What does it mean to surrender—not just in theory, but in your body?
Katie Silcox is back for an intimate and expansive conversation where we explore the intersections of shadow work, yoga, energy practices, and the divine. We talk about the emotional courage it takes to let go, the healing potential of the word God, and how to distinguish between meditation and prayer in a way that supports your spiritual evolution.
You’ll learn:
🔹 Why shadow work is more about integration than excavation
🔹 The difference between vertical and horizontal energy flow
🔹 How to ground yourself for deeper emotional intelligence and energy work
🔹 What it means to surrender to a benevolent universe
🔹 The distinct but complementary roles of meditation and prayer
If you’re longing for connection—to self, to Source, and to the real sensations of spirit moving through your life—this episode is for you.
🌹 Download my somatic sequences & playlists for teachers: https://www.brettlarkin.com/somatic-sequences/
💗Get Brett’s Free Somatic Yoga Workshop: https://www.brettlarkin.com/embodiedyoga
GUEST EXPERT: Katie Silcox | @theshaktischool
Katie Silcox, M.A. is the New York Times Best-Selling author of the book Healthy, Happy, Sexy – Ayurveda Wisdom for Modern Women and the new book – Glow-Worthy. She is the founder of The Shakti School, a premier online certification school for women-centered holistic wellness that bridges functional medicine and eastern traditions. She holds a Masters degree in Ayurvedic Medicine and is a member of the National Ayurvedic Medicine Association. In her former life, she has been a researcher in Artificial Intelligence, a cover model for Yoga Journal magazine in Russia and the owner of a beach bar in Spain.
Uplifted Yoga Exclusive $200 discount codes for The Shakti School’s Ayurvedic Wellness Coach Certification:
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Order Glow-Worthy by Katie Silcox here
FREE Practice: Total Body Yoga for Women | DEEP STRETCH HIPS AND BACK
Relevant Blog: Understanding What is Divine Love: Key Insights and Perspectives
Relevant to Today’s Episode:
💖 Uplifted Membership
🎧 Also Listen to:
#284 – How to Love Your [Broken, Dark and Angry] Self with Katie Silcox
#352 – Redefining Feminine Energy in Yoga & Ayurveda with Katie Silcox
© 2025 Uplifted Yoga | BrettLarkin.com
Transcript:
[Brett Larkin]
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’re longing for connection to self, to source, and to the real sensations of spirit moving through your life, you are going to love today’s episode with my dear friend, Katie Silcox.
We’re going to be talking about shadow work, vertical and horizontal energy flow, the role of God in yoga. If you love nerding out on all things yoga, theology, shadow work, tantra, like me, you are going to absolutely love today’s conversation. Katie runs the Shakti School, which is a sister school of Uplifted Yoga.
If you’re thinking about studying Ayurveda, I highly recommend the Shakti School’s Ayurvedic Wellness Coach Certification. You can save $200 off tuition with the link and the coupon code in the show notes. I love talking with Katie and exploring many reframes and paradigm shifts compared to what’s typically taught in the yoga community.
I hope you enjoy this episode and listen to the very end, because you will see that I mentioned something special I have coming soon that you will get to hear all the juicy details about next week in the following episode. Now, let’s dive in to this week’s episode with my friend, Katie Silcox. Katie, I’m so happy to be with you, and I love my conversations with you so much that I even re-listened to them.
I know, I’m such a geek, but I was listening, re-listening to an early episode that we did together. So probably years ago now, and we were talking about shadow work. I’m making a quote sign because it was so much deeper than that, because I feel like that’s a pop culture term at this point.
But we were talking about integrating dark energy, and something that struck me when I was listening to our conversation was you mentioning, you were like, I love the word God. And I thought that was so interesting, because I think as yoga teachers or as a yoga teacher trainer, I’m always hesitant if I can bring that word into the space. Do you feel a little bit the same where you’re like, or you’re just using it freestyle?
I don’t know. Let’s talk about this.
[Katie Silcox]
Yeah. I love talking to you too, by the way. What I love about Brett, I’m speaking of her, she’s sitting on the mountain over there.
What I love about you is this commitment to truth and to history and to understanding and doing yoga, bringing light to that, which isn’t clear. I was speaking with a friend the other day, there’s this whole thing that you were actually talking about in some of your newsletters on the sutras. And all of the technology in the sutras can be done, right?
Because there are as many methods as there are beings, but you can also just surrender to God. And it’s like Ishvara Pranidhana. And so like, the seminal text on yogic technology says you can do all these things and be clear that all these things set the scene to be able to feel the possibility of that because it’s easier said than done.
And so I said, I love the word God for a couple of reasons. And one is like just being a student of this thing called yoga. And if we take God out of it, we’re really missing something important.
And then secondly, I think in that podcast, Brett, I was talking about the word God is different than goddess and God is a fatherly energy. It is a masculine word. We do understand the difference between God and goddess and so many women, especially in the yoga community, for very good reason, have wanted to move towards the goddess.
But when we throw the baby out with the bathwater, so many of those very same women have struggled and do struggle with their relationship to men and to fathering. And when I say fathering, I mean the archetypal principle of that. And so for me to actually feel this like word that is not foreign to me, that I grew up with in the Southern Baptist culture that I grew up in, it is like a healing balm on my nervous system that’s different than maybe other words or things.
And so I think I see what you’re saying because I do kind of caveat it by saying you don’t have to do this because you don’t.
[Brett Larkin]
You don’t have to. And I think there’s so many different ways we can translate Ishvara Pranidhana. And I think, let’s take it back to the sutras.
So I think Patanjali very intentionally included this idea of a deity or a higher power or this concept of Ishvara Pranidhana, which we do see many people translate as God. But there’s so many different ways you could translate it. Surrender.
I translated in my first book as relinquishing control, but here’s where the rubber meets the road. And someone was asking me this in teacher training the other day, actually. They were like, how can I release control more because I have high Pitta.
So let’s weave in Ayurveda here. And I was like, well, in order to release control, you need to have belief in a benevolent universe. If you don’t have belief in the benevolent unfolding of life, it’s incredibly hard to let go of control because you’re in a state of constricting.
And we all know that if you’re constricting, not only can prana not flow, but I think something I’ve been tapping more into or talking about more is like constriction actually takes up a crap ton of energy because to be constricted, I actually need to use a ton of energy in an inefficient way to kind of clamp down. So not only is prana not flowing, it’s almost like I’m wasting gasoline, like my car’s gas tank has a hole in it. So we need to have a belief in a benevolent universe for any of these principles that we’re learning about or for the Kriya Yoga system to actually function.
What are your thoughts on that? Like, how does one relinquish control more in daily life if you don’t believe in the benevolent unfolding of life, however you choose to define that?
[Katie Silcox]
There’s two things that come to mind. I love you because you’re like, let’s break down Ishvara Pranidhana and let’s go back there for a second. And then I want to go to this idea of benevolent universe.
Ishvara, Isha, what we’re actually like, if you go to the Sanskrit or the Vedic, that actually means the Lord of all of the entities or like Ganesha, Gana-Isha. Isha means Lord and Gana means Gunas, like all the qualities. And so when you say you can just relinquish control, if people struggle out there, listeners, with this idea, you can also understand it as you’re not alone.
There is this thing that is just all the other things that exist. And so I think that’s a beautiful way of saying God. It’s just the fact that there’s just so many things that aren’t you and that you’re not experiencing as you.
And then the idea of a benevolent universe is so central to the tantric cosmology in that we learn how to, in this tradition that I’m studying now, it’s the Tibetan tantra. It says you learn to trust the sacred mandala of your life, meaning even the things that feel horrific, challenging, dark, as we spoke of before, that there’s this faith in that everything that’s occurring is a part of that sacred mandala. And that is brutal.
Like let’s not candy coat it. Brett knows this, but I’ll share with you. I already did a podcast, like my house burned down three weeks ago.
I lost every single thing that I own except for some clothes. And like the Lord is like the dark mother of destruction that literally is like the ashes on the walls, right? And so learning how to actually trust this unfolding, I think, is the most important part of yoga.
I don’t know if I even answered your question at all, but I just kind of wanted to speak to those two ideas.
[Brett Larkin]
Well, what was coming to mind for me as I heard you talking, God, right? We often hear that as like the generating, organizing, destroying principle. Like you could think of that acronym.
And often I’ve mentioned that to my kids where I’m like, well, you know, cause they’re like, what’s God? You know, there’s all these questions. Right.
And I think that’s a really like simple way to break it down. It’s like that, what creates that, what organizes and that what also destroys. And a lot of us, I think we want to be overly focused on the good, like all the things it’s creating or all the things that’s coming, but your house is proof that things also get destroyed.
And I think to surrender to that mandala of life, like you talked about, like that’s really everything. And I was at an event recently that a friend of mine ran and she was talking about surrendering to God. And she had this really fun visual.
So I’m going to describe it for you guys. She had a stool on the stage and she was kind of like one hand on the stool, but not actually putting her booty on it. Kind of like, you know, half sitting, half not.
And she was like, this is the state that we’re all in. We’re not suffering, not surrendered. And if I could just surrender.
And then when she surrendered, she sat on the stool and she was like, I don’t know. I could just be just trust in God’s plan. And I think this is something that’s really been shifting for me.
And I know you’ve talked about this years ago. It’s because someone’s listening and you’re like, well, what, how, what does that mean? And really that just means asking spirit to be with you all the time.
Like come, like when I listened to the podcast a while back, which obviously everyone will link in the show notes so you can listen to it too. But it’s something you were saying. And it was like, that struck me was you were talking about how much you are asking spirit to be with you.
Like, just, just come be with me and to keep me company. And it’s really putting yourself in this place of not knowing. Like I often think of that meme of like, put it on the universe’s to-do list.
But that’s like the bubble gum wrapper. But it’s like, it’s so much deeper than that. It’s really like, I can’t function when, or when I tried to function from my egoic identity on the grasping and the control.
I’m like that awkward, my friend, like half in and out of the stool. Everything’s constricted. Her body looks so awkward.
It literally is like, I’m going to totally do that. That’s amazing. And then when she sat down, it was just like, and I’ve been finding the more every single day that I’m asking just like spirit to be with me, spirit to help me before I write an email.
The first thing, when I get up, you know, today I had a complex logistical morning, just even in every single little thing. It is so, so beautiful. It’s so freeing.
And you’re basically just saying, I know I’m not in the driver’s seat, but I really need you to sit here and be my passenger. And I think this is something else we wanted to talk about that I’m really interested in. It’s like, what’s the difference between meditation and prayer?
And where do we draw those lines? And what does, you know, your meditation practice look like these days? Because I’m sure people would be curious to know.
There’s something in Christianity called imaginative prayer. And there was a really interesting one that I did, many actually. But one is like, you’re just visualizing.
There’s a whole thing where you’re like by a river, blah, blah, blah. But then you’re visualizing Jesus sitting next to you on this bench, just in sort of companionship, like being with mode. And it was a really cool visual because it wasn’t like whoever God is to you on a pedestal.
It was like them sitting right next to you on a park bench kind of vibe. And I don’t know why, but that was very, very powerful for me in that particular moment. I think so many of us too from yoga, we’re so into pratyahara.
So as yogis, it’s like we’ve gotten so trained at sense withdrawal. And then to me, the meditation is very much like we have an aim. We’re moving energy to the third eye or we’re moving energy to connect with God or universal intelligence or mahat.
However, you might define that basically to pure consciousness, untouched by karma. And so there’s this like verticality to it. Maybe we’re saying, okay, the goal is to feel energy in the heart center.
But that’s still different to me than prayer, which how would we want to define that? I don’t know.
[Katie Silcox]
I’m passing the mic to you. Okay. I love this.
So let’s go back for a second to this idea of surrendering to God. I love the stool analogy. And I think it would be helpful for us to think on levels of there’s the mental body, the emotional body, the prana body, and these other higher bodies.
And so I need to do it in all of the bodies. And so what meditation helps us do is like when I breathe, and when I close my eyes and I go into my bodies, what I am noticing is the direct raw embodiment of experience. There’s physiology, there’s emotion, there’s mind, there’s energy, there’s, you know, angels, who knows, right?
There’s everything that’s there and I’m learning how to open to it. And by doing that and watching the way that the mental body, because that’s who’s doing it, the mental body wants to control everything. That’s who’s doing that control thing.
And to actually allow that to go on without demonizing it and trying to annihilate it. But surrendering is coming back into the present moment that is freaking hard. Because the present moment is oftentimes, especially when it’s new, it’s really scary.
In the Tibetan tradition of Tantra, you learn that enlightenment is not blasting out to nirvana or getting samadhi the way we might think of bliss. It is actually learning how to tolerate greater and greater waves of energy. That’s their definition.
And so when I’m saying surrender to God, another way of saying is like, I’m learning how to surrender to the intolerable. And, you know, I’m tearing up because it’s very real for me right now. Just breathing in and out, even talking about it.
And what that’s doing is preparing us for the D part of God, which is death, which is when we practice meditation, it is in every moment of surrender. I’m getting better and better at death. And death isn’t what we think it is.
Because the more I open into that black terrifying chasm where I don’t exist in the way I’m used to solidifying into, that’s what ego is. It’s just solidification. And when I dissolve the solidification, I’m dying to that part.
And we realize that death isn’t what we thought. So that’s the meditative piece that’s so valuable and so important. For me, prayer is different.
And prayer helps us on the very human level of that heart space where I am still human. I still have attachment needs. I still have relational needs.
I’m still on the horizontal plane of the me and the you. And prayer is a direct line to, we could talk about what we’re praying to, but let’s just say it’s that direct line to feeling an archetypal level of an attachment figure that will never leave you, that will never abandon you, that will never abuse you, that will never harm you, and that always has the right attunement. And so I think it’s really important for yogis to learn how to pray.
And I think it’s really important for people that do a lot of prayer because I know these people. It’s like, just play another song and raise your hands to Jesus. It’s like, yeah, that’s great.
But I do think it’s super helpful to have both.
[Brett Larkin]
I feel like this is so deep. So I feel like I want to review it. And then I feel like we need to give people lots of practical examples.
[Katie Silcox]
Sure. I mean, do you agree? Is that how you understand meditation and prayer?
I’m sure we have a nuanced distinction, but it sounds like we’re pretty much have something similar. Yes.
[Brett Larkin]
I feel like what you were talking about with meditation is it’s like, we have Annamaya Kosha always changing, right? And then we have the mind, the layer of the mind, observing and making stories and meaning making about all of that, being worried about pain or suffering and how to avoid it, how to get more pleasure, like all of those types of things. And I really like what you said, because I think so many of us are attracted to yoga because it’s like we want to peel back the layers of the onion and get to this samadhi or this bliss state.
And then we think that means all the pain is going to go away. And that’s, I think, the promise that yoga inadvertently or on purpose offers. And we have these people coming to it.
And that’s, that feels really lovely. Like I can witness all of it. I can be detached and kind of get to this bliss place where nothing bothers me.
And let’s be honest, like when I was a train wreck, many, you know, like just emotionally, like had no awareness of my thoughts, like very emotionally immature, energetically immature, like that sounded great. I was like, that sounds fantastic. Like if I could just witness all of this and not be attached, that would be fantastic.
But I really loved your repositioning and talking about bliss or enlightenment as actually being the ability to tolerate greater and greater waves of emotion, including positive and negative emotion. And let’s not overlook positive, because something that I’ve really been tapping into too, in a lot of these like advanced somatic trauma trainings that I’ve been taking, is that there is so much resource available to us. And we have this negativity bias, this what’s wrong attention that amplifies always what’s wrong.
We’re so tuned into that narrative that we’re not seeing the blue sky, the green trees, the fact that actually right now in this room talking to you, everything is perfect. There’s nothing wrong right now. Like I’m safe.
But trauma is actually that faulty neuroception where it’s like, I’m not clear on what’s happening in the moment. I think I’m still in danger. I think I’m still in that parking lot where the thing happened, because I’m thinking about it and my nervous system is actually there and not here.
So it’s almost like if we can just turn up the dial on the sensory world, turn up the dial on the present moment where things are actually okay, and actually turn down the volume on all the thoughts running around in the head, there’s actually so much safety available. And I’ve been working a lot with Dr. Rick Hansen. He has a great meditation called Taking in the Good.
It’s like you’re expanding your nervous system capacity to feel good feelings. So in this meditation, I have it in the Uplifted Membership, I’m pretty sure. But basically you call to mind like someone complimenting you or like a really wonderful memory.
And then you try to really feel it in your body. And then you try to amplify it. You try to turn it up.
So it’s like more pleasurable. And you’re letting yourself relish in the memory or the parts that feel good even more. And you’ll notice that at a certain point, it starts to feel uncomfortable.
You’re like, I don’t want to think about this anymore. I want to do something else. You start to get distracted.
And the hypothesis behind this is that like most of us, the muscle for receiving good things, we have a very, very low tolerance for that. And I find like in our society, we’re actually obsessed with like, well, how can I increase my nervous system capacity for hard things by doing like hard kriyas and hard chants and lifting my arms up for a long time? And, you know, so we’re really, really focused on like, how can I increase my nervous system capacity to handle more negative?
And that’s definitely one approach. But an alternate approach is like, when you consider you’re only maybe taking in 5% of the safety and good and beauty around you in every given moment, because you’re so distracted by this what’s wrong attention, is if you actually just increased your nervous system capacity or your capacity to feel all of that. There’s so much healing available there too.
And we have these like golden shadows, right? Where it actually doesn’t feel safer. We don’t give ourselves permission to feel something good.
And exploring that is just as valid as the dark shadows.
[Katie Silcox]
Yeah, you’re learning how to stay on the spot, whether it be positive, what we would label as positive or negative. We’re learning how to just be here. And I think that there’s this false idea that the positive, that we’re very comfortable with it, when actually we haven’t even probably felt it.
We’re much more living in sort of an outer layer of things. And so another way that we can define enlightenment is the ability to be with reality as it is. And that includes the positive and the negative, the thing that is wanted, the thing that is unwanted.
And I think just, I know you and I totally agree on this. There’s the tendency in us to run from the things that we don’t want and move towards the things that we do. And Ayurvedically speaking, some of us are more tendent towards the pleasure portal and some towards the avoidance portal.
And some of us do both. But I also think that there’s also a striving in trying to get to the pleasurable thing. And you’re not even actually on it, you know?
And so I love this idea of being open to whatever is arising in the field of experience without pushing anything away and without trying to get anything to stay. And that is really, really challenging. That’s the whole game.
And how I think God fits into this, God’s goddesses, God, capital G, goddess, capital G, is that we are running on a certain level of mind and energy that has a really specific thumbprint and tendency. And we can shift that and change that through these different practices, of course. And that’s hopefully what we’re doing over a lifetime.
But my teacher calls it, when you pray to God, you are calling in the big guns. You’re calling in an energy that’s really different and way larger than the one that you run in your microcurrent, in your own biophysiology, in your biofield. And so one of those is Gaia, like the earth.
The earth has an electromagnetic field that is banana sandwich. And so we can learn how to connect with that through these various practices that both you and I are really adept at, right? But there’s also all of these other divine entities that in the tradition that I’m in that live in the back of the heart.
The front of the heart is my relationship to, well, we could go into the chakras, but the front of the heart is more like the manifest reality. And the back of the heart that starts at the level of your spine and goes behind you as much as you can imagine or infinitely, that is where the realm of the unmanifest lives. And that is the realm of God.
That is the realm of Krishna, Jesus, ancestors, Angel Michael, whatever, right? You’re working with, it’s that. And so when we work with the heart chakra, I think you and I both grew up in this yoga reality of the up and down.
And this is opening up that whole front to back. And in that place, we have access to all of these other resources that can support us in the journey that we’ve been talking about before, which is how do I learn how to tolerate reality? And if I try to do it on my own, I can, right?
I can do things on my own, but I think of my relationship to God. And for me, it’s Jesus Christ. It’s what I grew up with.
It’s what my nervous system and my brain recognize. That is like a bone on the part of me that’s very, very young. And so I think when we run far, far away from our own traditions, we, and I’m not saying everyone should go back to the tradition that they grew up in at all, because some people didn’t even grow up with much of a tradition.
But for me, in the working with the heart chakra, accessing these energies that may have been what our nervous system did learn early on can be really, really resourceful. And I think we kind of ran away from that. But what we’re seeing culturally is there’s a little bit of a return back to some of those roots for many of us, which is a lot of us, like almost everyone, right?
At least in the United States, there’s a huge relationship to some kind of divine tradition.
[Brett Larkin]
Yeah, there is. And I think let’s put a pin in that because I know there’s been articles, like even New York Times articles about how more and more people are flocking to Christianity more than ever before. I think it was even maybe talking about like from, I don’t know if it was from yoga specifically.
Before we go there though, I wanna back up and like dig into some of the things you said. Because when I was like, why am I talking about our tolerance for positive things? Let’s just make that connection for listeners.
Like you were talking about how being enlightened in this new definition paradigm we’re playing with is the ability to tolerate greater and greater waves of emotional intensity, things that are actually happening here on planet Earth, be them good or bad. So experiencing something so pleasurable can be heartbreaking in its own like texture.
[Katie Silcox]
Right, because you know it’s not gonna last.
[Brett Larkin]
Yeah, and it can also be overwhelming. And then when something hard is happening, not pushing it away or just like quickly distracting yourself with your adult pacifier called your phone and stuffing it down and not feeling it, but like really feeling it. Like the visual I was getting is my son was on a summer swim team and there was like the pool where the swim team happens, which is like this deep, big pool.
And then there was like the kiddie pool, the wading pool for like the younger siblings, which is like, you know, really not, I mean, it’s like you could just, it’s up to like your ankles. And most of us are just in that kiddie wading pool, right, with like everything. We’re not really willing to like get in the big pool and like feel some of these bigger feelings.
And then we know from tantra, like anything fully felt will release. And that this pleasure and pain are literally two sides of the same coin. Like that intense, intense pleasure, like this is so beautiful.
Tear down the cheek and this is so, so painful. Like my heart is shattering open. When we go to the deepest level, the energetic texture behind both of those things is identical.
Okay, so we have that. And then I’m just so digging this idea because I feel like so many people like us have been trying to a little bit reframe, like the up and down framework that is just really penetrated all of yoga. And it’s like we have these chakras and they stack and people love the chakras.
And so it’s like this journey up and down. Then we can be like, well, it’s not a journey up and down. It’s an orbit.
And then it’s like, okay, it’s an orbit up, shumna nadi down, ita vegan pingala in the vagus nerve, right? It’s not the destination of the third eye. The destination is the heart.
But what I love that you’re saying is that like we can actually, instead of working on this vertical plane, we can work on this horizontal plane. And the vertical plane, let’s be honest, like actually doesn’t make that much sense because we live on polarity planet. So even if we can go up and ascend and maybe touch that universal consciousness, untouched by karma, mahat, god, bliss state, ecstasy, whatever, we need to pull it back down through the chakra system.
And there’s like a lot of tantric lineages that actually you and I both have in common that teach that exact methodology. And I think it’s valuable. Like I teach it in the 300 training, like pulling that energy back down the spine.
But wouldn’t it make more, so much more sense if we’re human beings actually stuck here for now, living in polarity planet to really focus on rather than the vertical ascension that always has to come back down, to just work on actually mastering the horizontal forward and back, energetic like plane of the heart. I want you to dig into this with us a little bit more. Also, because I kind of came to this in my own weird way.
There’s this meditation that I teach it’s like rods of light. I call it an anchoring meditation. I think I teach it in the somatic coaching program.
And how it works is you have these, you think of these light beams or rods going up and down, one up and down the spine, but one through the heart, like front and back. And then it’s like kind of also, there’s one at the throat and the pelvic floor. So it’s kind of like you’re gridded into these light beams, but it’s really working more actually with the horizontal plane and beams than the vertical one.
So I know you talked a little bit about the energy behind and the energy in front, but I think you should just double click a little bit more into that for folks.
[Katie Silcox]
No, I love that. And I loved watching that, the grid and the sacred geometry. There’s many mandalas we can create in our mind.
And that helps the energy have that structure to flow through.
[Katie Silcox]
Doing the gridding is still a very masculine approach, and we need that. We need the masculine structure is what prana shakti, the raw embodied prana, flows through structure. So it’s not that structure is bad, but it’s still an overlay.
And so the idea in pranatana is that you are working with overlay like you would work with a pranayama practice, right? But at the end of the day, if you want to think of it like more advanced, even though that’s kind of stupid, but it is, it is more subtle. Think of it like for me, the work that we do in shakti school is about having first an established relationship of you said it before Brett, and it freaked me out because I’m like, how are Brett and I rarely talking and yet tracking so many of the same threads?
And it’s being able to perceive the textured quality of prana itself is the definition of pranayama. It’s not nose stuff is no stuff, you know, it’s being able to actually have the perception of it. And so the first chakra is not a point in the spine.
It’s actually goes all the way down into the ground and goes all the way up as far as you want it to. It’s huge. The first chakra goes down up all directions.
And so the first chakra in this way of working, and then my experience is like a pilot light that lights up all the other ones. And it goes from the earth up through your legs, lights the light. And then it actually just to give us some structure around it, we can imagine it goes out through the first chakra red energy goes out through the front of your pelvis.
And it’s snake like, like on your website turns like a snake, and it goes from the horizontal realm from the front of you into your lower back. And that’s second chakra. So it’s more like an oceanic serpentine feminine form current that then makes that wheel of light go in all directions.
Like you said, it can be an orb, it can be structural, it can do anything, and then goes back behind you flips it from the back like a snake like an ocean current, and it runs it through the front of your navel and your solar plexus. And that’s the mental body. And that goes out in front, turns goes in through the heart out through the back in through the throat expression turns goes in the third eye is an intake portal.
That’s what our eyes do goes back, and then out and all around like the classic auric field, right? So that’s yet another way of working with it. We could call that a current structure, right?
That’s not to say it doesn’t also do this, this up and down thing it does, but the up and down isn’t linear. It’s actually serpentine in this way of working with energy. And what I love about this approach is that you’re taking the raw unfiltered primal earth energy, which is our relationship to fight, flight and freeze, which I know you’re super interested in.
And that red energy that fight flight freeze, it moves up into the emotional center, and it gets digested and the emotions digest the fight flight rawness. And that emotional center, the heart’s also an emotional center. That emotional center, Brett, is how you feel about it selfishly.
This is about me and my friends and my kids and me and mostly me. And then you digest it there. And you should know how you feel about a situation, but most people live up in their head.
So they don’t even know how they feel about it. And we’re also stuck in the mental body and the mental body digest the fight, flight, freeze energy and tells you what to think about it. Then it goes to the heart and you have a second pass or second digestive process on the raw feeling.
And that’s where we can feel the way it affects all of us. So something like these horrible wars that hopefully many of them will end. Like that’s where you can feel the impact, right, of how things affect everybody and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
We could talk about all the other chakras. But what I’m noticing in myself is, oh my God, my energy bypasses the emotions. It goes straight to the mental body.
Fight, flight, freeze can get hijacked by the mental body. And this is what the yogis have been saying for thousands of years. Our third eye is our seat of future visioning, which is always a positive vision.
And the third eye can get hijacked by the first chakra. And the way we know that we are getting hijacked is we’re scared and we’re projecting fear into our future. And so when we learn how to work in this way with all the chakras, it opens up that full dimensionality of all of them so that we can have a perspective where we can see all the fight, flight, freeze, all the petty emotions, all the mental musings and stories and false and real beliefs.
And we can also see our spirit’s vision of everything. And we can also see our soul’s vision. We can also see the way that we act, how that affects everybody.
So working with energy is synonymous to working with soul, to working with God incarnate. And I know I went off on a little bit of a tangent, but I hope that’s helpful for people to even start to visualize and practice moving energy through them on that horizontal serpentine level, while at the same time having that vertical field is game changing. And it’s funny, that’s the sacred symbol of the cross.
[Brett Larkin]
You need both horizontal and vertical. Yeah. I think what stuck with me with what you said too is the fear, right?
We’re scared. We’re scared so much of the time and the cheat sheet version of I think a lot of what you said, correct me if I’m wrong. Like when we’re scared though, that’s when you can be like, God come be with me, or spirit come be with me, or consciousness come be with me.
Because if you realize when you’re someone to call on who can sit with you and can be with you and can love you unconditionally, that’s incredibly calming and can help you regulate and make a lot of different decisions. As opposed to when you feel like you’re alone, which is essentially egoic, right? I’m alone, I’m in control.
That’s me being half out of the chair again. I’m controlling and puppeteering everything here, right? Rather than sitting on the chair, surrendered and being sit with me, come be with me.
I feel like there’s so much more that we could explore here with both the chakras and as you were kind of making the serpentine motion and going forward and back, it was making me also think about masculine in quotes texture as compared to feminine texture of energy. For example, that rods of light meditation that I described, I would describe as a very masculine technique because you do it at the beginning of a coaching session because you’re about to hold space for someone else. You are the container, so you want to be anchored, rooted.
In the Kundalini training, it’s like you are the energetic anchor for your class. That means that you need to be very deeply rooted because there’s a lot of energy moving around. Now, if I wanted to be more in that kind of free-flowing energy that you were describing, I don’t know, is there just a simple technique that is a go-to for you?
I know I’ve heard you talk before about the waterfall breath, if you want to describe that to listeners again, but that was a while ago. What are you into now?
[Katie Silcox]
Yeah, same thing. Super simple. I’m thinking about the rods of light and thinking about the masculine feminine.
In the end, we’ll go together and we need both. What a lesson, right? Yeah, you can imagine that waterfall dropping all the way down the body.
That takes me down into my legs, all the way down into the ground. In this tradition, being grounded means you’re all the way down your body and all the way into the earth. Then the earth energy comes all the way up into you.
First chakra energy goes all the way up. Now the little light is in her socket. That’s what it means to be grounded.
You can imagine that going all the way down and it coming all the way up. Then the mode that it can go up is just what I said, right? In through the front of your lower belly, out through the solar plexus, in through the heart, out through the throat, in through the third eye, out through the crown and you go back down.
You can go through your body as well. That’s sort of a method that’s really helpful. I think if there’s one thing that I can encourage people to do is have their back leaning up against a pillow or a chair or a foam roller on the ground because we are mostly so out of that interception and proprioception of the back of our body.
Most of us have most of our prana. Even when we’re yogi kundalini practitioners, especially yogi kundalini practitioners, it’s inside like you’re saying pratyahara obsession and frontal. This has been a radical change for me in realizing that the center of the chakra is in your spine, which is anatomically in the very back of your body.
So imagine half of my chakra is actually way behind me, but most of us have our chakras pressed up against the front body and we’re future oriented and we’re kind of orbiting out in front of ourselves and we don’t feel grounded. So you can also just feel energy going behind you at any level.
[Brett Larkin]
Great place to practice this, everyone, is driving. Try to drive with all your energy behind you. I’ve been practicing this and it’s a really fun place to be.
And you end up not cutting people off and all sorts of stuff, but it’s because you’re in a totally different energetic plane. Anyway, keep going.
[Katie Silcox]
No, no. I mean, that’s enough to get started. But just, okay.
But the last thing maybe to say is remember all of these are methodologies. And at the end of the day, what we’re training to be able to do is to feel prana on her own, what she’s doing inside us with irrespective of any kind of mapping or channel or interior drawing methodology, right? Like that focus is wonderful, but like most advanced level, if you will, is really zen, where you’re just like, boom, I can feel my energy and I’m going to see what it is doing.
I might like get it grounded first, right? But then she begins to teach us. And that’s where the original, in my opinion, you’re much more of a history scholar than me, but that’s where I think that the original poses came from was a humble, appropriate interoception of prana shakti.
And that by moving the body in these weird contortions, we were letting the ego be moved by the prana connection.
[Brett Larkin]
What is prana trying to teach us? That is a great thing to think about as you flow through your next set of poses. Everyone listening.
Yeah, because we’re usually telling her what to do. And then again, that comes back to the humble. I don’t have all the answers.
I’m seated on the stool receiving. We’re closing out. Is there a practical example you’d like to share with folks of a way that you’ve been doing or practiced any of the things that we’ve touched on today, like the tolerating greater waves of big energy or sending energy behind you, which I know you’ve talked about before, or asking God to be with you or just any glimpses of the practicalities of what that looks like in a difficult situation in your life or in your practice, just so we can ground some of this before we close.
[Katie Silcox]
Sure. Yeah. I think the most important thing for us to do is to everything that kind of you’ve been saying, Brett, that we get grounded.
Without grounding, everything is a little bit ungrounded, right? It’s up in these upper planes. It’s also up in the mental body.
And so what grounding essentially is, is a methodology of getting back on the planet in the present moment here with the sensory world. And so looking out into the world, taking the world in through your senses, naming a couple things, seeing what things you are drawn to, seeing what things you avoid in the outer world, feeling the texture of things, all those like sensory things you were saying, I think are really important. And then when that feels settled, literally imagining your attention moving downward into the ground, rather than it being like an intellectual exercise, see if you can feel, what does it feel like down there?
And you will begin to develop a sense of a biofield that you have a relationship with called the earth, the electromagnetic field. And at any given moment, every second, there are like 50 lightning bolts going off on the planet per second that are charging this thing. This is just science.
It’s not woo-woo. And so you can feel that electromagnetic charge factor, earthing, laying on the grass, you might feel it more. And so for most human beings with the internet and the media, including myself, it’s just a constant battle to get grounded because we’re all so online.
And without that, none of the other practices even work. They don’t because the pilot light is the earth. It’s her.
She’s the one we have to get connected to first. And so grounding, grounding, grounding, and then you can practice moving that up and moving it down or moving it front and moving it back. But I think that’s the most singularly important thing for us.
[Brett Larkin]
My tip, I think would be when someone or something is irritating you or you want to control someone.
[Katie Silcox]
Oh my God, teach me teacher Brad, I need this today.
[Brett Larkin]
Pray for them. That’s been working really well for me. So when I want to tell my husband to do something differently, or I’m about to give him advice about his career or something, I just say nothing, do energy work and just say, God, I’m praying for my husband.
[Katie Silcox]
I feel like I need a therapy session with you, Brett.
[Brett Larkin]
It has been so profound. And I think it’s, I think it’s hardest with those that we’re closest to, right? Because we have such an agenda for them and we’re so invested for them.
But when I’m just like, God, pray for my son, pray for my, pray for my husband. It just, again, it’s, it’s loosened something. It loosens the ego.
[Katie Silcox]
Yes, totally. I feel like I’m like a maha yogini. And then I start dating someone called a man.
And then I’m like, oh my God, I suck at all of this. These reaction patterns are so intense. And I know it’s in all of us, right?
[Brett Larkin]
But they’re so intense. And I wanted to echo back just really quickly, something that you said on a prior podcast we did together, which is like a classic energy work mantra. The solution to pollution is dilution.
The solution to pollution is dilution. Friends, this is the other thing that it does. Like when I’m, you know, irritated at him or he’s doing and it’s like, that’s pollution, that’s control in praying for him or asking spirit to just like be with me.
Cause I don’t know best God knows best or whoever, you know, universal consciousness knows best pick your, you know, Athena knows best. I don’t know, pick, pick whoever you want, but then the vice grip loosens. But also I start bringing in that energy, that texture, and it starts diluting the field of intensity as well.
[Katie Silcox]
I have a, okay. I have a final question for you asking for a friend, my feeling. So here’s what I struggle with.
And this is when I forget about my 27 years of practice. And it’s like, I’m a baby that just came out of my mother on this planet. And I’m like, I get so scared when I am in an intimate relationship and I want to take that fear to the person and I want them to reassure me and make me feel great.
And then I hate myself because I’ve lost my dignity in the sense that I want you to make me feel safe. You’ve made them God. That’s receipt.
[Brett Larkin]
I had an exact thought while you were talking, you’ve made them God and put, you know, your wellbeing, like they’re all of a sudden the stool and look, this stool is shaky. Well, the reality is just like, well, nobody is the stool is human. That stool is human.
And we see this all the time with people making a human, a God. I mean, I like in our brainstorm list for today, one of the things I had written down was like guru complexes and stuff, but like the humans make mistakes. There’s no, like, if you have a human as your God, whether you’re obsessed with Tony Robbins or, you know, the person you’re dating or whoever it is.
So they’re going to like, that’s why like God is the rock. However, like this texture, this energy textures that you have to make that the center of your life. Cause I also was thinking about like how much so many people or cultures have prayer before they eat.
And I was like, well, that’s just a great idea because that means you’re, you’re calling on spirit all the time. Cause you have to eat all the time. Like you don’t actually think it’s like the eating.
We pray before every meal and it completely alters the energy, right? Just because it’s like a point in your day where that, that for sure happens. But I’m again, I feel like I’m getting better at this where it’s just like, first thing, when I wake up, first thing, when I go to bed, first thing, when I enter my office now, before I even teach a call, like in my programs, it’s always just like, I need help be with me, you know, calling that energy.
And this was such a delicious conversation.
[Katie Silcox]
Always, always.
[Brett Larkin]
Yeah. Thanks for asking so many questions. Well, thank you for sharing so much of your beautiful wisdom and people who are listening, you should join the Shakti school.
If you have not, you should take online teacher training or somatic yoga certification, which I love right now, or the new Kundalini certification, which I’ve completely feminized not in gender, but in all the different things that we’re talking about here. And I also have a new book coming out. I don’t even know if you know that healing with somatic yoga.
So I’ll make sure to give you a copy when it comes out. Maybe it’ll be out by the time this podcast airs. And Katie has a book as well.
We’ll put all our past episodes in the show notes. So if you did enjoy this conversation, you can keep it going.
[Katie Silcox]
Thank you, Brett. This was awesome.
[Brett Larkin]
Thank you so much for being here and listening all the way to the very end. I want us to get to 1000 reviews on this podcast. We’re already over 500.
And as a free gift to you, if you leave a review, I want to send you my chakra balancing audio track and journaling hack. Maybe you have a problem right now and you’re not really sure how to solve it. Well, guess what?
Did you know you can ask your chakras? So I’m going to send you this five minute self inquiry process that I use all the time, the PDF and audio so you can consult and balance your chakras. All you have to do is leave a review wherever you are listening to this podcast, screenshot the review before you hit submit, because sometimes it takes a while to show up and then send your screenshot of review to info at upliftedyoga.com subject line podcast. And we will respond within 48 hours with your chakra balancing audio track and journaling PDF. I’m so excited to share with you this special way that I quickly connect with and balance my chakras. Thank you so much for your review and claim your free copy today.
