Pro surfer Taylor Knox

Taylor Knox is an American professional surfer and a trailblazer in the sport, having won competitions such as the 1995 Professional Surfing Association of America tour, leading team USA to gold in the 1996 ISA World Surfing Games, and securing the $50,000 prize money during the inaugural K2 Big-Wave Challenge at Todos Santos.

But about 20 years ago, he was in a bad place mentally. “Even though everything on the outside looked great; I had a great career, I was on tour—but I wasn’t happy and I didn’t really know why,” he says. “I felt like I had the answers, but I couldn’t access them inside myself.”

A friend suggested a new type of meditation called Kelee–named for the Sanskrit word meaning “having to do with different states of mind” as well as the Greek and Hebrew words meaning “vessel.”

The concept centers around two five-minute meditation sessions a day in which you learn to take your vessel or “Kelee,” and take bad things out and put good things in. Knox was skeptical, having preconceived ideas of meditation (drum circles and chanting?); it likely wouldn’t be for him.

“After about a year of being kind of miserable, my friend was like, ‘Why don’t you just go and check it out for yourself? You’re not going to wear a red robe and shave your head and become a vegan,’” he shares. “So I was like, ‘OK as long as it’s practical and something not too hippy-dippy, then I’m in.’”

Courtesy of Taylor Knox, IG

He decided to meet with Ron Rathbun, founder of Kelee Meditation, who created the method 35 years ago after dealing with his own childhood pain. When Rathbun began meditating, he found that when his mind was still, he was assaulted by huge emotions.

So he developed the concept of a “Greater Kelee” and “Lesser Kelee.” The former is where emotions come from while the latter is where thoughts begin. “I would sense the fears and I would pull up and get still right there, and all the fears and all my troubles—which are basically a person’s issues—just started to dissolve,” says Rathbun.

“If you really pay attention to emotion, when you feel it, you feel it come from your chest, right? You don’t think emotion comes from your head, you actually feel it,” says Dr. Daniel Lee, a physician at UC San Diego who researches Kelee. “And you can sometimes feel a heaviness, or something in your chest, especially with sad emotion.” So, he says, our thoughts exist in the Lesser Kelee “above the surface of the mind.”

To practice Kelee Meditation, you have to learn what mental feeling is and how to access the Greater and Lesser Kelee. “If you touch the top of your head, this is a physical feeling,” Dr. Lee says. “If I have you remove your finger from the top of your head, but mentally feel where your finger just left, then this is mentally feeling your awareness.”

Essentially, you’re learning how to become aware of those sensations starting from the top of your head then relaxing down through the brain to around eye level. “[Then you can] use this kind of relaxed, softer mental feeling energy,” Dr. Lee says. “From there, you want to relax your awareness back to a single point as if it’s in the middle of your head, behind your eyes or behind your sinuses. And that’s in preparation to relax into the Greater Kelee.”

Kelee foundation

Courtesy of Kelee Foundation

To get into the Greater Kelee, relax your awareness and “it will naturally drop into this space,” he says. Relaxing into this state takes practice, but over time it gets easier. “The more time you learn to spend in there, you can be more mentally still,” says Dr. Lee. For Knox, it was life changing—though it took a couple of months for him to get used to the practice.

“I was so wrapped up in my head and I had so many programs going on. It’s kind of like when you have an iPhone and you don’t know it, but there’s all these apps running [in the background],” says Knox. “That’s a good analogy of what this meditation does. It’s kind of like you can have all these things kind of spinning in your head, and so you kind of shut it all down to conserve energy and get some clarity.”

Out of Kelee meditation, he’s learned to be more patient, a better parent, and a stronger surfer. He says despite having back surgery as a teenager, and more than 30 years of a surfing career, his body still feels great thanks to Kelee.

“In the past, I would just physically overtrain because I felt like that was the way that my body was going to react better or heal faster,” says Knox. “But what I realized was the body follows the mind, it’s not the other way around. So I needed to clean up my mind, and my body got better.”

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After Dr. Lee discovered how Kelee Meditation helped him on a personal level, he started putting it to use in medicine. He found that it reduced burnout in nurses at UC San Diego by decreasing stress and anxiety. And more impressively, he found that as people continue to do it, normal stressors in life impact them less.

“The hallmark of this practice is the things that used to affect you start to affect you less, and over time actually cannot affect you,” says Dr. Lee. “You can really notice that there are things that really do not bother you.” He says it’s a way of getting rid of the things that push your buttons, or your baggage. Knox compares the practice to the movie Benjamin Button, where as he ages and gets more experienced, he gets healthier, because he has more clarity in his mind.

For Rathbun, that’s exactly the point. He says when he started working with Knox, the surfer’s friends worried he’d become a different person. “What they realized is they love him even more because he’s a more pure Taylor,” he says. “Kelee Meditation didn’t change him into something that he isn’t. It helped him to become who he really is.”

This month, the Kelee Foundation will host a workshop discussing the the importance of being centered in an effort to help individuals realize the necessity of self-care to reduce burnout. The workshop takes place on Saturday, February 25. Early registration (before Feb. 8) is $75 and goes up to $100 after that.

The post The 5-Min Meditation Pro Surfer Taylor Knox Swears By appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Movement, mantras and meditation at Cosmic Flow Kundalini Yoga in Point Loma

Leah Lipson

Yoga is a diverse world. Kundalini, also called “the yoga of awareness,” is designed to give you an experience of yourself. The practice includes combining a variety of breathing techniques with specific movements for results that are quick and powerful. Much of the practice is spent with eyes closed, encouraging participants to go within and forge a connection with the deepest parts of the subconscious.

“You can see results instantly after one class, even after one exercise,” says Gurumeher Khalsa, the studio head at Cosmic Flow Kundalini Yoga in Point Loma. “Even just taking a few long, deep breaths is calming and centering and relaxing. You can come into a class feeling stressed or overwhelmed and leave an hour later feeling much lighter, relieved and happy. I see it all the time.”

The practice is relevant and handy in these times, when it seems each new day brings a new reason for a panic attack. Khalsa says Kundalini Yoga can teach breathing techniques to cope with those situations. The techniques focus on releasing things such as anxiety, stress, fear and selfloathing. Meditations and mantras are used to open up even further and focus on self-healing and connecting with a higher consciousness.

“We do long, deep breathing, because it’s calming, centering, releasing stress and anxiety,” she says. “But it’s on a different level.”

The different level is using a variety of breathing techniques combined with other aspects of the classes, including the movement, mantras, and meditation. Khalsa says her 75- or 90-minute classes teach different types of breathing techniques, in-person or over Zoom.

Cosmic Mudra

Cosmic Flow Kundalini Yoga

“One breath that is unique to Kundalini is called Breath of Fire—a rapid inhale and exhale through the nose,” she says. “The best way to learn it is to stick your tongue out and put your hands on your navel and then pretend like you’re panting like a dog. And it’s basically that breath, except just close your mouth and switch it to the nose. And it’s really one long, continuous breath, and the purpose of it is opening up the lungs. It’s good for releasing toxins and purifying the blood.”

Khalsa says with practice, this breathing technique can offer an overall sense of calmness, and “the things that maybe used to bother you or trigger you just really don’t seem to bother you anymore.”

Another technique is called Sitali Pranayama, which involves rolling one’s tongue like a taco.

“And then inhale through that taco tongue and then exhale out the nose,” Khalsa says. “As the name implies, it is a cool down breath, both on a physical and mental level. It is good for releasing inner anger.”

Another is to alternate nostril breathing, meaning using one’s thumb or pinky to close off the right nostril, and then inhaling low and deep through the left nostril, exhaling out the left nostril and alternating.

But, Khalsa says, the classes are about more than just breathing.

“The typical class structure is tuning in with a mantra to connect with ourselves and also connect with the teachings,” she says. Next is breathing meditation, and then the yoga portion, which combines the breathwork with the movement, all prescribed by the Kundalini teachings. The classes wrap with meditation and relaxation, where participants lay out on the ground and take in all the work they’ve done.

“So, really just the overall sense of calmness and overall well being is what you’ll experience,” Khalsa says. “And that’s just all from putting in the work yourself.”

The post The Secret Power of Taco Tongue appeared first on San Diego Magazine.