Aside from the elaborate mythologies about these gods and goddesses, at the core they represent forces in human nature. Fundamentally Shiva or Siva represents consciousness in its dynamic of dancing in and out of the form of existence, and Shakti or Sakti, represents the energy that came from original consciousness and causes the appearance of form. Kundalini is an aspect of this Shakti, having created us, and coiled itself down at the base of our bodies, where she holds our energy fields in stasis throughout our lives.
Many people dream of snakes at the beginning or during the kundalini process. The snake is an ancient symbol found in sacred places throughout the world, representing this coiled consciousness. As pointed out in chapter 1, the snake in the Garden of Eden likely represents the personalization of consciousness, the principle that brings us from unified cosmic consciousness into the limited world of identification with form.
Once we have identified with the body and mind (or eaten of the apple of the tree of knowledge), we see everything as duality, and we lose the innocence and joy of living a life in which we trust that everything is okay. We recognize limitation and death. We are no longer of a nature that is just naturally unfolding, but begin to think we have power over it, and vulnerability within it. Perhaps Eve emerged from Adam’s rib because pure consciousness was represented in masculine form, and the movement into physical incarnation, into life, was symbolized by the feminine. She ate the apple first because she was the principle of form and creation, and we only partake of the knowledge of opposites because we are in physical forms. Adam has no choice but to follow her way, because consciousness is merged into the forms we live, and follows the imaginings of mind and thought.
Whether imaged as a snake or a goddess this activated energy begins to recreate the interior form through which we engage our lives. Most people who feel her movement eventually notice bliss, even ecstasy. Some describe being drenched in love, shimmering radiance, subtle ever-present happiness, and a peace that passes understanding. A few people have described to me being so overpowered by the sensation of love that they say this is what kundalini is, the overwhelming and unspeakable love that permeates the universe. They may feel this consistently or sporadically for months or years.
To the extent we can surrender, and let it carry us, it can feel like a great shaking out of tension, dropping away all those energies of contraction that have been accumulated in our cells and nervous systems. When this is done, there can be a great fullness that is spacious and empty, like a helium balloon, and we can feel transported out of the suffering that came when we identified with our problems.
In some cases new experiences arise while we lay on our beds, letting this energy run through us. There can be images of childhood, positive and negative, collective scenes of joy and celebration, ancient stories we think could be past lives, light patterns or mandalas appearing in the mind, geometric descriptions of the making of the universe, the appearance of a teacher or god, the smell of sandalwood, or a taste of honey in the mouth. All of these things can be given in this process, none as a result of a demand, and none that can be grasped and held on to later. We may be spontaneously introduced to the vastness of the mind and senses. These experiences are reported, mainly gifts that follow an utter surrender into the process, free of fear, and open to whatever the universe wants to do with us. Here are a few of the descriptions of grace taken from my files.
I had a dream in which a beautiful man who was full of light came into my room and made tantric love to me, and every cell of my body was radiantly alive. The orgasmic experience was exquisite, but he kept saying, “Move the energy all the way up to your crown.” When I did we melted into the universe.
***
The most joyous experience of my life was when I was meditating and consciousness entered a space of such profound love it was unspeakable. I felt completely wrapped within the arms of this love and every sense of separateness from love dissolved. I was just that.
***
I keep getting this feeling that I might begin to let myself open up to this immense love, where I would love the whole of humanity unconditionally, just as God loves through Christ. As if the world is forgiven in my eyes, and within me is a fountain of joy so deep and eternal, so rich and so gorgeous it cannot be overcome. This feeling might be growing in me and there may come a point where I might be faced with a choice...'do I stay or do I go'...not literally going anywhere, but there would be a sense in which I would walk out on my life and allow myself to be more easily overtaken by this Christ consciousness, receiving the grace as I feel it in the way that I think Jesus did. I feel sure about this but obviously cannot justify the conviction.
***
At times I would be sitting on the couch and suddenly fall unconscious. I never knew what happened until I was at a conference at a drumming session, with my eyes closed, and I suddenly left my body and felt myself to be in my kitchen, watching my son and his girlfriend sitting at the table. She took her earrings off and left them there. Later at home I found the earrings and called my son who told me they had been at the house. After that, I realized that I was astral traveling in an altered state, and learned to do this consciously. At one time I went to my daughter’s hospital bed, put my hands on her body, and knew I was stopping her from hemorrhaging. She was about to lose a pregnancy, but the bleeding stopped and all was fine.
***
I was driving through town and heard a voice say, “Go to your father’s home now.” I was headed somewhere else and thought at first it was just a fleeting thought, as I had no reason to be concerned about him. The voice repeated again, and so I turned around and got there within 15 minutes. He had just had a stroke, and I got him to the hospital.
***
For weeks, wherever I went all I could see in others was radiance and love, and my heart was so open to them. I was never so happy, and there was just a lightness of being that is beyond describing. My son was in a serious auto accident during this time and was arrested for leaving the scene, and sitting in a field a few blocks away in shock. I went to the jail to get him out on bail, and I sat there in peace and acceptance. He held me and wept. Even with this my internal bliss and happiness continued, until weeks later when I became bogged down in the challenges of his time in court.
***
When I read Gopi Krishna’s book I began to doubt that was what I was experiencing, because he described a terrible ordeal, and mostly this was about joy and ecstasy for me. One night I woke up to a sound like celestial music, and a voice distinctly said, “This is really kundalini. We’re just taking it easy on you.”
When I began my research into the kundalini experience my primary question was, “What is the difference between someone who has an ecstatic and wonderful experience with this process, and one who suffers and can’t get through it?” My life work has been to find ways to point people toward a positive engagement with this grace and opportunity. Despite many years, and hundreds of interviews, I have not definitively answered this question but here are three of the conditions that I suspect make the experience more positive.
Understanding the Nature of the Process
It is important to have a context and understanding of this process as a spiritual development that is of service to you. Those individuals who have sincerely wanted an understanding of spiritual truth, or a relationship with God, are more likely to experience grace within this process. Those who have come from rigid spiritual traditions with preconceived prejudices about energy and the body will have a more difficult time because they reject what is happening, or give it some dark and supernatural explanation that prevent them from relaxing into it. Those who have a spiritual orientation that acknowledges the potential for truth and beauty to be at the core of humanness have a much easier time. If religion is exteriorized you feel like something is being done to you by unknown forces outside of yourself, and if it feels bad you naturally resist. When you understand that Truth is part of the inward path, that you fin
d God inside, then the journey is open to grace. Exterior grace may also descend, but you are not waiting for the arrival of a heavenly outside influence.
Many mystics in devotional states have reported powerful outside visitations, feeling embraced or absorbed in a downward rush of love or ecstasy, and may also report the sensations of being made love to by the divine. These mystical experiences are not the same as kundalini awakening, and usually occur as a response to deeply concentrated devotional states. When they trigger a downward flow of energy, this may in turn activate kundalini. They are not permanent states and can leave a mystic deeply sorrowful when they go away. The inward questioning of who is having this experience is the way to find a permanent sense of grace and peace after having such experiences. Ultimately self-realization is the remembering of what we are.
A Note on Exterior Graces
I believe there are many realms of mind, and certainly many people describe other-dimensional experiences within the kundalini process, or even outside of it, in their ordinary life. Consciousness is boundless, and often we are moved to our spiritual life by an unseen force that appears as a vision, a miracle, or an unexpected shot of grace. Sometimes a divine person, or a guru or teacher appears in consciousness to help direct the experience. At other times a dream, or an encounter with nature or even a unique stranger opens us up. Perhaps the difference between a mystical or other-dimensional experience, and a kundalini or spiritual awakening, is that in the former the other-dimensional event seems to come from outside of us, while the latter seems to occur within.
Consciousness is both within and without, the form and the sustenance of all life. We have access to realms the relative mind cannot imagine, until they appear in our perceptual range. Sometimes we are invited into a spiritual journey through these external manifestations because they disarm our ordinary way of thinking, and suggest to us there are more possibilities in life than the culture has admitted to.
These super-normal experiences sometimes occur during a kundalini awakening, or occur in ordinary life long before such an awakening. They are not essential to self-realization and it seems that some people are just more accessible than others to these expanded dimensions. Despite the pleasure of such graces, it is useful to return to the inward path. Finding who it is that is having these experiences, and anchoring that wisdom in your physical body, will allow you to move toward a natural awakened life, instead of having an ungrounded disembodied sense of living in the magical realms, longing for repeated phenomena, and resisting the human experience.
The Capacity for Self-Acceptance
Those who have had psychotherapy, under the guidance of someone who has helped them learn to witness their own shortcomings and history until they achieve a relative dispassion, are much more prepared to navigate the challenges of a kundalini awakening, and be open to the benefits. Our true nature, the consciousness within us, has a tendency toward compassion, wholeness and love. Nothing is excluded. It accepts all parts of us. So those parts that are dark and painful in our personal and collective minds must somehow be met with compassion, instead of fear, rage and guilt. When we learn to accept whatever is, we are moving toward genuine freedom, and the process unfolds more gently and completely.
The Dalai Lama once told a group of Western students that he was astonished to find so much self-hatred in students here. Our culture, imbedded in competitiveness rather than cooperation, tends to leave childhood residuals of self-doubt, a sense of inadequacy, and deeply ingrained interior critics in our psyches. While our ego is simply the movement of mind that identifies with our thoughts and experiences and thinks these represent who we are, our super-ego is like a torturing overseer who has many judgments about the quality of our thoughts and our behaviors, and can be especially harsh on those who see themselves as “spiritual”. This is not a service to the awakening of Self or wisdom. We do not become self-realized through judgment, self-condemnation and forcing ourselves to be better behaved. We only become more enmeshed in the delusions of our conditioned personality patterns. In these cases the kundalini energy not only has to clear out the conditioned patterns, but the overlay of judgment and negativity. We can feel overwhelmed as all these pieces come forward in consciousness, one-by-one, to be seen clearly.
We can become more grace-prone when we are able to be open and vulnerable, as innocent as we were as children, before any judgments ever fell upon us. We were only openness, love and presence then, and we still are, but these overruling thoughts of a separate self who is a problem keep us from remembering this.
Awakening When the Body/Mind are Harmonious
Yogic systems, and some Buddhist schools, have traditionally placed a great deal of emphasis on preparation before kundalini awakening. Only those with healthy personalities, and great dedication to awakening, were allowed into the system in the first place. Then preparation involved purifying the body through complex cleansing practices, breathing practices that open the subtle body, physical practices that make the body more flexible and open, and lifestyle practices that tend to make life more simple and peaceful. Devotion or service to the guru or to others was emphasized to make the ego less assertive. Students were discouraged from using alcohol or recreational drugs, eating meat and sometimes other stimulating foods. All of these conditions tended to make the student more physically harmonious, long before doing practices that might stimulate kundalini.
Very few westerners who activate kundalini have had this preparation, and instead most of us come into awakening with many bad habits. We eat and drink whatever is before us, sleep erratically, stimulate our minds with heavy crime shows, horrific world news, and horror films, live with stress in our personal relationships and our work situations, and use drugs to calm ourselves down or pick ourselves up. Sometimes there is heavy abuse and drama in our history, or a latent illness we have not treated adequately. Our bodies and minds are not prepared to be innocent and open, blissful or peaceful.
It is not impossible for grace to suddenly descend in the midst of all this stress, and occasionally a person is knocked over, like Paul of Tarsus was knocked off his horse on his way to war, and wakes up a different person. But then there is a great call to change your ways. Presumably Paul did this, as he later became a preacher and saint, or he might have had a very difficult time of it.
For this energy of kundalini to bring peace to the receiver it is most helpful to have a calm and receptive disposition, a healthy body, a stress-free lifestyle, a drug-free energy field, and mellow friends. The practices that will help this process move more gently in your life will be discussed in a later chapter.
Aside from these issues, there is no guarantee that you will feel graced by the kundalini experience, and a few people appear to suffer with many powerful difficulties that are triggered by the intensification of energy in their bodies. However, it is very rare to be made permanently ill, and it certainly is not the nature of kundalini to do so in most cases. When illness happens it is likely an underlying physical or emotional imbalance that has been amplified by the energies. More commonly kundalini simply triggers a string of odd and sometimes uncomfortable events, and they pass as the energy moves up and through the crown, bringing realization. This may take a few hours or 25 years. Usually the most intense experiences are in the very beginning weeks and months. Yogis would tell you the degree of difficulty depends greatly on your previous life preparation, your readiness in this life, your personality style and whether or not you have the assistance of someone who has already completed the process. Other factors I have noticed are the general state of the energy system, the health in the past history, the level of emotional maturity, and the capacity for self-witnessing.
Even though there are no guarantees, the opening of a body/mind usually does bring grace. To know the unlimited and eternal vastness of the pure mind, and the universal wholeness we all share, is wondrous and life-changing. To feel our minds as open and radiant expansiveness, free of attachment to thought fo
r even a few moments, brings great happiness and peace. When cells break free of the contraction of lifetimes there can be ripples of great ecstasy flowing through the energy field. When we no longer care how life works itself out, not because the heart is closed but because it is open and trusting, there is indescribable equanimity. This allows us to move spontaneously toward what is needed in the moment. These are the true graces that flow from kundalini awakening, once it has come into its full flow. In time, if there has been a drama, it will subside. Our spiritual journey will regain its footing and follow on into the more mundane aspects of life.
Chapter 7:
Supporting the Kundalini Process
Kundalini awakening has been called a purification process, and also, in Hindu terms, it is the release of samscaras and vrittis. Samscaras are all the conditions brought into this unique life to be played out from previous lives, but could also be considered as the consequence or effects of choices made in the present life. Vrittis are all the internal movements of mind and thought. Many spiritual practices exist for the purpose of calming and overcoming the activity of the mind, breaking old patterns, and clearing psychological conditions.
Deconstruction of the Past
This process is about deconstruction. It gradually strips away old identifications that were woven through your energy field in this and previous lives, including everything you have learned to think about yourself and others, and tendencies that have probably been brought through genetically. When the awakening of kundalini is completed you will likely have some of these tendencies, preferences, and thoughts as well, but you no longer will attach importance to them. They are arising from a field of spacious emptiness and will return there, and you will experience yourself as that field; that is, if any sense of self-experience can be attributed to this at all. You will continue to live in the world in a way that looks like everyone else, and you may be drawn to engage in some activities, but you will experience a freedom from self-identification with who you are and what you are doing.
The Kundalini Guide: A Companion For the Inward Journey (Companions For the Inward Journey Book 1) Page 9