Anja Kühnel
Berlin Jivamukti Yoga
Senior Instructor KKA
Anja mainly teaches at the two Berlin Jivamukti Yoga Centers that she owns and directs.
If time allows, she accepts one of the many invitations to teach workshops worldwide. She also has been teaching intensive international Jivamukti Yoga retreats worldwide for a number of years now, often together with internationally renowned teachers like Sharon Gannon, David Life, Manorama and Dechen Thurman. Privately, she has a special interest in studying the teachings of Vedanta and Sanskrit and adopting rescued dogs.
Anja leads the 800-hour Jivamukti Yoga Apprenticeship Teacher Training program in Berlin where she has personally mentored and certified more than 40 Jivamukti Yoga apprentices over the past 10 years. She is regularly invited as a faculty or board member for the Jivamukti teacher trainings and Jivamukti Advanced board tests. In 2017, she was a facilitator together with David Life and Rima Rani Rabbath at the Jivamukti Yoga Teacher Training in Costa Rica and in November 2018 she will co-facilitate together with Yogeswari the German Teacher Training on Chiemsee (Bavaria), which in 2013 she simultaneously translated from German into English for the non-German participants.
Anja discovered her passion for Jivamukti Yoga in 2000 while living in New York. Back then, she also met her teachers Sharon Gannon and David Life for the first time. Anja has been practicing yoga with teachers of various yoga styles and traveled the world to do so. But in her heart, she knew right after her first Jivamukti class, where she belongs.
Living as a Yogi for Anja means to try to balance the disequilibrium between herself as part of human civilization and the world as a whole. In her classes, Anja strives to emphasize the yogic tenet that none of our doings, whether they remain thoughts or are actually carried out, are without impact to our surroundings. The direction, in which the world turns, is in the hands of each and every one of us.
The love of life, of all beings, and this world as a whole are what motivate Anja to teach yoga. The path of yoga gives every single one of us the chance to grapple with our inner selves and to find the harmony within us that we are longing for.
Anja thanks her teachers Sharon Gannon, David Life and Patrick Broome, and all the other teachers she encounters every day.
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"The 5 Tenets of Jivamukti Yoga"
Becoming The Knower of the Field
“Walking the Razor’s Edge"
The body is called the field. He who knows it is called the Knower of the field.“ - BG XIII.1
Explore and practice the five tenets of Jivamukti Yoga as Anja combines the key postures and sequences of this internationally recognized style of Hatha Yoga to build a perfect vinyasa and lets you dive deep into the ancient techniques and teachings of Yoga.
In this Jivamukti Yoga workshop, you will dive deep into the essence of Jivamukti Yoga and learn to know and practice its five tenets. And we will also take it a step further and seek to apply it all to our daily life. With a focus on śāstra, the study of the ancient yoga scriptures, we will explore the sādhanā that is given in the Gītā and learn what students of Yoga can do to put themselves in the right direction of truth at all times. In addition to setting an internal mood for our practice, we will be chanting from the scriptures, especially from the Bhagavad Gītā, and practice āsanas, prānāyāma and meditation.
The Bhagavad Gītā is a text seen as one of the most important śāstras describing the spiritual
sādhanā of the ancient Upaniṣadic teachings of the oneness of the Self. In chapter 13, Kṛṣṇa, the jagad-guru (Guru of the whole world), gives essential teachings on how to distinguish between the body-mind (which is made up of the five elements, the five sense organs, the five organs of action and the three components of the mind: manas, ahaṁkāra, buddhi) on one side and the supreme Puruṣa on the other side, which is the Absolute Reality and ultimately our true nature. To live in the spirit of that absolute light is the practice of the yogī, and all purifying practices are only there to remove avidyā, which binds us to a very limited experience of ourselves.
Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gītā wants to be a student of Yoga. It is a new beginning. One has to put one’s efforts into the right direction and start planting the seeds for the ultimate enlightenment.
Sharp like a razor’s edge, the sages say, is the path, difficult to traverse. Those who realize the Self are forever free from the jaws of death. - Katha Upanishad
As Yogis we should strive to walk the path of developing an all-embracing compassion that ultimately enables us to forgive anybody for anything. No matter who wronged us or how unfairly we have been treated, our goal should be to feel neither anger nor bitterness or even hatred in our hearts, because in the end, these feelings only work against ourselves as they separate us from our true Self, keeping us from the knowledge of being one with all.
Sharp as a razor’s edge, the sages say, is this path to enlightenment, and difficult to walk without defecting from it. One needs superhuman endurance and superhuman determination to accomplish this goal, they say.
Thus, we have to attain a state of consciousness in which we live free from all drama in a state of ever-present vitality that even transcends the constant change of time. Igniting and cultivation a blazing fire of life force, what we call prana, can help us reach this state. By practicing Jivamukti Yoga in a way that the founders of this method, Sharon Gannon and David Life, developed it, we can discover the source of prana within us and kindle it for good and all.
This workshop contains all the elements that, in the eyes of many, make Jivamukti Yoga the “Wild Child of Yoga“. It is sequenced to spark our vital fire through yogic techniques like Pranayama, an intense asana practice and meditation in order to acutely work on creating a room within yourselves, from which we can develop the strength, power, endurance and serenity that we need to walk the razor’s edge in a state of realizing that all is one.
Open for all levels.
© 2018 Ljubljana Yoga Conference