In this interview with Derik Mills, Glo teacher Kia Miller shares about her commitment to reconnecting with herself, discussing her practice of the Kundalini kriyās, which are sequences of movement, breath, and mantra meditation. As Kia says in the interview: “We are an instrument, and the more attuned our instrument, the greater the frequency, the greater the information we can pick up, the clearer channel we become.”
Glo instructor Kia Miller recounts her transformative journey of self-discovery through yoga and meditation. She describes how her Kundalini practice helped reframe her sense of self and examine limiting beliefs.
Kia shares how a summer-long spiritual retreat surfaced deep-seated negative patterns. As her practice unfolded, she began releasing layers of self-doubt and reconnecting with core human emotions like joy, fear, anger, and sadness.
Listen as Kia and host Derik Mills discuss yoga’s potential to align our body, mind, and spirit. Kia draws comparisons between humans and musical instruments - both capable of beautiful vibrations when aligned. As their conversation continues, you’ll join an enlightening exploration of dreams and Kundalini kriyās, learn about yoga’s power to disrupt negative patterns, and its potential to bring out our deeper wisdom.
Key Takeaways for this Episode
1. (0:00:00) - Inner life exploration through yoga, self-healing, and emotional awareness.
2. (0:18:40) - The infinite journey: The impact of yoga on personal transformation and self-discovery.
3. (0:23:49) - Kundalini yoga and kriyās: Shifting the autonomic nervous system and awakening energy.
4. (0:37:22) - Yoga and elevated states of consciousness: Overcoming self-doubt and negative patterns.
5. (0:47:08) - Kriyās for personal growth: transforming our state of being and healing the mind.
Kia Miller Transcript
COLD OPEN
00:00 - Kia Miller We want to start to create the mental capacity for deep concentration, not deep concentration on something that’s ever changing, scrolling through, but the capacity to hold a steady focus of attention and, simultaneously, an awareness of self and the greater reality.
And in doing that studies are showing this the brain starts to heal all the ways that the neuro-connections in the mind have become fractured through our use of modern technology. As we meditate, as we focus on a mantra, we focus on our breath and we cultivate this capacity for sort of a nice flow of awareness, the brain starts to heal and then the mind-heart connection it all starts to come together and we get tapped into the deeper intelligence of being.
INTRODUCTION
01:09 - Derik Mills (Host) Hi, I’m Derik Mills. Welcome to the Glo podcast. This week, on The Glo podcast, please join me as I interview Glo teacher Kia Miller. Among other topics, Kia shares an interior journey she took this summer. She committed to a deep dive to reconnect with herself, discussing her practice of the Kundalini kriyās, which are sequences of movement, breath and mantra meditation. As Kia says, we are an instrument and the more attuned our instrument, the greater the frequency, the greater the information we can pick up and the clearer channel we become. She makes it clear, as we often find in our Glo podcast interviews, that yoga is a catalyst for healing and self discovery. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Kia Miller.
BEGIN INTERVIEW
Derik Mills (Host) Hi, Kia, I’m so grateful to be here with you today. I want to note up front that I’m also grateful to have worked with you for more than 10 years and to have had the pleasure of spending time outside of work together learning about your travels and interests and just generally, thank you for your support all these years.
02:26 - Kia Miller (Guest) Oh, thank you, Derik. It’s been an absolute joy for me as well, both on the personal level and, definitely, working with Glo. That’s been just such a supportive relationship, so I truly appreciate it.
02:44 - Derik Mills (Host) Excellent. There are so many different ways we could take this conversation. We could spend easily hours just on teaching or philosophy or your background. I hope to cover and touch upon all of those and to some degree. Leading up to our conversation, I started dipping into some of your recent classes that have focused on the emotional journey and deepening our experience with our connection to emotions and feelings. I wondered if that might be a good place for us to enter this conversation. I know this isn’t a new topic for you, but I suspect, as you and I of similar age, enter into a different stage of life here certainly the mid part of our journey I can see how your understanding of these aspects of the inner life are evolving, and they’re evolving in ways that resonate a lot with me, and so I wonder if that might be a good way for us to enter into this conversation.
03:59 - Kia Miller (Guest) I love that, Derik. That’s straight into the deep end, because the emotional body is such an important aspect of the yogic practice doing practice in such a way that we can clear through the stagnant, unprocessed emotions of the past, ideally so that we can begin to experience the full benefit of each emotion as it arises and the energy and the information that it’s bringing to us. So this summer I went on a really deep dive within myself on an emotional level and I got to learn things that I just didn’t have such a connection to before. I’ve done a lot of healing work. I’ve done a lot of processing through Kundalini kriyās, so dynamic movements and sequences of exercises and breath and mantra meditation, all designed to clear the emotional body and help the mind settle in a stable, luminous place.
05:20 And something happened this summer where I injured myself, tore my meniscus. So I injured myself to the point where I felt like I was brought to my knees literally in life and I had to really do a hard stop. And when I did that hard stop I decided, okay, I’m going to water fast and I water fasted. It’s part of a regular thing that I do. I went for four and a half days and then I decided to do a deep dive and I just was journaling, meditating, sipping tea all day, basically, and I went on a bit of an emotional journey into my past and clearing things that I just hadn’t felt before, and it was very powerful. One, I felt empowered, that I could just hold space for myself while I was going through the process and not fear if I went into crazy anger or rage, not fear if I went into sadness, and I got to sort of clear things, clear some things that I hadn’t allowed myself to acknowledge.
I got to rewrite the stories a little bit, which was super helpful as well and then I got to recognize how, culturally speaking, anger, fear and sadness are not given this necessary space for so many of us in our life that we’ve learned to suppress them some way or another. Oh, this is not an appropriate time, or anger is not an appropriate emotion, or I can’t be sad, I’m going to be seen as being too emotional, or fear getting to the point where we’re not actually letting ourselves feel it. So then fear turns into chronic anxiety, which I think a lot of us feel. So I got to explore in a very deep way, and part of what really helped me to get there was looking at the really four core emotions of joy, which we don’t usually have any problem expressing when it’s there.
07:46 It’s there, we just tend to want it to stay there. Fear. So joy, fear, anger and sadness. Narrowing it down to four core emotions helped me to begin to discern when I was feeling what and to start to allow what I was feeling to show itself. And I learned so much. I learned so much about each emotion and the value that they have for us. So that was my journey as I went into the summer and then I started to share those classes on Glo just little, tiny insights into some of what I’d been learning myself.
08:29 - Derik Mills (Host) I figured, knowing you, I figured there was some backstory to the inspiration. It’s interesting, my journey into learning how to feel more deeply was also through an injury and it started in 2020 with a herniated disc and three years of pain. And I agree with you, the entry into exploring emotions from a more granular point of view, as opposed to. You know, there’s the emotion wheel, right, you have, like, the core emotions and then, as you, move out on the wheel, you can define or categorize feeling emotion in more granular ways, and so to look at emotions in a more macro sense, like that is an easier entry point, and it was also a time for me of learning when in my life I say blocked access to not just anger, sadness and fear, but also joy, and so maybe that’s a great way to move on to our next question about your childhood and what was it that?
I know you have so many experiences in terms of your time on the Falkland Islands and the conflict/war, and there’s a lot that we could get into there as well as your activism. So take it however you want, but to whatever extent we can stay on this theme of the interior life, like what was it that connected you to or created an interest in this realm, this experience of an interior life that has sort of informed your teaching and your understanding of yourself?
10:36 - Kia Miller (Guest) Well, I grew up on a 110,000 acre farm my father managed. I rode horses, I was out on the land all the time and I was out on the land a lot on my own, as in no other human being, with my horse, with my dogs, and I always felt very at home in nature and I always had this sense of a presence that was with me. So I never felt alone and I don’t know where that sense came from, if it was just inherent in me or it came from somebody that pointed something out, I don’t know. I just always had it. And when my father passed, when I was 14, he’s, I can only just say he spoke to me. I was asleep, but it wasn’t a dream, and that night he just said to me it’s okay, I’m okay.
11:44 And I knew he was okay and it affirmed a certain understanding that, oh, there’s more to life than just meets the eye. And that really set me on a much deeper spiritual quest of, okay, there’s more to this, he’s okay. So where did he go? You know what’s underlying this life, what’s the purpose, who am I? And so when the question started, really at that, that young sort of mid teens, in you know roped in with, of course, all the confusion of teenagers as well. But it was there. My quest was there. I found yoga when I was 15 in a Raquel Welsh book on beauty, because Raquel Welsh and Jane Fonda were the babes when I was a teenager and I wanted to be like Raquel Welsh and so she shared the Bikram sequence in her book and I remember thinking it’s good enough for her, it’s good enough for me and I started practicing and I resonated with it and I had a curiosity. I was already an athlete. I had a curiosity about my body in the ways that yoga began to inform how I was moving and breathing.
13:10 - Derik Mills (Host) That’s a young age to have that experience.
13:13 - Kia Miller (Guest) Yeah.
13:15 - Derik Mills (Host) To begin with the loss of a parent, but then also to extend that to something much larger than yourself.
13:20 - Kia Miller (Guest) Yes, yes, I mean it was a great gift. I look back and see that as a great gift and then, for whatever reason, that yoga then just immediately resonated with me. It was, you know, a giant yes, and I love following those giant yeses and I love how the practice of yoga helps us to develop that strong yes. So we use, you know, the inner guidance system in our decision making, and so that was one for me, and I learned to not doubt it when I got such a strong hit about something.
14:02 - Derik Mills (Host) So that inner yes could also be thought of as, say, intuition or just a feeling that this is the right way Dealing that this is the right path.
14:07 - Kia Miller (Guest) Exactly. Intuition. And I think one of the ways I like to speak to it these days as well is the inner voice of your conscience, like that, that knowing, that knowing. And for me at least, if I was to speak to, one thing that I love the most about the integrated practice of yoga is that it awakens that inner knowing it. And it could be better put, because the knowing is always there, it aligns us, it attunes us to that inner knowing so that we begin to think, speak, act from that place more and more and more. There’s a continuity of connection that we create with that inner knowing.
14:58 - Derik Mills (Host) It’s like turning the dial to that frequency or set of frequencies.
15:02 - Kia Miller (Guest) Yeah, I love that. Tuning ourselves.
15:06 - Derik Mills (Host) Because that’s what I often think of myself as an instrument, not just a physical instrument but an energetic, psychological instrument that you know we can just like a piano or guitar, through whatever it is I’m doing in that moment, whatever outcome I’m trying to achieve. There are different ways of sort of pressing on that note or set of notes to create a chord, to create a vibrational outcome of sorts.
15:41 And so, yeah, I love that. I love the idea of us humans as a way of engaging with the world, engaging with ourselves, such that we can ultimately just make it easier or have greater access to how to press on those notes in different moments.
16:00 - Kia Miller (Guest) Oh, I love that. I love that. It’s so empowering and it, just as you were speaking, the feeling I was having was that it depersonalizes in the best way the experience of self. We’re an instrument and the more attuned our instrument, the greater the frequency, the greater the information we can pick up, the clearer channel we become. And I think when we are in that stance, it’s much easier to feel confident and emboldened by life and like, oh, life’s happening for me, not life’s happening to me. Oh, I have a choice here.
16:44 I remember if I pick up my old guitar and it’s out of tune, it’s just not going to sound very good. But if, if you spend a moment to tune it now, all of a sudden all kinds of creative notes can come through. And yes, I really see that that is us. That is us, we are these incredible creative instruments. And you know, many would say that the human being has the most sophisticated nervous system and brain. And wow, how incredible is that?
17:20 That, I think, is one of the things I fell in love with in the yoga tradition so early was the stories of the extraordinary, almost like superhero capacities that the yogis created, sort of blowing away any idea, preconceived idea of what we thought was possible. And that’s really the most interesting part of the yogic practice to me these days. Well, two-fold, both healing, healing. Healing the wounds of the past, creating in harmony and peace, but also leaning in towards this evolutionary part, this emerging self that we all are, and finding ways to keep tuning and tuning, and tuning and so that we become a clearer channel and our creativity, which we all have, that inherent creativity really gets to flow in the moment. It’s super exciting to me. I think that’s why I remain passionate all these years later about the power and the possibilities within yoga.
18:39 - Derik Mills (Host) Likely, because it’s, as you said, infinite.
18:42 So you’ll look at — so we’ll stick on the guitar, because I’ve been teaching myself for the last year and a half and I’m so into it. I’m blown away by how much I’m into trying to learn how to play the guitar and I look at the fretboard and I think, and the more I expand my sense of note combinations, scales and you know, et cetera, I see it as wow, it’s almost, it seems like it’s infinite, all the different combinations and same too with the human condition like you’re saying. Part of what attracted me as well to this word yoga, which ultimately is a set of practices, a set of yogas plural, is the fact that there is a plurality. There isn’t a sort of, in its more academic objective sense, non-agenda, seeking sense, open to you to interrogate, to investigate, to explore what it is that works for oneself, versus sort of attaching to a particular dogma or any one tradition or any one sort of metaphysical view of the world, and that to me, as I sense, for you, is what is eternally exciting, because that never ends.
20:12 - Kia Miller (Guest) It never ends exactly. And as we develop that connection to you know the pulse of life that exists within us, as we learn to trust more and more that impulse of life that is flowing, extraordinary things start to happen in life. That’s my experience. I think, the first many years of my yogic practice, it really was about healing and moments of deep peace and creating harmony within that changed how I was relating with the out of world.
21:04 And then an experience during a Kundalini Kriyā that completely transformed me in the moment. I went from all the noise of the mind, as we usually have, into deep silence and just like a little distant voice saying to me oh, that’s who I am. And I just felt like as I kind of settled into myself and I, in a glimpse, I just saw all of what I’d been projecting into the world as like false personas and that sense of oh, oh, that’s who I am. And once identifying that feeling of core self, there was no other need for a different kind of practice. It was like empowering me in that moment, as you said, clear of dogma, clear of any of that, to use that in a connection as the barometer that could guide me from one moment to the next to help me to transform slowly from the being who was hiding behind so many masks into this being who was learning how to just stay in a deeper place of integrity, moment by moment, by moment, and of course, that’s a journey.
22:39 - Derik Mills (Host) And what a gift to experience it at this point in your life. Yes, one could wonder had you experienced it earlier, what might have been different? But some never get to experience that.
22:56 - Kia Miller (Guest) It’s true, and it is an incredible gift. It’s an incredible gift. Because I wonder sometimes who would I have become without an understanding of who I really am and an understanding of how the mind works, so that I am not a slave to the mind, I’m not a slave to my emotions, as we were speaking to in the beginning, to just be able to take full sort of self authority. I think it’s an incredible gift, and no wonder when we have that insight into self, when we have the gift of healing. I see it in all those around me on the yoga path or other healing modalities. They want to share, they want to serve, they want to help others in the ways that they have found that space of revelation within them. They want to share that with others.
24:12 - Derik Mills (Host) And so many of us are so lucky because they/you do and make that your life’s journey and your life’s practice.
24:22 I do want to come back to in a moment what it was about that particular Kundalini Kriyā and just the Kriyās in general that maybe helped engender that experience.
24:30 But before we move on to that, you mentioned the experience of hearing that your father was okay and that you thought or you felt, experienced it, not as a dream, but then also the combination of the two-pronged navigation of healing and emergent self. I have benefited so much in the past three to four years as part of my healing and emergent self slash selves journey that I’m curious if dreams play a role in any way in terms of like how you, how you maybe do or do not work with dreams, what your your take on the, your take on the unconscious is, and certainly for me, dreams have definitely helped me experience a greater humility and compassion, but also helped me see myself not so much, yes, as a coherent self, but then also that coherent self is comprised of many selves in a healthy way, and so I was just curious what your point of view is on that and if, to what extent that has also contributed to some of your recent learnings and evolution.
25:51 - Kia Miller (Guest) I believe, my higher self, higher reality, whatever we want to call that unseen benevolent force that’s holding this universe in place or that’s guiding us, whatever we want to call that it speaks to me often in that, in that sweet space where I am between a sleep and awake, and often it will just flow in and then just I receive all this, this insight that can completely change the way I’m relating in the day from the moment I wake up onwards. So I I do believe that there’s power in that. You know, the yogis say that the super conscious state that we arrive in when we are in a state of yoga, a state of complete union, or as we might call Samadhi, that that state is the same as the state that we dip into when we are in deep sleep. It’s the same brainwave state. It’s just that in the super conscious state we’re aware and when we drop into deep sleep, the mind, the sensory mind, closes down, from the outside at least, and we’re not then connected as a self, we’re unconscious, and so we’re touching, we’re dipping into this luminous mind state. We’re just not aware of it at nighttime, and so I think oftentimes when we’re going to sleep, there can be a lot of processing dreams, depending on what we’ve been mentally and emotionally engaged with and when we’re coming out of that deep, super conscious state. We might still be processing if there’s a lot going on in our lives, but we may also be in that sort of sweet place of receiving insight, seeing things more clearly that we can bring into our day.
28:05 Last night I was up a lot during the night and I was learning something. The funny thing is, I was awake at times and I was actually sitting up and contemplating it and yet this morning I couldn’t remember it. But I know that it’s there. There’s a certain frequency where I really look, dialed in and learn something, and I think if I get drop in deep enough, I could probably go back there. But yes, it’s an infinite subject, isn’t it? It’s an infinite subject. I’m sure everyone listening could relate to the times where dreams have felt so healing or prophetic or any of the things that dreams can be and that alert us to the fact that there’s more going on that meets the eye.
28:57 - Derik Mills (Host) Yes, it seems perhaps the unconscious is monitoring what we do and somehow plays a role in our homeostasis, keeping things in check. The more I speak with people about dreams and read books about dreaming, the more confident I feel that dreams are playing a crucial role in our emotional health. But let’s go back to this moment in the Kriyā that you were referring to, like what is it about Kundalini Kriyās in general, and, and if there was something specific about that particular moment, what was that?
29:38 - Kia Miller (Guest) Yeah, well, two things there. I think with Kundalini, Kriyās in particular, we’re moving, often dynamically, and that that has a direct impact on the autonomic nervous system. So it starts to it starts to shift the autonomic nervous system and kind of give us and give us an in to that deep operating system, and so it’s powerful. Just, for example, if you’re spinning side to side inhaling, exhaling or any version of these dynamic moves, just creating a shift in the energy system, a shift in the brain, a shift in mind-body connection, mind-breath connection, it’s all shifting slightly and You’re building energy. And usually in the Kriyās there are sequence of these sometimes dynamic, sometimes stationary postures, and each posture is building energy. So you’re enlivening energy, you’re moving it from stuckness and you’re enlivening it, and then you’re directing it usually to the heart or to the third eye and then you’re stabilizing it. A Lot of energy is awakened in the navel. That’s what I was doing when I had that experience. I was really awakening energy in the navel To such a degree that it just flushed through my entire nervous system and I had this awakening moment. But Kriyās do that and often you’re moving your body in ways that you don’t in your daily life and so that also stimulates something energetically different. Often you’re doing something that, for your ego’s comfort, is going on way too long and you want it to stop. But if you just persevere on a little bit, there’s a breakthrough. It’s like the, the grip of the control of the ego that’s wanting to keep us the same, that’s wanting to keep us safe. All of a sudden it releases and we get a glimpse beyond. Then we inhale, we hold the breath and we pause and all that energy that’s been building and moving, just it stabilizes as we’re paying attention and the, the depth of stillness available in those moments between the poses is really, that’s where the alchemy happens. We’re still the subtle body, the energy body is just still swirling until it to settles.
32:25 The deeper you pay attention to deeper the integration in that moment, and we get glimpses into the self, beyond the limitations of the lower mind. We get glimpses into the feeling state where there’s not that feeling, let’s just say the feeling state, where we’re not grasping for anything and neither are we pushing away. There’s such a sense of wholeness in the moment that we’re not waiting for the next moment to show up so that we’re okay and we’re not trying to fix anything in the past. We’re just in the okayness of the moment and the longer we stay there and studies of being done nowadays that show this the longer you stay there in that place, the more the whole physiology of the body starts to shift to reflect that state and the more emotionally you begin to balance and attune to that state. So, going back to our idea of the tuning of the instrument, this is what we’re doing through the practice, and Part of what I love about Kundalini yoga is, yes, it’s about the physical body, but the physical body is an instrument to help us.
33:49 The physical body and the breath and our attention are the three main instruments to help us to In, live and, like, gather up this energy, stabilize it where we want it to be, like opening through the heart, opening to gratitude, opening to appreciation, to love, or stabilizing it in the third eye, starting to feel. You know that pulse, that that luminosity, that that connection to a mind that’s not gripped in analysing life, but that level of mind where we’re just aware. We’re aware that we’re aware, where the mind is open, it’s luminous, there’s a subtleness, there’s a luminosity there and it’s just this profound feeling of connection. That’s what I had in a In such a proof, in such a powerful way, that it left a positive imprint. It was like you know, it was like in the, the giant holograph that I am all of a sudden this imprint of something else was laid and everything started to shift and change around that core imprint and then that started to influence in a pretty powerful way, my, my whole decision-making and understanding of who I was and what I was capable of.
35:15 And I think, in particular, the big one that used to trip me up in my life was self-doubt, doubting in myself, doubting in what I thought that I knew or knew, doubting in my capacity, or self-doubt in terms of or what are other people going to think of this? Will they approve, will they like me, will they like this, and and so all that got rearranged in that moment and in my, in, in the depth of my practice that came after that, because that moment showed me what was possible. Then I had to go on a journey to continue to cultivate that and expand it and that. That’s where my discipline and devotion, concurrently, they came together in practice and I recognized, oh, I really get it all that my teachers have been telling me, practice every day, practice with wholeheartedness, consistency, stay with it and, concurrently to that, practice, letting go of the things that are not serving you in your life. Practice letting go of attitudes that are not serving you. So this, these core tenets of yoga, came alive in a different way devotion to practice, because that’s where I am Learning how to more skillfully use this mind-body energy vehicle. And then practice to study I, or the study of myself, the study of myself in relationship to the divine, the study of myself in relationship to others and the world. And yeah, that’s an ongoing journey, isn’t it? It’s a beautiful ongoing journey of continued refinement.
37:21 And last thing I’ll say on this is the. The yoga tradition came from those steeped in really sublime, elevated states of consciousness and they left these footprints of consciousness for us to follow. So when, when you spoke of the infinite earlier, it’s like that. It’s like they were so luminous, so clear, that it feels like there’s always another step to take. There’s always something else that’s revealed through the yoga, yogic teachings, through the mantras, through the text. There’s always, there’s always more, not in the I need more to be whole, but ooh, there’s more, there’s more possibility. Oh, there’s that. Oh, I could expand into that, oh, I can self-correct that way or this way, and it’s such a— it’s such a deep and very fulfilling and sometimes excruciatingly challenging journey.
38:36 - Derik Mills (Host) I want to stay on this topic — I haven’t even looked at my notes yet. I have so many questions just on that particular part. Just as a quick note, I’ve always had an aversion… I’m glad you mentioned this, this experience of more possibility. I’ve always had a strong visceral aversion to any teaching lineage, school of thought, that sort of Advocates for a sense of finality finished, done, yeah, extricated from, immune to, etc. And. And as you were speaking, I was going to ask you to provide an example and I appreciate that you gave the example of self-doubt and based on what you were sharing, I suspect it’s not that you no longer experience doubt, it’s that your relationship to the experience of doubt in that moment shifted, is shifting, will continue to shift. Is that correct?
39:51 - Kia Miller (Guest) Yes, that is correct Absolutely, and I feel that it’s the same for so many of these, these, whether it’s self-doubt or whether it’s, you know, need for approval or whatever the thing is that’s tripping us up. The more present we are in our lives, the quicker we can catch ourselves falling into something, and then the quicker we can self-correct until there’s a sense of it in your field. You’re like oh, okay, why am I feeling like this? And to me that’s the most empowering thing. Okay, well, why am I feeling like this? What, what’s really going on? And taking a moment to stop, like pause, tune in, feel what I need to feel and then move on from that place.
40:48 Because I think, for myself at least and for many of us, we just try to push away the things that are the things that we don’t want to have to deal with in the moment, and yet they come in for such a powerful reason. They’re there. They’re there. They’re not just there randomly. They’re there because there’s something in you that needs to be looked at. For example, if I’m really ungrounded and I haven’t taken a moment to connect and really tune in, then that self-doubt could easily come in and throw me off my center, or my need for approval or whatever those core unconscious driving desires may be. And so learning to pause, to stop, to connect, to be okay, to take these moments of self-reflection, self-correction and a lot of that for me has been learning to slow down so that I can be sensitive to what’s arising in the moment, I can make myself bigger and make space for it and not use so much energy trying to push away things that just feel like they’re taking me off wherever my mind wants me to be. So then what happens is we become more emotionally intelligent and tapped in at a deeper level because of how much energy is taken from the creativity with which we engage in the moment. So much energy is taken from that if we are trying to push things away that we are doing or deeming to be undesirable in the moment.
42:37 And then the practice is there, because sometimes that which we’re deeming to be undesirable can have such an intense pull on us mentally and emotionally that it can threaten to overpower our sense of self in the moment. So I really recognize that that’s true for so many. And so in that case, the practice is there to help to raise your energy, to attune you to a different frequency, to clear your mind so you can more clearly perceive that which was threatening to overcome you emotionally, mentally. You can perceive it from a different place. It has less power over you, and the more you can relate to it in that way, the less power it has over time, until that which used to emotionally, mentally topple you over is no longer has that power. It rises up in your field of awareness and you can notice it and, with detachment, let it go.
43:45 So to me, that’s the deepest work of yoga. When I speak to challenge, it’s usually some aspect of myself that’s rising up, that’s been living in the unconscious, that is some aspect of my ego, my need, my I, me, my mind, whatever that is, was whether that’s coming in the negative form of doubt or whether it’s coming in an attachment to whatever it. The challenge is for me, coming on the inner level, and the way to to deal with it is to practice, practice, practice, practice. Raise your energy, raise your, your yourself in the moment. Learn to transcend, not so that you can avoid, but transcend enough that you can look at it with different eyes, with neutrality, and begin to sift through that monster that you would somehow subconsciously created until it has no power anymore.
44:55 - Derik Mills (Host) And I appreciate you added that bit after transcend, it’s to transcend or to be in transcendence, while not avoiding.
Kia Miller (Guest) Yes.
Derik Mills (Host) I think oftentimes use of the word transcend can be coupled with a sort of sensibility of of avoidance or passing over versus going through and being with.
45:22 - Kia Miller (Guest) Yes, exactly, and I think that’s why in in yoga, there’s so much emphasis, when you do deep kriyā work or pranayama meditation, to to learn, to stabilize energy at your third eye and to strengthen your power of discernment so you can see clearly. You can see much more clearly what’s real and what isn’t real, what is a threat, what isn’t the threat, what is a part of a story you’ve created versus what is true, and that then you can move to the heart and begin to sort of clarify on that emotional level.
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45:58 - Derik Mills (Host) I want to bring it back for a moment to the initial question, like what it is. What is it about these kriyās and the experience that one has during them? And I’ve heard you speak to this. If any of this has sounded a little sort of inaccessible or esoteric, I’ve heard you speak to how simply the experience of why am I doing this, or I feel silly doing this, or gosh, I just want to stop, or can you? Can you expand on that? Because I think that also is a very powerful entry point to maybe someone experiencing it for the first or first few times.
46:51 - Kia Miller (Guest) Yeah, so well, fun and laughter is a really good thing in all of this because we can speak about it and it can sound so esoteric and somewhat daunting and perhaps somewhat dry and like, well, where’s the fun in all that? So part of the way that I relate to these kriyās is with fun, with fun, with laughter, with okay, let’s see how we can challenge ourselves and learn and grow from it, because the kriyās often put us in these very strange positions. Maybe I’m just turning my hands for three minutes like this with a crazy breath, and you’re like what on earth am I doing? This person’s completely crazy. And yet if you just try it and you’re working your breath and you allow yourself, okay, I don’t have to believe anything, I’m just going to try it. I’m going to be my own scientist here. I’m going to try it and I’m going to see how I feel in the moment, and so that’s what I encourage people to do Try these kriyās because they’re going.
48:08 - Derik Mills (Host) But even just that takes a lot of vulnerability, or can take a lot of vulnerability and simply just board that train as a leap of faith.
48:19 - Kia Miller (Guest) It is, it is, and I think it is. So then the other really maybe one could say prerequisite when you come to these practices, is just have an open mind and be curious. Open mindedness, curiosity. You know, at the very beginning of the yoga sutras of Patanjali, one of the core texts on yoga, the first line is atha yogānuśāsanam. And now the practice of yoga, and one of the ways to look at that atha word is “okay, and now I’ve tried everything else. I’m suffering in life. I’m uncomfortable in my body, I’m reactive in my life, I’m caught in these ever spinning wheels of negativity. I’ve tried so many things. I’m, you know the Western world wants me to medicate, and yet we know that there’s other ways through. So I’ve tried all of that. And now yoga, and now yoga.”
49:35 And then, and why yoga? Why? Why not something else? And my answer for that is just these are tried and tested practices over thousands of years. This is not just somebody made something up overnight and you’re being asked to do it. These are tried and tested practices and they’re going to hit you on all levels of your being. You’re going to learn how to find comfort in your body, the asana, the comfortable seat. You’re going to learn how to change your energetic state so you’re not going to be stuck in negativity, you’re not going to be stuck in your depression or stuck in a chronic state of anxiety.
50:26 There’s ways using these movements, using these careers, to transform our state of being. And then there’s meditations, there’s breath work, there’s mantra, using sound to really hone the mind, to train your mind and heal your mind. I think the thing about our modern lives is we spent so much time on these devices and it’s affecting the mind chemistry, it’s affecting the way our minds are wired, and we want to start to create the mental capacity for deep concentration, not deep concentration on something that’s ever changing, scrolling through, but the capacity to hold a steady focus of attention and, simultaneously, an awareness of self and the greater reality.
And in doing that studies are showing this the brain starts to heal all the ways that the neuro-connections in the mind become fractured through our use of modern technology. As we meditate, as we focus on a mantra or we focus on our breath and we cultivate this capacity for sort of a nice flow of awareness, the brain starts to heal and then the mind-heart connection it all starts to come together and we get tapped into the deeper intelligence of being and that sense of loneliness and disconnection that can plague us so deeply at times, it disappears because the intelligence of our being is on board and then we realize, oh, there’s nothing wrong with me, that I feel disconnected, dissociated, distracted. Whatever that may be, it’s not a core floor with our self, it’s just that we’re out of tune.
We’re out of tune and we keep doing things that bring us more out of tune and wow, what could happen if we got in tune. And what could happen if we got into, not just individually, but what could happen if, collectively, we got in tune. That’s where the emergent possibilities start to come through the collective and we find solutions for things we didn’t think there were solutions for before and we start to access deeper flow state that athletes speak about so much.
53:19 It’s there and available for each and every one of us. It’s, in fact, our natural state of being and these practices are designed to bring us to that. It’s not a dogma. We don’t have to believe in anything but our self and our own capacity, using certain techniques and tools, to heal and to access greater states of consciousness, to release ancestral stuff that we’ve all been carrying.
It’s like the possibilities that exist for us are endless and so exciting, and when I see people light up through doing a practice, it is. It’s so joyful for me to see somebody either burst into tears and then from tears move into pure joy, and then to see and witness that feeling of clarity and lightness of being that comes over one from seeing how much power they have and that they can tap into through the practice. So…
Derik Mills (Host) And how have you found teaching online? What has surprised you about it?
54:43 - Derik Mills (Host) I love. I love teaching online.
54:47 - Kia Miller (Guest) I always love teaching online. I always love teaching online. I always loved it. And what it is is when I look into the camera, I feel like there’s no such thing as time and space, that whoever is connecting with me whenever they’re connecting with me, that we’re together in the now. And I’ve always felt that when I’m sharing my classes, that I’m with you, whoever you are in that moment that you’re practicing, we’re together. That exists in the eternal now. That moment exists and we’re together. And I feel that and that’s what I have reflected to so many people from so many people to me. Oh, I feel like I’m really with you and that’s what I’ve learned since COVID is how connected we all are through the unified field.
55:55 You know what the quantum physicists call the unified field, what the yogis call the Haranya Garba, the womb of life, that the space that connects us all is not devoid, it’s not empty.
56:09 It’s full of brimming with intelligence, brimming with a subtlest form of consciousness.
56:18 And what I feel is, when we practice and we’re all in different parts of the world, that we’re connecting through the unified field.
56:29 It’s like a palpable sense that I have now when I’m teaching either a live class, and I can feel and tune in, just sense all the points of consciousness around the world that are tuning in in that moment, and that I think that that is helping us evolve as human beings, being able to tune in in this way. So that’s on a collective level, and then on the individual level, the ease at which people can make yoga a daily practice because it’s in their home, the ease with which they can choose a focus, a time of practice, a particular thing to focus on, or a class that they want to do for 40 days or whatever that is. I think that’s empowering us as individuals, that we can do practices online. In this way, we don’t need to travel half an hour to a studio. We can and we can be in community and it’s wonderful, and if we’re busy in our life, we can just turn on and there it is, there’s Glo and there’s class. It’s fantastic.
57:48 - Derik Mills (Host) Wow, that’s beautiful and there is a consistency there. There’s no question that that feeling of connection that you have, that experience of presence and unification with others that you’re having, that is emanating through and we know that that’s landing on the other side, which you hear all the time as well my Glo members reaching out to you or you know them running into you on the street or attending your training, et cetera. Thank you, kia. This has been so wonderful and inspiring and I am looking forward to sharing this with our listeners. Thank you.
58:34 - Kia Miller (Guest) Thank you so much, Derik. I really appreciate this opportunity to connect more deeply, to share more deeply, and I love this level of conversation, and it feels really important to be able to have this level of conversation on a personal level and to be able to share some of the ideas and some of the things that have been going on. I think there’s a tendency for people often to look at teachers and to think that we have this, that we have everything figured out, and I love. I love to share what’s happening for me, not in an indulgent way, but just simply like, yeah, we’re all subject to this human condition and we’re all doing the very best we can. And when we remember that, our compassion for each other grows exponentially, because we understand that that life can be so challenging and how can we be there and show up for each other in a way that’s, you know, really relevant and meaningful. So so thank you for this opportunity to share and to speak with you.
59:52 - Derik Mills (Host) Thank you. It feels important to me as well and, yes, we’re all experiencing this thing called the human condition.
01:00:02 - Kia Miller (Guest) Yes.
01:00:05 - Derik Mills (Host) Thank you, Kia.
CLOSING
Derik Mills
Thank you to our entire team behind the scenes at GLO. I’m so grateful for your care and commitment to serving our members around the world. Thank you to our teachers for so beautifully sharing your gifts and talents. I’m also grateful to our lovely community of GLO members. You’ve supported us since 2008 and because of you we get to continue to do the work we love. It’s the combined support of our team, our teachers and our community that grants me the privilege to continue to bring you the GLO podcast. Thank you to Lee Schneider of Red Cub Agency, for production support, and the beautiful music you’re hearing now is by Carrie Rodriguez and her husband Luke Jacobs. And remember, take care of yourself, because our world needs you. Thank you for coming on this journey with me. You can find the Glo podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or glo.com/podcast or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I’m Derik Mills.