KIRTAN KRIYA AS AN INNATE PRACTICE

A quarter of a century ago, a dear friend of mine returned from being a guest student at a Spanish university. We threw her a welcoming party eager to take part in her taleof the big and beautiful world.

When she came to the part about her experiencing hippie substances, amongst them LSD, I was somewhat more intrigued than upset. I would never consider doing drugs myself, but her report struck a resonance in me; intellectually as well as spiritually, when she reported having being able to smell colors and taste sounds. I was baffled and the thought stuck in my brain. How was that even possible? My friend was neither a person of big exaggerations or lies, but awake and with a certain undiscriminating curiosity that sometimes brought her into trouble which she always managed find her way through, being one of the most intelligent people I knew. "Brainy", she was. And now, her brain had made a dangerous but interesting leap of tasks.

Neuropaths in my own mind connected with an expanded univers through poetry; of course! We don´t need to see with our eyes or smell with our noses. I had a blind friend. She red with her fingertips and myself being really, really nearsighted; it was some what of a family joke that I still never missed the needles eye when threading it . The sense of sight was plastic. The fingers could see when the eyes could not.

This was way before web(how did we get to know things at all?) and my academical passions where mainly directed towards philosophy and history, but the brain, the mind, the body’s secrets had always intrigued me deeply. Not being a particular nervous person, I had always enjoyed messing with my fingers. I discovered (or never forgot the childs wisdom of) the connection between my fingertips, my brain-mind and my gut-mind, and I developed and prescribed finger games synchronized with favorite poems or songs for myself and my little sister when we where in sudden need of comfort or strength.

I found the same pleasure as the rest of my tribe of "giving the finger" through puberty, but remembering how having nailed the Latin alphabet quite early, I joined my older friends in developing secret alphabets with the hands and fingers in order to sign each other in secrecy, extending far beyond the middle finger.

Sometimes I even diagnosed my own emotions though the tapping of my fingers. After experiencing a big trauma of the loss of a best friend, I was numb with feelings and unable to translate my sound intuition into action . I began to watch my fingers, analyze what they would mean before the "fall of reason" and try to act on them. Kind of "fake it to make it". It worked in a strange way and made even more sense to me after the next blow of faith. After loosing my first child and my father in two months, the fingers developer their own "Kirtan Kriya" to the lyrics and melody of "Cradle Song" by the English rock band, Shrieckback. It worked my mind and fingers through the single worst year of my life.

Many years after, having "tip dancing" my self through pleasure and pain, loss and gain; I met the ancient science of Kirtan Kriya at the yoga mat. It felt a biographical, synergistic poetry beyond description. Recovering from a severe stroke of Multiple Sclerosis, with Kirtan Kriya and my own body as a tool, I changed and healed my brain with the simple sounds of the universe.

Sa, ta, na, ma; chanting, whispering, mentalizing. In three days; what I later on understood as beeing Kundalini Yoga as tought bay Yogi Bhajan, delivered by YouTube and Kirtan Kriya, put me on my path and my nerve spasms were silenced.

Now, a Kundalini Yoga teacher on my own, I gratefully share the world of healing through Kirtan Kriya with children as their yoga teacher, with guests in yoga therapy and with students in all my different classes. As Yogi Bhajan said, "Happiness is your birth right", and here you are... Having the world at your fingertips.

Sat Nam.

Sat Akal Kaur.