HealingSource.com

It’s that special pre-dawn time known by Yogis as the Amrit Vela and a group of 39 women sit steadfast in meditation during another morning of sadhana.

As they chant the “Wahe Guru” mantra, the stars, so clear in the Arizona desert sky, start giving way to a few golden rays of sunlight that glint over the red buttes in front of them.

After several minutes of meditation, one of them slowly opens her eyes and the beauty of the desert nature becomes as blinding as the glowing sun that illuminates her face.

She is moved to tears of joy and gratitude.

PREPARING FOR THE NEW TIMES TO COME

This beautiful scene set the stage for last year’s Womanheart retreat, “Meditation and the Mind of Woman,” 19 years after its founder, Sangeet Kaur Khalsa, woke up with the title of the spiritual retreats in her mind on New Year’s Day of 1991.

During the two weeks that followed that morning, materials for the women’s course poured out of her in an almost magical stream of consciousness that stemmed from many long years of studying Kundalini Yoga, meditation and women’s wisdom with Yogi Bhajan.

"Womanheart… is a state of being,” Sangeet says in her book Womanheart – Healing our Relationships, Loving Ourselves. “Of being kind and compassionate, courageous and conscious. It is a way of life, a path we as women walk, ‘the way of excellence and grace’.”

As a student of Yogi Bhajan since 1978, Sangeet heard many times of the importance of helping women walk such a path during the final years before the dawning of the Aquarian Age.

“The pressures on us from this energy shift are growing, the stresses are accumulating, requiring us as women to achieve even more meditative calm and radiant leadership,” she said in a letter to last year’s Womanheart retreat participants.

Having worked for 25 years in New York as an executive of Fortune Top 50 corporations, Sangeet says her experiences in this stage of her life in life helped her realize the essential role women were to play as nations shifted out of the fear-filled Piscean Age. However, she said, women need to lead as women, with the unique grace and ability for compassion God has given only to them.

“For centuries men have been trained in leadership skills, but they could not deliver the world to peace and harmony, and certainly not working by themselves alone,” Sangeet wrote in Womanheart, now in its second printing. “Now it remains for us as women to also take up the lead – not as pseudo-men, but as women trained to lead from the heart as well as from the head, from compassion as well as from consciousness.”

During her talks about women’s wisdom, Sangeet continuously reminds women how important it is to walk their highest path, especially in their relationships with a man.

“The dumbest man knows by instinct how much more powerful you are than he is, and it’s unnerving to him to see you cry,” she often tells students.

AN ATMOSPHERE TO UPLIFT AND HEAL

As Sangeet continued to gain experience as a Reiki Master trainer, spiritual counselor, numerologist and senior Kundalini Yoga teacher trainer, the course’s program evolved considerably.

Last year’s course mixed numerology basics on the 10 energy bodies and the 3 minds with simple Kundalini Yoga, breathwork and meditation techniques to bring mental and emotional balance.

From leading everyone in spirited Breathwalk to several releasing meditations while playing the symphonic gong, Sangeet immersed the women in healing experiences. Along with that, outdoor activities included hiking to petroglyphs, kayaking and horseback riding as well as sumptuous vegan meals.

For many of the women, their experiences releasing old blockages were evident. Lilian Borges-Zeig, a first-time participant, said the gong sessions targeting traumas of the past helped her transform attitudes toward her mother, who had passed away five years before the retreat.

“My mom came to me in a dream the night after the retreat,” Borges-Zeig said. “She hugged me and told me she was there for me. That was so powerful because in some ways I felt like I did not have a chance to really get to know my mom when she was alive.”

Returning Womanheart participants say that one of the reasons the course is so successful is because women feel so supported that they can open up to the healing energies.

A staffer in last year’s retreat and a retired pathologist, Gagandeep Kaur, said Sangeet’s command as a teacher is essential in helping women feel that way.

“Because of her work as a spiritual counselor and Reiki trainer for decades, she is very attuned to where other people are in a mental-emotional level and on an energetic level,” she said. “She creates a protective and nurturing space.”

It is the opportunity to open up to a heart-to-heart connection with other women that has kept Jennifer Powell coming to the retreats year after year. It was also what prompted her to travel to Arizona all the way from Texas to attend last year’s “Womanheart Spiritual Immersion” at Saguaro Lake, in the Superstition Mountains just East of Phoenix.

“I look forward to feeling that sense of community, of camaraderie and sisterhood,” she said. “It is very uplifting and motivating, it’s the boost that I need for my own spiritual practice.”

KEEPING UP

More than one-time, feel-good experiences, Womanheart was designed to bring ever-lasting changes to women’s lives through Kundalini Yoga and meditation techniques.

Every year Sangeet puts together a manual with materials from each retreat, so that women can take home the meditations and kriyas they learned and use them in their daily lives.

In the words of Jaap Kaur Khalsa, now an associate Kundalini Yoga teacher trainer completing her professional trainer qualifications, her first encounter with the teachings of Yogi Bhajan took place in a Womanheart retreat.

“The manual was like a bible to me,” she said. “Then when I started teaching and I had to talk about a specific subject I still kept referring back to it.”

Jaap Kaur, who made a pledge to herself never to miss a retreat, said she comes to soulful realizations every course. During one specific retreat, she realized the power of mentally repeating the mantra “Wahe Guru” when in trouble. She remembered she was walking and tripped on someone’s sheepskin.

“I was two-thirds of the way to the floor and, quickly chanting Wahe Guru under my breath, I immediately stopped falling,” she recalled.

Patricia Mindorff, who attended her first Womanheart in the early 90s and returned again in 2008, said the numerology materials explaining about her soul’s purpose in this lifetime served as a supplement to her spiritual practice.

“I love using the music and meditations specific for me and my birth numbers,” she said. “Each retreat was so impactful and helped me restructure my life in a meaningful way.”

LOOKING FORWARD TO NEXT YEAR’S RETREATS

Last year’s October retreat drew 39 women from states around the country including Michigan, Texas, Alaska, Connecticut and California. One lady drove over 4,500 miles from Alaska to get to the retreat.

“Some people wonder why so many women come back each year, “ Sangeet notes. “And they ask me 'Why? Didn't they get it?' And I tell them, ‘Yes, they did. That’s why they’re coming back'.”

Sangeet has scheduled two retreats in 2010. The first, in May, will be on sacred relationships. The second, in October, will focus on the subject of death and dying in the Fall of 2010.

So whether you make it to Womanheart or not this time, Sangeet says, for mankind’s sake, keep up!

As she often tells her students: “It's the inspiration and grace of women that help put the kind in mankind.”