What is Shakti energy?
Have you ever heard of the term, Shakti? It’s a form of energy that can be loosely translated to descending grace.
Shakti is the feminine energy. It’s the you’re onto something beautiful energy. I have a teacher that proudly shouts “You’re on the Shakti train!” when you’re listening and then following the path of your heart.
My first experience with Shakti was back in 2013, though I wouldn’t have called it that at the time. I had stepped into my first yoga teacher training. It was a kids’ yoga training in Alexandria, VA.
Even though I had taught dance since I was 14, learning to teach child friendly yoga poses felt like trying to walk with jelly legs.
I was so bad at teaching yoga at first. Truly.
At the end of our first day of training, our teacher shared that we’d be moving through a practice called Yoga Nidra, i.e. yogic sleep. I’d never heard of it before, but it sounded nice. I was in grad school and working full-time then, and needed the rest.
Well, the practice of Yoga Nidra coupled with my first immersive yoga experience awakened something within me that I didn’t know was dormant.
I came home and told Eugene all about it. My body and mind were humming with energy, yet I felt the most peace I had in perhaps my whole life. I was pleasantly awake and vibrant when I should’ve been exhausted after a long day.
In fact, after trying to go to sleep for the night, I got up and pulled out my journal. I wrote pages and pages and pages - maybe for hours - about my experience, and how right yoga felt…a feeling I hadn’t experienced since my dance career. I wrote about ideas for teaching yoga in the future. I wrote as if I had been familiar with the practice all along, and like it knew me, too.
Shakti.
I didn’t sleep that night, but when you have an experience like that you don’t really need sleep for a time. That was my first brush with descending grace - a feeling of knowing and trusting my Self completely.
Think back: Have you ever had a brush with Shakti energy? A knowing, a natural evolution of doors opening, a curiosity that lights you up, grace and a feeling of unconditional love?
This knowing has resurfaced several times since that first kids yoga teacher training class (in many ways). Shakti was telling me to pay attention in every perinatal yoga touchstone, every conversation about women’s health.
Fast forward to my own experiences with fertility, pregnancy, birth, postpartum, mothering, and beyond, and I dove headfirst into the Vedic wisdoms - yoga, Ayurveda, Tantra, etc. I longed to:
Understand what the heck happened/is happening to me (and others) in the perinatal continuum of life that spans MANY years, and
How to navigate them in a way that contributes to whole person health, especially in a world that shuns so much of the female experience, shrouds it in mystery, or pathologizes it with one too many diagnoses.
Listen, I have tried to turn away from this calling many times…to ignore it. It felt too BIG.
But, I can’t help it. I keep coming back. You see…
VERY few folks are connecting the dots between the perinatal continuum and how yoga/Ayurveda can really support women during these years.
VERY few programs are really getting to the heart of the matter - that if we significantly improve women’s health at the root level, then we improve children’s health, and that affects whole communities for years to come.
VERY few trainings bridge practices that connect all parts of Self, including body and mind. Now, even modern neuroscience shows that the body and mind cannot be separated.
The Afterglow Perinatal Yoga Training gives equal weight to the Perinatal experience in its entirety, covering yoga and Ayurveda for preconception, fertility, pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and very postpartum.
It goes beyond the industry standard certification for Prenatal Yoga, which is wonderful, but misses vital components of the perinatal experience.
Afterglow is incredibly comprehensive and will allow you to support yourself, your family, and/or your clients throughout the perinatal continuum in a holistic way.
This 85 hour virtual training is the culmination of my time studying with yoga teachers, yoga therapists, midwives, doctors, doulas, becoming a birth doula myself, becoming a sleep specialist for infants and children, and so on over the years. But perhaps most of all it is the result of my own lived experience, time with clients, and my connection with Shakti, Ma, Spirit, the great mother energy.
I believe in a future of nourished women, mothers and children. I believe that one of the ways we can significantly shift the health of our communities and honestly the world is through the ancient practices of yoga and Ayurveda.
I believe that there are people like you who want to be a part of this seismic shift, and I welcome you to join Afterglow.
Read more about the curriculum for Afterglow here and join us! You do NOT have to be a yoga teacher or a yoga therapist, though you certainly can be. All are welcome here.
As Rumi shares, the heart’s wisdom will not lead you astray. If this is speaking to you, let the Shakti come alive in you and be surrounded by others who are walking a shared path.
Jai Ma!
With love,
Leanne
P.S. Early Birds receive $300 off the Afterglow training until July 1, 2024. If you register by April 20, 2024 I’m waiving the certification fee of $300 to become a certified Perinatal Yoga Provider (PYP), too, where you will get listed on our website. That’s a $600 savings.
Payment Plans are available. Send me your questions. I look forward to receiving them. <3
