HELLO + WELCOME!
Today I’ll be discussing a style of yoga I refer to as TRANSFORMATIONAL YOGA and how developing your own transformational yoga practice will help you to release deeply ingrained trauma and drama from within your mind, body, and spirit.
You’ll learn:
+ the technical term of what transformation is
+ my personal interpretation of what transformation is
+ what specific elements my particular transformational yoga sessions consist of
+ how I uniquely integrate my brand of transformation into each of the elements of a traditional yoga session
+ how each individual elements assists you in becoming the highest version of yourself and living your very best life.
SO WHAT IS TRANSFORMATION?
When we hear the word transformation it sounds pretty obvious. But so often we may think we know what a word means, but there can be a million different interpretations.
We have to first look at the root word, “transform”.
The technical definition for transform is; to change in form, appearance, or structure.
The technical term for transformation is; the process or act of changing into someone or something different than the original.
I SEE TRANSFORMATION A LITTLE DIFFERENTLY
My personal interpretation of transformation is; the up-leveling or evolving into a HIGHER VERSION of who or what someone or something currently is. it’s the taking of what someone is and improving upon
I don’t believe transformation is about changing into a whole new person. I know there are some of us that would like that, but I don’t think it’s entirely possible.
But I DO BELIEVE that human-beings are capable of learning, growing, maturing, and evolving beyond a current version of ourselves into something much greater.
I also believe that everything that we are capable of becoming has already been placed within us by our Higher Power and spiritual team just prior to our incarnation into this lifetime.
This upleveled version of you is a part of you that hasn’t yet been recognized, remembered, or materialized yet.
TRANSFORMATIONAL YOGA
I came up with the term “transformational yoga” because I was already familiar with the term through earning my Holistic Healthcare Practitioner Degree because one of the specialties I majored in was Transformational Life Coaching.
When I started learning yoga, I discovered that the practice of yoga provided an excellent foundation to apply the transformational concept to it because it would guide my students to experience a much more direct and deeper healing experience than through practicing traditional yoga alone.
I see the act of transformation through yoga as learning the tools and techniques necessary to understand ourselves and our lives more intimately and begin opening up to the inner-goddess element that lives deep within us along with our divine feminine energy to break-through and release deeply ingrained trauma and drama from within the mind, body, and spirit to become the woman we originally created to be.
And then we’re in the position to discover our gifts and graces and begin to manifest the type of luxury lifestyle we’ve always imagined.
I chose the wording for Goddess Imagine and the services I provide very carefully in order to illustrate exactly what the services are intended to do and who they are for.
Transformation isn’t about recreating ourselves; it’s about rediscovering who we are at a core level and becoming the authentic version of ourselves, before the bullshit we’ve encountered throughout our life took us off-track and our progression sideways.
This is very important to understand because I’ve felt the need to literally shit-can my entire existence and start over from scratch and if you’re here, you’ve probably felt the exact same way.
But check this out…
THE SOUL CONTRACT
Before we were incarnated into this lifetime (yes, we’ve lived multiple lifetimes), we sat down with our Higher Power and spiritual team along with other spiritual advisors, to create an amazing lifetime filled with all the dreams and drama we could possibly want to experience.
This is what is called our Soul Contract.
Every single one of us goes through this evolutionary process every single time we incarnate into a brand-new lifetime.
Every lifetime comes with experiences and lessons that help us move up in the spiritual realm. Upleveling is a continuous theme within the upper and lower quadrants of the spiritual-sphere.
However, once Spirit lets go and we’re born into the current time and this space, we enter into that “free-will” zone, Spirit talks about. Sometimes, we can just end up being born into less than ideal circumstances.
Or we may ask to ski “Black Diamond” so to speak and create breathtaking scenarios to experience the most extenuating circumstances to rise-up and overcome.
But either way, sometimes there’s an over abundance of trauma and drama that can negatively impact us beyond what we can currently manage and end up shaping and molding us into a lesser version of who we were intended to be.
And if the experiences are too overwhelming, we can sometimes consciously or unconsciously disconnect or forget about our soul contract entirely!
In fact, there’s several types of incidents that can cause us to disconnect from our contract. It happens.
I’ll speak more about that in a moment.
Now, it’s certainly not this way for everyone, because there are people who have been born into some of the most hellish circumstances, the very things nightmares are made of, and have gone on to become incredibly successful and to do amazing things with their lives!
But some of us that were born into these types of environments didn’t have any type of “encouraging climate” to help us reach our full potential. Or the situation became so dire, we switched into survival mode and never turned it off.
Our authentic self and our dreams and goals are still there but we have no way to fully acknowledge and express them. They just keep getting pushed down, further and further, year after year until they’ve become unrecognizable.
YOUR SOUL-SELF
To get an idea of who you are at a core level or begin to imagine what reconnecting to your true-self or soul-self can look like I’ll share my own experience.
This may sound crazy but PLEASE trust me. For each of you the imagery or situation may be different, but I invite you to think back throughout your life for familiar images, themes, and/or feelings you’ve had throughout your life.
What consistencies exist?
You may have had times where you see an image of a woman out of the corner of your eye or within your mind’s eye. She may look somewhat like you or like someone you’re very familiar with but can’t recall who she is.
You may dream of her, you may hear her, or sense her. You may intuitively “know” that another version of yourself exists elsewhere. You may feel like you’re not your full authentic-self and feel like you should be someone else doing something else.
Maybe you feel the need to constantly change your living location, change careers, go back to school, change relationships, change your clothing style, or change your hairstyles.
The things around you don’t often feel comfortable and you never feel settled. You’re always moving about trying to make yourself busy.
The friendships you make are often surface-friendships and lack any type of intimacy and honesty. You often avoid social get-togethers.
Maybe you strive to make an extensive income, desire the finer things in life, have impeccable taste, and consistently reach for the most expensive items when you shop, but you’re NOWHERE NEAR that financial reality.
You’re always looking to do something different or for something to make you feel better. Any of these situations may differ for you, but somewhere inside of you, you just know something is not right.
When this was happening to me, I couldn’t put my issues into exact words but that’s precisely what was happening to me.
I kept seeing the side of a woman’s profile my entire lifetime. She’s tall, has dark wavy, slightly curvy hair, mind length, she has wide eyes, nude lips, blue eyes, with fair skin.
She’s always wearing a gray raincoat and sunglasses, carrying a black purse, and is extraordinarily elegant. I would DIE to look like her.
She’s always walking in an environment that is either super sunny or super stormy but it’s always windy. When she walks, she is looking back at me through her left eye as if she wants me to catch up with her.
Through my yogic journey, I learned that image was ME.I know it sounds crazy but this is what holistic healing is about, it explores the realms of our WHOLE SELF; often the areas that are often not addressed.
MANY of us have experienced this phenomenon. We come into this life with all the grandeur we can muster, but then reality hits and knocks us off the horse.
These images and feelings are there to help us remember that we had a plan and purpose and as we go through our yoga classes and do the work ,we naturally begin to release all of that negative trauma and drama to begin revealing our true self; the woman we were originally created to be.
This is why I created Goddess Imagine with the tagline I did:
“Learn how to connect to your inner goddess element + divine feminine energy to uplevel and transform into the woman you were created to be and manifest the luxury lifestyle that you’ve always imagined.”
Spirit gave me those exact words to help me make sense of my own experiences and to illustrate the type of work I do to attract the women who needed this healing.
The women I work with are usually just like me and are working to overcome the same type of damage and dysfunction that I have and want to become a much better version of who they currently are and live an extraordinary lifestyle.
We all desire success and financial freedom. We have impeccable taste and want some time in life to experience the life we planned before we came here.
MY TRANSFORMATIONAL YOGA PROGRAM
The following is the break-down of everything I put into a 60 minute yoga class and how each element works to release deeply ingrained trauma and drama from within the mind, body, and spirit, to help you understand how transformational yoga works, to help you uplevel and transform into the highest version of yourself and make all of your dreams come true.
Transformation begins with MAKING THE DECISION to purchase a series and create your own yoga practice.
We may not yet know exactly what our problems are or what exactly we want to achieve, but we’re willing to be present and dance in the mystery to see what unfolds.
Coming to the yoga mat daily represents our ability to SURRENDER OURSELVES to our HIGHER POWER + HIGHER PURPOSE and be open to the experience.
This signals to the universe that your journey has begun allowing it to conspire to meet you where you are and begin manifesting your dreams and desires.
The Dharma Talk is a brief lecture/life lesson or story I share at the beginning of the class that explains or represents what the theme or topic of the class is, why it’s important to you, how it’s intended for the class, and how you can use this class to improve your life.
I utilize this time to invite you to begin thinking about what types of improvements you would like to see in your own life regarding this topic.
Again, sometimes we come to this place in life maybe not knowing exactly what’s wrong with us but when we hear stories that relate to our own life, we can begin to build parallels and see ourselves in our own situations.
This gives us the ability to explore our personal lives and well-being and current existence and spark and begin imagining how we would like our life to be differently.
Sitting In Sukhasana initiates the OPENING OF OUR SESSION.
We’re preparing to detach from the mundane world and enter into the spiritual realm.
We begin each of my classes with us sitting in an upright position, our backs straight, chin parallel to the mat, our hands resting on our knees with the palms upright towards the sky connecting to our universal flow of energy, and we’re breathing naturally.
Or they’re set behind our hips.
Many of us have spent YEARS sitting bent over, our chests hallowed inward, our shoulders dropped and heads hanging either in disgust, depression, stress, or shame.
I BELIEVE sitting up straight, rolling your shoulders back, opening our chest, and raising our face symbolizes the rebirth of your self-confidence and self-esteem, both very necessary components for our transformational journey.
Pranayama is a style or system of BREATHWORK that works energetically to go deep within us to RECOGNIZE AND RELEASE all the different types of intricately wound negative trauma and drama from deep within our mind, body, and spirit.
Our breath also activates our LIFE FORCE ENERGY to cleanse and clear each of the chakras, returning them to their original pristine condition and divine purpose.
There are many different forms of Pranayama and each style works in a unique way to address and remove negativity from deep within us.
The Invocation is when we raise our hands up and over our heads into palm hands and we drop them down into prayer hands. We invoke our Higher Power and spiritual team to join our session for spiritual support, guidance, information, and inspiration.
I see it as beginning the EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS by signifying your commitment to doing the work and following through with your commitments.
Guided Meditation helps us BEGIN OR END our session by taking a moment to ground, center, and focus your mind, body and spirit and be present for the session in order to learn from the session.
Some yoga teachers do meditation at the end of the session, I sometimes do too.
I see meditation as also a tool to help us practice self-awareness and self-control. We hear meditation is about BLOCKING NEGATIVE thoughts from our mind when in actuality it’s about letting your thoughts come to the surface and recognize and release the thoughts that don’t serve our higher purpose.
Blocking them and ignoring them only causes them to fester and cause problems.
I see meditation as also having MINDFULNESS.
So often we go through life with blinders on either in a state of denial, disbelief, or just lack of awareness and we can’t uplevel and transform the things we don’t recognize.
I see meditation as an opportunity to reconnect with your mind, body, and spirit, and truly get an idea of the current condition of your life. It can also be used to help us plan to move forward.
This is an extremely powerful step in helping us to recognize and release the negative people, places and things that no longer serve us.
Setting the Intention literally means setting an intention of what we would like to be, do, or have, as a result of the work we’re doing.
This is a powerful step because it helps to increase our self-awareness and gets us thinking about what we really want to accomplish in this lifetime, not just what we’re willing to accept.
This action trains our mind, body, and spirit to become accountable for our actions and choices as to how we go forward into this transformation process.
Inhaling/Exhaling is a pattern of breathing that we do throughout the session helps us to move in and out of poses smoothly and build a type of rhythm that keeps us in what is called a “yoga flow”.
This also depends on the style of yoga you’re doing or the teacher you have. Not all yoga classes do this but I definitely strive to.
Sometimes we pause in a pose to take a deeper breath in and a deeper breath out and that accentuates the cleansing process by allowing energy to go deep within us to reach darker and less traveled parts of our mind, body, and spirit, to reach deeply hidden negativity and exhale it out of our system.
THIS is SUCH AN INTEGRAL ELEMENT of YOGA for me.
Because when we’re in a constant fight-or-flight scenario we either hold our breath and choke off our life force energy or we hyperventilate and spew our energy all over the place, wasting it as if our energy is worthless.
Either way our breath it’s not correctly utilized.
I utilize the breathing aspect of yoga to retrain the mind, body, and spirit and begin to break negative habits both inside of us and outside of us.
Breathing through yoga also helps to fill the body with vital oxygen which increases blood-flow and builds muscle as it builds stamina.
The Warm-Up is just that – a series of yoga poses and exercises unique to each class that opens the initial flow of yoga and gets the mind, body, and spirit prepared for our session.
You never want to enter into a yoga session without first warming up or you can also seriously hurt yourself and experience a terrible injury.
The warm-up also teaches us that before we can reach the success we so deeply desire, we have to be willing to put the necessary work into it FIRST before we can see the results we desire.
We have to warm up to success, take it day by day, and build on those internal and external strengths.
Sun or Moon Salutations are a series of pre-set “gratitude” poses that take place between the warm-up aspect of the session and the main portion of the practice ( the standing balances) that begins to get the body moving into a flow and further prepare for our session.
We use this time to stand at the top ⅓ of the mat, ground the feet, stand tall, open the chest, roll the shoulders back, and bring the chin parallel to the mat as we prepare to go through this integral flow sequence.
The Asanas or Poses are what makes up the sequences in a yoga session. They exist on a beginner, intermediate, and advanced level.
There’s literally hundreds and hundreds of different poses created by different yogis, (more are being created all the time) that were created to help human beings release negativity from their mind, body, and spirit and live a happy and abundant life.
I intuitively see each pose as having the ability to release a specific type of negative block and obstacle so I choose specific poses and patterns of poses for my classes in relation to the type of transformational work we’re doing.
In beginner classes there’s only so many poses we can do, and most yoga practices consist of many of the same poses, but those poses are usually the most powerful and integral poses in yoga that deliver the greatest results.
I also consider the intention behind the class, the desired result, and the location of each of the poses in the sequence as I create the classes.
The Featured Pose is normally a singular pose with a higher level of difficulty than the poses used throughout the class that occurs after the main sequences of poses or the standing balances and before the cool down.
The poses used in the class are traditionally chosen to help prepare for the feature pose. In an intermediate or advanced class the featured pose may be a shoulder stand or a handstand.
In a beginner class, I choose a featured pose that is in line with the topic of the class that gives the student a new level of minimal difficulty to achieve while they’re building their beginner practice.
The featured pose helps to build our internal strength as well as our personal will or personal power. It takes the skill we’ve built during the practice and immediately expands it.
It may be Camel, Dolphin, Cow Face, Plow Pose, Pigeon, or something else with a little raised difficulty to give the student a strong sense of achievement while also observing their limitations.
It’s powerful and exciting to immediately experience your personal growth.
The Cool-Down is a series of yoga poses and breathwork that begins after the featured pose that works to cool and slow the body down and bring the mind, body, and spirit back to a restful state.
It also helps to prepare us for Savasana.
In my mind, the cool down exists to cool down the body, yes, but also activates the HEALING PROCESS from all the trauma and drama we’ve experienced in our many lifetimes.
This works differently than the releasement process.
When we remove negativity we have to replace it with something and I use the cool down to begin activating the heart chakra or and begin the forgiveness and healing aspect of transformation.
During the cool down we can use any pose but we generally hold them for longer periods of time and direct our energy into a healing mode.
We’re slowing everything down, preparing for Savasana, maybe telling ourselves how much we love ourselves, respect ourselves, or how we’re worthy of love, worthy of respect, appreciation – whatever it is for you.
Savasana begins after the cool-down. This is when we come to lay on our backs on our mat with our face and palms directed upwards.
This is probably the most important element of a transformational yoga session because this is when the body is able to rest AND assimilate (absorb) all the work you have done on the mat that day.
We have to have adequate time to feel and absorb the effects of our yoga class, it’s an essential element of healing and transformation.
Savasana usually lasts for the last 5-10 minutes of class depending on the length of the class but brings closure to the mind, body, and spirit and prepares us to go forward in a new and positive light.
So often students skip this because they’re in a hurry but again, this is the most important part of the class.
Final Words involve bringing the class up from Savasana and have them sit on the center of the mat facing me in Sukhasana.
This is when I say a few final words and impart the class with a few lasting bits of knowledge and wisdom.
We also use this time to come back to prayer hands and EXTEND GRATITUDE for the people, places, and things we’re most grateful for along with the things we’re working to manifest.
Acting as if we’ve already achieved or acquired something is a powerful way to manifest the things we deeply desire.
Class Closing is when we literally end the class collectively, as a group.
From prayer hands, this time we close our eyes, bow our heads and say ‘Namaste’ out loud, to each other and the collective, as we would if we were in a live class together.
Namaste’ means “the Light or God in me recognizes and resonates with the Light or God in you”.
I see it as a way for each of us to HONOR ONE ANOTHER and to show appreciation of our community, even if we’re unable to practice together in a group, we can still energetically recognize and honor our virtual classmates and teacher.
I feel this is an essential component of transformation because it begins to help us realize we are not alone and we need more than just ourselves to get through this journey.
It also allows us to feel appreciation for everyone who has assisted with our transformational process.
BONUS: There’s an extra step I created called the “Ever-After” and it involves HOW we go forward and throughout our day after our session as well as the weeks and months after we begin practicing yoga.
These are just some of my OWN suggestions that I’ve personally implemented into my own life to further assist and support the transformational process and thought maybe you’d like to hear.
It’s important to keep in the forefront of your mind everything you’ve JUST accomplished during your yoga session and the results you intended to receive.
Because the results you receive are indicative of the positive thoughts and actions that go forward to activating your personal manifestation abilities.
In other words, WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT, YOU BRING ABOUT.
You don’t want to end your session and then scream FUCK YOU at the first driver who cuts you off (I personally still struggle with this big time, but I’m getting better).
Listen, TRANSFORMATION IS HARD!
It takes time to assess and address the changes we need to make, but part of the transformational process IS being AWARE of our thoughts and actions and stopping yourself and adjusting your attitude when appropriate.
We want to keep those good vibes going, people! You don’t want to deter it immediately after all the hard work you’ve just finished.
We also want to be mindful of our everyday activities like the foods we eat, the relationships we have, how we manage our money, do we pay our bills on time, the cleanliness of our home, how we talk to people, how we treat our friends and family, etc.
Maybe take some time and evaluate yourself and your life and begin to think about what about you or your life is in need of a glow-up?
We just don’t attend a class then go about our day oblivious.
The yoga session prepares the mind, body, and spirit for transformation, and helps us to release negativity, BUT THE REST DEPENDS ON US.
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GET STARTED ON YOUR TRANSFORMATIONAL JOURNEY TODAY!
Download my FREE PDF Workbook: The Goddess Imagine Sacred Space Project!
It’s filled with questions, suggestions, and a checklist to help you create the IDEAL SPACE for you to kickstart your transformational journey today!
Click HERE to receive your complimentary copy!
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READY TO DIVE IN AND START YOUR OWN YOGA PRACTICE?
Introducing: The Goddess Imagine Reflection Experience
This is a 30 minute introductory yoga class and support materials that contains all the insight and ideas you need to begin your personal yoga journey today!
You’ll receive a beautifully illustrated workbook, a link to the video, an illustrated yoga pose outline, and access to the GODDESS IMAGINE community!
Click HERE to get on the launch list!
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Thank you very much and I hope to see you soon!
Brightest Blessings + Namaste’,
Krysten Burkhardt-Hansyn
Goddess Imagine, LLC
A Transformational Yoga + Modern Metaphysical Practic