Kym Spry, 37, is a massage therapist living in Raglan. A Kundalini yoga devotee, she has been practicing for three years.
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“I think I cried throughout my entire first session of Kundalini yoga. The minute I walked into the studio there was just this sensation where I felt I could actually let my breath go. I hadn’t even realised I was holding my breath.
Kundalini is called the yoga of awareness. It’s been around for thousands of years. It is about strengthening the nervous system and the 72,000 nerve endings in the body and bringing the mind, body and soul into balance. We do a lot of chanting, there’s a lot of meditation, and there is some movement practice - but that’s not the sole focus. We do a lot of breath work so we can get to a real place of stillness.
Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
For me, practicing Kundalini, I’m just a better person for it on every single level. I’m more patient and aware, I bring a different sense of calm and joy and love and compassion. I find my senses get incredibly heightened, what I see, what I smell, what I feel, too, something as subtle as a breeze on my skin.
I had one practice – a pose with a chant - that I did every single day for 120 days straight. I even did it during a layover in Singapore airport. I found the prayer room. I’d never been into a prayer room in my life. I was like, right, I’m committing and sticking to this. So for me there is such a diligence and a discipline, not out of ego but out of that wondrous curiosity and desire of knowing the change that can occur within a 120-day period.
Every time is different. There’s a whole technology to Kundalini, it’s like training a muscle, the more that you do it the more powerful it becomes. It’s allowed me to connect with my internal stillness. There’s not so much chitter chatter.
Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
There are times when I’ve been on the mat and I’ve been holding a pose and I’m in tears because it is hurting and I can’t get to that place of stillness. But then I can have days where I will be in such a state of joy that I cannot even put words to it. It’s such a euphoric feeling, an aliveness in every single cell. It’s a connectedness that I’ve never experienced before - to myself, and to everything else - it’s so much greater than me.”
As told to Felicity Monk.
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