The European Yoga Festival is a seven day event held in the heart of the Loire valley in the south of France every year. It is a celebration of the teachings of Yogi Bhajan and the teachings of Kundalini Yoga. For anyone who has ever attended a Kundalini Yoga class or workshop, its description is much as you might expect. The question is, what makes it so special and why do over 1,000 people every year come back for “the experience”. The answer is in the question – It is the experience. In this article I will attempt to put into worlds something that is at the very least beyond words.
The concise description of the White Tantric Kundalini Yoga Festival goes a little like this: It’s seven days of full-on Kundalini Yoga where over 1,000 people gather in and around a French chateaux and live a communal yogic lifestyle. Every day starts before dawn with a 2 ½ hour morning discipline yoga set or “Sadhana”. This consists of reciting an ancient text called “Japji”, a yoga “Kriya” or set and a 62 minute chanting session. This is followed by breakfast, or perhaps a snooze. During the day there are yogic meals, lots of workshops and talks and the usual festive atmosphere and socializing you would expect – singing, dancing, story telling, meeting new and old friends, people swapping emails and phone numbers and of course lots of selling and buying at the Bazaar. All sounds pretty as one might expect for a yoga festival really… or is it? I’m not going to describe the details of the sets or “Kriyas” we did over the 3 days, as anyone who has attended White Tantra can tell you this – instead, I will attempt to describe the personal learning and enlightening discoveries I made during these 3 days.
White Tantra is very subtle. One thousand people, paired up, sitting opposite each other, face to face, in long straight rows. These long lines forms a channel for Energy to flow and build as it is bounded and constraint like a train on train tracks with the energetic connection between each pair of eyes acting like sleepers between that tracks that carry the energy. And you are part of this connected energetic system. It is subtle because you don’t notice how the energy builds within you over the 3 days. At least probably not until the closing ceremony. The energy maintains you, contains you. It lifts you. You lean on your partner and your partner leans on you. And white doing so you work through yoga sets that work on you. You begin to get to test the limits of what you believe your logical, rational mind can overcome.
For example: imaging lifting your hands over your head at 60⁰ angles for a moment. Easy enough. Now consider continuing to hold your hands in this position for 62 minutes. The challenge is this.. you want to support your partner and your partner wants to support you. You are both reciting a Mantra so the only way to express yourself so is through your eyes. After a while it appears that you are looking the depts of their soul. It is like watching a movie of a fractal or Mandelbrot set as it zoom into infinite detail. The more you follow the detail down the deeper you go. But you are not journeying into the other persons soul – you are touching, ever so gently, like a kiss upon a sleeping child – you are reaching out and touching your own soul. It ignites a spark inside that light up a sense of contentment or bliss. Yes – bliss.
But first you must overcome the limited capacity of the conscious mind. And to the degree that you try to hold out, the more painful it becomes. At the festival, a room mate give me some advice on “breaking through” these long mentally challenging sets. A) You can use physical strength to carry you through. B) You can use mental power to carry you through or you can do it the easy way which is c) you just give up – surrender to the pain.
You see, when you hold your arms up at 60⁰ like this, after it starts to hurt like hell, you absolutely know in your heart and soul that the pain is temporary. It’s an emotional pain – it’s not a sharp pain like a physical injury. You know that the second that you drop your arms the pain will go away. But you also know that it will hurt even more when you put your arms back up. So the easiest way is to just surrender. Hold your heads up, gaze into the eyes of your partner and succumb to the pain. You feel like showing this pain through your eyes to your partner, but you also know that to do so will not aide your partner in carrying them through, So you hold a neutral complexion, maybe even have a tiny hint of a smile at the corners of your lips.
As the time passes you allow your mind to go blank or just focus on the “naad” – the vibrations of the mantra in your body. Don’t even try to begin to consider how much time has passes. To do so will simply stop time. As the time passes, endorphins flood your body and sometimes, maybe several times you reach out inside and touch nirvana. At that moment there is a yearning to reach out and grab it – but the slightest movement and it is lost again. It’s almost like that subtle movement of your left knee has totally changed the overall posture of your body and in doing so you reset the whole flow and it’s just like you are starting all over again.
Each day and each exercise build on the last and after 3 days you having stretched your mental capacity and physical endurance far beyond what you thought possible.
On the last day we did a blind walk – a powerful metaphor for the journey of the soul – but that is a story for another day.
Would I attend White Tantra again? You bet! In a flash. What would I do differently next time? I would spend a lot more time prior to attending, getting used to sitting in easy pose for up to six hours a day.
The rest , as the saying goes, is just a matter of choice.
