Humility on the path.

A teaching that is only memorized has already died in the mouth of the one repeating it. A teaching that is understood becomes practice. A practice that is sustained becomes recognition. That is the path that is alive.

So the practitioner now has to hold two things at once. How does one become ten times greater than the master — and stay in humility? And how does one be intellectually serious — willing to read the texts, trace the lineage, do the work — and still be able to drop the intellect entirely when the kundalini rises and the flow takes over? These are not two questions. They are the same question, asked twice.

Kundalini Yoga as the Siri Singh Sahib Yogiji brought it to the West, and as Yogi Amandeep Ji is expanding it now, is a powerful technology for exactly this moment — a technology engineered for nondual recognition in a time that needs it. And it is also undergoing what I call re-indigenization: a return of the teachings to the living Himalayan ground they emerged from.

For years I was wholeheartedly dedicated to documenting and teaching the transmission as the Siri Singh Sahib Yogiji gave it between 1969 and 2004. I studied with Tej Khalsa and with Harmanjot Kaur, who carried that transmission faithfully and gave me my foundations. Then I saw Yogi Amandeep Ji teach. My heart was given the first time I sat with him. I knew he was the transmitter for this age, and I gave myself in devotion to learning from him and to helping his work move into the world. It is from that place — as student first — that I now teach.

Much of my work as a scholar and teacher is reading carefully across the bridge between traditions. How does what was given to Westerners correlate to the yogic texts, the Indian tradition, the unbroken transmission? Where does it match the source, where was it adapted for the moment, and what is being recovered now? This is the use of poetry in my work: the system of poetic emergence is how nondual poetry and scripture become practice, and then become realization. The poem is the bridge the intellect can cross while the kundalini is doing its own work underneath.

I come to this work as a person of Creole and Indigenous ancestry, and I take re-indigenization seriously because Yogi Amandeep Ji is actively doing it: decolonizing Kundalini Yoga, revealing the original Udasin and Nirmala lineages, and bringing the teachings that crossed to the West back home to India. I want to help carry that work — and to make this practice genuinely available to Indigenous practitioners and to anyone whose ground has been thinned by materialism and the speed of modern life.

I teach from my own awakening as a humble representative of these teachings as they were given. Not as their owner. As someone trusted, for a season, to hold the door open.