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Carolyn Cowan & Devotion Trading

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Previous articleEvening Kundalini Global

Who am I?

You could glean public information about me from my Wikipedia page, or read through ten years of weblog to discover my more personal thought processes.

Carolyn on Wikipedia

I was born in Chelsea in 1960. This seems relevant because it frames my open-minded and creative approach to my work as a psycho-sexual and relationship therapist. My areas of interest, work and specialisation include, in no particular order, sex therapy, couples and relationship work, Maternal Perversion, trauma both past and current, addiction in all its forms, anxiety in all its forms, and pre and post natal issues including birth trauma, diastases recti and tocophobia. I am an embodied psychotherapist and work with the internal trauma cycles as they affect the mind, behaviour and regulation of the self.

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Tuesdays: Kundalini Rising Oct 2026

Wednesdays: Beyond Shame

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carolyncowanofficial

Change Maker.
A Specialist in Shame, Anxiety, Addiction, Sexuality, Breathwork and Yoga.
Kundalini Global Yoga Founder
Join classes and workshops:

Read more about my course Mastering the Addictive

Read more about my course Mastering the Addictive Personality: The Path Out of Hell on my website

carolyncowan.com

Mastering Addiction – The Path Out of Hell 7th – 1

Mastering Addiction – The Path Out of Hell 7th – 13th November 2026

This course will be delivered both online AND in person at 5 The Old Laundry, Battersea, London SW11 1YF. 9.30am start and finish at 5.30pm with breaks for lunch and tea! all times are GMT. You can come in person, join online, or do a mix. The training is recorded.

A seven-day training exploring addiction, anxiety, trauma, emotional regulation, recovery and the possibility of profound personal change.

This is a week for understanding the addictive personality from the inside out but…

Not as a diagnosis, moral failing, or as something to be shamed, ‘fixed’ or hidden.

Addiction, anxiety, disorders of various kinds… they are a robust and intelligent set of behaviours, beliefs and survival strategies that were created in response to life.

Over seven days, I will guide you through a powerful exploration of what leads to the anxious and addictive nature, how it lives in the body and nervous system, and what it takes to move beyond the patterns that once helped you survive but may now keep you stuck.

This is a week of lecture, yoga, breathwork, group process, reflection and practice.

It is open to anyone interested in addiction, recovery, trauma, shame, anxiety, emotional regulation and the path towards greater freedom.

It is also open as a specialist training for yoga teachers and practitioners who want to understand how to support addiction and recovery through embodied practice.

Read more on my website via the link in my bio.

7-13 November, in-person in Battersea and/or onlin

7-13 November, in-person in Battersea and/or online via Zoom. Mastering the Addictive Personality is probably my best known workshop, and one that gets incredible feedback year on year.

Seven days of learning, group-work, yoga (you don’t need any experience … it is within the days as a practice to help us stay regulated and put into practice some of the learning about how to change how you feel…)

This isn’t an invitation to trauma bond with a group of others with tricky stories and feelings. Indeed, there is no invitation to share your story. Instead, you will learn a lot about why you feel how you do, behave how you do, have the disorders that you do… and what you may choose to do with that via a new recovery plan that builds over the week.

The group is always fantastic. I find anyone who signs up to a course called The Path Out of Hell tends to be pretty cool and fascinating.

You can read a lot more via the link in my bio or on my website:

carolyncowan.com

“The Kundalini is the ability to actually be Divin

“The Kundalini is the ability to actually be Divine.”

And by Divine, I don’t mean perfect. We are all perfectly imperfect, Beautiful Person. It is not my intention to see you somehow floating several inches above ordinary life.

I mean present.

In your body. In your breath. Able to feel what you feel without immediately having to escape.

For me, this is where the practice of Kundalini becomes interesting.

What becomes possible when we work intelligently with breath, posture, movement and meditation, and begin to experience ourselves differently?

I’ll be teaching a two-hour Kundalini Global Masterclass at HOME in Primrose Hill, London. 11 October.

We will move. We will breathe. We will be still. And we will explore what it might mean to inhabit yourself with a little more curiosity, possibility and freedom.

Everyone is welcome. You do not need any previous experience. Booking via the link in my bio.

Come and practise with me.

Carolyn x

#KundaliniGlobal #KundaliniYoga #Breathwork #YogaLondon #Meditation

A Kundalini Masterclass on Sunday 11 October, 2.30

A Kundalini Masterclass on Sunday 11 October, 2.30-4.30 at Home Wellness in Primrose Hill, London @homewellnessuk

Join me for a two-hour exploration of breath, posture, movement and meditation.

Kundalini Global is a contemporary, deeply embodied approach to yoga, taught with an awareness of the stress system and the ways anxiety, overwhelm and past experience can shape how we inhabit the body.

In this masterclass, I will guide you through a complete practice combining dynamic movement and breathwork with stillness, meditation and integration.

Details can be found via the link in my bio.

I have a few places left on the upcoming Shame Wor

I have a few places left on the upcoming Shame Workshop. If you want to begin a journey toward a new way of thinking and being, whatever your history, consider joining me.

It isn’t an easy workshop. It is an intensive three day process that will allow you to come to a deeper understanding of your own story, what you did with it, and ways to create change.

Because of the nature of this work, I only run this workshop in person.

Find out more on my website and via the link in my bio. carolyncowan.com

Work with shame on a three day workshop with me. I

Work with shame on a three day workshop with me. In a beautiful studio in Battersea, 16th, 17th and 18th of October 2026.

Shame is a dark and uneasy emotion lurking within the depths of our psyche, which when stirred, fires up a host of painful emotions and a deep and unavoidable desire to change how we feel, and thus, is a major trigger for the addictive personality.

Shame is insidious, hard to identify, awful to feel, tricky to contain and easy to pass on.

In this 3 day workshop we will focus on where we hold shame, where our family holds shame, in what areas of our lives we feel shame, and how much we mask its hold upon us with perfectionism. We will identify our core wounding.

Talking, lecture, group-work and frank discussion will give us a clear view of how to identify our shame, how we hold shame for others, and how we shame.

Read more on my website, via the link in my bio.

Find out more on my website Beautiful Person. If y

Find out more on my website Beautiful Person. If you’re anxious or addicted or a people pleaser or obsessive or compulsive or … so many forms of human suffering… you may find you have some interesting work to do with shame.

carolyncowan.com

You can put down the drink and still have an addic

You can put down the drink and still have an addictive personality.

You can stop using drugs.

Stop smoking.

Stop bingeing.

Stop spending.

Leave the relationship.

Delete the app.

And then, Beautiful Person, rather inconveniently, you may discover that the compulsion has found somewhere else to go.

Work.

Exercise.

Food.

Sex.

Relationships.

Phones.

Achievement.

Control.

Anxiety.

The object changes but the pattern survives. We loop from one addiction into another, continually retriggering the same internal states. It is all a response to shame, abuse and trauma.

This is why my work with addiction is not focused on removing a substance or stopping a behaviour.

I want to know what happens inside you.

What can’t you bear to feel?

What does your nervous system expect?

What are you trying to control or escape?

And what would you need in order to stay present instead?

Mastering the Addictive Personality is seven days of going deeply into those questions through psychotherapeutic thought, teaching, yoga, breathwork, group process and practice. You’ll also build a practical recovery plan to take beyond the week.

You don’t have to identify as an addict. You don’t have to be in recovery. And you don’t have to practise yoga.

7-13 November 2026
Online and/or in a lovely studio in Battersea, London.

Read more and book Mastering the Addictive Personality⁠ on my website carolyncowan.com (linked in my bio)

Yes, Beautiful Person, I describe addiction, compu

Yes, Beautiful Person, I describe addiction, compulsion and anxiety as safety states. That does not mean the behaviour is safe.

It means that, somewhere along the way, your brain and body discovered that doing what you do changed something temporarily that you needed to change. Maybe being anxious made someone care. Or leave you alone. Maybe the compulsion to check made you feel better for a fleeting moment. So you learned to do it again.

And again.

And again.

This is why simply hating yourself into stopping rarely gets us very far.

In Mastering the Addictive Personality, we look underneath the behaviour: at shame, trauma, anxiety, the nervous system, emotional regulation and the survival strategies you built in response to your life.

Then we begin the work of creating something different.

7–13 November 2026
Online or in person, Battersea.

Find out about the seven-day training⁠ on my website via the link in my bio.

MASTERING THE ADDICTIVE PERSONALITY The Path Out

MASTERING THE ADDICTIVE PERSONALITY

The Path Out of Hell

7–13 November 2026
Online + London

What is your behaviour of choice?

Mine was drugs and alcohol. At the time of writing SHAME: The Path Out of Hell, I had been clean and sober for 33 years.

But addiction is not only about drugs and alcohol.

We find an extraordinary number of ways to change how we feel.

Food. Sex. Work. Exercise. Shopping. Phones. Relationships. Control. Drama. Overthinking. Busyness.

And so I am interested in what happens before the behaviour.

What is the feeling you cannot bear?

What are you trying to escape?

What happens in your body in the seconds before you reach for the thing that changes your state?

Because if we only take away the behaviour without understanding what it has been doing for you, we haven’t necessarily changed what sits underneath it.

In November I am teaching Mastering the Addictive Personality: The Path Out of Hell.

Seven days exploring addiction, anxiety, trauma, shame, the nervous system, emotional regulation and what it actually takes to create change.

You do not need to identify as an addict to come.

7–13 November
Online or in person in Battersea, London.

Who is on your list? Your ex? Your mother? Your b

Who is on your list?

Your ex? Your mother? Your boss? A politician? The woman on Instagram who irritates the living shit out of you?

Perhaps it is people who don’t indicate at roundabouts.

In my book, I call these people, places and things our oppressors.

We collect them.

We think about them, talk about them, gossip about them, scroll through them, become outraged by them… we recruit other people into agreeing with us about just how appalling they are.

And for a moment, it can feel rather good.

Because while I am looking at everything that is wrong with you, I don’t have to feel everything I believe is wrong with me.

Then the cycle begins again.

This is one of the more uncomfortable parts of shame work.

Not simply understanding what was done to us, but becoming curious about what we now do with what was done to us.

How do I reject?
How do I judge?
How do I punish?
How do I soothe myself?
How do I keep the loop alive?

That is where something can begin to change.

The Shame Workshop
16-18 October 2026 in Battersea, London

Three days of deep, embodied work with shame.

Booking via the link in bio.

How much of your life have you spent trying to bec

How much of your life have you spent trying to become a better version of yourself? How much of your life have you spent waiting?

Waiting.

Waiting…

To be.

Thinner. Fitter. Calmer. More successful. More productive. More desirable. Less anxious. Less difficult. Less needy.

There is nothing at all inherently wrong with wanting to change. It is a human thing. To strive for more.

I am very interested in what sits underneath the wanting. The waiting.

Because shame can be extraordinarily productive. It can really drive you to try and change… but it often ends up creating burn out or other types of suffering.

And underneath all of that doing and trying and waiting can sit a very old core belief:

There is something wrong with me.

That old core belief can be different to that. Less simple. Less kind. But most of us have one. A core wound.

In my work with shame, I am interested not only in where that belief came from, but in what you have built around it… the behaviours, identities and safety mechanisms that have allowed you to survive it.

And what might happen if you no longer needed them.

In October, I will be teaching The Shame Workshop, an intensive three-day exploration of shame and the path out of it.

16-18 October 2026
Battersea, London

Booking now. Link in bio. No online option for this work, Beauitful Person, it is too strong. We need to be in the room. Be brave and fearless, join me!

Shame is not only a horrible feeling you occasiona

Shame is not only a horrible feeling you occasionally experience.

Something happens. You drop. You feel suddenly small, exposed, rejected, wrong. You attack. You defend. You withdraw. You numb yourself. You reach for the behaviour that changes how you feel.

And very often, you have no idea that shame is underneath it.

In Shame: The Path Out of Hell, I describe shame as a cyclical emotion. We can be given shame by other people, internalise it, and carry it forward — sometimes for years, sometimes across generations.

The work is not about blaming your childhood forever but about becoming able to notice:

What just happened to me?
How old do I feel right now?
What am I protecting?
And is this response actually about now?

Once you can recognise the pattern, you have the possibility of responding differently.

This October, I am teaching The Shame Workshop: three days in person in London exploring what shame is, how it gets into us, how it behaves and how we begin to find a way out.

16–18 October 2026 in Battersea, London

Details and booking via the link in bio.

Tuesday Morning Kundalini Global Yoga. 9-10am. On

Tuesday Morning Kundalini Global Yoga. 9-10am. On Zoom. No experience needed.

Beautiful person,

A small note before Kundalini Rising begins tomorrow morning.

You do not need to be good at yoga to come.

In fact, you do not need to know anything about yoga. You do not need to be flexible, spiritual,,accomplished, able to sit cross-legged without thinking about your knees, or in possession of leggings.

You can be completely new. You can have practised for years. You can also be someone who used to practise, stopped, and has been vaguely meaning to start again for the last three years.

Come as you are.

My Tuesday classes are strong, but they are not terribly solemn. We breathe. We move. We stop. We notice what has happened. There is usually some excellent and fairly eclectic music. There is laughter.

And underneath all of that is something I care about enormously: learning how to regulate yourself.

Kundalini Global is not about leaving your body, transcending your life or handing your experience over to somebody else. Your mat becomes a place in which you can meet yourself, notice what you do when something is difficult, and practise responding differently.

Again and again.

If your practice has disappeared, this is a lovely place to begin again.

If you have never had a practice, you are very welcome too.

Kundalini Rising begins tomorrow, Tuesday 1 September, at 9am UK time. We meet live on Zoom for six weeks, and every class is recorded if mornings don’t work for you.

Come and see what happens.

Find the link to book in my bio. If you’re seeing this late, you can sign up at any time and gain instant access to the recording.

Love,
Carolyn

Join me for a 60 minute yoga class, tomorrow morni

Join me for a 60 minute yoga class, tomorrow morning on Zoom. 9-10am UK time. Recorded.

We exist with the terrible, seductive pressure that screens bring into our lives.

And here we are, meeting in an instagram caption on a screen. I am aware.

But I hope, in what I share, if you read and listen to what I say, I invite you to think.

There is not doubt that our screens add to our inability to bear ourselves.

“I don’t know what to do with myself, I’ll watch something on Netflix… I don’t know what to do with myself, I’ll look at Instagram, I don’t know what to do with myself, maybe I’ll go shopping, on Amazon.”

We continuously abandon ourselves. And that’s ok. No pressure to do anything differently. I just think it’s interesting and useful to be aware.

When we meet on the yoga mat, that magic place, and we play with the Kundalini, we consciously choose to move the feelings, work on letting go of how sacred we hold our negative relationships to our past, or on how useful, unconsciously, our stress and anxiety might be for managing our lives and the people around us… we have choices to change, for ourselves, by ourselves.

We get there by choosing to put down the pain of the past and the fear of the future and land in now. And to do that again and again and again…

Come along to six weeks of “Kundalini Rising”.

You will details that linked in my bio.

www.carolyncowan.com

#kundaliniyoga

Join me tomorrow morning for banging Kundalini Yog

Join me tomorrow morning for banging Kundalini Yoga. One hour, a total reset, no experience needed. Read more on my website/via the link in my bio.

#kundaliniyoga

Join me for six breathwork classes beginning tomor

Join me for six breathwork classes beginning tomorrow morning on Zoom. No experience required. All recorded for catch up. We will do breaths that allow you to move through your week with presence.

It sounds dramatic - that your phone is a portal to hell - until you think about what we ask our systems to absorb every day.

Horror.
Outrage.
Arguments.
Other people’s lives.
Bad news.
More information than we could possibly metabolise.

And all of it arriving through something we carry everywhere. A screen we prod and swipe at and somehow think will save us from ourselves.

Many of us can’t avoid it, but we can do more to counterbalance it.

Look up.

Notice the season.

Notice the light.

Notice the sound outside your window.

Notice your own breath.

Notice that your body is here, now, while your mind may have been hundreds of miles away.

This is some of what I mean by Kindly, Gently, Slowly.

Tomorrow morning we begin six weeks of Monday breathwork: using the breath to soften urgency, make space in the nervous system and practise meeting ourselves without force. you can sign up via the link in my bio or go to my website (carolyncowan.com⁠)

Kindly, Gently, Slowly
Starts tomorrow, Monday 31 August
6 to 6.30am UK time
Live on Zoom + recorded

Come and begin the week differently.

#breathwork #kundaliniyogateacher

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