Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa

Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa is the queen of Kundalini. Kundalini is a rigorous yoga involving meditation, chanting, and breath exercises which harmonize the body's energy centers, or chakras, and tune the nervous and glandular systems. The style of yoga is that she has created is very much geared towards hard climbing. First off, Gurmukh is maybe the physically strongest most beautiful women i have ever met. She is also almost 70.

Kundalini yoga involves physical practices that transcend what seems physically impossible, by breaking down the physical experience mentally. For instance, she will have me hold out my arms straight and turn them counter clockwise...for 20 minutes. After 5 i am pumped, and ready to quit, thoughts of failure, fear and anger envelope my mind. After 10 minutes i know i am certainly at my physical max, and i finally hit the wall mentally. Gurmukh is there to guide me though the wall, she tells me to embrace the negative thoughts and instead of saying "I am pumped", which is a finite and definite statement, to think "i am having thoughts of being pumped." Which is the actual of the two. (For instance when we say "I am angry", you are saying "I am anger." If you say instead, "I am having thoughts of anger", you separate yourself from the anger and are in control of it suddenly) The pain builds and builds until I break through the wall at 15 minutes, the next 5 i cannot remember, at around 20 mintues she stops me.

I believe from this excercise and its relevance to climbing, it is possible for a body that could not normally handle 30 continuous feet of v7 moves, to do 5 continuous pitches of it, though i am not sure that the actual pysical enlightment could happen without extense training directly from someone such as Gurmukh.