Kaivalya Centre: yoga, meditation and philosophy

The Kaivalya Centre described itself as serving the Ottawa–Gatineau region since 1998. It taught Hatha yoga, meditation and the philosophy behind them, ran stress-management talks for employers, and in its later years focused on hypnosis and coaching. Its tagline was Living With Awareness, later Awakening your Potential, and it ran in both English and French.

What “Kaivalya” meant to them

Both versions of the site opened by explaining the name. Kaivalya is a Sanskrit term, and the site read it two ways. The first is that there is really only one life: forms look many, but life is one. The second comes from the sage Patanjali, for whom kaivalya is the highest state of consciousness, when the mind sees truth directly without projecting onto it. That second meaning shaped the whole project. From the first version onwards, the site kept returning to Patanjali's Yoga Sūtras, which the centre taught, chanted and translated.

The mission statement barely changed in twenty years. The centre wanted to help people live with more awareness, respect and compassion, towards each other and towards all sentient beings. It presented yoga and meditation, and later hypnosis, as natural ways to handle stress, anxiety, insomnia, depression and burnout. It also carried a broader belief: a peaceful world starts with individuals who live peacefully themselves.

“Living With Awareness”

The tagline in the title of every page on the 2004 site

Two teachers

The site was built around two people. The lead teacher, Lynne Cardinal, was presented as having taught stress management, yoga, relaxation and meditation for more than twenty years by 2004, and more than thirty by the 2010s, in Canada, Europe and India. According to her biography she had lived in the Himalayas for over fifteen years, first studying and then teaching at a meditation institute, and held a doctorate in Eastern philosophy. She worked from the Sanskrit originals and produced study booklets and recordings that translated and explained each verse word by word.

Her public work took up a whole column of the site. She wrote for regional and wellness magazines on both sides of the Ottawa River, was interviewed on CBC radio in French and English, and appeared at book fairs in Hull, Trois-Rivières, Québec City and Montréal. In autumn 2002 she presented a series of thirteen short French-language television segments on meditation for a community channel. She also wrote a French-language book, L'art de la méditation, which the site said was on sale in French bookstores.

Her husband, Jürgen, co-taught. The 2004 biography says he had practised yoga and meditation for fourteen years, three of them in the Himalayas, while also holding a full-time management job at a local software company. He recorded Sanskrit songs, and the two of them made a CD of Sanskrit chants, Madhuram, with arrangements by a local musician. Both were vegetarians, and the site said so plainly. It had a whole Health section on vegetarianism, with statistics, recipes and, for a time, vegetarian cooking classes.

Courses and workshops

The 2004 site was a bilingual, hand-built site with separate English and French copies of each page. Its menu shows how much the centre covered:

• Courses: yoga, meditation, breath, stress management, the Yog Sūtras, Patanjali Yog Darshan, a course combining problem-based learning with mindfulness meditation, vegetarian cooking, individual counselling and private classes.
• Articles: a matching essay for almost every course topic.
• Health: statistics, vegetarianism and recipes.
• Interviews: with the lead teacher, from community television and elsewhere.
• Also: a schedule, weekend retreats, workshops, conferences, a newsletter, a store, and a page of quotes and comments.

The yoga page explains the approach. The centre taught Hatha yoga, done slowly and within each person's limits, with deep breathing and some somatic exercises (small movements meant to retrain body and mind for flexibility and balance). It offered a list of benefits aimed partly at employers: low cost, low impact, less stress, better morale. It also insisted that yoga was more than postures. It was a philosophy built on non-violence, and the page linked it straight to the Yog Sūtras and to vegetarianism.

The meditation page described group classes that combined several basic techniques, breathing exercises and Sanskrit chanting. It also gathered research findings, including a summary of psychologist Daniel Goleman's work on the physical and psychological effects of meditation. The underlying point, repeated throughout, was that meditation is one of the most effective stress-management tools available.

Sundays with the scriptures

The workshop page is the most vivid record of what the centre actually did. In autumn 2004 it ran a series of Sunday afternoon philosophy workshops, each on a different classical text: the Yog Sūtras of Patanjali in September, the Upanishads in October and the Bhagavad Gītā in November. Each ran three hours and cost $40 plus GST, with chanting, discussion and meditation. The same autumn the couple took a weekend programme on Patanjali's stages of meditation to a yoga studio in Kingston. The page also lists a Yoga Day with a guest yoga teacher, an evening chanting workshop for $12, and a “Rejuvenation Workshop” called The Karma of Relationships. Most of the Ottawa events were held at a massage and yoga clinic in the city's west end.

The store

The store sold what the teachers had recorded and written. Over the years that included a guided meditation CD (Equilibrium, four meditations with nature sounds and music), the Madhuram chant CD, a learning kit for the first chapter of Patanjali's text (the Samādhi Pāda, as a CD and booklet, also in French), earlier cassettes, and the French meditation book, listed at $19.95.

Hypnosis, coaching and corporate talks

Around 2012–2013 the site was rebuilt on a content management system with a slideshow header and a much shorter menu: Home, About Us, Services, Workshops & Talks, Testimonials, Blog, Store and Contact, with a French mirror. The mission statement stayed. The emphasis did not.

Hypnosis now came first. The lead teacher was presented as a certified consulting hypnotist and member of the National Guild of Hypnotists, with extra certifications in innovative techniques and weight loss. The hypnosis page said relaxation was the core of the method and listed what sessions could help with: quitting smoking, weight, confidence, fear of flying or public speaking, insomnia and snoring, pain, grief, relationships, clutter, and even finding lost items. It offered sessions over Skype, insurance receipts, gift certificates, and a discount for booking four sessions in advance. A testimonials page, updated to at least 2016, collected short comments from clients, signed with initials.

Meditation stayed, as weekly group classes that now included mindfulness techniques, plus private sessions. Coaching became a service of its own, based on an Integral Coaching fundamentals course. From about 2015 there was also Tai Chi. Jürgen, who had studied under a local teacher since 2008 and taught since 2012, ran weekly evening classes at an Ottawa yoga studio and ended each one with a short Qigong meditation.

The Stress Management page was aimed at employers. It opened with statistics on mental health and disability costs in the workplace and offered talks and workshops on stress, sleep, burnout, mindfulness, nutrition, active listening and meditation, in English or French. Its client list included federal bodies such as Statistics Canada, Health Canada, the Canadian Space Agency, the CRTC, Industry Canada and the IDRC, as well as private companies. A 2018 French-language page advertised a talk on finding balance through hypnosis and meditation at a wellness fair in Gatineau.

The blog

The blog, started in 2011, is where the teaching voice comes through most clearly. Its titles give the range: Yoga for your health, Why hypnosis?, Hypnosis for pain management, Habit formation: desperately seeking freedom, Discover the power of your subconscious mind, Regression: a powerful catalyst for moving forward, What inner radio station are you listening to?, 7 key benefits of regular Tai Chi practice and, later, The ABC of resilience.

The best-known post, from October 2011, was Particles of sand: the art of meditation. It was drawn from an interview for a University of Ottawa master's thesis. Its central image is an aquarium: stir the sand and the water clouds; stop stirring and the sand slowly settles until the water is clear. That, the teacher explained, is what meditation does to thoughts. She added that the whirling often looks worse at first, simply because you are finally watching it. The rest of the interview argues against judging your own meditation. It recommends a steady daily practice of 15 to 20 minutes, and sums up the whole approach as patience:

“Just show up. The rest will happen by itself.”

A saying quoted in Particles of sand, 2011

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