Singer-songwriter and yoga instructor Will Blunderfield has found a way to seamlessly integrate his two passions in life: music and yoga.
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His journey led him to discover Kundalini Yoga and has helped him lay a foundation of healing self-love practices that have allowed him to live in his truth and realize his full potential.
Passionate about Singing and Yoga
After being eliminated from Canadian Idol, Will went to musical theater school in New York City, where an instructor led the class in a yoga practice before they would go on stage.
Practicing yoga helped the actors become more present and engaged in the moment in front of the audience, but Will found that he was starting to enjoy the yoga more than the theater, so he decided he wanted to learn to become a yoga teacher.
He liked to feel good being in his body, and singing and yoga, his two core passions, both made that happen. Will brought yoga and music together, singing in class with his students as he taught.
After landing an international record deal in 2011, Will’s music became a hit in Japan. He traveled to Japan often, teaching yoga and singing, enjoying the immersion in his work.
Psychological Dependency and Darker Times
During 2015, Will was teaching several classes and feeling drained. He met someone who introduced him to cocaine, and it made him feel great. This led to a dependency, more psychological than physiological, on the drug, which often involved the use of alcohol and dangerous levels of consumption of both.
Looking back, Will now knows that he didn’t have good habits in place to keep him at his highest. According to Will, without that bedrock of a self-love practice, he was pulled into a pattern that was not reflective of his original self and did not serve him.
After hearing the truth about how cocaine is often laced with dangerous additives, Will realized he needed to get himself out of the dependency, and one particularly bad experience made him realize he needed to quit for good.
After calling to seek the support of a close friend who spoke truth to him, he could see that he was not living up to his potential, and he had a real reason and motivation to clean up his act. Through this process, Will visited a psychic who told him he should try Kundalini Yoga.
Discovering Kundalini Yoga
Kundalini Yoga is one of the oldest forms of yoga, and the traditional story is that it was kept hidden from the masses for many years because of how powerful it is.
Kundalini Yoga was brought over to the West by Yogi Bhajan in 1969. The practice allows you to feel good in your body, it helps you love yourself, and it makes you feel more blissful, more bountiful, more beautiful, and more free.
When asked if Kundalini Yoga was dangerous, Yogi Bhajan replied yes, because it keeps people from controlling the way you think about yourself and about life.
Kundalini yoga combines movement, breathing, chanting, and meditating. A simple, basic technique in Kundalini is called Breath of Fire, which combines breathing and chanting a mantra: Sat Nam, which translates to “truth is my name / identity.”
Kundalini Yoga: One of Many Self-Healing Tools
There are many benefits to practicing Kundalini. You become more loving and more aware, which is why it’s often described as the “Yoga of Awareness.” It also helps you manage your energy and “get high on your own supply.”
There are so many different ways to heal. Different types of therapies can be used synergistically in different ways, as long as it’s intelligently and mindfully done. There is no separation: you have to work with all the different dimensions of yourself, otherwise if you risk ignoring something, and it will eventually manifest through stress or in some other potentially harmful way.
Through practicing multiple diverse therapies such as floatation therapy, plant medicine guides, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), eye-gazing, or Gabor Mate’s Compassion Inquiry, you start to notice some of the same energetic sensations happening across different techniques. This universality effect allows you to see the universal truth present: these therapies may look different, but they are all going the same place.
The outer world is a reflection of the inner world. The more you accept yourself, the more you feel the world and people accept you. Not only does it change your perception by changing your own internal viewpoint, being confident changes the way people treat you.
Fears and Misconceptions about Kundalini
There are many misconceptions about Kundalini Yoga, mostly due to a lack of understanding, but also partly due to the perceptions of the rituals and attire common to the practice.
Kundalini Yoga is not a cult, but there are certain technologies that make people stand out and look like a cult. For example, the practice of dressing in all white gives the wrong impression to some, because dressing in a particular color is often associated with cult-like behaviour. Chanting and wearing a turban can also sometimes give people the wrong impression.
Will doesn’t wear the attire every day, usually when he teaches classes, or when he wants to feel safe and more like his original self, but people often have a problem with it, feel the need to make comments, or accuse him of cultural appropriation.
For practitioners of Kundalini Yoga, their attire and practices are technologies. Wearing white is useful for expanding the aura, making it easier to be yourself; whereas the turban has a similar purpose: to aid in meditation by literally helping you “keep your head together.”
Everyone can benefit from kundalini yoga, if you can get past the weirdness of it, the turbans, and the chanting. Will urges people to just try it. Have an experience and see if it makes you feel good.
Will’s new album, Wild Horses, includes several beautiful Kundalini mantras and can be found on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, and anywhere music is sold.
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