Myrah Peñaloza: Embracing Your Inner Goddess with Kundalini and Tea

Myrah Penaloza has been practicing Kundalini Yoga since 2004. She has been teaching it since 2011. She has run women's circles, led tea ceremonies, founded a fashion brand, raised children, and built a community that now exists across multiple countries. But if you ask her what shaped all of it, she will come back to the same thread: the practices.

Not the yoga as fitness. The yoga as technology for the nervous system, as a way of becoming more available to the life that is trying to move through you. The tea ceremony as a practice in presence. The clothing as an extension of the same intention: that how you inhabit your body matters, that the choices you make about what surrounds you either support or undermine the woman you are becoming.

This is what Myrah means when she speaks about embracing your inner goddess. Not a costume. Not a performance. A return. To the version of yourself that does not need to borrow her sense of worth from anyone else's approval.

What Kundalini Yoga Actually Does

Kundalini Yoga is often called the yoga of awareness. Unlike hatha or vinyasa traditions, which work primarily with the physical body, Kundalini works simultaneously with the body, the nervous system, the glandular system, and the subtle energy body. A Kundalini set is a technology. It has a specific mechanism and a specific outcome, and that outcome is replicable across practitioners when the set is practiced consistently.

The mechanism that most transforms Myrah's students is the activation of what the tradition calls shakti, the feminine creative energy that resides at the base of the spine. When this energy is awakened and allowed to rise through the body rather than staying compressed at the base, the quality of a woman's creative output, her sense of authority in her own life, her relationship to her own desires, changes.

This is not metaphor. Women who practice Kundalini consistently describe a shift in how they inhabit their bodies. A feeling of taking up the right amount of space rather than compressing themselves to fit what others are comfortable with. A willingness to want what they want, and to say so.

Tea Ceremony as a Practice in Presence

Myrah discovered Cha Dao, the Way of Tea, alongside her Kundalini practice, and the two traditions have informed each other ever since. Tea ceremony is one of the most demanding presence practices available, because the tea does not allow you to be elsewhere. The temperature of the water, the unfurling of the leaves, the precise timing of each pour, all of it requires your full attention in this moment. Not the next one.

She describes the experience of sitting with tea as a clearing. The busy mind does not disappear. It slows down enough that what is underneath it becomes audible. Insight that has been waiting beneath the noise of the day finds its way through. Decisions that felt complicated become clear.

The tea she serves at her ceremonies in Bali is not incidental. The specific leaves, the water temperature, the vessel, the pace of the pour, all are chosen with intention. The five elements are present: fire, water, earth, the vessel, the space. The ceremony integrates them. This is not a metaphor for integration. It is integration, practiced in the most literal and physical sense.

On Being a Woman Who Leads

Myrah believes, and the belief is not casual, that all women are leaders and teachers. Not in the corporate sense. In the most fundamental sense: your presence teaches. How you carry yourself in a room teaches. Whether you compress yourself or inhabit your full size teaches. The energy you bring into an interaction before a word is spoken teaches.

This is what she means by stepping into your inner goddess. Not becoming louder or more visible or more certain. Becoming more yourself. The woman who has done enough internal work that she is no longer performing an idea of who she should be. Who is simply, consistently, recognizably her.

That woman is a teacher to everyone she encounters. She does not have to try. She simply has to arrive.

The inner goddess is not a destination. She is what is left when you stop carrying everything you were told to carry that was never yours.