Donna Quesada: This abuse of power… I always like to ask this question… It seems like we are entering an age where we

are starting to become more aware of where these abuses are held, and carried on… even encouraged, and passed down from generation to generation. We saw it in the continuation of the Black Lives Matter movement. These abuses of power. Do you think, and as a Yogi, we think about these things… The balance between feminine and masculine. Do you think these things are starting to come out, as we deal with the kind of imbalance of masculine power that has been in place for so many years?

Kia Miller: Yes, I think that is the result of the deeper imbalance, which is that we as humanity have lost a connection to our own inner power, the force of our own connection. Everything we are seeing is the result of that core loss of connection. We have identified ourselves in very limiting ways.

And so, because we are identifying in very limiting ways, I think the animal part of the human being has been ruling. It’s been about power struggle and it’s been about gender and it’s been about race. It’s been about class and who has more. And this is coming from a core identity as separate beings trying to master this three-dimensional reality. And whoever has more is the winner versus the deeper reality that we are all connected. All part of the one source. The one creative consciousness. Ek Ong Kar… We are all one. Part of this one creative consciousness.

And our understanding of this is what brings us into connection with our truth, with our innate blissful nature. With the place that… how we treat our neighbor is how we treat ourselves… That every action we take is having a ripple effect on the collective. And I feel that this is where the new emerging paradigm of consciousness is leading us… to understand this at a deeper and deeper level. In many ways, our job as those on this path of Yoga, is to embody more and more of that truth and light in our own lives, in our waking hours, so that we can be part of the creative force that is bringing forth this new emerging paradigm. Where we as human beings do recognise our oneness. Our unity. Our connection.  And then, all of these outward expressions of disconnection will start to become irrelevant. So, to me, the source underlying all of this. If you want to get to the core… is the core belief that we are separate. And that is creating all these other ripples.

DONNA: What has been your mission in this lifetime?

KIA: You know, I think it’s changed and developed as I’ve grown in myself. But what I would say is that my core mission is to awaken myself and to teach and share from that level of awakening that I am experiencing at any given moment. And so, it is a two-pronged approach in life. The personal commitment to know myself is at the root of all of it. That allows me to share from that place and to hopefully invite others to access deeper and deeper levels of truth for themselves.

DONNA: And how do you balance that personal practice with a higher calling to serve as a teacher or your place in the community?

KIA: It’s my commitment. So, it’s not something that I really have to try to do anymore because it’s been built into my way of living. There came a time when I realized that the essence of what I wanted to share with others was not going to come from more and more study on the level of mind, but it was going to come from my direct experience, and my journey within the realms of my being. My meditation practice that explores what it means to be human… What possibilities and potentials and experiences can unfold when we pay attention to the present moment and when we learn how to change our emotional state. And when we learn how to open more and more into the unknown.

So, for me, this self-exploration is the foundation for everything else that I’m sharing. Thankfully, two of my teachers, like Guru Singh, who really drilled into me at a Yogically young age… Sadana, Sadana ,Sadana. Do your personal practice. At first, I did that practice because I was told that it was going to be good for me. I had faith in it… that the practice was going to work for me, and so I did it. And I feel like I am a slow learner. It took some time for me to penetrate through the denseness of my own consciousness. To reach pockets of awakening and love and connection. Once lit, those became the guiding force for my practice. But in the beginning, it was the faith in my teachers that allowed me to hang out long enough in those daily practices to actually penetrate below my surface reality.

DONNA: What kind of breakthroughs did you have?

KIA: Well, I had breakthroughs… first of all, having disassociated for so many years… I had no sensitivity to energy. When I first started practicing, I had to learn how to feel my muscles. Let alone energy. So, I had breakthroughs in understanding how to tune into my energy versus my physical body. I then had breakthroughs in terms of catching a thought as it was happening. And recognizing that I could make a choice to stay with that thought or go in another direction. I had breakthroughs in terms of having explosions of love in my heart that came from the inside out… that were self-generated… that did not come because anyone outside showed me love. They were coming because of this connection within myself.

Swami Rama gave this wonderful term. “To be citizens of two worlds. The outer and the inner world.” And I used to think what does it even mean to be a “citizen of the inner world?” What is the “inner world?” And I have to understand that the inner world… Yogis lay this out… The inner world is the world of our energy. It’s the world of our mind. Our consciousness. It’s the world of our awareness and our capacity to sense the deeper layers of reality. And that… just like there are maps of the cities that we live in and the world around us, there are maps that can lay out the inner-workings of our energy and mental-emotional experience.

Because all of us have mental-emotional patterns that we have created over our lifetime that are like little densely populated areas of a city… And some of those densely populated areas of emotion and memory and thought are really detrimental to our health and our radiance. And so part of knowing and becoming a citizen of the world is starting to learn… What is our emotional frequency? What emotional frequency are we putting out at any given moment? What are the thoughts that prompt unconscious reactivity in our life that keep perpetuating cycles of suffering and pain? What are those thoughts, so we can begin to catch them? What are our dominant emotional states? Is it anxiety or depression or addiction to stress or anger? It’s really good to know that because… we will keep recreating this cycle of energy and consciousness that is within us.

So, the process of becoming and internal citizen is one of becoming a self sovereign being. In other words, not allowing our experience of the moment to be governed by anything outside of us. Right? But also not allowing our experience of the moment to be governed and overshadowed by our unconsciousness. And that unconsciousness is there because it’s how it’s mapped our experiences through coping mechanisms, for as many years as we’ve been alive. If we are not aware of those thoughts and those emotions that are dominating our life, then we are constantly at the mercy of that unconscious momentum.

And so to me, becoming a citizen of the inner world is getting to know who I am. How I think. What makes me feel different ways? And then the radical part of that is to take 100 percent self responsibility. My experience of life is 100 percent my doing. I think a lot of us live with subtle and not so subtle levels of victim consciousness. My life sucks. I struggle. I hurt. There is pain and it’s somebody else’s fault. Not recognizing that we are the creators of our own experience. And yes, many of us have had pretty heinous things happen to us in the cycle of this lifetime. But how long are we going to carry our mental victim in life? How long are we going to choose to be disempowered by the story of that pain and that’s a really big one for us to recognize.

So, we can choose to step out of that consciousness. To open ourselves to something new. I feel that collectively as human beings, that we have bought into this victim consciousness, that there is always somebody else to blame for our life and for our experience. And this time… this moment in time, this pandemic, this loss of jobs, all of the things that we are collectively experiencing right now… This is our wakeup call. This is our moment to take radical self-responsibility. And say, hey wait, I am not going to choose to be a victim to this right now. And to start the very necessary work of choosing and changing these dominant patterns, so that we can be awake. So we can be awake to what wants to come through. Each and every one of us right now. We have to be awake and alert and present, so that we are available to be a clear vessel for the truth… for the higher awareness… for deeper levels of love to be expressed and come through.

Those of us who are fortunate enough to not be struggling to put a roof over our heads or put food on our table… it’s really our responsibility to do as much of this work as we can so we can support all of those around us who don’t have the freedom of time to meditate in the morning or the freedom of time that it takes to change in the way that I’m speaking of change. There are a lot of us that have different levels of privilege in our lives. And we have to stop. We have to stop the stories. We have to take that self-accountability and step up.

DONNA: You have dropped so many little golden nuggets. I hope that the viewers are able to pick those up. Something you said was a wonderful way to encapsulate what we are doing on the mat. You spoke about self-sovereignty. And this is very powerful because it means I’m not enslaved by my past. Self-Sovereign… just to recap: It means a thought can go by and I can either go fishing, and stay with that, and attach to it, and turn it into the story of my life… Or, I can just let it go, like a little cloud passing through the sky. And that gives me power because I don’t have to believe that thought. And by extension, I don’t have to believe the stories. That is freedom!

KIA: Exactly. That is freedom. That is freedom. And for those who struggle to get that degree of clarity. It’s not your fault. I’m not saying that you are a victim, but it’s not your fault if you are not getting that degree of clarity yet. What it is… is a lack of coherence in your energy. So your internal wi-fi receiver is picking up mixed signals from your environment and from within you. What I mean by it’s not your fault is that… You have an incoherent signal going on in your mind., energy, soul, experience.

DONNA: Some people are watching and they are saying, “hang on a second, I was with you so far. I don’t have to believe those thoughts. But what does incoherent energy mean? And how can I take control by getting together with my energy, so to speak?”

KIA: What you so beautifully reflected is that you can see… oh, I’m not that thought. Choose this. If we are not able to have that clarity to see the thought that is creating the suffering that we are experiencing… Or maybe we can see it but we feel powerless to change it. What I would say is “don’t beat yourself up about that.” What it means on an energetic level is that there is a lack of coherence. What a lack of coherence means is that our energy has been discombobulated. Our mind has been fractured into many directions. Our energy has been fractured. What we need to do is create coherence.

This is where the practice is, the physical and energetic breath. Practices of Yoga come in because they help us to create energetic coherence—where the energy, rather than the signal of your energy being all over the place… You start to get a nice harmonious signal that is moving through your entire being. We do all these weird arm movements. We do some breathing. What we are doing is, we are creating coherence in our energy. Harmony in our energy. What happens when we have harmony in our energy? We start to think more clearly. We start to make those connections… Oh wait, that’s the thought that always takes me in into resentment. Oh, there is the thought that helps me to feel good about myself. We start to see more clearly.

And so, the action for all of us to take is to wake up our energy. That’s the first action. Wake up our energy, move our body, create this harmony so that the brainwaves start to be more coherent. We start to think more clearly. We start to see that faculty of insight that comes alive within us and we start to see… Oh, just did it again. Alright, going to do better next time. I see you… pattern. Next time my husband, wife, kid, triggers me, I know how I’m going to respond. And so, you start to change.

DONNA: And you mentioned victim mentality. I had a friend who I jokingly call The Rabbi. He thinks, and I think there is a great deal of truth there, that victim mentality is the root of so much of our suffering.

KIA:  It is because it’s where we’ve given our power away. And it’s a learned behavior. Again, the tendency, especially for us Westerners, is to… We recognize something about ourselves. I’m being a victim… but then what we do is… like they say in AA… We release the second arrow. Now we’ve sunk to blame ourselves. Oh, I’m helpless, Oh, I’m useless, Oh, I’m never going to get better, and so the downward spiral energetically happens.

So, for me, If we can understand that we are all subject to the same human condition. We all have negative thinking. We all have negative self-talk. We all have that blame and guilt mechanism just kind of wired into us. So, we want to start to rewire ourselves. On a neurological level, we want to create that harmony in our energetic body, so that our frequency changes and we can tap into more awareness. And then we just want to start to get alert in our minds, so that we can recognize the challenging thoughts. And rather than add on to them with more self-defeating blame… And to recognize… Oh, I really just judged that person. Wow, I was a b-i-t-c-h just then. Wow, okay, but I’m not going to beat myself up. I’m going to recognize the fire within myself and be like Wow, that wasn’t a cool way to respond. Maybe, I’m going to, right a way, ask for forgiveness, and then I’m going to forgive myself. And I’m going to put a nice big highlight on do better next time… alert, when that trigger happens, don’t do that—do this, and I’m going to move forward. And that, to me, is what it means to live on the Yogic path.

Read and Watch Part 3 Here: Awaken Interviews Yogini Kia Miller – Pt3 – Get out in Nature. Hug a tree. Sit on the Earth.

Read and watch Part I Here: Awaken Interviews Yogini Kia Miller – Pt 1 – The Spiritual Heart That Is Within

Source: AWAKEN