A Chat with Carolyn Cowan

Carolyn Cowan is a Kundalini Yoga teacher, Teacher Trainer and a Psychosexual Therapist specialising in addiction & trauma recovery. But Carolyn is so much more than this definition. It does not reflect her own experiences and battles with addiction, and how she created her teaching training program ‘Mastering the Addictive Personality’, which is the first of its kind.
Delna Mistry Anand talks to her to find out more.

Tell us about your journey into spirituality and Kundalini yoga?

[Carolyn]: My journey began when I realised I wasn’t very happy with myself. I was working in the film industry about 28 years ago, and I hasn’t learnt how to process my history very well. I got into some addictive habits (drugs alcohol, gambling and cigarettes since 1991. Sex addiction recovery started in 1996, sugar, June 2010, caffeine is sadly still a work in progress….). And I eventually got into trouble with this and decided it was time I got some help. I took up running, to help me deal with my moods and anxiety. And it helped a great deal, but eventually I know I needed to do something more. It was around then that I decided to leave the film industry and I changed my career. I got into photography, and I was trying to build my portfolio, which took me to Mumbai in India and then Gujarat. I started doing portraits of nomads in Gujarat – where they had never seen a European person. It was just my husband, my camera and I, travelling through the desert landscapes. It was an extraordinary time. One day as we got into a truck to get to our location, a couple of Europeans got in too. And for five months, I hadn’t seen foreigners there, so we started talking and realised that they were from London too. The lady was a stockbroker turned Kundalini Yoga Teacher. And my journey with yoga began right there. When we went back to London, I invited her to start teaching my Kundalini Yoga. I didn’t like it at first, but I realised that my emotional responses were changing. It was affecting me bit by bit, and gradually I slowed down on the running and did more yoga. Soon I enrolled for the Kundalini Yoga Teachers Training, not with the intention of teaching, but really to deepen my own practice. And here I am 28 years later, teaching Kundalini yoga all over the world! I also trained to be a psychotherapist.

How does one tie in the two?

[Carolyn]: So, as a trauma therapist, I am very aware of the effect of the body on the mind, and the mind on the body. And yoga is the perfect way to release ourselves from our contracts and our contractions.
Once we begin to understand the power of how to change how we feel and manage our relationship to our history, ourselves and our possibilities, we discover that we can manage ourselves, our emotional body, and our physical relationship to this. We then understand how the different postures affect our body and mind. Exploring our relationship to our hormones and their intense effect upon us, both physical and negative, we will understand how to change hormonal flow, how the different hormones feel, what they do to us and how we can expand or minimise their effects upon us. It is important to understand the importance of posture, its power, roots and how to use posture to create internal change. Pranayama is as potent a practice as posture or meditation. It is breath manipulation. Playing with the Divine, in whatever form you believe the Divine to take. I do not take any religious aspect of Kundalini. I don’t believe you have to be a certain religion to teach or learn Kundalini Yoga. In Kundalini, you don’t just follow a random sequence. You work with intentions. Energetically, our intentions are very powerful. It is a powerful practice. Especially because of the intention.

Do you feel more and more people are turning towards spirituality? And why?

[Carolyn]: It’s because of stress. And anxiety. We abandon ourselves to the other. To social media. To the world outside of ourselves. We are consumed by movies, or social media or being outside with friends. We can’t sit still. We are not able to tolerate ourselves any more. I was telling a friend the other day that I allow myself one minute a week for Facebook. And I allow myself one minute a day on Instagram. I used to be on it much more earlier, but I realised it was such a toxic environment. It changed how I felt. I understood how it was working. I realised that the more toxic or violent, offensive, the newsfeed is, the more you want to come back. Its shiny, its beautiful and it’s so easy to keep coming back. And It’s hard to make that change. It’s hard to be away from it when everyone is. What kind of role models are we being for the youth this way? Can we sit and be present and just chat? What are the children see us do? It’s so important to see that. In a way we use things like social media to numb ourselves, so that we don’t feel. The screen numbs us. We have forgotten how to be still. It all comes down to how do we bear ourselves. If we can’t bear ourselves, how will our children do that?
We have a constant invitation to go into another world – new Netflix series, new movie, new phone… but we also have more and more people who are increasingly stressed and anxious and depressed. What will it be like if you don’t pick up your phone, and read a book instead? Or if you don’t watch TV while eating dinner and talk to the family, sit down and be present? What would it be like to not look at your phone first thing in the morning, and maybe stretch a bit instead? Then you learn to negotiate with yourself. Create boundaries. Make a contract with yourself. Learn to bear yourself. Then you can see what you feel. Do you feel anxious or tired? Spending time within yourself helps you to really have presence.

You specialise in trauma. What is your experience working with people with trauma?

[Carolyn]: Trauma has three routes – (1) Generational (trauma coming down from ancestors), (2) Gestational (either what happened to you in the womb/ stress hormones taken in from your mother while she was pregnant) and (3) Experienced (something you have experienced yourself).
Again, it keeps coming back to being present. Some people have experienced trauma but it doesn’t bother them.. they don’t talk about and they are fine with it. While others get highly affected. They are desperate to heal it. Some, on the other hand, want to hide away from everything and run into the mountains. So, there are no real rules to dealing with it. It really comes to understanding what you need.
Anxiety and trauma come from an inability to bear one’s self. When you are away from all these distractions, you realise that you aren’t really happy, you need help, you need to talk to someone. It is only when you reach within and recognise that, that you can take corrective action.

It doesn’t explain how she discovered on her own journey that she couldn’t agree with the disease model of addiction and felt that addiction recovery warranted a kinder, more compassionate approach. An approach that she consequently went on to work out for herself and then three and a half years ago, develop into this immensely popular training program, which includes ‘everything I wish I’d been told’.

This simple description doesn’t mention how her Pregnancy Yoga Teacher Training ‘The Mother’s Journey’ encompasses pre-conception, gestation, childbirth, motherhood, leadership and liberation and has been helping women all over the world for the last twelve years.

Or how, as a Psychosexual and Relationship Therapist specialising in Addiction and Recovery, she has worked extensively with abuse and trauma, varying sexual issues, all manner of addictions and eating disorders, with numerous individuals, each presenting with a unique mix of individual experiences.

There is no doubt about it. Carolyn Cowan has done the work. She’s been there. She knows exactly how it feels. She’s lived the life, that’s for sure. Her Wikipedia page makes fascinating reading. Back in the 80s, she was working in the pop music industry and fashion world as a make-up artist and ‘helped Duran Duran “perfect their decadent, glamorous look” for the music video of their hit song “Rio”’. The inevitable life of excess that accompanied this lifestyle of course took its toll in the end. She was addicted to drugs, alcohol and smoking cigars. It was David Bowie who challenged her to change her life dramatically. He was in recovery at the time and encouraged her to stay sober and start attending AA meetings.

That was in 1991. She changed career and became a photographer. In 1996, she was photographing nomads in a desert in India and met a Kundalini yoga teacher. She had never practised yoga before. She had never come across Kundalini yoga before. But from that day, she was hooked. She still has very little experience of other styles of yoga but is passionate about Kundalini. She trained as a Kundalini teacher because to fully master something, you have to teach it.

During an interview in 2006, Cowan described yoga as ‘a wonderful way of uniting the body and soul and has been a crucial part of my recovery.’

Kundalini Yoga uses sound, breath, and posture to develop spiritual awareness by freeing the kundalini energy within each individual. It has its roots in the Tantric Yoga tradition, which dates back to the eighth century. Kundalini is the spiritual energy or life force located at the base of the spine, often conceptualized as a coiled-up serpent.

Carolyn Cowan is uncomfortable with Kundalini Yoga being labelled as a spiritual practice. She feels it is then all too easy to link it to one religion or another and for it to drift off into fundamentalism. For her, it is all about empathy, humanity, compassion – learning from nature, human nature and experience.

There is a new generation of strong women coming through in Kundalini Yoga. Women who seek liberation. It was said that a woman could only ever find liberation by giving birth to a saint, marrying a saint, serving a saint or liberating themselves. In Kundalini Yoga, we liberate ourselves through this wonderfully centring, empowering, ecstatic practice.

She teaches weekly Kundalini classes at Triyoga Chelsea. I went along. The class was well attended. The room was wonderfully light and airy. The sun was shining in through the large windows and the modern stained glass panel threw colourful shapes onto the floor. Carolyn led us through a sequence designed to remind each of us of how utterly fabulous we truly are. Each pose was there for a reason. I was introduced to Breath of Fire which started strong and then began to fade – until Carolyn voiced strong words of encouragement to get us through. And then that wonderful afterglow after each strong exertion. She took us on a journey deep within ourselves. There was chanting and a gong bath too.

…you are pushed, poked and provoked into really becoming the most exquisite version of you.

Yes. That was it. I walked out of that class a different person.

Carolyn Cowan is a force. She’s confident and strong and tall and beautiful and totally unique. She seems sorted. Like she’s got it all worked out. Her eyes seem to look straight into your soul. Her voice speaks into your inner being. She has a presence about her. You just want to be near her, hoping some of this immensely positive energy will rub off on you.

And yet, as I interview her, I worry for her. She gives so much. She is there for so many people. She is around pain, real pain, and trauma every single day. She’s under pressure to get it right all of the time, for all those people who look up to her. So how does she cope?

Well, firstly, she does not consider herself to be in any way a role model. She sees that as a male approach. She will not feel that she has to behave in a certain way or perform in any way. She is determined to not lose her sense of self. Whatever choices she makes in her life, she makes for herself, based on what is best for her.

Secondly, she believes strongly in accountability. She has three supervisors who keep her right – one an expert in sexuality, another an expert in trauma and a then a really supportive Shamanic group that she is a part of.

When she is working as a therapist, she has a very clear routine that she follows. She allows space between each client – time to have a drink of water, to go for a walk, to re-establish her kinesphere (the space and energy surrounding the body).

Over the years, she’s become really good at listening to herself. She’s aware of her own sensations and needs. She knows how to listen to her body. So when she is overwhelmed and her body is telling her she needs a break, she takes it. She cancels everything. And however busy she is and however many demands she has on her time, she takes four days off a week.

And finally, she keeps it real. She has a great life. She loves her children. She has just taken up bee-keeping and enjoys working in her vegetable garden. She has a passion for photography and uses Instagram as a platform for her images.

This is Carolyn Cowan.