In this episode, I introduce the core principles of Feminine Form Kundalini, a radically different approach to energy and transformation. We explore how the body responds not to pressure, but to rhythm, wave-like movement, and the right conditions for deep inner uncoiling. This practice isn’t about transcendence—it’s about coming home to your body as the sacred gateway to power.
You’ll learn:
🔹 Why biological safety is the foundation of true spiritual awakening
🔹 How spiral and wave-like movement unlocks stuck energy
🔹 The vital role of pleasure in feminine energy practices
🔹 How this method differs from traditional Kundalini approaches
This is your invitation to experience energy, embodiment, and transformation—on your terms.
🐍 Download the FREE Feminine Kundalini Starter Pack: https://www.brettlarkin.com/online-kundalini-yoga-teacher-training/
FREE Practice: How to Awaken your Feminine Energy | EASY KUNDALINI YOGA FOR WOMEN
Relevant Blog: Harnessing the Power of Kundalini Divine Feminine for Transformation
Relevant to Today’s Episode:
Kundalini 200-hour YTT
🎧 Also Listen to:
#265 – What is the Kundalini Serpent? The Major Misunderstandings Demystified
#277 – Trauma Conscious Kundalini Yoga with Katrina Marie
© 2025 Uplifted Yoga | BrettLarkin.com
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Transcript:
Welcome to the Uplifted Yoga Podcast, where ancient yogic wisdom meets modern business strategy. I’m Brett Larkin, creator of Uplifted Yoga, where I’ve certified thousands of yoga teachers, built a multi-seven figure business, and guided over half a million students on YouTube. Here’s the truth.
You don’t have to choose between embodying deep yogic wisdom and building a thriving, freedom-based business. This podcast is your space to integrate both, because yoga isn’t just what you do on the mat. It’s how you show up in every part of your life.
Whether you’re here to deepen your yoga practice, grow your teaching career, or align your energy with your purpose, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in. If you love Kundalini Yoga, you must listen to today’s episode, where I am going to introduce the principles of what I’m calling Feminine Form Kundalini, a radically different approach to energy and to transformation.
I’m going to talk about how what I’m calling Feminine Form Kundalini differs from traditional Kundalini approaches, and I am so passionate about this way of practicing that after doing it myself for five years, I now have an online Kundalini yoga teacher training specifically about this style of yoga. This is something you can audit through what we call our Bridge Program, if you already have a 200-hour degree for Yoga Alliance Continuing Education Credit, or maybe it’s just the Kundalini training you’ve been looking for that teaches you the why behind every pose with a focus on functional anatomy, helps you blend Kundalini with other yoga styles and teach it in real-world settings. If you’ve been wanting to explore the power of Kundalini, the depth of its tradition, but also experience it as a grounded feminine force, this brand new uplifted program may be exactly what you’ve been waiting for.
The link to check it out is in your show notes, and on that page, you can download your free Trauma-Informed Feminine Kundalini Starter Pack to experience this style of embodied transformation with me and also receive exclusive tuition discounts on this new training. Now let’s dive into today’s episode about what Feminine Form Kundalini Yoga actually is and why biological safety is the foundation of a true spiritual awakening. What is Feminine Form Kundalini? We are exploring this today, and what’s interesting is that this idea of Feminine Form Kundalini is technically redundant.
The word Kundalini itself is already feminine. That suffix i-n-i, ini, is a feminine marker in Sanskrit. So saying Feminine Form Kundalini is like saying Feminine Form Queen or Feminine Form Princess or something like that.
And the reason that I don’t care that Feminine Form Kundalini is technically redundant is because it’s also a reclaiming. The Kundalini technology, so beautiful. I love it.
But it’s become very associated Kundalini Yoga with Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan, right? People in white turbans, grumukhi chants, strict rules, exact postures held for precise durations in rigid sequences. And the practice became so prescriptive, so rigid in its approach that I believe we forgot, myself included, that Kundalini actually means the coiled feminine one. Shakti, divine feminine creative energy is what moves, flows, spirals, and creates.
And what I am positing when I talk about Feminine Form Kundalini and this beautiful new training, which I’ll tell you a little bit about at the end that I’ve put out around this methodology is that we have the traditional yoga paradigm of the goal being enlightenment, leaving the body. And I talk about this extensively in chapter two of my first book, Yoga Life, about how this yogic practice, while it’s so beautiful and has transformed our lives, transformed my life, but we have to keep in mind that the original texts, the original Vedic teachings weren’t designed for householders. They were designed for young men who were living the equivalent of a monastic life and elderly men who were preparing for the next life.
And so a lot of these methodologies saw the body as the obstacle to overcome. It wasn’t about connecting or being in the body in the here and now, it was about transcendence, leaving the body to connect with Brahman or universal intelligence or this bliss state, Samadhi. And in order to do that, we need to move this Kundalini Shakti that lives at the base of the pelvis upward, up through the chakra system to connect with the divine.
And the way in which we do this in Kundalini Yoga is through force. Let’s be honest, we have these Kriyas where we’re systematically moving energy, siphoning it up the spine. And that’s beautiful.
We’re going to talk a lot more about that. But as I started studying more and more about trauma or about somatics, I started getting curious about, well, what if we created the context of safety and pleasure in which the Kundalini wanted to rise naturally? And this question really changed everything for me. And I don’t think one approach is right and one approach is wrong.
I think both what I’m calling the traditional Kundalini path, which we might associate more with the masculine, again, not in terms of gender in any way, shape or form, but in terms of polarity, these universal Shiva Shakti archetypes of consciousness and love or structure and flow or sun and moon, however you choose to think about it. Both have value and both are going after the same thing. What are we going after in a Kundalini practice? Let’s review.
We’re seeking coherence. Coherence is this great word. Coherence means harmony, where all parts of a system of a biology are working together as a unified whole.
In physics, coherence often describes waves that are synchronized, moving in harmony with each other rather than canceling each other out. So we could say that in the body, coherence means that your head brain, your heart brain, your gut brain, your nervous system, your chakras, everything’s synchronized and communicating smoothly. There’s no internal conflict.
There’s no static noise. There’s just clear signal, clear signal with what? Your Sat Naam, your true identity, your authentic frequency, who you were before life essentially and all the trauma and patterns and things that we learn to survive and get attention and succeed, who we were before all of that taught us to dim who we really are. So Kundalini Yoga is so beautiful because not only is it about ascending energy, it’s about tuning your whole body back to your original frequency, the clear undistorted signal of who you really are.
And that’s the definition of Kundalini I’ve been working with for five, six plus years. Those of you who’ve taken my trainings that Kundalini, the Kundalini awakening is an unfurling of your essential unis. Kundalini is your birthright.
This Kundalini awakening is actually a Kundalini reawakening because you’re not achieving something you haven’t had before. You’re simply removing obstacles. I often describe it like the kinks in a garden hose that restrict the free flowing orbit of energy in your body.
So what we’re after is this healthy Kundalini orbit of energy up Shashumna Nadi down through Ida Pingala and the Vagus Nerve. But what I talk about in this brand new uplifted Kundalini Yoga teacher training is that there is more than one way to skin a cat. There is more than one approach to get to a particular destination.
If I want to get to the grocery store, it’s about half a mile from my house. I could power walk there, hurl myself through space, walk as fast as possible, or I could take a really long leisurely path. Instead of going on the sidewalk, I could kind of go on the trail that’s a little more woodsy near my house, gaze at the sky, take in the beautiful leaves and colors that are surrounding me this season.
And I’d still get to the grocery store. It would just be a very different approach, a very different way of getting there. Now one way isn’t shameful or wrong.
One way is not better than the other. They’re just two completely different ways that are going to result in two different experiences. Either way, I’m going to get to the grocery store.
So both traditional or if you want to say masculine Kundalini, what we’ve experienced, what I think we see in the Yogi Bhajan Kriyas or a lot of the KRI books, right? These systems of postures that have been written out for us and this new methodology, what I call feminine form Kundalini, are aiming for the same thing, coherence, a healthy energetic orbit, removing obstacles in our energy body. But what’s different is the method, how we’re going to move the energy, the plane, how directionally the energy is moving, and the goal, where we’re focusing on getting the energy as we direct it, like where we want it to end up. So traditional Kundalini, the directive or what we might call the more masculine approach is using this idea of pressure, tension, stress, and friction.
We hear this like poke, provoke, elevate. We have this polarity model where I always use the example of like torso twist, right? We’re like going right, left, right, left, right, left. We’re creating chaos in the system.
I talk about this in my Kundalini Demystified course, which is a great introductory course and a prereq for the teacher training or you get it, you know, included in the teacher training depending which path you take. But I have a whole presentation about like polarity and chaos and how these percussive Kundalini movements serve to lift energy, actually force energy up through this, like these hydraulic pump motions, like think of the frogs or the twists and through precise angles and exact timing and this idea of like keep up, we squeeze or pump the energy up the spine. So we’re working very much on a vertical plane.
And I do talk about Kundalini energy as an orbit, right? So we want it healthfully going up and down. And we’re trying to get the energy to the third eye or the crown. We’re trying to, you know, merge with divine consciousness up the crown chakra or up and out through the eighth chakra, like the auric body.
But there’s a transcendence idea. We’re trying to move the energy up, up, up, up, up. And this is a valid approach because let’s be honest, we live in a gravity well, so energy tends to move down and massaging the pineal and pituitary gland creates profound hormonal effects for the whole body.
And what we see in this traditional or more masculine approach is that we’re really creating containers through which energy can flow. This is fantastic. This is so great, but it’s kind of like power walking to the grocery store a little bit.
It’s not the only way. It’s not the only way to get there. So what I feel is so exciting about some of this material that I’m introducing now and that I’ve been experimenting in my body with for the past four or five years is what I’m calling the feminine form of Kundalini, this receptive feminine approach, where instead of the pressure, tension, stress, and friction, we’re working with safety, pleasure, sensation.
Instead of focusing so much on the orbit of up and down, we’re focusing on spiral, circular, flowing, melodic, wave-like movements. And we’re trying to create the context in our body in which the Kundalini energy rises naturally. I’m going to say this again because it’s that important.
We’re going to create the context in our biology in which this Kundalini energy unfurls, comes out to play, rises naturally without me having to do five and a half minutes of breath of fire, without me having to hold my arms up in force and pump my belly, without me having to chant Waheguru, Waheguru, Waheguru 120 times, without me having to do the thunderbolt mantra, which I love, but without having to do that for 31 minutes, without all the force, we can still get to the grocery store. We can create the context in our biology which this coiled feminine one, Kundalini truly means the coiled feminine one. If we want to go really literal about it, although I have a lot more about the etymology of the actual word because it’s changed how that word has even been used if we trace it through a timeline.
You know, it was originally referring to actual like a bowl that was used in Vedic rituals and rites. But I think the traditional way is so familiar to us and it’s so appealing because our culture loves to work harder and our culture loves to achieve. And that feels really natural.
It’s pretty revolutionary to think that you don’t have to earn your healing, that you don’t have to earn your Kundalini awakening, that you don’t have to work for it, that you don’t have to fight for it. It’s it’s such a paradigm shift for most of us, which is why I think this technology, this system has gotten lost because you’re like, wait, I can relax my way into it. I could, you know, in some ways do less effortless and maybe even get a more intense and pleasurable awakening of this energy.
It’s almost like our modern brains can’t even compute that because we’re so trapped. We’re so locked up in this achievement, no pain, no gain paradigm. What if this energy wasn’t something that you had to force an effort awake through pressure, tension, stress, and friction? What if it was something that you could connect with when you created biological safety, pleasure, spiral, melodic, wave-like movements in your body, slowing down instead of keeping up, feeling more deeply and created the biological conditions for this coiled serpent to want to uncoil and come out and play with you? What if instead of just focusing on the vertical plane, working energy up, up, up the spine, you focused on the horizontal plane, working front to back through each chakra in a serpentine motion? What if instead of up, up, up being the goal, deep grounding was the initial goal? Because let’s be honest, the tree that has the deepest root structure is the tree that is blossoming and has the biggest structure up top.
What if instead of trying to get energy to the third eye center or up and out the crown of the head, it was about embodiment on this plane of consciousness, union of the divine within yourself and moving this energy into the heart? I want you to visualize right now a chart in front of you, and on the left-hand side of the chart is traditional Kundalini, and on the right-hand side of the chart is feminine form Kundalini. So if you’re in a car, keep focusing on the road, but you can visualize left half of your windshield, right half of your windshield. And I’m going to say different words that I think represent the traditional path compared to what I’m calling the feminine form path.
So traditional Kundalini, fast. Feminine form Kundalini, slow. Traditional Kundalini, rigid.
Feminine form Kundalini, adaptive. Traditional Kundalini, prescriptive. So prescriptive.
Like we’re literally given things written down by mainly men, all men, let’s be honest, written down telling us how our innate, unique energy should move through our system. Feminine form Kundalini, instead of prescriptive, intuitive. Traditional Kundalini, structured.
Feminine form Kundalini, unstructured. Traditional Kundalini, percussive, right? We have a lot of the satnam, satnam, satnam, we have all of these percussive movements, left, right, left, right, up, down, up, down, breath of fire, breath of fire. Feminine form Kundalini, melodic.
Traditional Kundalini, precise. I don’t know how many teachers I’ve trained in Kundalini yoga over the past five years who come to me and they’re so scared about teaching an exercise for more than three minutes. When the book says three minutes, what if they go over by 10 seconds? What if they go under by 30 seconds? What if their student literally can’t do it for that long, right? All of this noise, right? So we have traditional Kundalini, precise.
And with that precision and structure and the prescriptive nature, I think it generates actually a lot of fear. But it feeds into a paradigm that we’re really loving in this culture, which is like getting it right, right? So it feels familiar. So we have traditional Kundalini, precise.
Feminine form Kundalini, exploratory. Traditional Kundalini activates Kundalini, right? So it’s that activation. We’re doing work.
We’re efforting. No pain, no gain, right? Pumping in the stretch pose, right? Feminine form Kundalini receives Kundalini. So we’re receiving this energy instead of forcing it.
Traditional Kundalini applies pressure, tension, stress, friction. It’s that hydraulic pump thing. We’re moving the energy like engineers.
Feminine form Kundalini uncoils the divine. Traditional Kundalini, focus on the third eye. Feminine form Kundalini, focus on the pelvis and the heart.
Traditional Kundalini, angles and triangles, right? So we see those, the angles and triangles, the leg lifts, the stretch pose, the arms at 45 degrees, the ego eradicator. Feminine form Kundalini, instead of angles and triangles, we have spirals and waves. Traditional Kundalini is focused on poke, provoke, elevate.
Feminine form Kundalini is focused on safety and pleasure. Traditional Kundalini is focused on the vertical plane, this up and down the spine. Feminine Kundalini is focused on the horizontal plane.
And this is some of my favorite content that I put into this training about the horizontal plane, about the back body. Traditional Kundalini, we have this orbit movement again, right? Up the spine, down, eat a pingala and the vagus nerve. In feminine form Kundalini, we’re really focusing on the serpentine movement.
In traditional Kundalini, we have an ascension focus. In feminine form Kundalini, we have an integration focus. In traditional Kundalini, constancy is really important.
We have the 40-day Kriya, which again, is a beautiful container. I have nothing against any of this. I love it.
I’ve done it all. But it’s just half of the story. That’s why we come back to there’s more one way to skin a cat.
So with the traditional, we have this constancy, the same practice, the same way that every time, right? With feminine form Kundalini, instead of constancy, we have this adaptability, responding to your body’s ever-changing needs, much more like the moon, which is always changing. Traditional Kundalini expands your capacity for hard things. It’s literally making, and I’ve said this when I teach traditional Kundalini, it’s like we’re making nerves of steel.
It’s increasing your tolerance for discomfort. That’s what it’s doing. And that’s very valuable.
It’s very, very good. However, what’s been overlooked, missed, and lost, and this is feminine Kundalini, is expanding your capacity for pleasurable things. That is equally important.
Most of us, again, because we like to effort and work hard and no pain, no gain. It’s like we’re so focused on healing as work, as a project, and we want to do hard stuff to get results. And we’re totally missing that if we just expanded our capacity for pleasure and all the pleasurable things around us that we’re missing, that that would actually be life-changing, that that would create this biological sense of safety that we’re so craving.
So traditional Kundalini increases tolerance for discomfort, and feminine form Kundalini increases tolerance for sensation, really feeling things in the body. So if you’re still listening, this is your invitation to take this new training with me. You do not have to do it to become a teacher, although it is a 200-hour Yoga Alliance certified program.
You can absolutely take it as part of your own healing. Unlike any other program that I have out there, any other training, this one, because it’s kind of based on 10, 15 years, like a body of work, I’ve really designed it as a pilgrimage for you. It’s not just about feminine form Kundalini.
I take you on the full spectrum journey that I went on with Kundalini Yoga. So you start out with the Kundalini Demystified course that I talked about. You can get that course right now.
It’s a beautiful home study program. It’s lovely to move through. If you do the teacher training, you’ll get it right away as well.
And this is kind of like the get real module, the course that I wish had existed when I was first learning Kundalini Yoga, like 20 years ago at this point, when I went into my first Kundalini studio in New York and felt so out of place and was like, this is so weird. What is going on? And I got a terrible migraine. I had a really negative experience.
I had so many questions that I didn’t feel safe asking in public classes. What is this Sikhism thing? Who are these teachings really from? How does this energy move? What if I can’t do the classic version of a pose? And this course is like me giving you these practical investigative answers, as well as energy breakdowns of key postures and mantras, so your practice can feel clear. And then you move through a 40-day Kriya experience because structure changes you, right? We can’t just run away from structure and say traditional Kundalini is bad.
That is not what I’m saying in this training. I’m taking you on a full journey where we’re going to explore everything, like no stone unturned. And the goal of this is so that by the end of the training, like you’re in co-conversation with me and your peers and your trainers, figuring out like, where do I fit in this lineage? Like, how do we make meaning out of this? How do I make sense out of all of this and figure out how I want to carry it forward to either share with others or for my own healing and development? So yes, we have a 40-day Kriya.
Then we go into anatomy and teaching methodology. And I really felt like this was the missing link in the Kundalini training that I was a part of previously. Kundalini is energetic, yes.
But guess what energy moves through? A body, a physical body. And so we can’t overlook functional anatomy, props, adaptations for diverse students, pregnancy, elderly people, people with limited range of motion, people who have breathing challenges. So this module is really diving deep into anatomy, which I think Kundalini teachers should be trained on much more.
And the adaptations and how you can cue and teach so that your classes feel safe, credible and powerful. And we’re really focusing on, you know, maybe not necessarily you teaching in a studio, although absolutely it’ll equip you for that. But how might you teach in a school, in a clinic, in community settings? And then the next module goes back into the living lineage of Kundalini yoga, exploring a lot of the controversial topics like turbans and rules and translating the philosophy behind Kundalini yoga into practical choices.
And the idea is that we’re like exploring all of this in a way that feels really alive, not dogmatic. Like we’re questioning everything and trying to, again, make like it’s the meaning making that I think is so exciting about this training because we’ll be together for 10 weeks. This is all the pre-recorded modules that you’ll watch.
The last of which, of course, is the feminine form Kundalini, where we shift from keep up to slow down. We shift from forcing energy to inviting the serpent to rise through like the safety and nuance and pleasure. And so you’re going to get to see everything, right? Like the traditional Kriyas, the way that, you know, there’s many videos from my prior Kundalini yoga teacher training.
Like you’re not going to miss anything that I’ve taught before, but it’s really this training is structured as a journey. So you move from kind of like the most traditional, get exposure to that, see all the questions that I asked about that, that I’m sure you have as well. Go into some of the KRI, you know, Kriyas, look at those, examine those, question those, make meaning of what we want to take and what we want to leave, which is going to be different for everyone who’s in this program.
Keep moving it forward to like controversial topics, figuring out how we bring this lineage forward, especially considering all that has happened in Kundalini yoga over the past couple of years. And then ending with the Feminine Form Kundalini. And I’m not saying like you should teach the Feminine Form Kundalini style.
I just want to shine a lot of awareness on this because I don’t see it. And my goal is that more people are aware of it, not only to teach, but as a healing modality for themselves. So you get instant access to the home study curriculum.
So you could literally start today or tonight. And then you have 10 weeks of live small group calls. And this is really like the connection of you with others who speak your same language.
Because like, let’s get real, who can you really talk to about this? Maybe in your neighborhood or even at your local studio. These are deep, hard questions. You’ll graduate with a Yoga Alliance certification.
And if you already have a certification in Kundalini yoga, we have a special program for you to be able to audit the course. But this is not just about learning Kundalini. You’re learning in this training and especially in the live calls how to tell your story with it, how to figure out how you fit into this bigger narrative and teach from your own truth.
And I’m so looking forward to these conversations. And of course, the trauma-informed approach is something that we’ll be talking about extensively throughout, especially in the teaching methodology section. So if this sounds like something that you might be interested in, go to brettlarkin.com. You can find the new training.
It’s the new 200-hour Kundalini teacher training. You’ll find it right on my website. Of course, we’ll put the link in the show notes.
And a great first step is to download the free trauma-informed feminine Kundalini starter pack that I’ve put together for you. And this is going to give you a guide of how, you know, I’m approaching some of these poses with this methodology. It’s going to give you videos to practice.
It’s going to kind of preview a lot of the course for you. And of course, once you unlock the starter pack, there’ll also be information about the syllabus. And you can also book a call to talk about it if that’s something you want to do.
I’m so excited that this is now available. And I’m so excited to walk this path with many of you in this 10-week live container, especially after you’ve watched this really beautiful and large curriculum that’s really focused on integration of anatomy with the energetic systems, as well as designing and adapting Kriyas to support your own personal growth. And of course, prioritize nervous system regulation.
Go to brettlarkin.com to learn more. And thank you so much for being here all the way to the very end. Until we connect again next week, make sure to practice yoga and take care of you.
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