Picture a path. An actual path, the kind your feet know. You step onto it the way anyone steps onto anything: half by choice, half because life put it there. At first you read every sign. You want the names of things. You note the markers, the elevation, the language carved into the stones. You are careful, because you have heard that people get lost here. So you carry a notebook.
I came to this path as a poet. My doctoral training is in creative writing, with a concentration in visionary poetics and the poetry of transmission — Gurbani, the ecstatic poetry of many traditions, the modern American visionary poets. I am a yogi who applies a scholar's tools to the yoga: close reading, formal precision, traceable lineage, accountability to the source texts. That is the notebook I carried in.
Some way down the path I came to a long stretch of stones — the archives of the Siri Singh Sahib Yogiji. I sat with them a long time. And the thing I noticed, reading slowly, was that the meditations he was teaching were, again and again, transmission-oriented interpretations of the Gurbani he was reciting to the class. The kriya was the scripture entering the body. The mantra was the verse, breathing. The signs along this path were songs. Once you hear that, you cannot un-hear it. You start walking differently.
For years my work was a project in precision: documenting what the Siri Singh Sahib Yogiji taught as faithfully as I could, the way you might transcribe a song so the next person can sing it. That work mattered. It still matters. But the path keeps going. And what I believe is warranted now is something deeper — precision in the teachings of the transmitters, with a real study of the yogic sciences underneath, so the practitioner can see where each practice came from and why it does what it does.
This matters more in this moment than it ever has. The other walkers on the path are not who they used to be. They are reading. They are reading the newly translated tantric and nondual and yogic texts, and reading them well. Modern PhDs in Sanskrit literature are on the trail now. Long-time practitioners who have spent decades wondering where the practice came from are on the trail. The walkers want sources. They deserve sources. And the practice can hold up to that scrutiny — beautifully — when it is taught from inside the river it was always flowing in.
Two tendencies among Kundalini yogis right now, both good, both needing to deepen. On one side, devoted study of Siri Guru Granth Sahib, which is right and which is the heart of it. On the other, a tendency to mix the practice with the New Age, which is also an opening — people are looking for something true. The Guru is the Guru. And Yogi Amandeep Ji, as a teacher in the Udasin and Nirmala lineages, reads it nondually — the way the householder-yogi lineages have read it for centuries. His work is the bridge: relationally accountable to the source traditions, and legible to the modern reader who is now genuinely literate in this material. He revives Kundalini Yoga and seats it back inside the larger world of yogic teaching and teacher, inside the river it was always flowing in.
I believe the thriving of the lineage in this age depends on exactly this kind of engagement. And then, at the same time — and this is the strange thing the path teaches you eventually — you have to be willing to put the notebook down. The walking becomes the teacher. The breath becomes the teacher. The signs stop being signs because the path itself is now speaking. This is the turn into pure intuition. The scholarship is what makes it trustworthy. The surrender is what makes it alive.
So that is where this is going. Slowly, with breath, with the texts in one hand and the kriya in the body, and the long ear that knows when to stop reading and just walk.
The path is not a road toward something. It is the breath you are already taking.