WHAT IS KUNDALINI?
A GUIDE TO PRIMAL ENERGY AWAKENING

These notes came to me as clarity for myself, and I wrote them down and decided it might be interesting to others. When the kundalini awakens, things and stuff arise: the scaffolding that held our personal identity together such as beliefs, concepts, conditioning, habits, relationships, work, mental health, moods ... all those properties we collected to build ourselves up, is being released. This releasing or unraveling happens all by itself - it's perfectly spontaneous.

This stuff comes to our awareness, and we become even more aware of it as it is being released. This is where we tend to get in the way of the process itself because we do not want to let go or go through what is being released; so we resist it or try to stuff it down or dampen our energy with excessive grounding. As the stuff releases, there is a fire or a transformation happening, a metamorphosis is beginning to happen: an uncoiling. The held item is releasing and dissolving our attachment to it, so what is releasing is our holding or ownership of it. As this item releases the brain mapping and organization is changing to essentially erase it. Healing is happening; the energy we held, forced and kept inside is in form and is now being freed or released into no pattern which for that apprehension now allows a spontaneous response to similar happening vs. the old programmed autopilot reaction. We are now aware of that happening and can just be spontaneous with it.

Pain is felt as this burning uncoiling metamorphosis takes place, which can be physical, emotional or mental. All we have to do is learn to feel the core of the pain sensation, to fully accept the feeling with no action or doing or pulling away. You don't have to do anything. You want to facilitate release, which happens when there is no holding onto or resistance, so you only need to let this energy flow through you and transform and release itself.

When you tap into the pain sensation and fully accept it by just letting the energy flow with no action or thought on your part, then amazingly this pain sensation suddenly shifts to a blissful feeling. You can still be aware of pain area in the body (where energy is working), but also you can see the arrangement of it as it releases. Hone into that sweet spot that pain, that feeling, which is the vibration and inner feeling and just be with it in a non-doing and non-thinking approach.

For so long on this wild journey, it's been very tough because of the pain, and finally, I can see clearly that the discomfort was what I was avoiding in all the ways I could find to do so. What didn't occur to me was that accepting the pain to the fullest was actually the way through; where the joy and sorrow meet, where the writing and erasing happens. Where bliss and pain converge, right in the middle of the metamorphosis - we are the change itself. We avoid facing that, we tend to want to keep things the same rather than to change.

But change is all there is, all the time. I think deep down - we all know this to be true.

It is terribly frustrating, and in the end and so in the beginning, we don't really need teachers per se or armchair discussions. In my recent frustration with a counselor who is supposed to be skilled with working with most people going through spiritual awakenings and specifically kundalini, I stumbled upon a type of model for Kundalini Awakening.

This model treats each individual as an individual, and we each vibrate to our own vibration according to our path and namesake. I know that, for me, growing up in our culture, I ended up having to hide my spiritual side in order to survive. So I was many religions before my spiritual awakening, and I have had the epiphany that many deeply spiritual people in the world today are actually the same due to how our culture is set up. I see awakening happening all over.

We may have a number of different guardian parts that develop to keep our internal selfs safe and also hidden in our culture so that we can survive. These protectors tend to get a bad reputation in our culture from many different angles. They can acquire labels like our “inner critic" or, from the spiritual world, they can be labeled "ego." And then the general tendency can be to think of them as bad or as something that needs to be battled. But this new model has the approach that all "parts" are welcome because every part ultimately has a purpose. Our job then becomes to interact with these parts of us and to lead them from a healthy sense of self-awareness.

This model of looking at things makes a lot of sense to me, especially given that some of my initial spiritual awakenings were accompanied by hearing certain voices in my head that appeared to be battling each other and so I knew there was so much more going on than just my "ego." And also, it didn't make sense to me that my ego was always bad. All parts are welcome and, therefore, darkness is welcome because we can learn from the darkness, without it we would not have light.

If our culture were different perhaps this process would not seem so painful, but it is changing. In a recent book I read, there is a passage that says: Hold onto your beliefs, stay true to your values. These are the values of your parents, of your parents, parents and of your friends and of your society. They form the structure of your life, and to lose them would be to unravel the fabric of your experience. However, examine them one by one. Review them piece by piece. Do not dismantle the house, but look at each brick, and replace those which appear broken, which no longer support the structure.

It sounds like we are being warned of the possibility of their being too much change all at once as it may be painful to unravel the fabric of our experience. And that is so much of what spiritual awakening is really, an unraveling and uncoiling of the Kundalini.