Founder – Chakra Yoga

David Goulet

A truly rare yogi

With his 54 years of experience he is a celebrated teacher of teachers and master yogi. In-depth knowledge of pranayama techniques Expert on the 9 forms of yoga and the yogic way of living. He developed the chakra yoga system over the years. A style of yoga that will detox your system and transcend your mind into free consciousness.

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David Goulet

First studying in India in the early 70's, he has dedicated his life to the science of yoga. More than 5 decades later, the wisdom of the chakras are at the center of his practice and teaching.Ever since graduating from Ananda Ashram in 1972, David has continued his personal and professional pursuit of the yogic lifestyle as an international Yoga Teacher, Healer and Founder of several Retreat Centers.Studying for two years under the dynamic, inspired Dr. Swami Gitananda in Pondicherry, South India, David's strong foundational understanding of the Ancient Chakra System provided the basis for much of his present-day teachings. Through exploration, examination and parallel research in Quantum Physics, David's subsequent travels in Mexico, Guatemala, Egypt, and South East Asia only further affirmed the wisdom he received from Swami Gitananda, which he now shares with his students.This invaluable knowledge is shared through the Pyramid Yoga Centers, one in Thailand and another in the Philippines. These centers focus on teaching students the ways of Chakra Yoga (for example, through teacher training courses) but also serve as a place for patients to come for healing, utilizing the science of Chakra Yoga directly.A truly rare yogiIt's rare these days to find a teacher of such incredible persistence and dedication to their craft. With almost 5 decades of personal practice and exploration, David presents the science of Chakra Yoga based on an exceptionally strong foundation of experience. He has blessed the world by training more than 1200 new student teachers, as well as touching the lives of hundreds of people, bringing back their self-awareness and individual empowerment. Countless people have reclaimed their health, happiness and contentment due to David's guidance.

Autobiography

When I began my journey into yoga, I knew of no one in my environment, friends or family who had heard of such a thing. I found a book about it in the psychology section of the local library in North Bay, Ontario: Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga by Swami Vishnu Devananda. I was keenly interested in exploring the mind, so I looked for related information in that library section. Little did I know where this first book would lead me. I gained interest in it or at least a curiosity. In that library book, I found many techniques to improve the functioning of the mind through physical exercise, as well as to promote better health. There were also statements about better perception and higher states of consciousness, though at the time, I did not know what the author meant by a “higher state”. Some months later, I began travelling and bought my first small book on practical exercises or Hatha Yoga. Thus began five decades of experience and research. I certainly didn’t realize when I first started doing a few exercises, in 1969, that I had stumbled upon the oldest science on the planet; I didn’t even know until later that it was a science.The basics were simple enough: a bit of exercise and some breathing. In some ways, it was like looking at the first two letters of the alphabet; I had no idea there was a whole alphabet to follow. I was coming from a different culture. In my Western culture, exercise was acceptable, and cleanliness was connected to health, but this elaborate system seemed a little extreme. There were some strange things in this yoga book. For instance, there were pictures of a man passing a string up one nostril and down through the mouth, to clean the nasal passages; another picture showed him swallowing a 30-foot strip of rag and pulling it out again, to clean his stomach and digestive tract. I found this type of internal cleanliness a little far-fetched. I did not think I would ever want to do that, and I never did. However, there were other aspects of this yoga method that did capture my attention, like the concept of perfect health and developing mental abilities.
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Perhaps I found this to be interesting because of my previous education. Having finalized my high school education with math, chemistry and physics, and with electronics and stereos as my favourite hobby, this whole idea of the electrical energy side of our being made a lot of sense to me. Most of man’s latest creations were electronic, while he himself also had an electronic part. This part is as obvious as the nervous system an elaborate wiring system that is continuously conducting energy impulses between the brain and every part of our physical bodies. It seemed to me that gaining an understanding of how we were wired could lead us to some interesting places. I got the impression that the nervous system and its mental effects had already been largely mapped out in the East, while everything I had read in the world of Western psychology seemed primitive in this regard, although this wiring aspect of the nervous system was a bit documented; the research that I could find was still directed at rats and attempts to modify their behaviour.

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I was quite fortunate in my travels, in that everything worked out fairly well and I never had any bad experiences. I don’t mean to say there were no challenging times, but I met a lot of good and helpful people along my journey. Within the first months of my solo journey, I connected with some people of like mind in Mexico, who invited me to stay with them. They had a paradise villa in Cuernavaca and were all interested in yoga, so we soon became friends. Each morning the sun would rise and shine onto the front lawn to find Nancy and I breathing deeply and doing postures. Half the day would be spent talking about the philosophy of the East and the religions of the world. The experience created a nice bond of kinship among all of us. For me, it was the first occurrence of being with a group of friends I could fully relate to. After a month of living in this heart-warming environment, I continued along my solo journey, but I kept meeting folks who were on similar paths, exploring the world and looking for philosophical idealism.
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Swami Gitananda had studied yoga in his teenage years with Ram Gopal Muzumdar, who is referred to in Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi as the Sleepless Saint. In his late teens he went on to England to study medicine. Either his mother or father (I don’t recall which) was British, so he had the opportunity to go to college in that country. His medical career went from there to Canada and the U.S., spanning 38 years. I heard many interesting stories about what was really going on in the medical establishment, some of which surprised me at the time, but since then I have come to see the reality of what he said. The result of his years of experience as a doctor and surgeon led him to the conclusion that Western medicine had no long-term positive effects. Consequently, he returned to India in order to teach people how to live healthy lives with a spiritual purpose.
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At the time I arrived, he had only been there a couple of years, but he had managed to establish a very happening ashram. The atmosphere was bustling with activity; over 40 students were in the full-time residential curriculum and several others were coming in as guests for a period of a few days to a week. Swami himself taught eight hours of classes each day, seven days a week, except Thursday afternoons when we had time off to look after personal business. The course was intense by anyone’s standards. He made it more so that term, by extending it for one full month. Also, that semester was the only time that I know of when he taught the full course on Yantra Yoga.He dropped it the following year. What he added in that year, however, was a series of discourses on the chakras. Again, this proved to be a one-time event that he never repeated. Some of us advanced students prompted him to do this, and we recorded every lecture. Afterwards, I took the tapes and spent my spare time during the next month transcribing the tapes. The notes I assimilated at that time became the foundation for my research on the energy world of the chakras, an exploration that is still expanding my inner vision 50 years later.Swami Gitananda was a brilliant orator and a very inspiring teacher, always a dynamo of energy, who bounded up the stairs to our rooftop classroom in such a way as to stir everyone up with his radiance. With his storytelling abilities and his sense of humour, he kept us all well entertained. When we were not being entertained by his words, we were busy practicing the multitude of things we had learned. For me, this experience of being intensely involved in the practice of yoga for so many consecutive months created a lifestyle that simply became part of me. I am forever grateful for that gift. The wealth and depth of his knowledge of yoga was encyclopaedic it covered such a wide range of the various aspects of this science that I have not since found anything like it in my studies.That first year at the ashram, the Yantra year, there was another doctor who came every day to teach homeopathy. Dr. Ganapathy was his name. Only about a dozen students took the course. I did not because it was half over when I arrived, but I did get to know him as a teacher. A couple of the other students, Teresa and I, became friends with him after the teachers' training, when all the other students had left. He was full of good philosophical advice on how to live a spiritual life, very knowledgeable on herbs, and, as we found out through the grapevine, quite an adept at healing through touch. I got to verify the latter when Dr. Ganapathy put the final touch on healing my heart problem one day. He quite literally touched my rib cage, just near my heart, and kept his fingers there for what seemed like one whole minute. Meanwhile he was talking about compassionate living through reaching out to people in need and helping them in whichever ways were appropriate. I noticed the dramatic change in my condition a few minutes later when I went running up two flights of stairs to get something, and felt empowered at the top of the stairs, rather than my usual heart palpitations.These two doctors were the teachers who initiated me into the ancient wonders of yoga, health and healing during my first few months in India. In the months that followed, I travelled around the country as a saddhu, a wandering monk, staying in temples and mingling with those who had renounced the world for the spiritual path. It was during that period of travel that I met Om Prakash, a man with a name that translates as God’s Light. Though I met many people who had something to teach me throughout this time, I can say that Om was one of the three principal teachers who contributed to my transformation. I spent one week with him and his family up in their Himalayan home, during which time he offered me his meditation room and often gave me advice on what was important to practice and what to teach or not teach. This enlightened gentleman always possessed an aura of serenity, but what impressed me deeply was his vision. He could scan through you to past lifetimes, and let you see what he was seeing. My time with Om was not filled with teachings and techniques, but rather like an expansion of mind and consciousness that allowed me to see the greater picture of who I was, had been, and was going to be. This summarizes my encounters with some of the masters of India. The next significant phase of my education came the following year when I began living in Guatemala and Mexico. I was still a wandering monk, a penniless monk in fact, as is the tradition in India, but now exploring the old ruins of the Mayan civilization from Palenque to the Yucatan. Within these ruins I kept finding icons, statues and symbols that reminded me of India. In one of the old temples, I found a life-size statue of Shiva with the five-headed cobra rising up over his head. This my friend Don and I discovered in an underground area of the temple that was closed to the public. We were there at 5 a.m. with flashlights, and there was no one there to stop us from exploring. We were also finding mandala symbols of the chakras in a variety of places and contexts, while the serpent Kundalini kept raising its head everywhere. Not only did the serpent raise its head, but here it had wings, as if it were a flying serpent. Obviously, Kundalini was once awake in this part of the world. As well, little icons of people in different postures that were very yoga-like could be purchased from some of the locals (often illegally, since they had been found during excavations and were not supposed to be sold).

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The familiarity of all these things made me feel there was an old India buried here, and we were just seeing some of what was coming up to the surface. Even the structure of the temple towers looked the same as in India. The following year I made my way to Tikal and found what I recognized as a South Indian Temple, still half-buried in the Guatemalan jungle. To me, this was the final proof that the ancient system of yoga and the chakras had been here. It was still here. I had been living in Guatemala for a couple of winters by then and had spent time observing the ways of the brujos, the local shamans. They had a lot of chanting and drumming rituals similar to the saddhus of India. What struck me the most was their bright jackets embroidered with those same chakra mandalas that kept resurfacing.This was the period during which I was painting mandalas myself while reading books about ancient native cultures.
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Books like Burning Waters by Laurette Sejourne, and Seven Arrows by Hyemeyohsts Storm, were providing further inspiration about an underlying perennial philosophy that was bonding all these cultures. That philosophy explained the universal energy of the chakras, the energy which weaves the fabric of the world as we perceive it.The more deeply I looked into it, the more apparent it became that beneath the surface of these belief systems from separate cultures lay the understanding of the energy world and its manifestation into matter.Almost a decade later I finally made it to Egypt, again for the purpose of exploring what they knew about yoga and the chakras. Although much of what I found in Central America was coded in symbolism that requires a background in Yantra to decipher, Egypt required a lot less interpretation. Many of the classic postures of Hatha Yoga are carved in stone. In the museum at Luxor, for example, you can see Queen Nefertiti and her dancers in a whole variety of classical asanas. There is a statue of King Tut sitting in the half-lotus with a scroll in one hand, his other handheld in a mudra position usually demonstrated by Buddha or the Hindu deities. This is said to be in his student years; so, what was he studying? One of the favourite things he was buried with was a golden, two-and-a-half-coiled cobra Kundalini strikes again. This serpent is everywhere in Egypt; the seven chakras are in most temples, and the little pyramid I had seen in a Hindu version of the first chakra is here blown sky-high.In the Temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, which I visited during the winter of 2001 with my teaching partner Marina, I found the serpent to be woven into the fabric of virtually every wall and walkway. No one doubts the strong Hindu influence that inspired the original temples. For those who understand yoga and the energy world of the chakras, the whole area can be seen as the expression of a culture which lived to awaken all the dormant forces within us and develop full human potential.It is not within the scope of this text to go into all the details of my/our research. However, I want to highlight my eclectic perspective on yoga. I have observed that this wonderful science of the energy world is based on a universal reality that goes beyond any one culture.It has been a long and interesting study, and after 40 years I can say that mystical yoga turns out to be much more scientific than most of the sciences of the West. Because of my experiences with high school science, which taught me what science and scientific meant, I could clearly see the logic in this yogic approach. For instance, in the classical scientific experiment, you need an objective, a method to demonstrate that objective, and then you must observe what happens when you apply these methods. After a certain amount of observation of the results, you can draw conclusions about what is going on during this experiment.With yoga the experiment is performed on your own body and mind. You, the practitioner, must become the scientist, performing the experiments with posture, movement, breath, diet, concentration, visualization, sound, and a variety of techniques over an extended period of time. You must carefully observe the results of what you are doing at the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels over that time period. Then, and only then, can you draw conclusions about what affects the body, feelings, mind and spirit, and just what those effects are. You learn this from your own experiences, and although this is considered subjective rather than purely objective, it is valid for each individual. Yoga is a very personal experience, one that each individual needs to go through on the path to enlightenment. Don’t worry too much about getting to that final enlightened state either, as you will find that with the practice, the inner light simply becomes progressively brighter, as the outer world becomes more colourful.
Peace and Om, David

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David Goulet

David Goulet

Autobiography