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.
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.
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