Coping With Kundalini

With kundalini, you soon see how everything is connected.  You feel it.  You might even feel yourself becoming it.  The physical body is caught up in this trans-formative process, and there are some very physical things you can do to make its presence in your body easier to deal with.

I think that it depends on where you are in your process.  I lived with kundalini for about four years before things began to get difficult.  I certainly had some difficulty before then, but nothing compared to when I began to question my experience, which led to a deepening of the energy within me and this highlighted the issues within that had lain more dormant as the energy seemed to have a place to reside, but was, I think, coming up against strong internal resistance on my part, albeit subconscious in many ways, against its going deeper.  When I began to work on loosening blocks in a much more conscious way, life became very difficult because the inrush of kundalini through all these knots made things very painful.  I think its possible to live with kundalini but have its energy only go so far.  Its as though it wont go where it is not welcomed, and while some would see the coming of kundalini as nothing they ever asked for, it is my feeling that on a deeper level it was most certainly bidden, and if you consider that there was something moving deeper within you that did bring this on, you are in a better position to begin to consider why this is so, and to feel less like a victim of this torrential energy and more as someone who has just awakened and is now growing up, so to speak.  I know that when I ask the energy to come on stronger in order to do some work, it does.  Sometimes it feels like it is kicking my behind, but I know that this pain or difficulty is merely lack of alignment to its perfect energy. I know that I did not have the trouble with adrenaline until I began working to remove blocks.  Only then did adrenaline rev up like nobodies business. 

The effect that this has on the adrenals and kidneys is very real.  Some can suffer adrenal burn-out, and having adrenaline pumping through you in this way can be very wearing on the body.  This can be part of the trial by "fire" that many talk about. But one thing is for sure; for as hard as this part of the journey was, it taught me come hell or high water how to be the captain of my own ship, which meant learning how to flush out latent fear in my body and soul and to get a grip on my physiology and actually learn to control it.  Your body will mirror your feelings perfectly, but in awakening, you might be a few steps behind what your body is trying to tell you by having anxiety or fear or adrenaline going full tilt.  Consider that kundalini IS a few steps ahead of you and is trying to tell you something.  the adrenaline side of this experience, when it winds up being a daily phenomenon until it finally gets resolved can be incredibly trying.  Maddening, even.  But if you have encountered this, you are not alone and it IS possible to get through it.  Many have, and you now have it in you to do so also, if there is stored fear in you somewhere.  I do suggest surrounding you with people who either understand you very well or who love you unconditionally and regardless of whether they understand or even KNOW what this kundalini is all about, are willing to be there to help you talk you down out of a tree when you need it, if you need it.  Sometimes the best thing that you can do is listen to a great joke or blow off steam in moments like these.  If it feels like you have been gritting your teeth for the last week and a half, its time to do something that will break this cycle and focus you in a different way.  there is something that some call kundalini syndrome and it has resulted in some people kind of losing it.  You have to stick with this and work through it in order to dredge the latent material in your psyche.  It is curious because its less about chucking something out the door as its simply not mattering anymore.  More on this towards the end....

Listen to what your body is telling you.  If you are not hungry, eat when you are hungry. If you are a strict vegetarian and feel an urge to eat meat, this is not something you should ignore.  If you can't bring yourself to eat meat, at the very least look into what it is your body is craving and seek to supply it in other ways if you can. Some foods I have found that have been very calming have been curry, cantaloupe, and eggs have been a very good "smooth" form of protein that I do not have many reactions to. I have read that any kind of melon can have a calming effect.  I often have issues with meat sometimes, especially beef.  Not always. We pump all kinds of things into these animals and we do not have good ways of slaughtering them. All of this can be felt in the heightened state of kundalini. Soy has estrogenic compounds in it, but Mung beans are almost as high in protein as soy without these compounds which might have a calming effect, and they might also have the effect of working against your own hormonal output. I have found that greek yoghurt, while higher in fat than other yoghurt, it also has a lot of protein too and tends to stick with you.  Peanut butter has been a staple for a morning meal on toast and is something that can stick with you if you want to stay away from meat.

  To this end, there are things you can do to help support your body during this time.  One of these is simple, but very useful.  Its exercise.  Some have said that exercise can make it worse, but my experience has been that it helped to burn adrenaline at a critical time when I was in a kind of misery physically.  If this get to this point, strong exercise can do the job.  Realize, the reason why there is so much adrenaline is because of fear rising to the surface.  This is not JUST a physical effect, but one brought on by kundalini pushing fear out of your subconscious self into waking consciousness.  As hard as that is, it is what Kundalini will do.  It is a very hard blessing because it will clear you out in the end.  When I say exercise, it may need to be strong exercise in order to burn off the adrenaline.  Understand that adrenaline is there to power your muscles.  So power it.  The adrenaline comes in proportion to the presence of fear that has long been suppressed. During some of the hardest times with this, I had a bicycle that I would ride.  My bike is a mountain bike, so I took it off-road and rode up and down grassy hills around parks and in natural locations.  Instead of feeling totally jazzed, I felt a measure of peace after these rides.  This is of course a stop-gap measure, but if this is a big issue, a painful one, then for the time being exercise that will get your heart rate up will most likely be the best.  The other side of this is learning to deal with the fear, which I will get to later.

One thing that was pointed out to me by a friend who had lived with kundalini her whole life and who was educated in eastern practices, was how the eastern cultures tend to have an alkalizing diet.  It is in these cultures that there seems to be the greatest awareness off and perhaps incidence of awakenings.  Is it possible that the by products of adrenaline,the fight or flight end of our experience, creates compounds in the body that serve to keep it in a frightened state?  A kind of chemical reminder that we are still very much swimming in the chemical soup of fear and the shadow side of ourselves?  Alkalizing the body serves to actually change the body from acid to alkaline.  Its totally unintuitive, but the results are that it does.  One way that I introduced this into my day to day regimen was to put two teaspoons of organic apple cider vinegar in water.  I eventually got to a place where I would just quaff a tablespoon of it straight with a good dose of water to chase it down. I tried to do this twice a day.  Another way would be to use lemon juice.  You can also make sure that you eat salads that have vinegar in them as well.  One things you will need to watch is how it might effect your digestion.  Normally stomach acid is very strong, but in some people who have problems with acid reflux, making sure you don't aggravate your condition with the addition of more acid could be something worth considering.  The other side of this was how to help the kidneys, because it is the kidneys that are involved in the production of adrenaline.  One very good tonic is organic wild cherry juice.  It can be had as a concentrate added in the same way to water as the vinegar.  Take a few times each week, it is supposed to help support the kidneys.  At the core of this, though, is learning how to deal with adrenaline.

I am of the opinion that the reason why the adrenaline is there in the first place is because of an unresolved issue concerning fear.  Kundalini highlights this and builds on it in a kind of unmerciful way where everything is put under the spot light so WE SEE IT instead of just shoving it down.  We may not even know WHY we are shuddering from the adrenaline and having such a hard time of it, but I do believe that the whole purpose of the adrenaline syndrome is to learn how to transform or transmute it in the body.  This is huge.   HUGE.  Being able to figure out intuitively how to change this set up in your body, this end of the chemistry is a form of spiritual alchemy.  We can analyze it all we want, but ultimately it requires an ability to gain some control over our bodies and how they react to this chemistry.  Adrenaline, I suspect, is only part of the story.  In fact, I believe that my bliss is not simply a dopamine/serotonin cycle but a cycle of adrenaline as well (but in a much smaller dose---we have kind of gotten off track with our feelings and this has affected our body chemistry).  Adrenaline mixed with dopamine gives me the "high" that feels perfect with kundalini.  I also suspect that most addictions to opiates (which are dopamine mimics) and to speedy drugs like cocaine and amphetamines (which mimics the adrenaline) are the inner yearnings we have towards trying to find a balance of them in our bodies, a subconscious effort to bring about a balancing of them, and thus a craving for them.  I think this MIGHT work in the beginning of using such outside forms of the chemistry, but it quickly devolves as it almost always does with addiction into something that wrecks health and life.  We recognize this chemistry, but learning how to foster it in our bodies is the trick. Its very much like learning how to ride a surf board.  Not too much forward, not too much back.  You have to be in balance on this mighty wave.  Its a kind of way, very hard at first, for finding that balance point where through feeling (feelings are the catalyst for all our chemistry internally I feel), we are able to steer our own vessels into waters that were entirely unknown before all of this took place.

So let's think about fear for a moment.  Why do we have fear? And what does fear accomplish?  Most often fear is the result of something that has happened in your past that created a strong memory.  We all know that the event is in the past.  It is gone now, but we carry the fear into the present and even project it into the future.  This does two things. It takes us out of the present which is the point of all power and it also keeps us from meeting the world in a more direct way free from prejudicing it with fear.  The cycle of fear continues until the fear is either faced or let go.  Learning the art of surrender is a powerful way to stop the cycle of fear. But how do you do this? It takes some doing.  It takes being willing to relax in the moment and tell yourself that there is nothing you can do about the fear. Fear is from the past, not something in the present.  You are merely projecting it into now or some unknown future and it robs you of what resides in both. Tell yourself that there is nothing you can do about whatever you are fearing.  What happens if you feel fear but feel like it is so irrational that you do not know its source? The same. Tell yourself as you sit quietly breathing that there is nothing you can do about the fear except to let it go.  You tell yourself that you will, step by step, reduce your reliance on this frame of mind.

Breath in deeply and slowly and as you do imagine that you are breathing in nothing but the present.  You are not breathing in the past. Imagine that the air of the present is not touched by the past and that what you are breathing in is perfectly pure air free from all troubles. As you breathe in, imagine this pure air exchanging itself and as you breath out carbon dioxide, you are also ridding your body of a fine layer of fear.  With each breath, you are doing this.  As you think through the day, focus on your breathing.....and all you have to do is imagine this, image it in your mind. This type of practice is very powerful because we go where our thinking goes. If we can imagine a different outcome or condition, then this will eventually take hold. Its how we are. We are  like computers that get programmed. What you are doing is reprogramming yourself.  In order for this to work, you must work at it and give it time to work. The next type of breathing is very helpful and the most potent and it involves breathing in one nostril with a finger covering the other nostril for a number of breaths.  Four would be a good place to start.  Then switch to the other nostril and do that four times.  Do this as many times as you feel works for you.  it does a very good job of calming your mind. You see, your mind has been allowed to run this fear program for years, and now you are beginning to put that program to an end.

Relaxation CD's  have also been very helpful for me.  The best have been the ones where someone is simply guiding you with a minimal of other bells and whistles.  I used a CD for dealing with anxiety at the hardest point of my process.

Another very simple yet effective way of dealing with energy is to lie on the ground to help discharge it.  Another is simply surrender, a practice that will loosen your field up some and just allow all this energy to flow. If one area feels tight, it suggests there are knots there.  Kundalini can help to dissolve these, but it seems to work best when absent having any understanding of what the block is about. You do not need to consciously know all the time what these are. Allow yourself to be led. Consider knowing is not necessary.  Feeling will lead you there and using the mind can sometimes get in the way. The mind is not always the greatest tool for getting yourself around this. Surrender will tend to allow the flow to increase and also run more smoothly.  If it all feels too much, surrender more. This is the act of realizing what you are deeper down.  If this brings on anxiety, its most likely the presence of ego. The only way around this is to let the ego drift into the background. It can cause most problems especially early on. The phenomenon of "ego death" which I consider a misnomer, is a rearrangement of the ego within the self so that things function more smoothly.  Ego has been put front and center where it occupies the same space (kind of) as the essential self should.  Moving it out of the way will help immensely.  However, this can be a difficult process.  Some call it crushing, a kind of collapse of all kinds of artificial constructs that we thought were so important. But this is not the end, but the beginning. You will find great relief in letting the ego go.  This is why meditation can be so helpful because the ego has a tendency to drift back and away.  In sleep this happens in the normal course of dreaming, too.

Meditation can be helpful because of its naturally relaxing tendencies.  Allowing the self to quiet down and open so one can flow can be very helpful in coping with kundalini. Sometimes it can also make one feel less grounded, so you have to decide for yourself what works best.  I am of the mind that an increase in the energy is a positive thing, and the only problem lies in feeling safe with it. If the energy feels adversarial, it is best to realize that this is not coming from the energy but from you.  The energy is colored by this and it will seem it is true.  Removing the "problem" is the solution. Surrender.

I have used Chi Gong (also spelled Gung) during my process that helped a lot. Chi Gong means "energy work" and involves a very low impact physical workout.  It helps to move Chi in the body. I found it helped to dissolve blocks very effectively.  I spent close to a year going to these weekly classes that were held by a man who had learned White Crane Chi Gung that is part of the Shaolin tradition. I think it is good if you have a teacher who is calm and supportive.  You don't need someone yelling at you or barking orders. Ordering a DVD on this type of work could be good for a daily routine alone if need be.

Another aspect of healing blocks is shaking.  Many people will go into shaking fits when kundalini hits them. There is a reason for this.  The instinctual self repsonds to try and remove or make the way easier for the energy to move and shaking will do this.  This is just another form of movement.  People who reach ecstatic states most often do so with shaking and even jerky movements. There is a reason for this. It has a neurological, energetic, and physical basis. Do not feel funny about shaking or moving.  It is nature's way. Even vigorous dance will no doubt make you feel much better. Past trauma and hurt and other issues are lodged in the body on all levels and this shaking helps.  People who do energy work in the body find that by moving the body this can help release blockages.  Ida Rolf had a very aggressive form of deep tissue massage that she found helped to release old impacted emotional material.  You need someone who knows intuitively where to work on you in order to locate and then liberate your body of this material.  Shoulders and upper back can be a popular place for material to rest, but so can the abdomen, the hips, and other joints. Often people will lodge a lot of emotion at the location of an old injury. Anything lingering from than injury can often be found there.  It happened to me that I had emotional material lodged in my shoulder after an injury there.

Movement is something I am dealing with in my book Waking The Infinite, and in it I have observed through numerous traditions that movement, even ecstatic movement, serves an important function in the physiological connection to the effects that trauma has on the body.  As you awaken, I am sure you have discovered a whole new way of sensing energy.  Things are much more apparent in this way, and you feel through the energy body to the point where you can feel others around you.  You feel patterns of past trauma in others as energetic patterns that can be translated into etheric pain that gets referred to the body as well.  This is where extreme stomach tightness can occur, headaches, and pain in the heart or just about any other part of the body.  As a result, you can become more acutely aware of those issues you have in your own etheric body and which have become lodged also in your physical body since the etheric and physical feed perfectly into one another.

Something that can also help you is to simply use intention.  If you reach a place where you feel like you are all out of answers, if you feel like you can use this method, do.  Ask the universe to send you the resources that will serve your highest.  You do not need to know what this will present to you as.  You can also ask for more specific things like a teacher or assistant of some kind.  The more open you are to its coming in many different forms, the quicker it can happen.  This could come as a person or it could come in the form of a book or an experience or conversation with someone who mentions to you just what you need without your having ever mentioned it. If you have not yet experienced the power of this during awakening, it is time you tried.  It is known that there are these odd events called synchronicities that happen in greater number with those who are awakened. If you look up synchronicity on this blog there should be some examples of my own experiences with it. It does no good if you simply do not believe in it. The way for it to work is to hold the hope or wish as clearly in your mind as you can. Imagine how you wished for some toy as a child. Do you remember how excited you were when you wished like that as a child?  You need to do that and as you do, hold it only for a moment and then entirely let it go. Give it to the universe.  Don't hold onto it.  The energy has to do its work FOR you. It does no good to simultaneously wish and then feel like it can never happen because what you are doing is asking the universe not to give it to you. Its going to mirror you perfectly, so send the wish with as much hope and excitement as you can and let it go. Put your mind on other things and forget about it. I do this all the time and its as simple as making the wish and then not obsessing over it.

If I were to tell you how this has worked for me over the years, you might have a hard time believing it.  And yet, if you let yourself consider it as a possibility, you can see for yourself how you can begin to utilize this very powerful ally in your own journey.  You do not need to know how it will work.  If you ask for something that does not come it could be two things.  It could be you have a competing belief or it is somehow not right for you. I do not mean to say that it wont ever be right, but trust also that there might be other things more pressing that you have to get through. If you can feel a sense of trust in this vast power that will do what is best for you, it can open you up to just the right attitude that you need.  Consider being led.  Let your own will become the will of the universe.  Feel devotion to it, feel peace that everything will work out as it should.  You are small, and you may not be able to see the bigger picture.  This also does not mean that you should simply sit idly by for it to happen. Follow your instincts too. Make yourself ready or open by living your life.  Allow accidents to happen.  Follow a hunch. It does not always have to make sense.  I have made my greatest discoveries when I pulled a random book off a shelf or followed a completely odd urging in my head to go somewhere or do something.  These can be the things that can lead you to the resources that you didn't even know exist.

One of the single most effective stances during awakening is courage.  Being willing to meet every single skeleton in your closet and let it go is a powerful tool at your command.  This is important, at least in my experience because a very interesting things happens when you are sitting there at two in the morning aware that there is some great wall of menace bearing down on you as you sit in meditation; when you let yourself step into that wall of menacing blackness without fear, a very curious thing happens; the fear is transformed into a sense of buoyancy, even of bliss.  What you thought one moment was the end of you was in truth a new beginning.  Whenever I have stepped into the unknown in this way, the very nature of the thing before me changed.  What once was like a giant dragon became a small mouse.  I laugh; over and over I seem to have to relearn this!  My goodness!  So in the beginning of awakening, you might be faced with something that might paralyze you with fear, but in that moment be brave and ask yourself; are you going to die from some faceless fear?  Will this REALLY be the end of you or your ego or identity?   I think of that old scratchy recording of FDR saying "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" I smile because you know, he was right!  Its the FEAR that is the problem.  Once it is gone, most challenges tend to pale in comparison.  Your faceless fear (okay, so let's say it has a face....its still being driven by fear after all....so consider that) can morph and change into anything because it really is beyond all reality.  By facing it, you bring it into reality and realize that the REALITY is that within you is this divine creature seeking to emerge (really!!).  Try it sometime, and I think you will see what I mean.  You are actually in the process of shedding layers and for a time these layers might project themselves against the wall of your fear and make you concerned.  But I encourage you to take courage.  Believe in yourself.  Be easy on yourself.  yes, we have all fallen short, yes we have all done things we are not proud of.  If you must seek forgiveness or confess, then do so.  Do what you need to do to reach  a place where you feel right with the world.  Piercing the depths of our own ignorance and fear is one of the single most laudable acts a soul can make here on this planet!

See, when we fear something, the fear itself serves as an attractant for whatever that vibration is of that thing that is upsetting or dogging you.  You are like velcro inside with loops custom made for whatever that thing is that is upsetting you.  Your job is to let go of it, and when you do, all those little loops just relax and it just slips away.  Its very much like this!  By changing your own inner energetics, you make it to these things that were drawn to you or that still hang around you to just go away.  This is so for old hurt or trauma, to people in your life to even etheric critters that might show up to give you a scare. Like attracts like....and it might only be a fragment of like that is in you, but you really do have to let go and the rest will slip away.  Layer by layer you will go at this, so do not be surprised that when you clear your heart center one time, you wind up going back to it a year or two later for deeper clearings.  Its almost like dimensions within your energy field.  the Hindus, I have come to learn call these Etheric Sheaths (and I have a post on these, so you can search using that term and find the post).  Its like you go from one dimension within one chakra center only to find that you emerge into another world within that chakra, and then another and another.  This I think will take some time, and do not be concerned about it, because once you get to that point, you WILL be in a much better place (its all a process, layer by layer....).  So don't feel defeated if you make a big release only to find yourself having another in the same place.  It wasn't that you didn't do it completely or somehow failed at it, you certainly DID release material, there was just more of a different vibration.  It might be a smidge of something at the first level that has to be flushed or it might be a block deeper down.  Be easy on yourself.  Keep your perspective!  And when worse comes to worse, don't forget to laugh!  I mean it!  Don't get to serious!  Ego loves serious, and you need to keep the bugger at bay.  And when we laugh, we most often tend to put things back int perspective:  "Oh my goodness!  I was so serious about that big knot in my chest!  Now that its gone, I see it wasn't such a big deal as I made it out to be!"  Just go easy on yourself, okay?  And if you can't do that, realize that you are here at a time when the vibration on the earth is changing and its changing in part due to YOU and thousands, perhaps even millions like you in an event that is unlike another in history (hows that for revving your ego engine?) which is that there are more people now having spontaneous awakenings than at any other time in recorded history!  I think that is pretty awesome, don't you?  What does it mean?  Well....that's for another day.  For now, chop wood, haul water!

I am a firm believer that as you seek, so shall you find. Doors will be opened to you as you ask for them in the right way.  Believing in the possibility but not dwelling on it or anticipating their happening has always been the best key to their happening. In this way, they feel entirely effortless, and this is I think the whole point. Things can be much easier if you let them. If something is tripping you up, maybe some pain in your field is resulting in fear or hurt.  Maybe through movement or a simple act of forgiveness, you allow some long lost issue to simply drop away, one that had gone past its due date.  And as it does, the hurt resolves into its opposite, which is joy.  And love.  Being able to do this kind of work for ourselves is a profound act of love towards the self, the soul.  it seeks to make YOU right before trying to make the world right. Since the world IS inside of you, getting better inside you is a fabulous and very healthy way to find authentic happiness and fulfillment.
I hope you find the magic that is your own soul peering back at you through these marvelous events that are great gifts!

The Levels To Awakening

When I experienced an awakened kundalini, my experience was not one where a bolt of energy burst up my spine and illuminated me in total cosmic bliss.  Oh no.  It was much more subtle and gentle.  In fact, I didn't know what was going on with me at the time.  I was not scared or even terribly alarmed.  I had read some about kundalini many years previous, the book that is now a classic by Gopi Krishna.  His description of the experience didn't come into my awareness or thought when considering what on earth was going on with me at the time.  This is to my mind why its so important that we try our best not to pigeon hole this experience.  Rather than a thing that happens, think of it as something that you are becoming.  An evolutionary spiral has moved within you to a bend where you are now turning into something different, moving through a very different part of your becoming.  Eventually, we will all experience this as if I feel is right, its an eventual thing, a human thing, not an aberation or oddity.  It is what we are.  The energy which we call kundalini or awakening, or nonduality states is part of us.  It IS our consciousness.  In a way that I have described before and have felt to my marrow, is that the energy that inhabits us, while it feels like its some intelligent energy, is our own refined consciousness doubling back upon what we could say is its ancestral state, us, developmentally.  It is like going back into time with a time machine and telling the self you were in an earlier time, all the things you needed to do in order to grow into a happier more fulfilled person.  This is very much what is happening.  This energy is you, and it is also, by the way, the universe. 

For me, the process was piece-meal and gradual.  I had odd sound phenomenon.  I actually heard a woman's voice as though it was just outside murmuring for hours on end.  As soon as I mentioned it to anyone, it went away, only to be replaced by other sounds that I could hear coming from a different location. One sound was that of Native American drummers who were singing and drumming.  I wondered over what it was that was making it so I could hear them in the distance?  Around this same time I began to notice phosphorescent markings on the wall at night.  They would appear night after night until I realized there was no way these lights could have been there as I saw them.  No light was shining through the window, and there were some mauve and green colored plastic bins that had been stacked along the wall, so even if the light was shining from outside the house, they would not have looked as though they were flat against the wall, but against curved plastic surfaces that no doubt would have colored the light with their industrial plasticy-ness.  I began to suspect that these lights were a kind of projection coming from me.  I listened to a hemi-sync audio cd during this time and found that I was seeing still more strange lights as though my own eyes were like a projection lamp in front of me, staring at these forms on the ceiling.  All of this, most of it, is mentioned in some accounts of what kundalini is, but at the time, the sheer detail of the experience kept me from thinking this had to be an Awakening.  My body, both the physical one and the energetic one, was gearing up for something.  What it was, I had no idea, but because I had had unusual things like this happen to me before, and perhaps because I had always been interested in the nature of consciousness, I observed all of this with a mix of fascination and curiosity.  I was around my edges a little concerned, but not afraid. In retrospect, an energy was working in me at many levels, aligning my consciousness on subtle levels and beginning to shake up some of the dross that stood in the way of this flow of universal energy moving through my conscious self.  This was like a construction phase, and like all projects of that type, its often hard to know just what the project was really all about in its fuller scope.  Its hard to know what your living room is going to turn into when the workmen have begun to deconstruct it.  Or, like many different parts of a much larger puzzle, I only had a few pieces that bore no relationship to one another, and while they looked interesting at the time, I didn't know where this was headed. 

The process was gradual.  It began to grow a head of steam over about a six month period.  During this time I had none of the usual symptoms that would make me suspect this was kundalini. In fact, I suspect that the classic kundalini awakening is one that is less desirable for us to have happen as it it more like a lightening bolt than a slow and gentle churning of our insides.  I have since read a few accounts of this bolt from the blue experience and many of the people are left afterward with a huge question in their minds as to what that was all about.  It was as though they were suddenly and powerfully transported to some ascended state of being only to be put back into normal consciousness.  Like riding in a New Delhi taxi, the rider is subjected to many jerks and turns that feel a bit overwhelming and hard to take. In the end, however, the path that this energy takes is the path it probably needs to take based on where the person is energetically and physically.  Its interesting for the fact that a friend of mine who worked in the same field as I spoke of how he had awakened kundalini during a class he took in kundalini yoga.  For him, it was a more classic example of the energy flowing up his spine.  He knew what he had done, or was doing, and chose not to let the energy proceed further.  He shut it off.  Then, when he talked to his teacher about it, he found out that the teacher knew the techniques for the type of yoga he was practicing, but had never had any direct experience himself in it!  Stunned, he felt fortunate that he didn't move forward with the experience.  For him, the experience left him shaken, even a little scared.  He spent years dealing with what he described as the fall-out from this stirring of his energy.  Instead of being able to embrace it, it was something that he steered clear from.  Perhaps if it had come on more gently, he might have been able to have been able to experience all of this in a more gentle way before the flames grew bright within him. 

For a couple of years I experienced what this energy was doing to me on a deep level.  I watched curiously as this visitor took up shop in my body and began to do its work of stirring my insides, helping me to reach a place where I found a number of long forgotten issues to rise and lift from my awareness.  It was unblocking me, this I knew, and at a certain point the energy reached a place within me where it more or less stopped.  I could feel the energy still vibrant inside of me, yes, but the cleansing action seemed to have stalled.  At the same time I had reached a place where I was feeling a deep connection to someone I had never even met.  This was all energetic in nature, and was the one facet of the experience that stretched my credulity.  On the one hand something in me knew this was fact while another part needed evidence because the place where all this came felt so....imaginary....so fluid.  I was used to using my imagination to make art, but not fact.  Imagination was something that could be used to create fact, but imagination was not itself fact, right?  Later I learned there was a lot that I didn't know about this new world I was moving into.  At first this connection via bliss and powerful life force made this connection feel as if it was fated by the universe.  Somehow I was in an energetic dance with another person on the planet, and I thought at first it was because of this other person and their spiritual chemistry that was making all of this happen.  As the energy stalled and I began to take stock of my situation, I found that when I turned my attention to certain areas of the energy, it would seem to talk to me....it stirred a knowing inside of me that only created more questions.  Long before I heard anything about the holographic nature of the universe, this energy was talking about it, showing me in dream-like imagery while in full wakefulness how it worked, how the universe was made up of particles all dancing on a wave.  I was shown the world in its most massive scales and its most minute, and at each level the structure was the same....or nearly so. Everything was built on a simple form of energy and it very much had to do with positive and negative charges.  While this worked out ina perfunctory way in physics, what I saw was the the universe was filled with feeling.  The stars that gave birth to our consciousness were inside of us, and we were inside them, bearing their lineage as part of the stuff that made us what we were.  It was less that the world was a giant parking lot that we filled with our lives as  a universe that had feeling, was filled with energy that was alive and pulsing with desire.  As I turned my attention to this energy, it showed me the relationships that all of these pulsations have, and how our position within the seeming polarities of universal energy was part of a choice that we made moment by moment.  Our sexuality was itself a fundamental expression of this universe.  Around this great pulse of energy there was masculine and feminine, and they existed as seemingly separate in a world of duality so that we might experience all the parts of conscious energy in an upclose and intimate way.  In truth, we were both masculine and feminine, for we were the universe looking back on itself.  We were droplets of individuality beginning to move in a sea of collective waveform identity that went beyond anything we could have previously imagined. 

This left me wondering what the limit was to all of this.  There wasn't any.  It simply was a vast field of limitless energy that we were beginning to experience, and it would reveal itself only in terms that we were comfortable or capable of experiencing at the time or place that we were.  As I began to shift my ideas, my world took on a different cast.  My energy went through the roof.  I found boundless creative energy available once I gave myself over to it. This was not something flowing as a result of being connected to an energetic counterpart, but as a result of my own inner counterparts dancing within me.  By learning to loosen up my rigid masculine self, a feminine flow of energy sought a way into my life.  Being involved as an artist, this naturally expressed itself in making things, but things that reflected a different process for creating. I was less in control and more willing to let this energy do its thing.  I was only just begun to inch out onto the shore arm of a vast ocean.  As I questioned the experience and what it might be, events in my life began to change, too.  I met someone who challenged my old ideas, and suggested I was not in such a great place as I had thought.  I was woefully lacking in awareness about who and what I was.  I was given some basic suggestions for how to help this energy do its work in me. When I did this, still more miraculous things began to take place.  I was told that there was someone in my community who was a kind of local expert in energetics and was going to help me in breaking some of my blockages energetically. In a matter of days, events happened that would put me in contact with a man who was in the forefront of his field, and part of his expertise was how to help move energy.  It turned out his classes took place just a few blocks from my home, and whose presence was made known to me by a customer who contacted me the following day and happened to mention how she was taking his class and maybe I might want to try it out.  Much later, I would learn that this same person had also had a kundalini awakening a few years previous to this time.  This was the kind of events that would take place in my life surrounding the resources that would come my way as a result, I feel, of needing something more, of feeling as though I had only heard part of the story.  This began a process that was in truth incredibly arduous.  It stirred all the deep hardened material that was inside of me and revealed all of my frailties for the world to see (or so it felt).  Letting go, I learned the more I could let the ego go and be humble and willing to let this experience teach me, I began to have incremental improvements in my state.  The energy, though, had grown to incredible size.  It powered an inner alchemy that included a sudden pouring down of adrenaline into my body.  This was the hardest part to deal with.  The anxiety and fear that it aroused was horrible. I went from a few isolated dark nights of the soul to an ongoing battle with all manner of things that were lodged in my psyche.  The first thing I learned was how to deal with and transform the adrenaline in my body.  Slowly I learned to transmute the fear into bliss.  I had to change how I felt about fear.  I had to not let fear get to me.  I had to be okay with it.  When I figured this out, the experience began to get better.  For about nine months, though, I was caught in a nightmarish clash with my shadow self, with adrenaline, with ego, and the fear of letting go.  I felt as though my entire being had been put in a vice and was being crushed.  I often just wanted it to STOP.  For the first time I understood why someone might kill themselves just to get something larger than themselves to come to an end.  I was very fortunate to have had a friend who understood how difficult all of this could be, perhaps the only person who understood, and who was not there to judge me but to help me find a constructive way out of this mess I was in. Just as everything was ramping up, I began to be aware of a very large energetic presence around me, and this was when I became aware of a very old guide who had been with me my whole life but who had seemingly emerged during times of inner clarity for me to become aware of him. His face had changed some but his eyes were still the same interesting mix of piercing blue with pure compassion.  This was when something amazing happened.

Ealry in the mornings I often had this guide come to me.  he had awakened me one morning to have me go outside to witness what would wind up being the dawn of Easter Sunday.  He explained to me that all my lifetimes were opening up to me like a vast hallway and through my work with awakening, I was learning to let go of all the junk that held me connected to the hurt and trauma of those lifetimes.  This was negative karma, he said, and as I listened to him speaking in the darkness of predawn, I saw the hallways of my lives begin to turn up like a bottle that then got shook so that all of its undersirable contents would shake out.