shamakaur

In celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8th and Mother’s Day on March 21st, I am writing a piece about women, for women and with women, in Egypt, in the Middle East and around the world! Throughout time women have been subjected to mental, emotional, physical and psychological abuse not only from strangers, bosses and co-workers but also from lovers, husbands, fathers and mothers. From domestic violence to sexual exploitation to verbal abuse and so on. But in the last fifty years women have been rising up and raising their voices loud to call out what is inappropriate, unacceptable [...]

The Wounded Healer Whether we like to talk about it or not, whether we like to remember it or not, most of us have experienced early childhood traumas while growing up which still affect our lives until today in both positive and negative ways. For most of us, we suffered from our parents or relatives who raised us in the first seven years of our lives. “Between the third to seventh years of a child’s life is the time when something that happens to the child is carried in their subconscious and its carried so heavy that it becomes the [...]

Yogi Bhajan often described humans as spirits living in this body and using this mind in order to have a human experience. As part of this human experience we eat, sleep, walk, run, watch movies, cook, work, dance, play, talk and engage in sexual intercourse. From the human perspective we take part in actions that bring us pleasure and we avoid those that bring us pain or displeasure. When it comes to sexual intercourse, many of us engage in it for the sake of pleasure or procreation. But seldom do we consider the spiritual and sacred possibilities that it can [...]

“Anything in your life when you mix with fear it becomes non-reality because fear is non-reality. You always want to know what is a truth, truth is which has no fear, lie is which has no truth in it. That means it has fear. So when you fear, mix fear with anything it becomes non-reality”.  – Yogi Bhajan Like it or not fear has always been part of our genetic make. Everyone in the world has fears, some are conscious and some are subconscious. One of the beautiful aspects of Kundalini Yoga is that it is known as the yoga of awareness, which in a nutshell means that it [...]

"During those months [of pregnancy] she is required to be in circumstances which are very secure, respectable, and comfortable, and in which she can have a lot of understanding around her. We always know how to raise the rose bush, but we have never tried to study how to raise our children. Our children are actually raised within those nine months of pregnancy and development. Those are very important days of life of the child." ~Yogi Bhajan, "The Ancient Art of Self-Healing" Despite the fact that I have never been pregnant, I experience an absolute joy and pleasure when teaching [...]

“To feel horny is not a sin or wrong, but if one knows how to invoke the meditative mind, which raises the energy up, one can become totally creative. Horniness on the physical plane can manifest as sexual intercourse; on a subtler plane it can manifest as creativity. It is the same energy, used differently in different body centers”.  - Yogi Bhajan From a very young age, in most parts of the world and especially in the Arab world we have been taught that sex is taboo, a topic not to be discussed in public or even in private. The [...]

I love Yogi Bhajan’s teachings on the art of being a woman in the Aquarian age. For six weeks every year throughout the 80s and 90s, Yogi Bhajan dedicated his time to teaching women because we wanted them to be strong, since he believed that; “when a woman falls, generations fall; when a man falls, an individual falls”. Growing up as a young woman in Cairo, I remember that I was very much concerned with my appearance, quite often comparing my outfit, body, style, make-up, hair-due, with my friends, cousins, celebrities and strangers. I felt as though I was competing [...]

"Love is the most secure place in an individual. It is very secure, very deep, very curative healing. It has no pain. It’s not limited. The highest state of security of an individual is when a person is in the state of love. It is a consciousness which can penetrate through anything for that thing and nothing can penetrate it." ~ Yogi Bhajan Throughout the ages of time, we have asked the question ‘What is Love?’ In my journey of finding love, I learnt many things. I learnt that the feeling of being in love is so electrifying, ecstatic and [...]

One of the greatest gifts of Kundalini Yoga is that it can make you very creative. With regular practice, the energy located at the base of your spine, known as Kundalini begins to rise filling you with insurmountable energy. Some of the ways you can experience its release is when you have a constant flow of creative ideas, new ways to solve problems, novel ambitions and/or a high level of energy, enthusiasm and glow. I remember being filled to the brim with energy and thousands of possible ways to grow and expand my yoga center; YallaYoga. I desperately wanted to [...]

“Fear and love is a complicated statement you have made. Actually when you are born, the concept in the mother when she get pregnant she does not give you the fearlessness. That is the corruption on the part of every mother who conceives, nurtures and then controls you. Not only that, in your childhood, you do not have your capacity and your sanity to be real, you are given a absolutely fixed situation of fear. So what happens is that if you count all that, let us say up to 18 years old? You will have progressively seventy percent [...]