How to Set an Intention When You Come to the Mat with Brett Larkin [Episode 255]
Release Date: 02/05/2019
The Uplifted Yoga Podcast
What happens when healing becomes another thing you’re trying to achieve? In this episode, I’m joined by my friend Bailee for a tender conversation about grief, the feminine, Shuniya, and the power of not fixing yourself. We explore grief not as something you “get over,” but as a living process to be felt, held, and slowly alchemized. Bailee shares how her journey led her into deeper stillness, sensory awareness, sound, archetype, and the feminine mystery. This conversation asks: What if there is nothing to fix? What if the next step is learning how to listen differently? Inside this...
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Today’s episode is another behind-the-scenes look, this time inside my 200-hour Kundalini Yoga Teacher Training. This teaching comes from the Feminine Form Kundalini module, where we unpack what we mean by feminine energy. In yoga, tantra, and Kundalini, feminine energy isn’t about gender or identity. It’s archetypal energy, the Shakti current within all of us. In this clip, I explore Shiva and Shakti, the light and dark feminine, and why both matter. I’ll also look at how feminine energy becomes blocked, through over-control, disconnection from desire, difficulty receiving, and lack...
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What if the world itself could become your meditation object? In this episode, we explore Chapter 10 of the Bhagavad Gita, known as Vibhuti Yoga — the yoga of divine manifestation and sacred seeing. This chapter explores how to train our perception and helps us stop dividing life into “spiritual” and “not spiritual.” The sunset, the breath, the body, the mountain, even impermanence, all can become doorways back to the sacred. It also marks a turning point in Arjuna’s relationship with Krishna. Until now, Arjuna has known Krishna as his friend, cousin, mentor, and charioteer. Here,...
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Do cravings, fatigue, or hormonal shifts have you feeling like a stranger in your body? In this episode, I’m joined by Sema Özpekmezci for a grounded, compassionate conversation about chronic illness, women’s health, perimenopause, hormones, and what it really means to listen to your body. We explore how midlife changes can feel confusing and how symptoms like cravings, energy dips, mood shifts, and inflammation can become invitations into deeper self-understanding. Sema also shares a powerful way to think about your hormones as the “CEO” of your body and why food, stress, blood...
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What’s actually happening in the body when yoga helps you “calm down”? In this behind-the-scenes lesson pulled directly from the Uplifted 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training, we explore the nervous system science behind yoga, and why practices like breathwork, inversions, mantra, repetition, and Savasana can profoundly shift your stress response. You’ll learn why yoga isn’t just about relaxing, but about building awareness, resilience, and the ability to move skillfully between stress and recovery. We explore: 🔹 How yoga activates the parasympathetic nervous system 🔹 Why slow...
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Why do the world’s great spiritual traditions teach through stories, imagery, and metaphor instead of simple instructions? In this episode, I’ll explore why metaphor changes us in a way facts alone cannot and how imagery bypasses the analytical mind to speak directly to the nervous system, imagination, memory, and body. Building on Part 1, we’ll dive deeper into Tantra’s vision of awakening as a love story between Shiva and Shakti: awareness and energy, stillness and sensation, consciousness and embodiment. I’ll explore: 🔹 Why metaphor activates the nervous system differently than...
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How do you make a big decision… yogically? In this episode, I explore what happens when you deeply desire something — a new job, a baby, a retreat, a training, a relationship — but don’t actually have the capacity to hold it right now. This is a conversation about desire, capacity, and the real conditions for clarity. Because so often we think we’re confused, when really what’s happening is that one part of us wants something badly, and another part of us knows we don’t have the bandwidth. In this episode, I explore: 🔹 The difference between desire and capacity and why both...
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What if the patterns running your life didn’t start with you? In this conversation, I sit down with Uplifted alum Amy Hunter to talk about the deeper work of somatic coaching, recovery, and healing family-of-origin patterns. Amy has taken multiple trainings inside the Uplifted ecosystem — including 200-hour, 300-hour, Kundalini, Embodied Yoga Life Coaching, and most recently the AI course — and now brings all of that into her own coaching practice. Together, we explore what it looks like to move from self-awareness into real change. In this episode, we cover: 🔹 How somatic coaching...
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What if the deepest spiritual secret wasn’t hidden somewhere far away, but woven into your ordinary life right now? In Chapter 9 of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna reveals what he calls the “king of knowledge” and the “most confidential secret”. A teaching so simple and intimate that most people overlook it completely. This episode explores the heart of bhakti yoga: devotion, relationship with the divine, and the radical idea that the sacred permeates everything. We explore: 🔹 Why Krishna says the divine is both everywhere and beyond everything 🔹 The paradox at the center of yoga...
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What if stress isn’t actually the problem? What if the real issue is that your body never got to finish the stress response? In this episode, we revisit one of the most powerful conversations we’ve ever had on the podcast: why healing isn’t about becoming calm all the time and how sacred rage, movement, and emotional expression may actually be the missing piece to your healing. Using the archetype of the Hindu goddess Kali, we explore the difference between suppression and regulation, why so many yogis get stuck in spiritual bypassing, and how somatic practices help the body finally...
info_outlineOften teachers ask us to "set an intention" when coming to our yoga mat -- but what does that actually mean? And how do we do this? What if having to set an agenda for our practice triggers us or feels like extra work? In this episode, I cover 3 key methods of "intention setting," how you can use intentions to get key questions about your life answered, and even how to heal yourself (and loved ones) with the power of your practice.
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Brett is the founder of Uplifted Yoga, an online yoga and meditation community empowering students to personalize their practice and ignite their best life - on and off the mat. She’s instructed at top studios, companies like Google and Pinterest, and leads the world’s most interactive Online Yoga Teacher Training program. She teaches to a social media following of over 300K people. Her content on Youtube is streamed for 2 million minutes each month. Learn more at BrettLarkin.com
Creator & Host: Brett Larkin
Sound Engineer: Zach Cooper
Producer: Benn Mendelson
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