of just being able to relax and be with yourself. It is a feeling that I am not supposed to be able to put in to words and I can’t seem to, because it really has no words to describe it. It is experiencing the thing that has no words to describe it… that is my favorite part of this system. Trying to put words to this feeling, limits the feeling. Teaching has quite often been the highlight of my week and it has been the nicest thing that I have done for myself in the week. I think even in the last couple of years, which have been particularly challenging, it has been the glue that has kept everything together. That is the experience of teaching so far. Now I need to make it so that I already have the glue that holds things together and that I am giving it without needing to give because I am getting what I need from myself. It wasn’t my intention to teach to nourish myself but to nourish others, and I know that I nourish other people as well because my students relate that back to me. Yet the experience has been that I am also nourished with every class that I teach. If I have been exhausted after work or stressed or sad about something it is guaranteed that I will be a different person after teaching. The other day I asked for testimonials for my new website and I got one back from one of my students who had been on many painkillers and through doing this series of āsana she has stopped taking all of them and what she realizes now is that what her body needs now is this yoga. She also said that since she had been coming, that it had been the source to get through difficult times which is what I get from it. Another woman had swollen feet and just after coming to two classes a week, she dropped a shoe size and lost weight and made it in to a shoulder stand which was really huge for her.

In one word, my experience at Shri Kali, has been amazing. It has changed my whole life. Perhaps, not changed my whole life; however, the ways in which I experience the world are completely different. So when I say, it has been amazing, it has made me see a more beautiful world. I originally came as a backpacker through India, yet I wanted to show my family something that I had done. So, I came to do a yoga teacher training to get my certificate, and my time here never really ended. I arrived at Shri Kali as my first stop. The traveling never happened and that was four years ago! Within the context of Bhagavan’s lectures, I found what I had always had in my head but what I could never rput in to words. It kind of felt like coming home, so you don’t leave that place, now do you? I never knew I was looking. I just wanted a piece of paper. I had a lot of physical recovery from when I was a child, when I went through a lot of cancer treatments. The modern doctors had told me that recovery from these issues was not possible. Yet, here, I found it was possible. I went through a whole mental/psychological shift. When I had cancer at that young age, I started seeing my body as the enemy. So making peace with my body has been a huge shift for me at Shri Kali. The āsanas have been a big part of that I still have experiences in the āsanas where I may get scared all of a sudden or happy all of a sudden and then something that I used to think about myself is gone afterwards. Things seem to be going away without even doing anything. Plus there is the whole mental shift that I was talking about before; the way the whole world looks different. The physical seems to just be a side effect. I have been doing the āsanas, prāṇāyāma and the bandhas and in this, my whole mental and physical body has been put back in to balance. It’s amazing that after years of being in and out of hospitals doing checkups, I do a few āsanas and it is all of a sudden possible… it’s crazy! Now āsanas are just part of life. I had done a few yoga classes before back home but I never really enjoyed them. I had a few experiences that were sort of nice but other than that I just felt it was kind of scary. I was really inflexible and thought it was just for people in spandex. I didn’t really get it. I was actually a little scared when I came to India for yoga training. I also wasn’t looking for anything spiritual and so I knew nothing about Tantra other than the fact that it was linked to sexuality, nothing deeper than that. There are some people that come and have long trainings in Tantra, but then they get here and realize that the teachings are just so different. Even after I came, I tried to look at some of the other stuff, but it wasn’t really for me. There are a lot of weird things going on out there, so I am grateful that I have found this beautiful place on the first try and without even trying. It’s a different world after leaving the ashram. It has been wonderful to have the opportunity to see the world in a different way and have the chance to look at myself, to see my patterns in my relationship history with my family. Part of that, was being able to have a relationship with my parents and my family, in general and being able to have a close relationship with my parents was a big thing for me and was something that was just not possible before. There were too many aspects that I hadn’t looked at and it seemed unimportant. Now, I am just able to be with my family and let them express; able to just love them for who they are. Also, in general, it’s easier to interact in the world when you don’t feel like you have to control people and you can let them express the way that they want to express. My life experience is much richer now. Often I feel when I study, that I have just scratched the surface and that there is so much out there that I have not even seen. It is like having seen the world in black and white and then all of a sudden, all of these colors arise. It’s difficult to explain. It’s like sitting with someone who has green glasses on and you have pink glasses on. You have to agree with them over what color the world is, however even this doesn’t matter. I have my experience and they have theirs and that is enough. I don’t think I can pick anything out specifically with this system that I like more than the other. It’s a wholesome system. Some days, I hate really looking at myself, it can be horrible, but I also love it. It is only horrible for a little while and then you get to the other side and this is truly wonderful. Āsanas can be amazing some days and there are also not such good days. The teachings can be confusing and a little bit scary, but then down the road, you get it. The system is complete. I teach four times a week, āsanas for tourists, beach exercises and the Āyurvedic Bone Alignment. Originally I wanted to teach, that is why I came for the certificate. But then my experience that I had was so powerful, that I just wanted it for myself. However, 6 months later, I came home from Shri Kali and I told my friends what it was like and they were all very excited to try. Then slowly I started to show them. At this point, I realized something that was so beautiful, I couldn’t only just have for it me, that would be really weird. So the second time I came to Shri Kali, I wanted to learn more about teaching it. The first time I was really not interested. It took a long time for me to actually want to share it, but it’s impossible not to share because once you start to integrate what we do here, just being you is part of the sharing. I like the teaching. It is very nice. I have been a teacher since I was 16, teaching almost everything that I ever did. So that was maybe also why I originally thought I would keep this to myself. But teaching this system, is not really like teaching in any of the ways I had done before. We always say at this ashram, that we are not teaching, but sharing. I just have to be there and share the āsanas. Sharing other aspects of this system, like the talks, also opens people’s eyes, which is a beautiful experience. To tell them something that might make them look at their lives a little differently is rewarding. I think in all the time I have been teaching, I might have had one person that didn’t like it and the rest of them love it. I have several tourists that come on Monday to my classes and then come back the whole summertime. As long as I am learning about the Kaula system, I don’t really care what shape or color it is. It’s the same system and this system fulfills me.