Jyoti - Profile of Jyoti

"Jyoti is a flame of..."

"Kundalini is described by..."

Jyoti has explored multi-cultural approaches, including those of indigenous peoples (such as Native Americans), of healing and spiritual practices, combining these studies with that of more traditional psychology. As a result, Jyoti has become involved in a variety of projects, including the co-founding of Kayumari, a healing retreat center located on a mountaintop in Columbia, California (three hours east of San Francisco). Here she and her husband, Russell D. Park, Ph.D. (a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in transpersonal psychology and neurotherapy), offer specially created individual and group healing and life transformational workshops and seminars that includes her own individualized form of breathwork.

Born in South Dakota and raised in Texas, Jyoti’s early work as a marriage and family counselor began in 1978 working with abused and neglected children and teenagers, an experience which necessarily led her to explore the dark side of human nature. She went on to become director of various institutional and residential programs providing services to children and adolescents from ages 6 through 18 in Texas and worked as a lobbyist to change child welfare laws in the Texas Legislature.

The death of Jyoti’s father in 1974 had been a powerful transformational experience, but her life was radically transformed when she underwent the process of Kundalini awakening, which started in Switzerland when she was at the C.G. Jung Institute and took place over a period of 15 years.

Kundalini is the healing life energy force situated at the base of each person’s spine. The awakening involved various physical, psychological and spiritual experiences, all of which led her to her life work of helping to restore balance in the world.

Photography © 2001 Jyoti (Jeneane Prevatt, PH.D.)

Russell Park and Jyoti

Russell Park defined Kundalini as follows:
"Kundalini is said to be consciousness itself, and will move up the spinal column, awakening the chakras and removing blockages and impurities within the physical and psychological make-up of an individual. It is this movement of consciousness and the resulting interactions with ‘impurities’ that results in the physical, emotional, or mental symptoms upon ‘awakening’ the Kundalini, symptoms are typically very individualized..." It is an evolutionary process; it is untapped potential energy. Kundalini energy can be considered the very foundation of our consciousness. When it moves through the body, consciousness changes with it.

In 1988 Jyoti went to Peru on a spiritual pilgrimage to more deeply understand herself and the extraordinary Kundalini experiences she was having. In 1991, she traveled to India with her teacher, Anandi Ma, to study with Dhyanyogi Mahasudandas, a 115-year old Sat guru and from whom she received the name Jyoti (meaning "light" in Sanskrit). It was there that she married Russell Park.

Jyoti, along with her husband, Russell, is sincerely devoted to helping people going through their own experiences of spiritual emergence. One way she has done this is by writing a book, An Angel Called My Name (DharmaGaia, 1998), about her personal Kundalini phenomenon.

Jyoti has a BA in education from Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, LA, a MA in Human Relations and Community Affairs from the American International College in Springfield, MA and a Ph.D. in transpersonal psychology with a special emphasis on cross cultural aspects of the spiritual development in children and adults from Summit University in New Orleans, and took post graduate studies at the C.J. Jung Institute in Switzerland.