The Spiritual Path
What My Kundalini Awakening Taught Me
Your body holds more energy than you realize.
It was the third day of rather intense lower back pain, and I was fed up. No matter what pain pill I took or cream I applied, nothing seemed to help. It wasn’t my spine; no vertebrae were out of alignment. It felt like I had overworked the muscles, and they were in desperate need of a stretch, but no matter how much I stretched them, that ache wouldn’t go away.
Frustrated, I laid down on my bed. It was the afternoon, and I figured I’d try to nap.
As soon as I laid down, my lower back exploded. It felt like a hot coal smoldering at the bottom of a charcoal pit had suddenly been doused with lighter fluid. I had never experienced anything like it. It was a searing, hot energy — almost painful, but not quite — and it felt like it had burst into flame at the base of my spine.
The energy was so intense that I had to arch my back. I could feel the heat pouring out from what I knew was the place where kundalini resides. I wasn’t scared, but surprised, as this was an entirely unexpected experience.
I would soon realize how little my studies had taught me about the chakras or kundalini.
What Is Kundalini?
In Hinduism, kundalini is the dormant spiritual energy at the base of the spine. It is often depicted as a coiled serpent in deep sleep. When it is awakened, the serpent uncoils and travels up the spine — or, more accurately, an energetic channel along the spine known as the sushumna. As it travels upwards, the kundalini passes through each of the chakras.
In my case, the energy moved out of the base of the spine and then paused at each chakra center. The sensation was like a ball of energy that would reach a chakra and pause, as if trying to move further. I could feel the energy expand and push, as if to move past whatever was blocking its path.
Sometimes the process was quite electric, hot, and even painful, causing me to break into a sweat. Other times, it was soothing, smooth, and even blissful. I also experienced kriyas, which are spontaneous movements in which the body shakes and spasms as the energy clears blockages.
This energy emanated from within. It did not feel like it came from an exterior source, as if from some higher realm. Yet it did not feel like any kind of internal sensation I had ever had. It felt like it was bursting forth from the core of my being.
The kundalini had an agenda all of its own; I never directed it, and I still don’t. I never felt afraid that I was somehow in danger, as if any harm would come from this, and I was often in a state of bliss for much of the time. Despite its intensity, I understood that this was one of the most loving and transformative experiences available to a human being. I was about to embark on one of the most powerful and wondrous experiences I could ever imagine.
We Are Energy
It has become something of a commonplace in spiritual communities to speak of energy. People talk about being love and light, the energy of our thoughts and emotions, sending and receiving energy, and of course, one’s vibrational frequency. A kundalini awakening showed me just how much energy we possess.
Even before this experience, I had felt energy throughout my body. I’m not talking about sexual energy, or emotional energy, or physical heat. I’m talking about feeling like light was pouring into me, or electricity was traveling through me. I had had darshan (a Sanskrit word meaning “vision of God”) with various divine mother avatars — a kind of direct transmission of energy that left me feeling filled with light, expansive with a loving energy unlike anything else I had experienced in the world, or supercharged with an electricity that wanted to move and shake.
But this experience taught me that we contain a much more profound reservoir of energy than I had ever imagined — and that the chakras are more complex than I had previously believed. The pictures and presentation of the chakras in most contemporary spiritual works don’t do them justice.
They are not just portals that open and close or are “balanced” with essential oils, yoga poses, crystals, and pranayama. Those techniques are helpful (I enjoy them all), but they are the equivalent of dusting and organizing your house — maybe even a spring cleaning. A kundalini awakening is a gut renovation.
Our Chakras Store the Past
We’re used to seeing chakras depicted as colored balls or even the multi-petaled flowers. I now see them as floors in a house, with your root chakra corresponding to the foundation of the house, the sacral chakra corresponding to the basement, the solar plexus chakra corresponding to your first floor, the heart chakra, to the next floor, etc.
Importantly, these floors all contain multiple rooms. Each floor is a sprawling complex of interconnected rooms, filled with psychic residues, memories, and emotions. It’s as if each room had been packed by hoarders, filled floor to ceiling with every memory, thought, and emotion that one had ever experienced.
If you hear echoes of the Akashic Records in that description, you would not be wrong — your chakras are your Akashic Records. You carry them with you, literally in and as your body.
My most profound healing experiences have come from opening up those hidden rooms when the kundalini would move through a particular chakra or the spaces between the chakras, working on the connection between chakras.
Indeed, one of the key lessons is that the connections between chakras are important for how different aspects of our lives work together or block each other. Consider, for example, what it means for the link between the heart chakra and throat chakra to be open and powerful — that’s the power of heart-centered expression. Or, by way of another example, if your solar plexus and your root chakras are deeply connected — that means you have a solid sense of identity about being in this world, and thus feel secure about your material needs.
These cleansing experiences did not always start with the kundalini. Often I would begin to feel pain in a part of my body, and then when I was ready, the kundalini would move through and release the pent-up pain. For example, one experience involving my sacral chakra released very dormant energy relating to betrayals from romantic relationships from past lives, but it started as a sharp pain in my groin.
Similarly, another healing experience involved my heart chakra cleared out an entire set of rooms where I had suffered in more than one past life a tremendous attack that had instilled in me a great deal of fear and paranoia about retribution for defying conventional wisdom. This started as chest pain that, despite undergoing several Western medical tests, there was nothing physically wrong with me.
When the kundalini finally pushed the repressed energy to the surface, I was flooded with visions and memories from lives I do not remember but which are a part of me, and I would experience over and over again residual feelings and emotions from those past experiences until the chakra and the body parts associated with the energy were finally cleared.
Understanding how deeply embedded these energies were and where they came from helped me to understand why these emotional patterns had been so deeply entrenched in my life and psyche, and why they had remained immune to traditional therapy or meditation.
The awakening was not limited to clearing negative energy. Some of those rooms also contain dormant psychic faculties. Early on in my awakening, when the energy had worked quite a bit on my third eye and crown chakras, I distinctly heard a powerful voice say, “We are going to write, and we are going to write quickly.” Shortly thereafter, I began to channel with great intensity three volumes of spiritual writing during the next six months.
My Kundalini Awakening Has Never Ended
Nor did the kundalini awakening simply stop. The period of greatest intensity lasted well over six months, but my kundalini remains “awake” still today, and at times, the intensity is just as strong as it was when it first began. It all depends on when the kundalini has decided that I’m ready to uplevel again.
When the time is right, the kundalini will open up and start renovating a new room. The kundalini, with its wisdom, knows when the time is right. The kundalini is like a contractor who never gives you a firm timetable for when the work will be done.
If chakra cleansing is like spring cleaning, a kundalini awakening is a gut renovation.
Nor did the kundalini limit itself to the chakras. The kundalini has gone deep into the bones, muscles, and organs. I’ve felt the energy penetrate different parts of my physical body, which were holding deeply embedded fears and other strong emotions, so that the energy could be released.
Not all of this has been blissful, either. The longer I’ve gone, the deeper I’ve descended. Opening some parts of those chakras or certain areas of my body has led me to the deepest pits of despair, conjuring up profoundly sad, bitter, or angry emotional energy, connected with bleak thoughts. The deeper you go, the denser the shadows. For example, at one point I released the deep-seated belief that my mother had never wanted to give birth to me. It was such a profoundly painful experience to confront that belief, but the healing rewards were beyond description.
What this experience has taught me is that to be human means that we still carry the past with us in our bodies, in these energy-filled rooms known as chakras. To be in a body is to be in a perpetual state of healing and wholeness. I learned, experientially not by reading, that your kundalini — your direct connection to God — is whole and pure, and by accessing it, you can continue to heal the past that you carry around in and as your physical form.
A Kundalini Awakening is Like Getting on the Express Lane, But There Are Other Paths
A kundalini awakening is not necessary to heal and release the rooms of negative energy in your chakras. While a kundalini awakening is something like jumping on the express track, other techniques can bring this energy to the surface, slowly and with commitment.
You can practice yoga, meditation, mantra, pranayama, and creative visualization to clear as much as you can from your chakras. You can also work with energy healers to deepen and accelerate the clearing.
For a kundalini awakening to happen, however, you must allow for it. It should never be forced.
Many who have forced themselves to awaken their kundalini before they had done sufficient work have made themselves ill doing so. The purgative effect of the awakening is so extreme that you want to have already done years of cleansing work.
For me, it unfolded naturally, when I was ready, so that it was not a traumatic experience. I had already worked intensively with my teacher for nearly 5 years, doing significant cleansing of my belief systems, karma, and energy field. Without that preparation, the awakening might not have happened, or if it had, it might have been debilitating rather than transformative and empowering.
A kundalini awakening is an experience of profound grace. It will alter your understanding of your nature, as you begin to delve into dimensions of your consciousness that you had never had access to, and it will fundamentally alter how you look at what it means to be human.
It is also a humbling experience, as you recognize just how deep your karma runs, and how much unconscious yet profoundly influential material resides in your body.
When you confront emotional patterns and beliefs that you cannot seem to uproot, pause and consider that they may very well be vestiges of a distant past life, housed in a back room deep within you.
The inner work of healing ourselves can be daunting, slow, and demanding. You might even feel like you’re not making progress, or you’re beyond repair. Keep going; keep clearing. With sufficient dedication, effort, and patience, one day you may be able to open up those stores of energy known as chakras and release the past once and for all.
