Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa: Yoga Master and Former Flower Child Breathes in Healthy Living.
Before she discovered yoga, she enjoyed altering her consciousness through much less healthy means.
The internationally renowned yoga master — who counts Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow and David Duchovny among her former yoga students — freely admits that she did “a lot” of LSD and other recreational drugs in the 1960s.
“I was a hippie and just kinda spaced out for awhile,” the gentle 68-year-old tells QMI Agency in a phone interview ahead of her visit to Canada this month.
“I lived in San Francisco and Hawaii on the beaches and I bodysurfed, we danced a lot and I took a lot of recreational drugs like LSD and I smoked a lot of marijuana.”
Gurmukh, now the director of Golden Bridge Yoga based in Los Angeles and New York, harbours no regrets for that “magical time” in her 20s.
“I’m just so thankful because if I hadn’t done that I might’ve thought I was missing something,” she says. “By the time I got on this path (yoga), I had done it all and I had no regrets. But I had no longing to go back either.”
Gurmukh discovered her life’s path circa 1970, after nearly seven years of the hippie lifestyle.
That’s when, as destiny would have it, she found Kundalini yoga.
“I took one class and I knew this was it,” recalls the former flower child.
It was a natural drug that provided Gurmukh with a three-dimensional high in body, mind and soul.
“That’s the beauty of Kundalini yoga — you work out, you sweat, but then you sit, you meditate and you do special breathing so that you can bring yourself into a oneness,” she explains. “The high comes from the connection of your breath to your spirit.”
Gurmukh immersed herself in her newfound brand of overall fitness, soon studying under Yogi Bhajan, the man credited with introducing Kundalini yoga to the western world after he moved to North America from India in the late 1960s.
But Gurmukh didn’t just adopt his preferred style of yoga. She also adopted the devoted Sikh’s religion.
Yogi Bhajan gave Gurmukh — born Mary Mae Gibson in rural Illinois — her Sikh spiritual name. And she has never turned back.
These days, Gurmukh, always seen in public in her turban and flowing white bana, travels the world teaching Kundalini yoga.
For the married mother of a 27-year-old daughter, staying fit is all about balance.
So besides yoga, Gurmukh has also been known to go inline skating along the boardwalk at Venice Beach, swimming in a saltwater pool near her Los Angeles home, hiking in Tibet and mountain biking whenever her hectic travel schedule allows.
“And I lift weights,” she adds. “I go to a gym that’s connected to a swimming pool.”
She’ll do any physical activity as long as it’s fun, makes her feel good and is challenging, she says.
Gurmukh’s diet, however, is much less varied.
She has been a vegan for more than 40 years.
“I eat an alkaline diet, which is lots of green foods — salads, vegetables, sweet potatoes and fruit, but that’s pretty much my diet,” she notes. “It’s what I found gives me the most energy and makes my body feel the best.”
In four decades, she also hasn’t touched drugs — both recreational and pharmaceutical — and alcohol.
“I’m almost 70 and I feel really, really — knock on wood — good,” she says.
“It’s a scientific thing: You put more oxygen in your brain, you think clearer. It’s the science of the breath. The capacity of which you breathe is the capacity of which you live. Breathe deep, live deep. Breathe shallow, live shallow.”
BY CARY CASTAGNA ,QMI AGENCY
