Walking the Path of Love

Life’s journey is paved with many challenges, but you’d be amazed at how walking a path of enlightenment can quite literally lighten the load.In this episode, Charlyn welcomes Brahmani Liebman, a lifelong student of yoga and meditation. She began her studies in the 70s and spent decades learning yogic and Buddhist teachings from Kripalu's original ashram in Sumneytown. Over the years, the practices extended beyond their professional settings and found their way into her home life and marriage.The conversation covers a diverse range of topics, including meditation and mindfulness. But a central thread runs throughout: self-discovery. Brahmani opens up about her entry to yoga, sharing the moments and feelings that led her to the ashram and, later, the wisdom that’s kept her focused decades later. The five mind states—desire, aversion, worry, sloth, and doubt—that she learned early on at a Buddhist retreat are just one example.Then she digs deeper. Most people have a hard time maintaining mindfulness in their everyday lives, but Brahmani has mastered it. Here, she talks about how trust has shaped her biggest decisions, including leaving her husband and young children for a month just to train at Kripalu and her decision to open her own yoga studio. Years later, that same instinct became her north star when it came time to grow her small studio into something much bigger. In the final moments, Brahmani tells the story of a house fire that destroyed nearly everything she and her husband owned, except a small Buddha statue left standing on the front step.The key takeaway from this episode is a question Brahmani asks often: What’s needed? The answer is never the same. But the act has become a symbol for something much bigger. At the end of the episode, she offers a closing reflection for listeners: You are exactly where you need to be, so keep living love.Episode Takeaways:How Brahmani found yoga and the teachings that shaped her spiritual path (10:06)How the question "what is needed now" has guided Brahmani's biggest life decisions (19:22)The five mind states and how naming one shifts you from story into presence. (25:51)Why self-observation with compassion matters more than self-judgment (28:34)The story of the Buddha statue that survived a house fire (32:51)Where to find Brahmani's retreats, trainings, and free yoga classes (38:16)Connect with Brahmani Liebman:YouTube WebsiteEmailInstagramLet's Connect!WebsiteFacebookInstagramGet your copy of Walking the Path of Love: Connecting to the Kripalu Lineage and the Core Teachings of Swami Kripalu

What has love taught you that you couldn't have learned any other way? And what does it really take to live without fear?In this episode of Walking the Path of Love, Charlyn sits down with Devarshi Steven Hartman, a yogi and spiritual leader whose work has shaped many students, including her own. He’s the founder of the Pranotthan Yoga School and the former director of professional training and dean of the Kripalu School of Yoga. He’s taught thousands of yogis and joins Charlyn to talk about his new book, The Three Essentials.As a longtime spiritual teacher, Devarshi offers his wisdom for spiritual advancement, drawing on his experiences for context. He shares the teachings that have shaped his work, breaking them down into three main pillars: the practice of conscious breathing, the five koshas as they relate to habitual patterns, and the belief that we are infinite, eternal, and whole. Then he speaks about the importance of community and how surrounding yourself with like-minded people can be crucial to your personal growth. It takes years to master yoga’s principles, breathing practices, and the spiritual teachings behind them. But Devarshi has managed to uncomplicate the path without losing sight of the messages. Throughout this rich conversation, he unpacks what it means to tear down the walls, choose a more peaceful, fearless way of living, and ultimately what true transformation looks like.Episode takeawaysWhy love is a vibration and a transmission, not just an action (07:51)The five koshas, and how our habitual, unconscious patterns get held in the body, breath, and mind (11:54)Why peace and fear cannot coexist, and what it means to walk a genuinely fearless path (19:48)The importance of community and relationship as a mirror we can't give ourselves (25:36)The five causes of suffering, and why "you are infinite, eternal, and whole" is the essential belief underneath them all (21:15)How loss and brushes with mortality reshaped Devarshi's relationship to the present moment (37:23)Conscious breathing as the foundation, and the doorway, of all yoga practice (43:07)Practical first steps for integrating the Three Essentials into daily life (46:37)Connect with Devarshi Steven Hartman:WebsiteInstagramFacebookGet the book, The Three EssentialsLet's connect:WebsiteFacebookInstagramGet your copy of Walking the Path of Love: Connecting to the Kripalu Lineage and the Core Teachings of Swami Kripalu

What if the most devastating thing that ever happened to you turned out to be the doorway into the deepest love you have ever known?In this episode of Walking the Path of Love, Charlyn sits down with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, an award-winning poet, teacher, and speaker whose work has appeared in O: The Oprah Magazine, the Washington Post Book Club, on the Carnegie Hall stage, and on A Prairie Home Companion. Since 2006, Rosemerry has written a poem every single day, and what began as a writing practice has become something closer to a way of life: a daily act of showing up, staying open, and letting the world teach her what she did not yet know.This conversation moves through many rooms. There is the room of devotion versus ambition, where a quiet but radical difference exists between striving to get somewhere and being so in love with the world that you want to show up completely right. Then there is the room of poetry as permission, the way a poem read aloud in a yoga class can make someone feel that their anger, fear, and grief are not only acceptable but worthy of being named.What Rosemerry describes is not healing in the tidy, linear sense. It is something more honest. For example, the tidal wave of love she felt the day after Finn died. Or the moment she began to understand that her husband's grief was his to carry, not hers to take on. Ultimately, she discovered that gifts can be hidden inside loss. Though she didn't go looking for it, peace found her, again and again, even during her most difficult moments.You’ll leave this episode with a question that a friend once gave Rosemerry: Is this the path of love? There is no fixed answer. Instead, the question becomes a compass, one that Rosemerry carries through every ordinary hour of her day. By the end of this episode, you might just find yourself asking it too.Episode Takeaways:An opening poem, Faith, and what it means to trust not the knowing but the becoming (02:30)The difference between ambition and devotion, and why one sustains a practice while the other depletes it (03:51)How poetry taught Rosemerry to write past what she knows to reach the unknown where the real discoveries live (08:54)Why grief and joy are not opposites, and what opens up when we stop insisting they should be (16:55)The tidal wave of love she felt the day after her son Finn died, and how it changed her forever (38:47)Why there are infinite ways to grieve and what compassion looks like when we stop expecting others to do it the way we do (24:52)The six-word question that became her compass for every ordinary moment of her day (46:01)Connect with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer:WebsiteInstagramGet Rosemerry’s books!Let’s connect:WebsiteFacebookInstagramGet your copy of Walking the Path of Love: Connecting to the Kripalu Lineage and the Core Teachings of Swami Kripalu

What if the teachings that could change your life were sitting in a drawer, waiting for someone brave enough to finish the work?In this episode of Walking the Path of Love, Charlyn sits down with Shobhan Richard Faulds, a scholar, writer, and devoted practitioner who has made it his life's work to ensure that Swami Kripalu's teachings reach the people who need them most. Shobhan has been actively involved in the Kripalu lineage since 1981, served as Kripalu Center's lawyer for twenty-five years, and has written three substantive books dedicated to preserving and transmitting Swami Kripalu's teachings in a form that Western readers can truly receive.Swami Kripalu practiced ten hours a day for thirty years, driven by a vision of yoga that began with health and moved all the way through psychological well-being, effective living, and spiritual awakening. He taught that these were not separate destinations but a single, coherent path, one that any sincere practitioner could walk. Shobhan spent more than a decade studying that vision, distilling over a thousand of Swami Kripalu's quotes, and finding a way to present it whole. He describes the work as the biggest puzzle he has ever attempted to solve in his life, and this conversation is a window into what that journey cost him and what it gave back.What emerges is a portrait of a path that begins not with renunciation but with a longing. Shobhan met Swami Kripalu two days after walking across the stage to receive his college diploma, and his response was immediate and visceral: " My God, this really is possible. This yearning I feel to express my soul in a full-hearted fashion is possible.” That moment set everything in motion, including a law degree, a master's in human development, and more than a decade of distilling over a thousand of Swami Kripalu's quotes into a coherent map for the rest of us.One of the most quietly important things Shobhan offers in this conversation is a correction that matters deeply for anyone who has ever felt like they were doing spirituality wrong. The early Kripalu community made a mistake, he says plainly. The renunciate path was treated as the real path, the one that led to enlightenment, and the householder path was seen as the lesser route, the one you walked until a better lifetime came along. The more deeply Shobhan studied Swami Kripalu's actual teachings, the more clearly he saw that this was simply not true. The householder path is not a dumbed-down version of anything. It is its own complete and sacred way.Episode Takeaways:An opening breath and arrival practice led by Charlyn (00:03)What it was like to come into Swami Kripalu's presence and why Shobhan had never encountered anyone like him (02:50)The moment two days after college graduation that set Shobhan on the path of yoga (06:45)How a newsletter template became the beginning of a twelve-year writing project (11:00)Why were Swami Kripalu's teachings so difficult to understand, and what was lost when he died at sixty-nine (17:46)The crucial mistake made in the early ashram around the householder path, and why it matters (35:54)How teaching stories reveal different meanings at different stages of life, and why that is the point (23:33)What love would say, if it could speak through you right now (45:40)Let’s connect:WebsiteFacebookInstagramGet your copy of Walking the Path of Love: Connecting to the Kripalu Lineage and the Core Teachings of Swami Kripalu

What if your life wasn't something you planned, but something that chose you?In this episode of Walking the Path of Love, Charlyn sits down with Prem Shakti, a woman whose path defies every tidy narrative about how a spiritual life is supposed to unfold. Prem has been serving individuals and groups around the world for 52 years, blending Eastern and Western traditions into a foundation for living with confidence, inspiration, and soul alignment.She was one of the first residents at the Kripalu Ashram in Sumneytown, Pennsylvania, helped invite the public into its earliest programs, and welcomed Swami Kripalu when he came to America. She has since trained thousands of bodyworkers, yoga teachers, and meditators across the globe, not to give them answers, but to help them find their own.What unfolds in this conversation is a life told in pieces: busking in the London underground, narrowly escaping a musician who nearly murdered her, running through open fields crying because suddenly she could feel God in everything. Through all of it, there is a steady undercurrent of trust. Not the tidy, affirmation-card kind. The kind that gets tested at every turn and somehow holds anyway.What stays with you most is the image of Prem on an airplane, weeping because a voice inside told her to leave the ashram she had called home for eighteen years, and her quiet, almost matter-of-fact response: I didn't ask for this. It was downloaded, and I can't argue. That quality of surrender, of being genuinely taken by something larger than herself, is the thread that runs through every story she tells. And far from being passive, it turns out to be one of the most courageous things a person can do.Episode Takeaways:An opening centering meditation: light descending from crown to earth, opening the heart with compassion and curiosity (05:24)What it felt like to sit with Swami Kripalu in darshan and dissolve into pure love in his presence (08:15)From London busker to near-murder to a Shaktipata awakening in a yoga class in New York (12:57)The booming voice on the airplane that told her to leave everything, and how she learned to trust it (21:19)Truth as courage: why facing reality frees up energy to create rather than cope (28:22)How personal practice evolves, and why what worked yesterday may not be what you need today (37:13)What love would say, if it could speak through you right now (45:45)Connect with Prem Shakti:Phone: +1 561-351-3680Email: premcreativepower@gmail.comLet’s connect:WebsiteFacebookInstagramGet your copy of Walking the Path of Love: Connecting to the Kripalu Lineage and the Core Teachings of Swami Kripalu

What does it take to finally trust love instead of fear after a lifetime of letting fear lead the way? And what happens when a writer known for raw, painful honesty decides her next book will come from joy instead?In this episode of Walking the Path of Love, Charlyn sits down with Priscilla Warner, the New York Times bestselling author of The Faith Club and Learning to Breathe, and now the creator of How to Fall in Love with Yourself, a book built around reconnecting with her younger self through art and photography. Priscilla is also a trained sound healer who works with antique Tibetan singing bowls, and her path has carried her through decades of panic attacks, a long marriage built on an instant (and unexplainable knowing), and the kind of healing that only comes from sitting still long enough to listen.Priscilla opens the conversation with a grounding practice using her singing bowls, each tuned to a different chakra, before she and Charlyn dive into what it actually looks like to choose love over fear in real time. She shares the night she met her husband nearly forty-five years ago, a moment she still cannot fully account for except to call it intuition, and how that same quiet knowing eventually grew into the deep trust she now relies on as a healer, sensing what people are carrying in their bodies before they say a word.What stays with you most from this conversation is the practice Priscilla calls click-click, a habit she picked up from her mother of pausing to truly notice a moment so it never gets lost, and the gentler one of simply calling herself sweetheart instead of the names she used to call herself. Both came from hard places: her mother's decline from Alzheimer's, years of self-criticism so sharp she barely recognized it as cruelty, and both became doorways into something tender. The invitation beneath it all is the same one she offers her grandchildren and the readers of her book: that loving yourself first is not selfish; it is simply where everything else becomes possible.Episode Takeaways:A grounding centering practice using antique Tibetan singing bowls (04:40)The night Priscilla met her husband and the intuition she still cannot explain forty-five years later (10:29)Learning to sense trauma in others through sound healing and what her teacher told her about it (13:50)From panic attacks to presence: how meditation, EMDR, and Reiki reshaped her nervous system (16:18)The sweetheart practice and why speaking gently to yourself is harder than it sounds (21:58)Writing How to Fall in Love with Yourself as a love letter to her children and grandchildren (28:33)Click click: the photography habit from her mother that became a lifelong way of staying present (29:52)A closing meditation on the magic rock and the invitation to become whoever you want to be (34:06)Connect with Priscilla Warner:WebsiteInstagramFacebookGet Priscilla’s books!Let’s connect:WebsiteFacebookInstagramGet your copy of Walking the Path of Love: Connecting to the Kripalu Lineage and the Core Teachings of Swami Kripalu

What happens when you stop forcing answers and learn to pause long enough to actually receive them? And what does it look like to build a life, a family, and a teaching practice rooted not in doctrine but in direct, lived experience?In this episode of Walking the Path of Love, Charlyn sits down with Connie Miller, a yoga practitioner since 1970 and the creator of Yoga Rhythmics, the dancing path of yoga. Connie was part of the original Kripalu community in Summertown, Pennsylvania, where she raised four children while keeping one foot at home and one foot in the ashram. Over five decades, she has taught thousands of people across every kind of setting, and today she also works as an intuitive energy healer, weaving together Eastern wisdom, modern neuroscience, and a lifetime of embodied practice.Connie opens the conversation with a grounding centering practice, inviting everyone present to arrive fully, feel the beating of their heart, and rest in the extraordinary electromagnetic frequency of love that lives there. From there, she and Charlyn move into a rich exploration of what it really means to walk a householder path and how a weeklong fever at 106 degrees became one of Connie's most profound encounters with Swami Kripalu's presence, a story she has rarely shared with anyone.One of the threads that runs through this whole conversation is the practice of pausing, not as a passive waiting, but as an active opening. Connie shares the now-legendary cellar window story, about how standing with her frustration and breathing instead of forcing led to a solution appearing in a way she still cannot fully explain. That moment, small and domestic as it was, became a living demonstration of everything Babaji taught about trust, receptivity, and inner guidance. And it is the same thread that moved through the vision she received in the meditation room, giving birth to Yoga Rhythmics entirely. The pause is when something beyond what we already know can come through.Episode Takeaways:A heart-centered opening practice to help you arrive fully present (05:34)Connie's rarely shared story of her near-death fever and feeling Babaji's presence carry her through (09:35)What the householder path really looks like: raising four children while living steps from the ashram (17:08)Teaching from lived experience, not from ideals, and why that commitment changed everything (22:29)The cellar window story: what happened when Connie stopped forcing and actually paused (25:08)The vision that gave birth to Yoga Rhythmics and why Connie waited years to tell anyone (31:26)Self-observation, the monkey mind, and how knowing yourself opens the door to genuine connection (33:01)Intuitive energy healing and working with brain networks to rewrite the stories keeping us stuck (37:57)Connect with Connie:WebsiteFacebookPhone: 215-205-1454Email: info@sizzleandsoar.comLet’s connect:WebsiteFacebookInstagramGet your copy of Walking the Path of Love: Connecting to the Kripalu Lineage and the Core Teachings of Swami Kripalu

What if the right guide could help you remember who you truly are and deepen your spiritual practice? How does receiving mentorship shape not just our own journey, but how we show up for others?In this episode of Walking the Path of Love, Charlyn sits down with Grace MacLeod, a pillar in the Kripalu lineage with direct experience learning from Swami Kripalu during his transformational time in the States. Grace is a mentor, guide, and devoted practitioner who works with others on relationships, creative expression, and spiritual remembrance. Her work is deeply rooted in the practices and teachings she received from the lineage, and she brings a gentle, compassionate approach to helping others remember their soul's purpose and walk their path with confidence.In this conversation, Grace opens our time together with a beautiful centering practice and blessing, guiding us into a place of remembrance and presence. She shares her profound experiences meeting Swami Kripalu and the wisdom she gained during those pivotal moments. Together with Charlyn, they explore how receiving guidance transforms not just our personal practice but also how we expand and deepen our ability to serve and teach.Sometimes the moments that shake us most are the very moments inviting us back to ourselves. Grace reminds us that when a wave rises inside, when fear, emotion, tension, or uncertainty seem to take over nearly all of our being, there is still a steady place within us capable of observing with compassion and breathing through the experience. The practice is not to fight the wave or pretend it is not there, but to soften, stay present, and trust that what arises can move through us and return us to peace. As you move through your days, perhaps the invitation is simply to notice: Where can you create a little more space, a little more breath, a little more love for what is happening inside of you right now?Episode Takeaways:A centering practice and blessing to arrive fully present (04:19)Grace's profound encounters with Swami Kripalu during his time in the States (09:24)The role of experiential knowing and trusting your direct experience on the spiritual path (16:34)Follow the breadcrumbs: learning to trust guidance one step at a time instead of needing the whole plan (19:07)How receiving spiritual mentorship transforms your own practice and expands your teaching (25:00)Why integration matters more than “fixing” ourselves and how unprocessed reactions remain in the body (33:26)Understanding different mentoring approaches: couples work, spiritual guidance, and service (42:00)Love's eternal message: You are cherished, safe, and never alone (49:25)Connect with Grace:WebsiteInstagramFacebookOfficiant Grace websiteLet’s connect:WebsiteFacebookInstagramGet your copy of Walking the Path of Love: Connecting to the Kripalu Lineage and the Core Teachings of Swami Kripalu