Kundalini Yoga, Motherhood, and Finding Your Inner Magic with Myrah Peñaloza

Myrah did not plan to become a Kundalini Yoga teacher. She planned to finish college. The yoga found her before she was looking for it, the way it tends to find the people who will dedicate their lives to it.

It started with a sports injury and stretch therapy. Then a religious studies course that kept returning her to Eastern philosophy. Then a meditation group in Los Angeles. Then her first Kundalini class at Golden Bridge, one of Gurumukh's early studios. She describes that first class as a vibrational energetic reorganisation. Something in her recognised it. Not as a new thing, but as a return.

That was 2004. Twenty years ago. Everything that followed, the teaching, the brand, the women's circles, the children, the move to Bali, grew from that first recognition.

What Motherhood Did to the Practice

Becoming a mother, for Myrah, was not a disruption of the practice. It was an intensification of it.

The early months with her daughter Soleil were what she calls bliss. But bliss does not mean without difficulty. Postpartum dips in energy, the physical demand of a newborn body needing everything, the recalibration of a woman who had been independent and self-directed suddenly learning how to need help, these things were real and they were hard.

What the practice gave her in those months was a baseline. When everything else shifted, the breath was still there. The mantra was still there. The understanding that the body knows how to restore itself when you stop fighting its process, that was still there. The practice did not protect her from difficulty. It gave her something to return to when difficulty arrived.

She quotes Yogi Bhajan: mothers are the baseline frequency of the nation. Not in a sentimental way. In the most literal energetic sense. The internal state of the primary caregiver radiates outward and shapes the nervous system of the child. This is not mysticism. It is neuroscience. Myrah understood it as a call to do her own internal work not despite motherhood but because of it.

Why Women's Circles Changed Everything

La Luna Social, the women's network Myrah founded, now spans five countries. It began with the simple observation that women need spaces free from competition, free from performance, free from the social contract that says we should be fine and should not need too much.

In a real women's circle, the agreement is different. You can say what is actually true. You can be witnessed by people who are not trying to fix you or advise you or reassure you prematurely. You can sit with something difficult long enough for it to complete its process rather than being rushed through it by someone else's discomfort.

Myrah has seen women heal decades-old relationships, with their mothers most commonly, by sitting in these circles long enough to name what happened and have it witnessed. Not resolved. Witnessed. The witnessing, it turns out, is often most of the work.

On Doing the Thing Before You Feel Ready

Myrah left college to follow the yoga. She moved to India to assist a retreat before she had a plan for what came after. She started teaching before she felt qualified. She asks her students to notice this pattern in themselves: the waiting to feel ready is itself the obstacle.

Readiness does not arrive before action. It arrives through it. The clarity that feels like a prerequisite for starting is almost always a consequence of having started. You do not know what you are capable of by thinking about it. You find out by beginning and discovering what you do with what you encounter.

If you feel called to the thing, she says, do it. Not recklessly. But without waiting for certainty that will not come in advance. The certainty is on the other side of the beginning. It is always, always on the other side of the beginning.

Your inner magic is not something you develop. It is something you stop covering up. The practice is the uncovering. The rest takes care of itself.