The great detective, Sherlock Holmes, found this to be a great strategy: hide the most precious thing you have in plain sight and no one will see it! Two leading yoga experts, Dr. Gurucharan Singh Khalsa and Dr. Yogi Bhajan, realized the power of breath long ago and have combined it with walking, two of our simplest yet most unconscious activities, for a powerful program of exercise called Breathwalk. Breathwalk coordinates easy-to-follow patterns of conscious breathing and walking steps with meditative focus to help relieve a wide range of troubling conditions from back pain to hypertension to weight gain and promises increased energy level, a clear mind, elevated moods, and deeper spirituality.

Yogi Bhajan, a master of kundalini and tantric yoga, is the spiritual leader of the Sikh religion in the Western Hemisphere and lives in New Mexico. Gurucharan Singh Khalsa lives in Millis, MA and is an expert in the mind, a yogi, psychotherapist, business consultant and writer who has taught kundalini yoga with Yogi Bhajan for over thirty years. He has also lead Cambridge's enormously popular and famed Thursday night yoga class at St. Mary's Orthodox Church in Central Square for over twenty-one years.

CAROL: I'd like to begin by thanking you for publishing this work. I delved into the book and tried out a few of the exercises to prepare for this interview and found myself exhilarated in just five minutes! It reminded me, once again, of how simple rejuvenation, healing and awakening can be. Perhaps you can begin by telling us how long this work has been in progress and to what do you attribute its success.

GURUCHARAN: I've been doing this for over twenty-five years. I started out learning it from Yogi Bhajan, the co-author of course, and I initially started applying it to people in therapy and healing, and people who just wanted intense personal change. As a therapist for three decades, I've studied many things—everything from traditional approaches and client-centered therapies to Jungian. So, it always comes back to the same questions. What are the things that put the power of change into the person instead of the therapist? What are the things that are simple to do and yet profound in their effects? And what are the things that you can do now that have a certain integrity to them so that you can hold them, keep that change going for a long time, for the future.

I had studied yoga, of course, and meditation therapies, and when you put those together, there is this very simple thing using walking meditation and conscious breathing and being mindful which is what Breathwalk is. You know, it's this great mixture, like making a cake: you add in a certain proportion of flour, of sugar and then you heat it to get this great combination that's a lot better than trying to chew on all the raw ingredients. In much the same way, the flour in this technique is walking, which most people do anyway, and the breathing is added in a certain ratio according to the recipe, and you cook it with mindfulness and awareness. The result is that you are glowing, radiant and your aura's great and you feel tastier! 

CAROL: What a delightful analogy!

GURUCHARAN: When I was young, I was raised on farms up in Oregon and Canada where I would see fields right next to each other. One field was lush and rich; clearly they were prosperous and something was going right. The smell of the field was there, the look was glowing. And right next to it, another field, well, it was okay. And I knew the farmers, it was the same soil, they had all the same basic ingredients, but the difference was the way the farmer paid attention to what was happening. The little formula, the proportion, the mix of what went into that field—the water, the sowing.

So I always thought of it the same way. I didn't really realize this until I was much older. I was always looking for this right mix, of what I could use and what's there as a foundation. For people, I think—Hey, God gave us the Spirit. Here we are. We're planted, we're a seed. What do we have? What's in our field? We have our consciousness, our intention, we have breathing, the capacity of language, the use of sound and the ability to move as long as we're alive. Frankly, if you're alive, you move.

I love it when there is a practical bridge. I see a lot of theory and a lot of etheric talk. When I do corporations and things, everyone has these big goals about people, but what do you give someone that uses what's already in their field so in a little while, they bloom, they feel radiant? And that's why I think Breathwalk is very self motivating — because of the immediacy of the impact — and why people are telling other people about it and it is getting out there without a very big campaign, which I am very happy about.

CAROL: Walking seems to be a more popular topic these days — it's all over the Web with huge sites devoted just to walking — and yet, it's just an everyday activity that is being hailed as the new healing cure-all. There's a Sherlock Holmes analogy that is applied to this work. What is that about? 

GURUCHAKAN: Someone told me that Sherlock Holmes was noted for making this observation about hiding some precious thing in a room. You know, the bad guys are coming, and what he did is stick it right on the table, right in plain sight because your mind has a habit of always telling yourself how you are in the world. Same way in the mysteries, the bad guys go in and would have a habit to say, ' well if it's precious, it must be over there locked away with a secret key in a safe somewhere.' So they're searching in all these places and they never even look right in plain sight, right in front of them where that most precious thing is.

And I think the breath is exactly that most precious thing. It's priceless, right in front of you, literally under your nose, all the time. And yet, we haven't learned to see. We look at it but we don't see it. Breathwalk certainly wakes you up. It says, 'Hey, it's right here! You already have the gems.' You don't have to pay a million dollars for some technique or something. You already have it if you just sense and open your perception to it.

CAROL: For close to twenty years now, you have led probably the most popular yoga class in the Cambridge area, the Thursday nigh kundalini yoga class... 

GURUCHARAN: (Laughing) The famous Thursday night class. 7:30 in Cambridge. Yeah, that's right. It's very nice because I have seen people in and out for over decades and new people all the time, so that's quite a class.

CAROL: How does this tremendous kundalini yoga practice — which any yoga student can tell you is incredibly beneficial to put in so much time and energy and discipline so that the effects are greatly magnified — how does that dovetail with something as simple as this Breathwalk? Are their beneficial effects different? 

GURUCHARAN: Okay, let me approach it this way. There's dearly a crossover because I learned Breathwalk from Yogi Bhajan, who also taught kundalini yoga and is master teacher of that. When I was working with him, I said, "What is something that absolutely everyone can do?" So we got together and collaborated on this book and he said, 'Look, the time has changed. The Aquarian Age is here. There's this whole dawning awareness, and the pressure on people is going to be beyond what anyone has even said.' And I said, 'You mean all the world's changing and the continents....' And he says, 'Oh no. This time it's a mental change. It's the very frequency, the capacity to deal with information and each other and communication. This is a whole growing up.' I said, 'Okay, so what's something anyone can do then?' 

He said, I'm going to give you a fitness program, kind of the ultimate conditioning for the Aquarian Age.' And that's when he started giving me the walk. Because he said, 'You can walk any place, you can do it at work, family can do it...' He started outlining the benefits and yet it's totally accessible. Breathwalk is a fitness program for everyone. I've been teaching with Tony Robbins for a number of years now, doing, like, 1,500 people at a time from all over the world. So, that has given me a chance over the years to see who has kept doing it and where it led. What I found was, Breathwalk was so practical that people would maintain it even if they didn't do anything else because it fits in their life and gives them profound change. 

CAROL: Will Breathwalk make yoga obsolete?

GURUCHARAN: No way. A lot of people who do kundalini yoga have discovered something deep in themselves. They want a benefit, they need relaxation. A lot of people can go really deep into the extreme esoterics — two and a half hour meditations, retreats for ten days and the amazing variety that's in kundalini yoga. Some people, like myself, love that and say this is a deep resource. In fact I'm now working with several different research centers and I'm even working with NIH (National Institute of Health) on yoga and "meditation as medication," as they call it.

But yoga can also be overwhelming because it requires the idea, 'Hey, I want to do yoga' and the time to develop the practice. And as popular as it's becoming, there's still a lot of people who don't understand and think it means you've got to be a pretzel. Breathwalk, on the other hand, is completely accessible for many people who have never had any experience at all in anything to do with meditation or yoga. So, the difference is a little bit like ' what can you do right now to get an immediate effect?' It's the part that can be done just like fitness because it's easy and anyone can really do it. It's extremely effective in the sense that it has a range of benefits that almost anyone can find is useful for them in some part of their life.

It turns out that changing the breath in very small ways creates big effects down the road as you keep repeating it. If you walk with someone and do this breathing, the benefits extend to connectedness and rapport. I've had so many families tell me that it helped them drop work at the end of the day and reconnect and have a human moment together and reconnect to the values that they're doing all the work for. That's also true with nature and just the openness that spirit that gives you.

CAROL: Does it make a difference if you walk on the earth or on the pavement or barefoot or not?

GURUCHARAN: We haven't put those distinctions in but I think that people should walk according to their sensitivity. I personally love beaches and woods. Actually, I've hiked so many thousands of miles that end up in the mountains and in nature somewhere that I like that a lot better. In our comments from participants, we always get the same thing. They say: The colors are brighter. There's a richness. I can smell things. I didn't realize I wasn't.' One person said. It's as if I was going for the whole day and seeing everything in flat pictures. The tree I'm looking at now looks three dimensional and I didn't realize it didn't before and now I have a whole different sensation.' There's many comments about elevated mood.

By the nature of our mind, we have a tendency to acquire habits — habits of perception, habits of feeling, habits of relation. That serves us and gives us a way to organize our world. But what happens under high stress, and a land of change that everyone is under now, is we unconsciously begin to live in a flat world. We live in a lower dimension, you might say, of ourself. When you start changing with breathing, your autonomic nervous system, your sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, the foundations of your nerves, alert the brain. That's why the first step in Breathwalk, we say, is an awakening. Because we want to awaken, shift the attention of the body and then allow new learnings to come in. Those new learnings come from being in the present, by experiencing what's going on that you've flattened, that you haven't seen, that suddenly you now do. Then, of course, it's up to you what you do with that, but it opens the window.

CAROL: Do you actually believe that in today's high stress world with everything getting faster and faster, that we really can get back to this natural rhythm? Do you see that this type of activity can cause change on a mass level, or is it only going to be valid for a relatively small percentage of the population attuned to this?

GURUCHARAN: No, I think that the whole shift we're going for, that's happening, requires everyone to wake up.

CAROL: How is that going to happen?

GURUCHARAN: I think there are a couple of ways. First of all, it's going to happen on its own anyway because people who don't awaken, don't adapt, are not going to adapt to this huge change that's occurring. So, there's an internal change happening on a mass level, even if no one ever did yoga or anything else. On the other hand, if you do incorporate things from those spiritual traditions and also those sciences now that allow us to take conscious control of our intuition and our sensitivity, and start incorporating that equal to all this high tech and change, we have this inner sense to be at least equal to the changes coming.

How it's going to happen is very simple: things like Breathwalk and things where people have an experience that I lived my life today a little better and I felt it. It's not going to happen because you sell a concept to people. I think it's that practical, pragmatic intelligence that comes by experiencing that's going to have the strongest voice. If you add to that, that part of the experience which is an opening of your own intuition and rapport with the larger spirit, just your very presence, literally, is going to feel different to others and they're going to say, ' What is that? What are you doing?' I think it's going to spread more quickly by people doing and sharing their presence. You know, when I find something good, I tell my friends. I give away books. I do all that stuff. That's the fastest way to spread things because we're all overwhelmed with media stuff. The thing that speaks the most is the experience and the extra reality, the extra kindness, the extra compassion, the extra rapport that comes automatically. I don't think: you have to push it

CAROL: But it's a relatively small percentage of the whole global population exposed to this.

GURUCHARAN: What happens in a huge complex system that is highly interconnected? How many people do you need to really make a major system change? The answer is a very small percentage. If you have even ten, fifteen percent, you create massive change throughout the entire system because of how people are connected. You need only a few people in these complex networks of society that are connected at cross levels for several thousands of people to be connected and create radical and rapid change. Leaders and speakers and teachers and even your magazine is one of those connectors. To the many people who wake up to a new relationship to themselves and realize, 'hey, I actually have a choice,' the important insight to remember is that what you give to people is service, what speaks to people is experience, and what holds people is acceptance and kindness.

For more information about Breathwalk books, audio cassettes, trainings or teacher certifications, visit www.Breathwatk.com or call 1-888-827-9255 (888-8BR-WALK). To contact Dr. Khalsa, call 781-237-9587.

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Carol Bedrosian is the Publisher and Editor of Spirit of Change Magazine which is located in Grafton, MA. To contact Carol call 508-839-2228 or fax 508-839-1173.