Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life through the power of TRUST.
Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.
In this episode, we dive deep into the transformative power of Kundalini yoga with Laura Goellner from LauraGyoga.com. We explore the practical aspects of Kundalini, how it can aid in nervous system regulation, and its role in personal healing and development.
Understanding Kundalini Yoga: Laura shares her journey into Kundalini yoga, highlighting its unique ability to transform heavy, stuck energy into something powerful and usable. She explains how Kundalini differs from other forms of yoga by combining powerful movements with stillness and awareness, offering a holistic approach to healing.
Yoga Therapy and Nervous System Regulation: Laura discusses her work as a yoga therapist, focusing on individualised practices that address each person’s unique needs. She emphasises the importance of breathwork and meditation in managing the nervous system, helping individuals move from a state of sympathetic dominance to a balanced, relaxed state.
The Practicality of Kundalini: We delve into the practical aspects of Kundalini yoga, debunking the myths and romanticised views often associated with it. Laura explains how Kundalini can be a practical tool for everyday life, helping individuals process big emotions and find a sense of calm and clarity.
Creative Status: Kundalini Rising
Join us in this episode as we explore the depths of Kundalini yoga and its practical applications for personal growth and healing. This conversation is a must-listen for anyone interested in using yoga as a tool for navigating life’s challenges and moving towards a more balanced and authentic existence.
Stay real out there,
Oli
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Episode Links:
Laura’s Website: https://www.lauragyoga.com/
FREE Kundalini 101: Modern Kundalini 101 Laura on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lauragyoga/
Laura’s Kundalini Yoga classes on Glo: https://www.glo.com/teachers/laura-goellnerGet the first-month access for $1 with code JOINLAURA
Creative Status Links:
Book a call with Oli and grow more REAL (coaching): olianderson.co.uk/talk
Yoga flows (including YIN DISSOLUTION): http://www.youtube.com/@vin2yin
BAM Challenge: https://www.olianderson.co.uk/BAM
Follow me on Instagram: instagram.com/olijanderson
My YouTube channel: youtube.com/olianderson
Get my books on Amazon: www.amazon.com/author/oli
7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose: olianderson.co.uk/systemshock
Free one hour creative workshop to take your creative brand or project to the next level: olianderson.co.uk/creativeworkshop
Kundalini Unleashed (Show Transcript)
Intro
Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there. Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status. This is a podcast where we talk about being a real human being—tapping into our realness by finding a connection to wholeness by any means necessary. That sounds dramatic, and it is.
Today’s episode is an interview episode with Laura G from LauraGyoga.com. We’re talking about all kinds of my favorite topics: Kundalini, yoga, nervous system regulation, healing, and what we can do to put ourselves back on the path we belong on.
I’m not going to say too much more, but this is an awesome interview. Laura, thank you so much for your time, your knowledge, and your wisdom about all this stuff.
And to everyone else, I hope this helps you go out there and live that real life. Here we go. Thanks a bunch. Boom.
Interview
Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Laura. Thank you so much for joining me on today’s episode of Creative Status. I discovered you and your work when I was looking on Udemy for interesting things to learn about. I typed in “Kundalini,” and I found a course that you’d made. It was amazing, so I thought I’d reach out to you.
Ultimately, we kind of got to talk about modern Kundalini, some of the misconceptions people have, and what we can learn from Kundalini in relation to our own healing and all that kind of stuff.
But before we get into it, would you like to introduce yourself, tell people what you’re all about, how you got into Kundalini in the first place, and also what you want to get out of this conversation that we’re about to have?
Laura Goellner: eah, sure. Thanks so much for having me and for sharing information about what Kundalini is. That’s a big part of my mission right now—to basically share the practices of yoga in a way that supports people’s healing and personal development. That’s kind of the cornerstone of what we think of as yoga therapy.
So, I’m a yoga teacher, but I’m also a yoga therapist. That means I work with all the different tools and techniques of yoga to really support people wherever they are in their healing process or personal development journey. Over the years of practicing all sorts of different types of yoga, Kundalini has been one that stood out because it is so powerful at creating an experience of transformation.
We think of it as taking a certain type of energy that might be there—a heaviness or a stuckness—and transforming that into something powerful and usable, so you can start to move in the direction you’re really working toward in your life. That’s what really drew me into Kundalini. I had a very personal experience with it in terms of my own healing and development, and it continues to be a big part of my life today.
It’s so important to me to be able to share that with people in a way that feels like it just becomes a part of your day-to-day life—a tool you can use to feel really engaged with what’s happening all around you.
Oli Anderson: So, when you say that you do yoga therapy as well, what other kinds of tools and techniques do you bring into the equation? Just to get a kind of overview of what it is you do.
Because, obviously, a lot of people think that yoga is just about the poses or the asana, but in the Yoga Sutras, there are only three sutras that refer to asana. So, do you use the philosophy as well, or what else are you talking about?
Laura G: Yes, it’s a very individual process. In the West, we’re quite used to seeing yoga shared in a group context—usually a big class. And I think for most Western yoga teachers, the bigger the class, the better. But with yoga therapy, we move in the opposite direction. It’s either a very small group or, more often, one-on-one, so we can completely focus on the needs of the individual.
It’s about getting to know where they’re at, what they’re struggling with, and what they’re moving toward. My role in that process is to say, “Okay, here are the practices of yoga, here are the philosophies and frameworks we have in yoga that can support you exactly where you are,” and to facilitate that healing process. Yoga is so good at that—any time we interact with it, it tends to touch a piece of that healing process within us.
It’s really a holistic process. It can involve postures, but I tend to lean quite a bit into breathwork and meditation because they interact so strongly with the nervous system. That’s the focal point of a lot of the work I’ve done—helping people manage their nervous system, which I find so helpful in the healing process, giving them those tools.
But it is a very individual experience. Every person who comes to yoga therapy will have a session that looks a little bit different because it’s so important that it’s tailored to them.
Oli Anderson: That’s awesome, because everybody’s healing journey is different, obviously, even though it’s all kind of leading back to the same place. I think that place is just wholeness, connection, and all that kind of stuff. I love how you mentioned breathwork and meditation. For me, in all the work I do these days, I think the “holy trinity,” so to speak, is yoga asana, meditation, and pranayama. All of those things together are just so powerful, and it does come down to the nervous system, which I think we’re going to get into in a minute. So, thank you for sharing that.
Before we get into the deeper stuff, if you don’t mind, could you explain exactly how you define Kundalini? One of the reasons I like your work so much is that you’ve made it very practical and down to earth, which kind of goes against the grain of a lot of the stuff out there on Kundalini. There’s often a romanticized idea that there’s a coiled snake at the bottom of the spine, and then it shoots up your chakras, releasing all these different rainbow colors, and then you get superpowers and all your problems are solved—you can walk on water and everything.
Is there some truth in that? Or, how do you define Kundalini?
Laura G: Yeah, well, perhaps—I don’t know. I haven’t gotten to that point yet where I’ve had any rainbows come out of any interesting places. But who knows? There’s a whole lifetime of practice ahead of me, so I’ll let you know.
My personal approach to anything—whether it’s yoga, a vinyasa practice, yoga therapy, or Kundalini—is always to make it practical for the people who are interacting with it. We can focus on all these esoteric things and lofty goals like reaching enlightenment, but if we don’t have the tools to engage well in the relationships we’re in right now, navigate our work life, or handle very practical things on a daily basis, I feel like we’re missing such an important part of the healing process. It’s about feeling really engaged and connected with life as it’s unfolding.
My experience coming into Kundalini, after many years of practicing vinyasa—very flowy, breath-based practice where one pose flows into the next—was wonderful. It helped me feel more connected and aware of my body. But when I reached a point in my life where some really big struggles started to come up—a tremendously pressured job in healthcare and a very difficult, complex divorce—I felt like my vinyasa practice wasn’t helping me as much as it had been. The feelings I was going through were just so big, and I didn’t have a way to process them.
That’s when Kundalini started to step forward in my personal practice. I started doing movements that felt so strange. When you first start, you feel a little ridiculous—like, what am I doing? But there was a part of me that thought, “Let me try this. Maybe it’ll help.” That’s where I was at—I needed something, and I was willing to step completely out of my comfort zone to find it.
What I found in Kundalini were components that offered both incredible power and release. The movements were really strong and effortful—perfect for processing anger or repressed feelings. It gave me a way to move powerfully and work through those emotions. This was so helpful for me because, in the landscape of yoga, I think emotions like anger and sadness are often avoided or not talked about. But these emotions are such a human thing, and when we don’t have tools to process them, they build up inside us and can have detrimental effects. That strong, powerful component of Kundalini practice hit a point for me that wasn’t incorporated into my other practices.
And then, what makes this practice so amazing is that you can jump right from powerful, energy-based movement into stillness.
Oli Anderson: Wow.
Laura G: And you watch that transition—”Can I completely let that go? Can I drop all of that effort and just let myself sit here in a complete state of awareness? Whatever comes up, I’m just going to be here with it.”
To me, that connection of powerful movement and engagement of the body, balanced with stillness and deep awareness—my favorite way to describe Kundalini, the yoga of awareness—is what makes this practice so special. It’s also so helpful in a practical way for anyone on this human journey who has big feelings they just don’t know what to do with. It gives you some day-to-day tools that you can work with.
Oli Anderson: That sounds awesome. If I’m totally honest, I do yoga every day, but most of the yoga I do is power yoga, vinyasa yoga, or yin yoga. Based on what you’re saying, it actually aligns with what I’ve experienced. Vinyasa and yin have both really helped me dissolve a lot of my emotional stuff, but it’s been a very passive byproduct of going through those yoga flows.
If I understand you correctly, with Kundalini yoga, you already know that certain emotional stuff—sadness, anger, or whatever it is—is bubbling beneath the surface. And certain asanas within the Kundalini context allow you to actively bring those emotions to the surface, almost like you’re stirring the waters intentionally. Then, once it’s stirred up, you get into the stillness, and you can just face whatever comes up and allow it to do whatever it needs to do. Is that a fair way of saying it?
Laura G: Yeah, that’s the process that’s unfolding over and over in this practice. I always like to tell people that I love all the different forms of yoga—they all bring something different and can help us with different things at certain points in our lives, depending on what internal processes are going on. I think they all have an important role to play, and we get to choose: do I need a yin practice today? Do I need a vinyasa practice, or do I need a Kundalini practice to let those things bubble up to the surface?
In Kundalini, you’re actually going through the process of bringing emotions up with specific movements. For example, you might be powerfully moving your arms back and forth, like you’re punching. The teacher’s role is to guide you through the experience, saying, “Okay, lean into that experience of anger. Don’t move away from it. Let it come up, let it be there, let your body process it, and show it how to release.”
Then, you bring yourself into a place of soothing, settling, and coming back to a state of peace. You don’t feel overwhelmed or stuck in anger. It becomes a fluid process where things can evolve, and when they’re ready to let go, they know exactly where to release. That process can be so helpful for purposely bringing up things we tend to avoid because they’re difficult to manage. But once you have the tools and know how the process works, you become more confident, saying, “Okay, I’m not going to ignore my anger anymore. I’ll acknowledge it, let my awareness rest on it, and say, ‘I’m angry, and that’s part of being human.’ Let me process this, and here’s the roadmap of how to do it.”
Oli Anderson: Often, when people talk about Kundalini—like when I talk to other Kundalini instructors—they often refer to it as a technology. Is that linked to what we’re discussing now? Ultimately, is it a technology for managing this kind of emotional stuff that’s normally just hidden beneath the surface in the shadow self?
Laura G: Yeah, that’s a really common term used in Kundalini practices. I tend to refer to the components as tools or techniques, but I think it all gets at the same point: we have this set of practices. One particularly interesting thing about Kundalini is that it’s a very holistic practice.
In vinyasa, you might do an opening breath, flow through some poses, and finish with a breath, depending on the class. But it’s usually more segmented. In Kundalini, throughout the practice, you might be doing a posture, flowing, stopping in stillness to meditate, or jumping right into mantra. It’s all woven together, so you’re taking all the tools of yoga and integrating them into that practice.
That’s one of the really important things I like to highlight about the direction some modern yoga teachers are taking Kundalini. It’s a very choice-based practice, which gets at the core of any yoga, but I’ll specifically talk about it in terms of Kundalini. It’s about listening to your inner information—having a little mini conversation with yourself over and over: “How do I feel? What do I need?” Then, you listen for that information to bubble up and have the courage to act on what it tells you.
We go through that process repeatedly. In listening to yourself, you step into that place of choice. For example, do I want to continue this movement, or do I need to rest because my shoulder is getting sore? Do I need to do this very strong, powerful breath of fire, or maybe today I need to be a little softer with myself and choose to stay with a slower, deeper breath because that’s what I really feel like I need?
You have these tools, these choices, and all these different components that come together to craft a practice that is exactly what you need to support yourself on that particular day.
Oli Anderson: I suppose this is where the conversation shifts to the idea of awareness. In my coaching practice, I always start by raising as much awareness as possible. When people come to coaching or any kind of transformative intervention because they need to change their lives, it’s often because they’re not aware of the inner information you’re talking about: What do I really need? What am I avoiding? What am I running from? What should I be moving toward if I’m being real with myself?
When people resist these kinds of questions, it echoes Carl Jung’s famous saying, “What you resist persists.” The more we operate on autopilot—doing the things we’ve become accustomed to, which may not allow us to get the healing we need and deserve—the more our lives can slip through our fingers.
Practices like Kundalini yoga, or any intervention that raises awareness, cut through the hamster wheel thoughts and limiting beliefs we filter life through on a daily basis. They help put us back on the path we need to be walking at any given moment, moving toward wholeness and healing.
So, my question for you is: What kinds of things have you seen that we need to become aware of in order to start healing our lives through this process? Additionally, what are the effects on the nervous system when we’re not aware of these things? Is this why yoga, as a whole, is so powerful? Does it align our nervous system with our true path, or perhaps the path of least resistance in our lives?
Laura G: The connections between yoga and psychology are among the most fascinating aspects for me. When we engage in practices that foster awareness, we often start with postures, focusing on sensations in the body. For instance, can I be aware of the feeling of stretch in my leg? We allow awareness to soak into the body. As we practice longer, we can draw our attention to deeper layers and observe our thought processes and habitual thinking patterns that may be simmering beneath the surface, influencing our choices.
Over a lifetime of practice, we create spaces to settle and turn our awareness inward, asking ourselves, “What process is unfolding as I go through my practice?” A particularly unique element of Kundalini is the transition from effortful movement to complete stillness. We repeatedly observe our relationship with effort and rest. We push ourselves into challenges, moving into discomfort, and experience boredom or restlessness in our minds. Thoughts arise, like, “Why are we doing this? I’d rather be doing something else.”
This is a meditative process in motion: noticing those thoughts and patterns. For example, why do I get bored so easily? Why do I seek the next shiny, exciting thing? Here, we observe our relationship with effort. A common pattern many of us, including myself, have experienced is over-efforting—believing that harder work is always better. This can lead to injury, as I’ve learned from pushing too hard without listening to my inner guidance, feeling the need to keep up or perform at maximum capacity.
Recognizing that I don’t need to push to the point of strain leads to deeper questions: Why do I keep doing that? What lies underneath this pattern? Then, in moments of stillness, we can gently explore these questions, gaining insights into our self-worth and core beliefs.
Students often notice patterns quickly: some gravitate toward effortful movements, enjoying the dynamic parts of Kundalini, while others find stillness challenging. This highlights where resistance arises and reveals how these tendencies manifest in the rest of our lives. Am I avoiding discomfort that could foster growth? Am I overworking to the point of detriment?
Once we gain awareness of these patterns, a significant shift occurs. We start to recognize moments of overdoing it and can explore new, more supportive patterns. What is my inner voice telling me? Is it suggesting I need rest instead of pushing harder? This constant evolution unfolds moment by moment within our practice. It’s fascinating to watch the strengthening of inner awareness and shine light on the darker places where these powerful processes occur. Often, we don’t realize they’re there until we settle in and look for them. That’s what I find endlessly interesting about this practice.
Oli Anderson: Everything you shared is so powerful because those cycles of effort and release are constantly unfolding in all areas of life. Our relationship with these cycles profoundly affects the quality of our lives. I’ve seen it time and again—many people, myself included, fall into the trap of being “human doings” instead of “human beings.” We force ourselves against life, striving to reach goals, believing that achieving them—whether in business or relationships—will magically heal us and make us feel whole. But it doesn’t work that way.
We need to fine-tune our relationship between effort and release, balancing the yin and yang of life to express both healthily. When we achieve this balance, we can truly lean into life. We do everything within our control and power, but when it comes to things we can’t control, we can let go, surrender, and trust life to unfold as it should. I believe yoga is a testing ground for this way of living—a microcosm of the macrocosm of life itself.
If we can reach what I call the “zero point,” where yin and yang come together, we’ve managed to put in the necessary effort while also surrendering to the effortless nature of life. This means accepting the limitations of our bodies and understanding that we can’t force everything to fit a perfect mold. When we unify these two aspects, life becomes amazing. We stop forcing our bodies, minds, and nervous systems into unnecessary strain.
This brings us to the nervous system. Many people push themselves toward perfectionism, even in yoga poses, without acknowledging that we all have different skeletal structures. If we force ourselves due to misplaced ideas of perfection, often rooted in shame, we can end up in a state of sympathetic dominance, where everything feels like a threat.
The practices you discuss can help align our nervous systems with the natural flow of life. This alignment fosters a sense of trust in life, leading to a healthier relationship with it. When our parasympathetic nervous system functions well, we can remain calm in the eye of the storm, allowing life to swirl around us. We can trust that we’ll arrive where we need to be without exerting effort where it isn’t necessary.
I apologize for my rant, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, especially regarding the nervous system.
Laura G: Yeah, well, you know, this whole process, this play that, as you were saying, is really something that unfolds on our mat, but it is the bigger picture of our life with everything, with how do I play back and forth with effort and ease? How does my nervous system adapt to effort and ease? And, you know, there’s a lot of kind of misconceptions in yoga that we’re always supposed to be—supposed to be, you know, in quotes—calm and placid and just completely relaxed. And that’s actually not the way that the human nervous system is designed. We are made to be incredibly adaptable so that when there is danger, we have that energy that mobilizes to help us address that situation. And then as soon as that danger is gone and that challenge has been handled, we can slide right back into that parasympathetic rest and digest, taking care of yourself, creating connection.
So a truly healthy nervous system is fluid back and forth between those things all throughout the day. As some challenge arises, the sympathetic nervous system kicks in and goes, “Here’s some extra energy, here’s some extra glucose. Like, here’s all the things that you need to meet this challenge.” And then as soon as you’re done with that, you go right back into rest and digest. But what happens is we get so much practice being overstimulated, overworked, that most people in the modern world tend to get stuck in that fight or flight, that stress response in a way that becomes detrimental to our health. But it’s not necessarily to say that that’s always bad. It’s actually a very natural and healthy part of our nervous system. It’s only when we get stuck there that it becomes something detrimental.
So this practice that we do in Kundalini, of inviting in effort, of saying, okay, we’re not going to do everything, you know, always soft, always calm. We know that there is a range of experience within our nervous system, and being able to have that flexibility of adaptation whenever need arises, your nervous system is ready and able to meet that. That is a very healthy nervous system—just fluid back and forth between whatever the moment really calls for. So the practice of Kundalini comes and gives us a whole bunch of tools for what we call in the therapy world nervous system regulation of making that choice of, “Oh, well, I feel that I am stuck in that tension. Like whatever happened during the week is still clinging to me. I still feel that tension, that kind of upwelling of energy. And I really need to get ready to go to sleep or something like that.”
So the thing that people actually don’t realize about Kundalini sometimes is that there’s a wealth of really deep meditative practices. Outside of the fun jumping around and energy and all that, we also have this wealth of mantra and breath work and deep meditative practices that can also help your nervous system to calm and to settle. And one of my favorite components of that as we practice back and forth and support that nervous system flexibility. When you get really good at making that choice of do I want to use this breath or do I want to use that breath? Depending on what I need to feed to my nervous system, it becomes this really dynamic relationship of how you take care of yourself. A whole layer of self-care and personal empowerment. To say, I have all these tools. I have an awareness of how I feel right now and kind of what’s going on. And I know what I need to bring into my experience so that I can move into that place of feeling regulated, feeling supported. And within that process is strengthening that relationship to your inner information. Being able to know that from a deep place within yourself, and that such an empowering process that I think is really key to the modern practice of any yoga, but particularly in Kundalini, that strong connection to listening to your inner information.
Oli Anderson: Do you think when people have a dysregulated nervous system it’s ultimately just causing them to receive information that seems like the kind of inner information you’re talking about, but actually is. It’s not. It’s not a pure signal, so to speak. It’s been distorted or it’s a consequence of kind of resistance at some level. And it just ends up kind of exacerbating the kind of problems that are causing them to feel stuck or blocked or to feel like they needed some kind of emotional healing or release in the first place? And, if so, like, I suppose, how do we—how do we distinguish, I guess, distorted inner information from the real thing if that’s not too deep?
Laura G: Yeah, this is a very important process that I really like to work with people on. Anxiety and having a harsh inner critic are such common experiences in the modern world. Many people have patterns of self-talk and various loud sources of inner information telling them that they’re not enough, that they’re not doing enough, and that they need to fix things or become better. That voice can be really overwhelming for so many.
The process of going inward can sometimes feel scary because we don’t want that inner critic to get louder. We often hear people say, “Meditation? No, thank you! I don’t want to sit there and just listen to my inner critic. That sounds terrible.” But that’s not what we want to happen.
Interestingly, when we are chronically dysregulated and stuck in a stress response, the inner critic tends to get louder and stronger. It’s a product of trying to protect ourselves and putting up walls. The first step is to engage in practices that help us feel more centered and regulated, fostering that flexibility in our nervous system and leaning towards the calming, quieting end.
Think of the arc of a yoga practice: you warm up, reach a peak where you really mobilize your energy, and then slide down into calm and quiet. When you reach that quieter endpoint, if we’ve effectively regulated the nervous system through postures and breath, we often find a bit more inner clarity. The voice of the inner critic, or the anxious thoughts that might have been loud and front and center, can dim down. Even if it’s still there, we gain the perspective to understand that it’s not wisdom; it’s the voice of fear.
When it’s fear-based, it has a very different energetic feeling. We might recognize it as the ego—protective and fear-driven. You can then say to yourself, “Okay, let me settle down past that active, loud place of fear-based information and go deeper.” Picture a leaf gently falling from a tree and landing softly on the ground. If you settle into that process internally, you might find a calm, clear awareness that feels distinct from anything else. It’s often a soft whisper or a gentle feeling, but there’s a clarity to it that is unmatched.
Oli Anderson: Yeah. Wow.
Laura G: And I think, when I tell people that, they will immediately respond, “Oh, that sounds wonderful! I want to make that happen.” It’s like they want to snap their fingers and say, “Yes! How do I listen to my inner wisdom? Let’s make that happen.”
Oli Anderson: Yeah.
Laura G: And it’s important to realize that it’s a process. We practice a lot and do many things to get to that place where we can root down into that deeper layer and listen to it. That’s where all the tools of the practice come in to help us get there.
Oli Anderson: Yeah. Is this a classic case of getting where we want to be? In 90% of cases, let’s say, which is just a random number I pulled out of thin air. Getting where we want to be really involves unlearning rather than learning. I think what we’re talking about here is all these different levels of fragmentation that build up the ego. It’s just stuff that we’ve picked up, identified with, and gotten used to because of the way our nervous system has been interacting with life. It keeps us from what was already there all the time anyway, which is our true self. For me, that realness is something I’m obsessed with and end up talking about all the time. It’s the connection to wholeness or truth, whatever you want to call it. Most of the most effective healing work ultimately gives us tools to discern what’s real from what’s not. When we can do that, we get to the place you’re helping people reach, where all that distortion and noise fades because they know how to tune into the actual signal.
Laura G: Yeah, that’s the pattern I’ve seen too. Many people in the healing space, and in personal exploration, discover that it all boils down to connecting to the core of who you are at your center. That’s where this very clear information comes from—this experience of wholeness. As you mentioned the process of unlearning some of the lies we internalize as truths, one of the most important lessons we can take from meditation practice is that not everything our brain says is true. When you hear that critical thought or harsh self-judgment, you can recognize it and say, “Oh, okay, I see that thought, but it’s not true. It’s just a thought.” It can take time to unlearn the belief that if your brain said it, it must be true. But we can reach a place where we realize our brains generate all sorts of random thoughts that aren’t necessarily helpful or true.
The more you work with your practices—any form of introspection, yoga, meditation—the more you discover the path to that experience of wholeness. You don’t have to fix it, be perfect, or excel at asana. All your flaws and your realness come together to create the full experience of being you. This is reflected in many different spiritual practices. I think we’re pretty good at saying, “Okay, this is what we’re working on.” We have different paths to get there, but this is absolutely the core connection we’re aiming for.
Oli Anderson: Yeah. And I suppose just one final question about that: if you go back to the old yoga texts, like the Yoga Sutras, all that yoga philosophy written thousands of years ago is still applicable today. Human beings back then are fundamentally the same as we are now. The only things that have really changed are technology and the scenery of our lives. Maybe there’s more complexity because we have the Internet and all this kind of stuff, but what it means to be human remains fundamentally the same. Do you think a lot of modern interventions are trying to find something new for whatever reason? But really, we already have the information we need to embrace the human experience and make the most of it. Yet we keep looking for new technologies, interventions, or esoteric answers. Why do you think we feel the need to keep searching for something else?
Laura G: I guess, yeah. One of the interesting things about our nervous system, especially in terms of habit, is that it’s designed to find the easiest path. It’s a built-in process of energy savings. Our brain will always try to figure out the fastest, easiest way to make something happen. That’s the path it wants to take. Anyone who’s been on a healing journey knows that it’s usually the long and winding path that brings the most discovery—really digging deep and figuring things out. It’s not necessarily the easy path. But you have to give credit to our brain; it tries to find the quick answer. Wouldn’t it be nice if that were true? Eventually, we come to the realization that we have to sit with the difficult things and dig into them as we feel safe and capable. This ongoing process is part of our human experience.
As you mentioned, those deep core truths known thousands of years ago, put into texts, are still important and true today. Some external details have changed—like how much we sit, how our hips and posture have shifted, and the different inputs our nervous systems are exposed to now compared to back then. So, our starting point isn’t quite the same. We need a bit more prep work to regulate our nervous systems, reconnect with our bodies, and bring in some sense of awareness and connection. Then we can start to gain clarity toward those deeper layers.
When you have that moment of realization and connect to that inner space, knowing it’s there, it’s like you touch it and then get distracted. This is the dance, the process. Once you understand that this is the experience of your core, your center, knowing it’s there and that it supports you through every challenge is an incredible source of strength and connection. If yoga can give us even a glimpse of that, it’s worth all the time and effort we put into our practice.
Oli Anderson: That was awesome. What I’ve learned from this episode is that I’m just not going to trust my brain anymore! If you could sum everything up, what are your final words of wisdom? Also, can you let people know where they can learn more about you and your work?
Laura G: I think the broad picture, especially the way I want to share Kundalini and yoga with the world, is that this practice gives you tools to take amazing care of yourself. There’s no other practice I’ve encountered that offers such a diversity of tools for caring for your body, energy, and nervous system, helping you navigate the very real challenges of being human. We have this whole set of supportive processes we can lean into. Kundalini has specific strengths, like processing big emotions and connecting to stillness, which allows you to tap into your inner wisdom. Once you have that connection to your center, it serves as a constant guide through everything you navigate, always providing support.
Whether you can practice for two hours a day or just have 15 or even five minutes to do a couple of movements and breaths, it’s incredibly supportive for the various layers of human complexity we deal with.
Oli Anderson: Awesome. So, what’s your website? Is there a way for people to try some of your Kundalini flows?
Laura G: Yes! My website is Lauragyoga.com, and you can find me on Instagram @lauragyoga. On my website, lar gyoga.com, I have a bunch of resources. I just made an updated version of my free Kundalini 101 class, which is perfect if you’re new and curious about the practice. It gives you a nice overview of what Kundalini has to offer, so you can experience it for yourself.
Oli Anderson: Brilliant! Well, Laura, thank you so much for this. It’s been awesome. I appreciate your time. Like I said, I’m going to go get a lobotomy because I don’t trust my brain anymore! But thank you so much.
Laura G: Thank you, Oli. I really appreciate the time to talk about Kundalini and share this information.
Oli Anderson: Thank you.
