Neuroplasticity & Conscious Transformation: Working with the Law of Attraction

Shakta Kaur Khalsa is the creator of the Radiant Child Yoga Program and the author of “Yoga for Women” and several other yoga books and DVDs. In this interview with YogaUOnline, Shakta discusses her work with the Law of Attraction and the inspiration behind her webinar on Yoga U Online, Happily Every Now: Yoga, You, and the Law of Attraction.

YogaUOnline: Shakta, we’ve heard so much about The Secret and the Law of Attraction—the notion that you can create your own reality through your mental projections. As I understand it, you’ve been engaged in this kind of work for a long time. What originally sparked your interest?

Shakta Kaur Khalsa: Ever since I started doing yoga and Eastern teachings in the early 70’s, I began to realize that we have a lot more power over what unfolds in our lives than we usually think we do. I was very curious about this. So I spent the past 35 years really being a student of life in the sense of “How does life work? How does creation work? How do things come to me? What is the idea of Law of Attraction?”

I’ve found that when I put out energy in a certain direction and I’m very confident that this is going to happen, when there’s a certain focus that I feel, then the universe brings it to me in some form or other. That’s not to say that it always comes in the form that I think it’s going to come in. But whatever came, it was actually a gift to me.

YogaUOnline: Your work with this is partly inspired by what you refer to as the teachings of Abraham. Would you mind telling us a bit about that?

Shakta Kaur Khalsa: Yes, about 8 years ago, someone gave me a book by Esther and Jerry Hicks called “The Astonishing Power of Emotions.” That was a book about the teachings of Abraham.

Abraham is the idea of higher consciousness coming through Esther Hicks when she sits quietly in meditation. It’s like her higher self comes through and they called that Abraham. So it’s not like a person; it’s really just a pure, positive sort of expanded viewpoint on life.

The work in that book really spoke to me. I felt like I already knew a lot of what they were saying, but that they had such a clear way of explaining it that it sort of accelerated my awareness and my consciousness.

The Abraham Teaching and Yoga

YogaUOnline: How would you sum up the core of the Abraham teaching?

Shakta Kaur Khalsa: It’s really just a different viewpoint on the same philosophy as you find in yoga. The core teaching of the Abraham work is that even though we seem like physical beings, we actually emit or project a vibration at every moment just like anything does. If you hit a tuning fork, it has a vibration to it. If you hit a gong and you put your hand in front of it, you will feel a tickling feeling in your hand, because it has a vibration.

So, according to science as well as this work, everything has vibration. When you do yoga and meditation, you become more aware of your vibration. What the Abraham work is asking you to do is to pay attention to your vibration, whether you are in a happy, connected-to-you-inner-self vibration, or if you are in a down-in-the-dumps negative vibration. Just notice that difference. And if your vibration is not where you’d like it to be, they have a lot of wonderful techniques to help you get into a better emotional place.

The concept of being vibrational beings is also a teaching of yoga. You know, the causal plane in yoga is the vibrational plane and that’s where everything starts. So it’s the same in yoga.

Another one of the Abraham concepts is that there’s only one relationship to attend to and that’s between you (who you think you are) and You (the inner Self with a capital S, the connection with your bigger Self). And that’s what all your relationships are about. It’s not about your wife, your husband, your child, or your coworkers. You can’t control what anybody else is doing but you have absolute control over the way you view things, the feelings you have, what you’re putting your attention on, how you get yourself in a better mental place… You have absolute control there. So I find this work very, very freeing.

YogaUOnline: That understanding of the deeper mechanics of the Law of Attraction could almost be called the secret behind The Secret: It’s not just about positive thinking, there are deeper mechanics involved to actually make the shift to make that higher vibration a reality.

Shakta Kaur Khalsa: Exactly. And it’s funny, because the woman who wrote The Secret was inspired by the Abraham teachings and wanted to bring it out into the general public. But by the time bigger publishers got a hold of it, ironically, they left the inspiration out. They left Abraham’s work out and it made it much more superficial, in my opinion.

It’s really about how you can feel good and be connected to your whole self as often as possible. To me, the purpose of life is about being as connected as I can be to my infinite joyous Self. That’s why people are attracted to yoga and attracted to meditation—even if they think they’re attracted just because they want a good stretch. On a deeper level, everybody wants to feel good. Everybody wants to enjoy their life. Everybody wants to feel connected in a big way to who they really are. So that’s why I want to offer this course on Happily Ever Now: Yoga You and the Law of Attraction.

YogaUOnline: You have an online course on YogaUOnline where you go ore deeply into this. Tell us about your course. What inspired Happily Ever Now?

Shakta Kaur Khalsa: Happily Ever Now was inspired by the idea that the teachings that are part of yoga, especially the 8 limbs of yoga where you start to understand that the purpose of yoga, is to come into the meditative mind and use your awareness. That was the inspiration for me to develop the Happily Ever Now course. The basis of this course is how to be happy now, by noticing your thoughts and noticing how you have the ability to move your thoughts and feelings into a happier place.

YogaUOnline: So even if people are feeling stressed and anxious, you are teaching people to move beyond those feelings?

Shakta Kaur Khalsa: Well, let’s say somebody is feeling stressed. The first thing that we would do, if we are working toward being conscious beings, is to notice that we are stressed. That’s the first thing. And to notice it without self-reproach. In other words, the things that we tell ourselves are really important. Those are what help us or inhibits us from being able to move into a better feeling space.

So, if I notice I’m stressed, I say to myself, in a friendly way, “I’m feeling really stressed now.” Then the second step is: “It’s okay. I can understand that I’m feeling stressed. I’ve got a lot on my plate. It’s alright. I’ve got to give myself a little bit of space here to be stressed.” If I do that and I tell myself that, I immediately start to feel more relaxed, because I’m noticing that I’m stressed and then I’m befriending myself.

So, the first thing is being compassionate towards ourselves. The next thing is, once you relax a little bit, then you can say, “Alright, what can I feel, think, or do that could be just one step better than this? I could get myself a glass of water and take a couple deep breaths while I’m drinking it.” Or just: “I know that this won’t last forever. It’s just a moment in time. In a few minutes or tomorrow, I’ll feel differently.” That already is making me feel better.

YogaUOnline: That’s a beautiful point. I think most people have experienced that they have certain patterns or mental habits that don’t serve them. However, it’s not easy to shift out of these just because you’re aware of them, if they’re deeply ingrained tendencies. What would you say in cases like that?

Shakta Kaur Khalsa: We all have habitual patterns. Dr. Wayne Dyer makes a great distinction between the habitual mind and the creative conscious mind. When we’re in our creative conscious mind, he says, we feel alive and that we can handle things. When we’re in our habitual mind, we feel like our patterning is so ingrained in us that we can’t move forward.

So the first thing is to just recognize that we’re in a pattern and we’re in the habitual mind. Then, it’s just like taking baby steps. So one baby step would be if I say to myself, “Look how far I’ve already come with these patterns. I trust, that I’m moving in the right direction. I’m just going to, little by little, move myself in the direction of using my creative conscious mind and be more in that space, rather than this space. It’s just going to take some time, because that’s the way life is.” So I’m already feeling better and I’ve done a little bit of movement.

Some of the best tools to break habitual patterns are yoga and meditation. I’ve been doing yoga and meditation for more than 35 years, and I’m here to say it really works. It moves you out of the habitual mind and out of those patterns into a more conscious, aware, state. Especially meditation—if you do ten minutes to an hour of meditation every day, or whatever you can afford to do, it will start to break down those habit patterns. And we’re doing that in this course. We’re going to help people establish something that they can do each day if they don’t have something already.

So by the Happily Ever Now course, everybody will commit to something that they can do in their lives that will help them feel better. It might only be 10 minutes a day. And then I ask people to just send me an email afterwards within the next month and say how’s it going, how am I doing with this.

YogaUOnline: In the course, do you draw on techniques from yoga and meditation techniques as well?

Shakta Kaur Khalsa: The course is also based in my style of yoga which is Kundalini yoga. It contains Hatha yoga, too. So if anyone is familiar with Hatha yoga and not so familiar with Kundalini yoga, they’re still going to see what’s familiar to them and they’ll hopefully find some very exciting new things that they can also use (some meditation, some yoga) that creates change within the body and mind very quickly.

To learn more, check out Shakta’s online course: Happily Ever Now-Yoga, You, and the Law of Attraction!