Kino MacGregor, Superb Yoga Teacher, Soothing Pathway To The Light

Even with the light on, no make that five lights on in one room, we can live our lives walking around in the dark.

The search for meaning in this short and often intense existence can be the cornerstone to finding peace, satisfaction and happiness.

Sometimes it can be a pathway that we find on our own, though if it were easy to do that, we would most likely already be there.

Perhaps most times we need help to reach our desired destination to touch and stay in the light.

One such beautiful lady who has helped many around the world find the light through Ashtanga Yoga is Ms. Kino MacGregor.

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She would like to meet you.

The light is on and shining bright.

Let’s knock at her door opening at kinoyoga.com. “I am not a naturally patient person. Most likely that’s because my mind moves at super-fast speeds processing different potentialities and buzzing with new ideas. Yoga has taught me patience, but I still don’t much like the waiting game.

I am all too human sometimes. I get attached to things working out how I want and I get upset by things not going as planned. This doesn’t make me less of a yogi. This makes me a real person practicing yoga. I haven’t gotten back on my mat every day for 20 years because I’ve been trying to perfect a pose or make a shape. I return to my practice because it helps me feel my inherent wholeness, because it teaches me new life skills (like patience), and because it tunes my mind in to the eternal presence of the Divine.

Challenging poses are amazing mirrors of our deepest darkness. How you respond to adversity tests the mettle of your soul. Do you fight back and claw at anything you feel threatened by? Do you try and desperately hold to things that don’t flow? Or do you cultivate an attitude or surrender and learn to let things go when they’ve run their course? These questions are at the heart of the journey of yoga. It’s not about the pose, it’s about what you learn as a human being, as a spirit, on the path of practice.”

Very intriguing. It appears that Kino started out as many of us do. Thus far what she has to say makes sense.

Who is she exactly?

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“Kino is an international yoga teacher, author of four books, producer of six Ashtanga Yoga DVDs, writer, vlogger, world traveler, co-founder of Miami Life Center, co-founder of Yoga Challenge and OmStars and co-creator of Yoga Pro Wheel. Kino’s dharma is to help people experience the limitless potential of the human spirit through the inner tradition of yoga. She is one of the few people in the world of yoga to embrace both the traditional teaching of India’s historic past and the popular contemporary social media channels. You can find her online on OmStars(www.omstars.com), teaching classes and workshops all over the world and on social media with over 2 million followers across all her channels. With more than 18 years of experience in Ashtanga Yoga, she is one of a select group of people to receive the Certification to teach Ashtanga yoga by its founder Sri K. Pattabhi Jois in Mysore, India and practice into the Fifth Series of Ashtanga Yoga.”

Nicely informative.

To some degree we all know what Yoga is but the definition can alter depending upon who is defining it. How does Kino see it?

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“Yoga is a spiritual path that leads to the center of yourself. It’s is a hero’s journey that takes you through valleys of darkness where you will meet fear, anxiety, sadness, anger, pride, jealousy and much more on the way. Along the way you cultivate the tool of the Equanimeous mind so that you can be strong and be brave. Once you arrive at the center of yourself a wellspring of light, knowledge, peace and love fills your heart. Practice until your cup overflows. Practice until your world changes. Practice until there is nothing left but the pure joy of surrender. Believe in yourself through the power of yoga. Practice every day. Never give up.”

We’re extremely happy that Kino did not give up.

What was her life like before she found her light?

Let’s peer in her journal at yogajournal.com. “My life before yoga consisted of all-night parties, dance music, and generally being too fabulous for my own good. I had a lot of high heels and makeup paired with plenty of attitude and ego. I never thought I would give all that up for early-morning yoga practice. A life-changing moment happened one day when I was in an elevator going to an after-hours party on an average Monday morning. A man in his mid-50s was reminiscing about the party scene of the 1980s, which were filled with cocaine and heroin. It hit me like an epiphany that endless raves would only lead me to be like him. I would either be in my mid-50s holding on to the almost glorious party days of the ecstasy generation, or I would have to do something “real” with my life.

It was another year before I took any real action, but I slowly started to see that my hunger for sleepless nights spent on the dance floor, fueled by chemical substances, was a kind of spiritual desperation. I had been struggling with my own sadness since I was nine years old. I was miserable, and I never had the tools to face my own misery. When I first took ecstasy, it was like a kind of happiness that I had never felt in my life. So I did more and more of it in a mad dash to self-medicate the then-undiagnosed depression from which I had been suffering for most of my life. There are many problems with self-medicating a psychiatric disorder using a controlled illegal substance, starting with the most obvious that reliance on drugs creates an addictive cycle that can wreck your whole life. On the quest for a bigger high, I was on the road to self-destruction. It was an endless train that I may not have gotten off if I had not met that man in the elevator. I guess that in some ways I owe him a debt of gratitude.

The first casualties of my new lifestyle were my party friends. While I knew that this new path was the right one for me, I felt like I was walking a solitary journey. Within a few months of that first yoga class, I moved to New York City and joined a traditional Ashtanga Yoga Mysore Style class.”

Kino MacGregor is one of only 14 people—and the youngest woman—in the United States to receive certification to teach Ashtanga Yoga from its founder Sri K. Pattabhi Jois. Ms. MacGregor and her husband, Tim Feldmann, are the founders of the Miami Life Center, where they teach daily classes, workshops, and intensives together. Her latest book, The Yogi Assignment.

If you want to check out her books, here is the link: