Art & Yoga
Kundalini Awakening in Everyday Life

by Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa

Now Available at The Source!

“The sole purpose of life is the soul.” —Yogi Bhajan

Learn to express your soul’s longing, delve into images that awaken your imagination and speak of a truth yet unexplored. Allow Art & Yoga to take you on a journey to your intuitive, creative and authentic self—the True Being, awakened!

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. Along the way, we will draw inspiration from the teachings of Yogi Bhajan, nature, artists of the past, and recent developments in healing and spirituality.

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 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.

About the Author

Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa, MA, MFA, is an artist and teacher dedicated to healing through yoga and art. She teaches at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, Monadnock Community Hospital/Bond Wellness Center, the Antrim Girls Shelter, Omega Institute for Holistic Health and sliding scale classes at the Union Mill in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

She trains Yoga teachers for KRI in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. She is the author of Art & Yoga: Kundalini Awakening in Everyday Life which will be released by KRI Summer 2011.

To view her workshops, paintings and public art events visit www.artandyoga.com and for more information on her April exhibition at the Brattleboro Museum see: www.whereveryouareisthecenteroftheworld.com

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Thomas Moore

Art & Yoga: Introduction

Chapter One: Guidelines for Practice

Chapter Two: Awareness

Chapter Three: Emotions

Chapter Four: Chakras

Chapter Five: Nature

Chapter Six: Dance

Chapter Seven: Working with Young People

Chapter Eight: Collaboration

Chapter Nine: Daily Practice

From the Foreword by Thomas Moore, bestselling author of Care of the Soul

If art is going to reach into the deepest strata of our souls and climb to spiritual heights, it requires a spiritual and soulful context....When yoga is practiced as a deep spiritual activity, contemplative and communal, it has a natural affinity for art, because like nothing else, art can evoke and invoke the eternal and the mysterious.

Artists are genuine creators, giving us bodies and landscapes and objects. They populate our imaginations with figures that live as presences in our lives that affect us and instruct us. The soul is hungry for images and, in fact, lives on them the way we live on food. We can never have enough images.

...Yoga gives art a context, but art also has something to give. Some religious traditions say that it provides a home for invisible spiritual realities that take up residence in our images. This is a way of saying that there is something seriously vital in our images. We are not just trying to depict something. We are housing the invisible factors that have so much to do with the meaning of our lives, making them available and being affected by them.

I’ve been waiting for this book for a long time. It represents a shift that I hope will become more evident as our new century progresses: a shift from separating matters of soul and spirit—images and practice, the poetic and the well defined, the intuitive and the carefully reasoned—to uniting them...When soul and spirit come together, there is a great healing. These two dimensions, like yin and yang, are the building blocks, the essential dynamics, in everything that is tangible and alive. Meditate/draw. Do the poses / have a conversation. Do your yoga / drink tea and enjoy each other’s company.

Hari Kirin, your teacher in this book, knows this secret of secrets deep down. Listen to her. Learn her way, and then use it to make your own. Yoga, the yoking of soul and spirit, can be accomplished in myriad ways. Don’t be afraid. Don’t block it with your certainties. Don’t worry about being wrong or incompetent. The path of innocence, the beginner’s mind, is the way of bliss.

...Allow the images to rise. Trust them. Listen closely to them. Honor them. Remember them. Enshrine them. Let your images interpret the old standard ones, the ones in stone. Let them interpret you. Let them resurrect you.

Yoga can wake you up and keep you awake. Although this is a crucial achievement, it is not the purpose of yoga. It doesn’t stop with you. The images associated with your practice bring your yoga into the world and into relationship and community. Your practice finds its purpose outside yourself and in a world that needs your devotion and intensity. Your images are a bridge between your inner discoveries and the world around you.