Behind every great yoga teacher is a mentor.
If thunderous cheers and outpourings of affection from students are any sign of greatness, Gloria Latham makes the ranks.
Just returning to her Semperviva studio on West Broadway in Vancouver from a summer of spreading the gospel of kundalini yoga to her native Greece and other far-flung parts of the world, this nymph-like creature with a long mane of tousled dark hair and deep brown eyes slips like a wisp past the throng who have gathered anxiously awaiting her return.
The goddess has come home.
Gloria might not be here if it were not for one 73-year-old Los Angeles-based yoga teacher who is known simply as Gurmukh in the same way some of her more famous students like Madonna are known by their first names.
Around the year 2000, Gloria had grown disillusioned with the practice of yoga just as she was close to completing her teacher training in Vancouver. She was finding it too dogmatic, too heavy.
Then while visiting a trade show for a health food company in Los Angeles, she and two company reps walked into Gurmukh’s Golden Bridge Yoga Centre.
At the owner’s impromptu invitation, Gloria and the others shed high heels, stockings and rolled up suit pant legs to attend one of Gurmukh’s classes.
“It blew our minds,” says Gloria. “We all came out and we didn’t know what had happened. We were buzzing. The energy in the room was incredible.”
At one point in the class, Gurmukh switched from playing traditional yoga mantras to a Beatles song. That cinched it for Gloria. She knew in that instant that yoga could be playful and inclusive.
From that time on, Gloria stalked Gurmukh around the globe, following her to places like London, San Francisco and New York whenever she could slip away from her children, leaving them with husband Scott, and whenever friends who were flight attendants could get her on board.
Gurmukh became not only her most cherished mentor but a close friend.
So just who is Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa?
With her sculpted features, radiant countenance and seemingly boundless energy, Gurmukh is a poster child for kundalini yoga, a spiritual practice that often combines the chanting of mantras, vigorous exercise, deep breathing, activation of the nervous system with a focus on the spine and a closing meditation.
While she exudes a curious alchemy of quiet grace and rock-hard purpose, the life of the woman born as Mary Mae Gibson in a small Illinois town was not always filled with bliss.
In 1964, she gave birth to a son who died seven months later from a congenital heart defect. Divorce followed.
Living the peripatetic hippy life, she moved from Haight Ashbury, to the Big Sur to Mexico and to Maui, a flower child in search of herself.
“I did so many drugs,” she recalls in a telephone interview from her home in Los Angeles. “I led such a precarious life, searching really for what my purpose was on earth.”
“Then through the grace of the creator, I found my spiritual teacher when I was 27 and just embarked on a different way to live.”
Her new path began in an ashram in Arizona, where she met Yogi Bhajan, an Indian-born Sikh yogi who introduced kundalini yoga to the US, persuading legions of hippies to trade their hallucinogenic drugs and free love for the rigorous spiritual practice.
He gave Mary the name Gurmukh, which roughly translates as one who helps thousands across the world, and told her she would help deliver babies.
Taking his advice literally, she assisted a doctor in delivering nine babies, trained to become a midwife, then realized she didn’t want to deliver babies in that fashion.
“My job is to help deliver their soul,” she says, explaining how she became a pioneer in prenatal yoga.
But her scope widened much beyond that. Becoming the queen of kundalini yoga in the home of Hollywood, she became a teacher to the stars, instructing the likes of Courtney Love, Gwyneth Paltrow, David Duchovny, Annette Bening and the aforementioned Madonna. Reese Witherspoon is also a fan and Cindy Crawford wrote the foreword to Bountiful, Beautiful, Blissful, Gurmukh’s 2003 book on pregnancy and birth.
She hops on and off planes, checks into hotel rooms and pulls off what she calls “all-dayers” teaching in yoga studios around the globe for about 290 days of the year, bringing her wisdom to a world floundering in confusion and searching for meaning.
Gloria wasted no time in bringing her to her Semperviva studio in Vancouver, which she visits annually along with other Canadian cities.
In her down time, Gurmukh often heads to her “earthship” home in New Mexico, where she spends countless hours meditating and practising yoga.
Whether she is teaching celebrities or the ordinary Jane from the street, her purpose is the same.
“I’m trying to help people have an experience of themselves so they can be more healthy, happy and whole. To give them an experience of consciousness because once you get the experience of consciousness, then you can line your ducks up and figure out why you are alive and take care of yourself. You are not living in a puzzle or a confusion or a cloudiness anymore. Kundalini yoga gives you clarity.”
Her bromides for healthy living range from the practical to the poetic.
To counteract the effects of radiation from so much air travel, she soaks in a tub containing one pound of sea salt and one pound of baking soda for about 15 or 20 minutes after a flight. She swears it works.
She follows a vegan diet, eating mostly greens. “I keep my body in alkaline. And when you keep your body in alkaline, there is no place for disease or weakness to come in. I don’t get things like colds or bronchitis. It just doesn’t happen.”
Born to a Sicilian mother and into a family of four healthy, happy siblings ranging in age from 69 to 75, she says she was also blessed with a good gene pool.
The word retire simply doesn’t exist in her vocabulary.
“I think there’s a lot of older people who don’t know why they are alive. They don’t know what to do. They feel like they retired. They feel that they don’t have a purpose. They waited their whole lives. They worked hard to what? Just to play golf?”
Her advice? “I think it is so important to find some spiritual practice that works for you, to make the connection with that which created us. Otherwise you are just kind of in limbo floating around, wondering why you are here.”
Also, serve others. “Do not let a day go by when you are not giving. Giving is living and living is giving.”
In her morning meditation, she never fails to ask, “Creator, what do you want me to do?”
And finally, reconsider your diet. “You wouldn’t put jelly beans in the gas tank of your car. You would wreck the car. Well, we’re a car, too.”
Like the rest of us ordinary mortal souls, she is capable of becoming agitated. Her husband and the daughter she had at age 43 tend to be the ones who press her buttons because she is closest to them.
When this happens, following the lessons taught by yoga, she tries to step back and contemplate what she is experiencing rather than reacting emotionally. “In kundalini yoga, the bottom line is to create a neutral, non-reactionary mind.”
Gurmukh feels she is getting better with age at her job as a yogi on the road. “It’s becoming easier because I’m getting it down better how to do it.”
It helps, too, that she loves hotels – good hotels – with fine cotton sheets.
A hint of excitement creeps into her voice as she describes coming adventures to new places like Vietnam, Cambodia and Burma.
She doesn’t know when she will stop teaching and travelling, but don’t expect that to happen any time soon.
Astrologers have told her she will live to be over a hundred. If outward appearances are any indication of longevity, they could be right.
“That’s up to the creator. He gave me the first breath. He is going to take the last breath.”
In the meantime, she plans to keep spreading her wings, carrying her yogic knowledge to places like Russia, Serbia, Iceland and South Africa that are awakening to its possibilities.
And in a studio in Vancouver, Gloria, one of the most influential forces of yoga teacher training globally, sends up a prayer of gratitude for the guru who taught her so many years ago how to push people beyond their perceived limits and to find some lightness and joy in this ancient practice.
On their many “pool dates” at hotels and on long walks in LA, she and Gurmukh talk yoga, all the time, as the older teacher passes along to the younger one the wisdom she acquired from so many years working in ashrams alongside Yogi Bhajan.
Gloria feels privileged to gain this insight as she never got the chance to know the master first hand.
“I find her deeply inspiring,” said Gloria. “I feel she has touched a lot of people because she deeply cares and teaches from the heart.”
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