I was recently sent a Youtube video of a popular figure in New Age circles whose claim to fame is that he has activated kundalini energy more than 70 times. If you have to activate it more than zero times, you’re doing it wrong.
If you’ve been following this chain of articles, you know that the healthy state of being is to be heart-alive, for that transcends and includes brain-aliveness. Many of us mistake being emotional as being heart-alive. Heart does not equal emotion. Heart equals understanding centered in joy. Understanding utilizes rational thought as a tool, invites compassion, and gives feeling. It’s not as mechanical as that sounds, but these are some functional aspects at the forefront of one living in heart.
One way to become heart-alive is to peel away the layers of brain-self through positive negation. Peel away brain-self to reveal… well… still a self. But a self who radiates joy. Think of heart-self as an intermediary between form-awareness (thought) and formless awareness (insight). Less rigid in what you’ve been taught you know, and more open to how things actually are. Or, less into dictation and more into revelation.
But once the shiny new you becomes… well… you, there’s still something blocking kundalini energy: you. When that realization strikes the core so hard that you shatter, in that moment, kundalini flowers. Momentary lack of you is the moist soil needed for kundalini to flower. But then you are back, obviously, because you’re saying to yourself, “Holy crap! My body is moving and I’m not the one moving it! I must be possessed by the devil!”
Spoiler alert: you’re not possessed by the devil. You are body awareness living in union with formless awareness. Both are you, but living in time means living with a sense of divisions. Relationship, and ultimately union, rectify this as best as possible in the day-to-day state of things. If you are not living in union with kundalini, but are constantly activating it over and over again? That is you trying to collapse the timeless/formless into yourself. You may do this for entertainment purposes or to “gain power” or to feel as if you have control or to feel you have conquered fear. But all of this is fear. None of it is the soil in which kundalini grows. You may grow from it, adding experiences and knowledge to yourself, but that perversion of self-involvement-as-evolvement has already caught up with us. No time to dilly-dally and play with broken psychic phenomena like a child pulling the emergency break on a car. As impressive and cool as he feels and, no doubt, looks to his friends as they watch him “drive” it, unbeknownst to them all, the child will eventually hit a wall or drive off a cliff. Was the experience worth it?
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Now we’re living in union with kundalini. Is that the end of the road? Is that enlightenment? Is that living in wholeness? Well… not exactly. It’s the best we can do for now and now is all we’ve got, let’s put it that way. In my case, the first thing that happened was my head spinning around as if doing a neck exercise. Small body movements followed. My right hand and arm moved around on their own. I tried talking to my finger like some Stephen King bastardization. It remained like this for months. I don’t know if it would have evolved into larger structured exercises, tai chi, spontaneous yoga poses, and so forth, if not for the fact that I had blown out my back and didn’t have health insurance to make it better. With no alternative and all the time in the world to lie in bed, I allowed the energy to do as it wished. And what it wished was for the body to get healthy. Not just the injury, but all of my abuses. This included obvious things like diet, but also imperceptible things like aligning the body with cardinal points at the right moments and doing prayer-like machinations when appropriate. Doing what can best be described as exercises for the body and energy work in the room. Essentially, getting the body right with itself, with local environment, and with Mother Earth herself in ways I understood and ways I did not, but people raised in heart cultures would.
But that was me. What would happen with you depends on your own abuses. Whatever you need to get right with physically, or have ignited psychically, is what’s going to happen—and in proper proportion to one’s injured and/or neglected aspects.
The notion that kundalini can be dangerous likely comes from two sources: 1.) People who do not live in union with it but play with turning it on and off. That’s like overdosing on medicine and then blaming the medicine for the pain it’s causing. Or the kid crashing the car because he pulled the emergency break to feel like an adult driver. It’s not the car’s fault. 2.) People who struggle against it at the first sign of discomfort.
Also not the kundalini energy’s fault? How long it takes to get to whatever happens next. If you become enamored with it, you will rest there, wherever that is. It might be with the movements; it might be psychic phenomena. It is all fascinating, but to get caught up in that fascination is to end the kundalini unfolding until you get out of the way and let it do its work again. Most people never do. They become psychics and healers and gurus and so forth. With every unfolding scenario comes the temptation to close up shop and say, “That’s it! I’m actualized! I’m a healer! I’m a ________!” Fill in the blank with your new identity. The “I” asserts him/herself every step of the way. To see this through to the end is to be chaste, innocent, and curious to understand for the sake of understanding.
When kundalini is active, you are not. You are there as witness, not as will. The assertion of will is the ending of it; the allowing of it is the ending of will. Originally, you were a self blocking out kundalini flow. Now, it is ever-presently conscious in the body and you’re a self who allows it to express. Many people confuse this passivity with being a student to Spirit. You are not passive of will to learn anything. There is nothing to learn. Let the energy fix you. Trust yourself. All of yourself, formless and form. You are, after all, also Spirit. It’s all you at heart, even though you’re experiencing differences as separations.
However long the unfolding takes is how long it takes. The snap of a finger. A day. Years. Become the fullest expression of yourself and the next thing that’s out of your control will present itself when appropriate. The only thing you’re in control of at this point is how in control you want to be. And again, that control—that assertion of self—will get in the way. I did not suffer this problem, so in my case, I took the express shuttle to the lightning round (or enlightening round). The one thing I did right was stay out of the way and wonder where, if anywhere, this was going. That was where I placed my astonishment, not on the phenomena that were unfolding through me.
These words might actually hinder you from experiencing what happens next if you take them to heart. Don’t. They reflect my experience. True though they may be, they are only words to tell you that this is real but, oh yeah: if you believe that then you’ll never experience the real, you’ll experience belief in the real. So let the notion that this is real drift away. You read it. That’s good enough. Don’t want it. Don’t expect it.
Understand as you, not as me or any other writer. We write to communicate through the shared illusion of separation. To see deeper into the oneness that underlies and is us means seeing that I am you talking to yourself, not a clever person selling you on something that is mine.