In the intro, Gurmukh explains that she is a Sikh (which is why she wears the turban) and has been practicing this faith *and* teaching yoga for 30 years. Despite her youthful appearance and the voice of a breathy 20 years old, she's 58 years old! They show clips of her teaching various classes and in one she has a gong with the Paiste cymbals company logo--it made me think of my heavy metal youth and the "Paiste is rude" ads in Circus magazine.

Visuals: The 4 twentysomething exercisers are outdoors on blankets with Gurmukh on a shaded platform in front of them. Gorgeous scenery. They're all wearing loose pants of different colors/fabrics and tank tops or t-shirts. One of the exercisers looks like Sarah McLachlan. Gurmukh is in a long cream or white overdress over leggings or a unitard. She has on an embroidered white scarf and a white turban.

The workout itself is divided into 4 parts--Awaken, Energize, Strengthen and Relax. You begin seated and you circle your body around while keeping your butt on the ground, and then spend a lot of time stretching and contracting your spine (kind of a seated version of cat and cow) in time with your breathing. This is not the slow cat and cow--kundalini yoga moves at a rather rapid pace! At first everyone seemed to be going faster than me and Gurmukh kept saying "faster!" and then I'd look at the screen and realize I was now going faster than the folks in the video. It reminded me a lot of children's movement classes. Lots of fast rocking, twisting, and bending moves, all done in time to the breathing.

You move on to standing poses in the Energize and Strengthen sections . At one point you're actually jumping around and punching the air--kind of a taebo-ish thing. It definitely has a cardio aspect. You really don't do any of the poses one usually associates with yoga, except for the corpse pose at the end. I would caution anyone who gets this tape to really follow their own pace and not try to match that of the exercisers--they do some things very fast and I could see a potential for injury with some of the movements. Gurmukh doesn't spend much time talking about form, in fact, at several points she says "Forget about form! Just do what feels right" (or words to that effect.)

The video is beautiful to see--the class participants are all attractive and twentysomething (one looks like Sarah McLachlan). The video is filmed outdoors with carpets on the grass. Of course, you don't see this much because you're supposed to do the entire workout with your eyes closed and rolled up in your head to look at the "third eye." People with low tolerance for this sort of thing may want to steer clear. It's not oppressive, though. I've been taking yoga for several years now and being instructed to "open your heart center" and to inwardly chant "saht" on the inhale and "nam" on the exhale don't bother me.

Renee Drellishak