Cover art: Art & Yoga

Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa

Kundalini Awakening in Everyday Life

BY MAGAZINE EDITOR SUSAN MAIER-MOUL

Website Art and Yoga

Website Wherever You Are is the Center of the World

Related article Conversation: Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa and Thomas Moore
Art & Yoga Teacher Training Hari Kirin @ Kripalu November 13 – 18, 2011

The practice of art encourages intuition, openness, discipline, and endurance.

Art is not just a matter of expressing in an outer form that we already know. Like yoga, art is a union of the known with the unknown.

Although we may begin an artwork from a feeling or thought we know, art is not just expressing that feeling or thought. It is not just illustrating something we understand; instead, it is an exploration that steps off the known and moves out to what is beyond.

Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa’s new book Art & Yoga is a companion you will find yourself happily dragging around with you everywhere you teach or practice, whether that’s from room to room in your home or studio to studio in your teaching life.

Practicing creativity and wholeness for everyone

Art & Yoga is perfect for anyone who wants to begin a personal practice and is looking for a gentle, stable path that invites curiosity and calm self regard. For creatives who want a way of connecting to source energy, the kriyas reveal entries to yoga with enough mystery to inspire true “encounters with the unknown.”

Durable, beautiful and useful, Art & Yoga is cover-to-cover full of the materials you need in order to make, invent, support or discover a door in the wall, a path into relation with the unknown, a connection with self and a wholeness of soul.

Encountering the unknown through the making of art is an ancient practice that has always been a part of the human experience.

This book is for anyone interested in yoga and the arts. It explains how to create a daily Art and Yoga practice. It provides step-by-step guidelines for producing art and doing yoga as complementary practices individually, in a group, or in community.

Yogis will find creative exercises to deepen their experience of yoga, while artists will discover simple, yet profound yoga and meditation practices that will help their creative flow, focus, and intuition.

Kundalini transformation without esoteric drama

In addition to quotes and teachings from her beloved Yogi Bhajan and other artists and writers, Hari Kirin brings together many somatic practice fundamentals from which to construct your own investigations.

Art & Yoga delivers concise and applicable teachings on the chakras in regard to the practice and exploration of practice of both art and yoga, and there are wonderfully colorful works of art keeping company with clear and well made photographs of kriyas and kundalini techniques.

In other books it’s not unusual to encounter hair-raising warnings about kundalini yoga and its power to make an unprepared or novice practitioner unstable or downright crazy. Thankfully, Hari Kirin continues her own much-loved teacher’s tradition of openly sharing and disseminating transformative practices, rather than maintaining Kundalini yoga as secretive and dangerous.

Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan® is safe. It doesn’t aim for strong cathartic or dramatic experiences. On the contrary, the goal is a stable state of awareness, creativity, and a feeling of neutrality.

You will know the kundalini is rising and circulating when you feel secure, creative, calm, compassionate, intuitive, and uniquely yourself.

Traditionally, masters had been taught to keep secret the yogic practices entrusted to them. Kundalini is a powerfully transformative yoga. Teachers would only share these secret kriyas after a student had shown humility, self-discipline, and obedience.

Yogi Bhajan broke with this tradition, however. He believed that in these transitional times, Kundalini Yoga should be available to all. He taught that the time of the Sat Guru (one true teacher) was ending … and we were entering a time when each person takes responsibility for herself.

Organic mud murals, kriyas and chakras

Art & Yoga is simple to use, and that’s high praise.

It is not easier to write a complex or arcane guide than it is to write one that can be adapted to many situations and different levels of engagement. It’s because of Hari Kirin’s deep commitment as both yogi and artist, and her years of experience teaching both, that she’s able to bring clarity and accessibility to yoga concepts and artistic collaboration.

Art & Yoga has practical, doable instructions for individual or group practice, and Hari Kirin leaves room for additional ideas or variations to be brought into play. Looking for warm weather class and workshop inspiration? The organic mud murals in the chapter on art and nature all by themselves will repay your investment.

There is no need to know how to draw, paint, meditate, or do yoga to use this book. The art exercises are designed to make the experience accessible and fun, while also introducing a variety of inexpensive, safe, and easy-to-obtain art materials. Any experience you, the reader, bring to the process will be helpful.

If you teach yoga or art or if you work as a healer, you’ll find inspiration and practical ways to deepen your professional practice.

If you are looking for a unique resource to begin a personal practice or to significantly open up the one you have or teach, or if you are searching for a practical yet inspiring resource that offers not just ideas and philosophy, but actual exercises to do on your own, with a group or to teach, you will find Art & Yoga immensely enjoyable and invaluable.

“The world needs our creativity, compassion, and intuitive intelligence,” writes Hari Kirin. I couldn’t agree with her more.

© 2011, The Magazine of Yoga, LLC.