Why Kundalini Yoga is the yoga for how we can help manage our 21st century digital mental and emotional lives.
Anyone can join (except those pregnant) and create the transformation within themselves – harnessing the inner energy you possess.
Kundalini yoga is always about a series of classes to allow for your TRANSFORMATION.
Why do so many enjoy Emma Ropner’s classes? Why Kundalini Yoga?
My classes are unique – every one is a mini-workshop where we create to become, the change in ourselves we want to be. I am a certified teacher with the largest certifying regulatory body for Kundalini Yoga, the KRI and also a member of Yoga Alliance. I trained with the Karam Kriya School in London and their Ashram in Portugal.
I also have many other yoga trainings which allow me to embody, and utilize a greater esoteric wisdom that I bring to my classes. I teach the main traditions of Kundalini yoga but my trainings in breathwork, cancer and the menopause, yin yoga, architectural posture and for children all filter into my teaching. I am a perpetual student seeking to grow myself, and my class students are offered wisdoms and teachings from the breath of my senior yoga teacher experience. However, I aspire to remain humble and working with gratitude at all times. When the teacher is ready the students appear. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. I hope this will be the case when I meet you.
General overview about my classes.
We are breathing in a body, yet living in our souls. My classes honour the eastern aim for yoga; to find that inner peace and true self, that you were born to be during this lifetime.
Dharma/Philosophical/Esoteric/Body Wisdom – talk at start of any class with Emma
We practice posture harnessing our flesh with our own breath (breathwork) yet, kundalini yoga is so much more powerful than a yoga class that delivers you posture instruction. We have one foot in our human life and one foot in our divine indwelling whilst on the yoga mat. Our yoga mat is our personal safe space for 75 minutes where you are on the altar of your own altering. A yoga class can radically change how you feel and your self-compassion and self-acceptance for who you are, you can be, during your one wild and precious ‘this lifetime.’
Each of my classes explore an aspect of Easter Dharmic and esoteric teachings or possibilities. Dharma is our inner wisdom or our subtle alliance with ancient wisdom guidance. When we open our minds and are curious about the healing capacity of our body, we are able to manifest our joy out into the world.
The term ‘follow your bliss’ seems trite – but it will lead you home to your true nature. There are times in life when the teacher leads you to the door and you can go through it. My intention for my classes is set via short introductions illuminating wisdoms of the body, how the mind works, the organs, our hormones, blood and breath. We cannot think our way to freedom. Our body is the way we open to the seat of our own soul and our own unique wisdoms gained through our experience, and our connection with Earth.
Yoga is not about placing your foot in the right position by a millimetre and if you merely want to tone your body and have this focus only, choose a posture-only yoga or work out on the pilates mat. Kundalini yoga gives you a strong toned body and tuned up glandular system, healthy lungs, a more neutral mind and more, yet this is a by-product of your practice. Your brilliance as an individual, your inner peace and your purpose to be here this lifetime, are what births when you practice Kundalini yoga.
How does Kundalini yoga transformation happen or work?
We work with your own inner energy, learning to listen to feelings within the body that are reporting to us, messages we often choose to ignore, thus stifling change for ourselves. So often, the potency of who we are lies dormant until our movement medicine awakens this sleeping serpent at the base of our spine (the kundalini fire energy for the human) and once we stir our own personal fire of potency and magic, we are launched into the quantum field of possibilities. Suddenly life begins to open up, our creativity as a writer or artist flourishes, opportunities in our life walk our way. We step into an abundant path.
What can you expect during a class?
You can expect the unexpected as I craft yoga classes that are unique every time. I choose the most appropriate series relating with the seasons, the planets, the universal consciousness or the collective consciousness. Through a specific series of postures and breaths and chants, we create useful hormones like endorphins and seratonin, dopamine etc in a safe environment – your yoga mat. These eat up your stress hormones and create a newer fresher version of yourselves to take home after class. The class follows a set pattern, and always ends with a gong bath. You will get used to the routine and love it!
I’m not bendy, I am middle aged, I am menopausal or pre or post-menopausal, I am in my seventies. I am a beginner. Are these classes for me?
I always allow you to work with your own body strengths and limitations in an experiential moving fluid way and sit/lie back after posture for rest that allows your physical experience to assimilate into your hormonal flow. Over time, your helpful nervous system dominates over your unhelpful nervous system as neural pathways are re-wired in your brain patterns. Rests to beautiful music that heals the brain are a feature of my classes and one of sayings in class to encourage inclusivity is ‘do what you can do, and feel good about it.’
I’m new to breathwork and mantra and I am a bit self-conscious, nervous about chanting and breathing in a class?
Breath: Kundalini yoga is unique in that we practice various breathworks whilst doing postures.We also have standalone breath sequences.
We know it is important to teach you about your amazing power in your breath and lungs. How we breathe is how we experience our life. We learn to ‘breathe to believe’.
You will learn various breath techniques that support our challenged nervous systems and activate glands for intuition and health. Glands are the guardian of our health. Kundalini yoga classes stimulate the glands so that they ‘text each other’ and this communication is how our body becomes healthier.
Kriya: We practice kriyas which are a series of specific movements with breath. A kriya is designed to have a specific outcome for the glandular body or create an embodiment of an intention, personal, or set by the teacher. Kriyas purify our emotions and we move from tension pressure stress and friction on the mat to joy, ease, knowing, and ultimately, our liberation.
Posture: We practice repetitions of each movement against the backdrop of the most beautiful music to embody and push this experience deep into our precious body glove. We will move and breathe gracefully into various shapes and postures (asanas) that incorporate angles and triangles or feel like moving meditations to music. Yes you can do posture You can do them – I a mid-life aged yoga teacher. So yes you can!
Rests Between Postures: As mentioned above, we rest between most postures to allow our bodies to absorb the beneficial hormonal effect. The gift in Kundalini yoga is actually BETWEEN postures in the lying down rests/mini savasana. Only then can our bodies receive the hormonal changes and reset the nervous systems and brain pathways.
Mantra: you will chant mantras that create percussion on the roof of your mouth to activate important master glands that drive your body health. Where Mantra is not being chanted out loud, Mantra is often mentally said or heard musically, whilst we do the posture. Chanting activates glands and is a powerful healing tool for the brain and throat chakra. I teach students to LOVE mantra and feel the benefits. Students say they find their voice and expression sometimes lost for years after being crushed by the patriarchal systems endemic in modern life.
Music: Kundalini yoga has special yoga music that creates an ambient effect for your nervous system and exhausted mind. Music is a powerful tool for your change. We may also chant in a meditative movement or meditation at the end.
Meditation: Kundalini yoga has rather special meditations. We demystify meditation in our yoga, you may not realise you are meditating if there is a chant and an action or mudra with posture. . Kundalini yoga meditations allow you to explore being still and going deep within through mantra, whisper, music, breath, or movement. We might do one within the class kriya, or at the end of the class before the gong relaxation, or both.
Gong: We are the only yoga that plays a special yoga gong, usually planetary, as the relaxation music at the end of every class. These gongs reset and align the energy centers in the human body and completes the healing process of the kriya for you. I am a certified gong player and play either my 38inch Earth Gong or a 32inch Chiron gong. To best describe this experience join a class!
Our Bodies Carry Us In Our Lives
You are conscious of this world by means of your body – it is your only way to know you ‘belong’ – that you can have earthly experience for your body is the ‘dense matter’ that houses your unique spirit and soul. When we stay in our bodies, (we learn this on the yoga mat) we are at ease, at home. We are able to make powerful conscious choices for we are not thinking ‘top down’ from a separate body glove. When we alienate our body from our brain, we are in dangerous ‘overthinking territory’ that does not honour the human experience and forgets that thoughts and ideology can cause great pain for societies. World leaders making decisions from the control tower of heads, cut off from their heart and gut, are very dangerous.
Kundalini yoga explores the subtleties of our body layers; obviously, the physical, but unashamedly, the spiritual. Classes delve into the power of our intention, gratitude, and non-religious prayer because they are powerful tools for creating changes in our lives.
So, we bring the spiritual alongside how this yoga physically focuses on creating powerful healthy glandular activity in the body.
Many testimonials for my classes are on the YSY website or my FB page.
Please email me to join a class in 2024 – I am waiting to welcome you to this yoga that is serving the times.
The class timetable is on the header of the main website here
emma@yogaspaceyorkshire.com
