The Kundalini Guide: A Companion For the Inward Journey (Companions For the Inward Journey Book 1)

by Bonnie Greenwell

  In addition to the tendency of kundalini to find problems, the stress of the highly amplified energy can cause physical problems such as adrenal exhaustion, hormonal imbalances, short-term visual dysfunction, headaches, burning sensations, back pain and other discomforts. Sometimes problems arise that are pseudo-illnesses: that is, they cannot be explained medically, and defy any diagnosis, and change their nature unexpectedly, moving from one part of the body to another. There can be apparent heart problems, gastrointestinal disorders, nervous energy and hyper-activity, eating disorders, dramatic rushes of heat and cold, pains occurring in back, head, stomach, or big toes. These and other unusual difficulties are atypical and often prove difficult to diagnose and treat because they are not consistent with known illness, and they come and go randomly.

  One issue that arises for some people is an over-stimulation of their energy field, leading to hormonal difficulties, adrenal exhaustion, thyroid issues and other factors. They jump out of hyper-activity into profound exhaustion and energy depletion. It is as if they have blown up their chemical and nervous systems. Usually this is the result of too frequent or intense energy practices. All practices that manipulate energy and consciousness can become overwhelming if done too frequently. Some people do Tantra practices, Qigong, and energy healing all in a day. Or they may do shamanic practices, heavy fasting, breathwork and kundalini yoga in a 2-week period. Bodies can only handle a certain level of energy arousal at a time. A person in this process needs to listen to their deepest intuition about what the system needs and pull back from too much activity, balancing it with quiet and grounding time in their lives.

  When there are conditions that appear to be serious, such as chest or stomach pain, or headaches, it is advisable to have a medical evaluation. It is possible to have a serious illness along with a kundalini arising, not caused by the latter but concurrent with it. If there are genuine symptoms of disease, then it is important to get treatment, because no degree of spiritual attainment can prevent you from getting a life threatening illness. (Every famous guru has ultimately released their physical body, several because of diabetes or cancer.) On the other hand, if there is no medical explanation for the problem, and if the symptoms do not occur with any consistency, then it is a relief to attribute them to the spiritual process.

  It is not uncommon to experience great shifts in eating and sexual patterns after kundalini arises. Many people feel compelled to give up certain foods, drugs and alcohol, and some lose interest in food or sex for brief periods of time, or even longer. It is important to eat a modest amount of healthy food during this time, to keep up your strength and energy, and avoid becoming “spacy” or nervous. Eating root vegetables, protein drinks, a bit of brown rice or heavy bread can all be helpful. I strongly recommend that people in this process have a consultation with an Ayurvedic practitioner who can suggest the best foods and herbal supplements for a person’s particular energy system in the condition it may be in at this time. Ayurveda, the medicine of India, identifies specific diets for various body-types, remedies for imbalances in each type of system, and a complete system for harmonizing subtle body energies for health and well-being.

  One of the most commonly reported issues after kundalini arises is insomnia. This is an ancient and well-documented problem. In tantric literature it is suggested that one simply recognize that they need much less sleep and do something useful with the time, like meditation or spiritual reading. If someone meditates a great deal of time his or her actual need for sleep is diminished. Also the energies tend to run more actively at night when we are in a more sedentary state. Once you realize you do not need as much sleep as in the past it is helpful to let go of thoughts and worries about it and find a way to enjoy the extra time. However if you have many nights with very little sleep you may need to take a day to nap, or use a mild sleep assistant such as melatonin to assure you do not become disoriented. Some people become irrational or mentally hazy when sleep deprived, and behavior can even appear psychotic. Listen to your body and catch up with sleep if you feel physically or mentally exhausted. You can drink warm milk, take time for daily exercise, listen to sleep inducing tapes, and invite peaceful imaging to encourage the body to let go and rest. Sometimes counting your breaths backwards from one hundred can be helpful. One teacher told me he looks for some part of his body that is ready to sleep and then puts his attention there.

  Psychological and Emotional Upheavals

  Sometimes awakening is accompanied by an intensification of unresolved psychological issues, fear of death or insanity, mood swings, or crushing waves of anxiety, anger, guilt, or depression, and this surge of feeling may seem to be unrelated to any personal issues. One may also experience waves of compassion, unconditional love, and heightened sensitivity to the moods of others. People are particularly prone to fall in love with inappropriate love objects during this time: that is, someone unattainable, or of an age and sex that would not have attracted them in the past. Love may arise and suddenly fall without discrimination upon everyone.

  Remember that this is a clearing process, and all the energies woven into your subtle field and related to your life experiences are unraveling. This brings an opportunity to look at and release all that has been hidden or held secretly as the foundation of your beliefs about your life. Subtle energies hold the patterns of your emotional responses, and hold together a “memory” of who you are that you wake up to every morning. Sometimes it seems that the emotions of this life, previous lives, and even collective lives, are expressing through your body, and you have no idea why, nor any memory you can call up to explain it.

  Through all this upheaval, if you can manage to develop self-compassion and silent witnessing, it will serve you well when you reach a stage of embodiment in your spiritual process. In order to hold the vast love and wisdom that we essentially are, we must clear out our impressions of ourselves and others, let go of emotional stances and self-destructive ideas, and become free of our history. In a nutshell, this is why we go through upheaval in this process. Deconstruction of the identity is an inevitable correlation of a complete spiritual awakening, and is discussed in more depth in the second volume of this set, “The Awakening Guide”.

  Extrasensory Experiences

  It appears that extra senses can activate when kundalini awakens, and some ancient scriptures say it is possible for the vision and hearing to become much more acute, even becoming super-human: for example, one might see the ants crawling up a tree in the distance, or hear whispers from another room. More commonly, people may experience unfamiliar and spontaneous visual images, such as of lights, symbols, and entities, or the reviewing of other lives, or visions that are felt to be psychologically or spiritually meaningful.

  A few times I have heard descriptions from people who have experienced a radical change of environment, where the surroundings shift for a moment into another historical time, become black and white, or appear to be in some other place. One woman, driving over a bridge, suddenly lost her bearings and felt she was out in space. Another saw frightful demonic images in the sky outside her 9th floor window. (I believe this was a personification of some extreme anger and despair she was experiencing). Some people may occasionally hear sounds, a voice, music or a helpful phrase from scripture. They may smell sandalwood, perfume or incense, or some other fragrance of their childhood i.e. cooking, although they know it is not present in the room. These kinds of events can be very disarming, especially as they are associated in most people’s minds with mental illness or psychosis. When the situation is triggered by kundalini, these events are very occasional, rarely threatening, and soon pass away. When they have elements of danger (such as the demonic images) they suggest an underlying psychological issue, or the residual of working with occult arts, that will probably need to be addressed in therapy.

  Parapsychological Experiences

  Psychic awareness, unusual synchronicities, healing abilities, seeing or feeling auras, channeling, electrical
sensitivity, remote viewing (seeing an event happening somewhere else) and psycho-kinesis (objects moving without being touched) are the most commonly reported parapsychological phenomena. Sometimes there is dramatically awakened creativity, far beyond what the person ever accomplished before. Amazing art and music have emerged in this process. While there is nothing wrong with having any of these experiences, becoming attached to acquiring these kinds of gifts can lead to spiritual cul-de-sacs, where one may be distracted from realization for a lifetime.

  Many people find as consciousness becomes more full or alive in them their psychic capacity changes, and they may have an interior message when a family member is ill or dying, a flash about an impending event, or simply be thinking of a distant friend before they suddenly call. For example, one woman felt compelled to turn around and drive to her father's home one day, and on arriving discovered he had just suffered a stroke. Of course many people are psychically sensitive who are not in a spiritual process, and in the teachings of kundalini science, this is thought to be related to brain centers that are more open in some people than in others.

  I have known people who felt they lived in a magical world for a while, with everything happening exactly as they needed it to, and synchronicities (something like a fortuitous coincidence) led their lives. Suddenly this ended, and they feared they had lost their awakening. But these kinds of events are not awakening at all, only ways that consciousness seems to support the movement while a person is in certain stages of the journey. All of us experience synchronicity at times, but often we do not notice, or we label it coincidence and let it pass. These events are much more common in a kundalini process.

  Some people find themselves spontaneously performing healing after a kundalini arising, moving to help a person or an animal who is hurt, and finding they make a huge difference. One woman I worked with, who had never known anything about healing, felt compelled to stop at the scene of an accident and stop the bleeding of an injured passenger. Later she found energy flowing out of her hands, and an inner guide that would tell her what a person needed and move her hands involuntarily to areas that needed help. Her process clearly was similar to the way the QiGong energy healers work, although she did not know this. She has continued her focus on spiritual awakening, but allowed this healing work to develop, taking no income from it but doing it as a service that feels aligned with her deepest Self. From the place of healing she is not a separate individual, but stands in the emptiness or presence of the vastness she knows herself to be. Because she is not identified with it, this work will probably not become a cul-de-sac for her, but if she were to become identified and create a personal conceptual or professional framework around it, this could slow down her capacity for self-realization. It could become a new identity to be melted away before she would be free.

  Another client came to me because her kundalini process was causing her to pass out, and after seeing a program on TV related to UFO’s she felt she might have been abducted. When she went into a hypnotic state the story that came forward was not about modern aliens, but about ancient Egypt, and she began to channel an entity that appeared to be a light being that had merged with her in a ritual in the pyramids in a previous life. After this we had several sessions in which she channeled this being of light, and in time it became an inner ally for her. This process slowly brought about an integration of her energies and her spiritual expression in the world, moving her to study various spiritual systems, ending her phases of passing out, quieting her energy, moving her through both psychic and healing phases, until the intensity relaxed and she returned into an ordinary life as a grandmother, artist and rancher.

  Electrical sensitivity is a topic well researched by the notable near-death researcher, Dr. Kenneth Ring, who found that many people who had near-death experiences reported an odd relationship with electrical objects, being unable to wear watches because they would stop working, having a tendency to short-out appliances and computers, and even making streetlights blink or go out as they walked beneath them. A small percentage of people find this happening during stages of kundalini awakening, as if their whole subtle energy field simply overwhelms the field of relative energy around them.

  Psychokinesis is a similar phenomenon, in which objects tend to move spontaneously across a table or fall off a mantel, in the presence of someone with a high pranic energy field. Some systems of energy-manipulation teach methods of using mental concentration to accomplish this directly. I have also participated in what is called a Psi-party, in which a group of several hundred people were taught how to bend metal objects, such as spoons, by concentrated thought, and most people were able to do this within an hour in that environment. The children present were particularly adept at this because they had no preconceived notions that it couldn’t be done. I have witnessed similar practices used to make seeds sprout within minutes, and to bend metal bars. This is not spiritual awakening, but rather playing energy games, and it does not require kundalini arousal to accomplish it. However it demonstrates the potential of the underused human psyche.

  Samadhi or Satori Experiences

  For the purposes of this book I will define samadhi experiences as absorption of consciousness into mystical states of unity, peace, light or energy, sometimes with a clear perception of existential truths, even Self-realization. (There are many levels of samadhi in Sanscrit scriptures). Satori is defined as a glimpse of Truth, a profound sense of, “I am not existent as a separate being yet I am everything” or, “This pure and open consciousness with no identity is what I truly am”. It is an experience that cannot be described as it is beyond thought, but it is intuitively known, almost a cellular realization. There may be less intense trance-like states that bring peace, joy, or waves of bliss. A Christian falling into ecstasy or divine union that is free of thought or self-reflection would be the equivalent of one level of samadhi experience. These may occur during or after meditation, or spontaneously at other times.

  Please note that any of these phenomena can occur independent of a kundalini awakening, for various reasons. But if a person has had a dramatic initiating event, and this is followed over time with experiences from several of these categories they are probably in a kundalini process.

  Why Phenomena Happens

  Although we must acknowledge a great mystery in this process of deconstruction that accompanies spiritual awakening, it appears that the primary reason these phenomena arise is that the subtle body field needs to reorganize and become more open. When the subtle body (the field of mind, emotions and senses) is influenced by the quickening energies of kundalini, it releases blocked trauma and pain, along with repressed memories and emotions, and opens the energy field into new experiences which have not been known before, including the opening of brain centers with capacities that are not commonly utilized in ordinary mental states. This is consistent with the teachings of kundalini science, as understood by practitioners in India.

  All of our conditioning, which has shaped our patterns of thinking and perceiving what is happening to us, is woven into the subtle energy body field. When kundalini arises, either before or after a spiritual realization, this conditioning is coming undone. Our structure of identification, how we think of who we are, is falling apart. For some unfortunate people, the outside world, and all the crutches of personal identity, will also fall apart. I have heard a few dramatic stories of spiritual initiations that were followed by exterior losses of jobs, homes, lovers, and friends dropping away, in conjunction with the inward collapse of personal identity during this process. This is one form of the dark-night-of–the-soul consistently referred to in spiritual literature. This is not a random destruction, however, but instead it is a stripping away of anything that is not truly authentic. The person is being invited to live in a new way.

  Gradual and Direct Paths

  Having been involved deeply in Ashtanga yoga, kundalini yoga, Advaita Vedanta, and Zen Buddhist traditions, I have seen two interesting patterns
that occur in those who have full awakenings to their true nature. Those who teach the gradual path to awakening, such as the eight-limbed yoga of Patanjali, the Kriya Yoga path introduced by Swami Paramahansa Yogananda, or kundalini tantra practices, believe that one must be fully prepared. They offer a process in which yoga and meditation practices awaken the latent coiled energy of kundalini, then move it through correct channels until it reaches the crown, where one then experiences the bliss and fullness of samadhi or satori states that reveal the nature of Self. Many Buddhist paths and Sufi paths also follow a gradual training program, leading to the awakening of consciousness, without an emphasis on kundalini arising (although it usually does anyway).

  Along the gradual path many chaotic events may occur, along with psychological traumas and insights, and spiritual experiences. There can be many openings of heart and mind, insights, and other positive experiences, so there is a sense of moving forward to a particular completion, especially if a teacher is at hand who knows the territory. A qualified teacher can tell from the reported experience just where the kundalini energy, or the spiritual process, is activated or blocked.

  On the direct path, for example in Advaita Vedanta or Zen Buddhism, realization of Truth may occur first, that is, before signs of kundalini energy arise. Sudden insight may happen while reading a scripture, hearing the Truth clearly spoken, or being in the presence of a teacher who lives it. (Practically speaking, years of long silent meditation periods are also essential parts of the Zen path.) There is a sudden recognition that might be called “I am that!” a movement of the psyche that cannot adequately be described for the mind, but shifts the identity outside of its narrow boundaries and into a vastness, emptiness, spaciousness and timelessness which shatters any illusion of a separate self. This is awakening. As the Buddha reported simply, “I am awake”. Those who have such awakenings suddenly, when they have never been on a gradual spiritual path, will probably find later that the deconstruction associated with kundalini moves in to support their realization.