Under the influence ...of Kundalini

Meditation invites Kundalini to awaken.

If you've found yourself attracted to the subjects of higher conciousness and spiritual awakening, and especially if you have a dedicated practice of some kind, chances are you're either already being influenced by awakened Kundalini energy, or your Higher Self is helping prepare you for (and guide you toward) a Kundalini awakening.

Kundalini is an aspect of the prana/life force that already animates your physical form in this dimension, but in super-concentrated form. It is commonly described as residing -- dormant in most people -- at the base of the spine. When awakening is triggered, it begins to rise up "snake-like" through the chakras, cleansing and opening them like, well, a "snake" you might use to clear a blocked drain. (Gross image, I know, but a lot of the energy we store in our bodies is residue of old hurts, traumas, and ego dysfunction and it is similarly toxic.)

If you had a traumatic early life, this process may be more intense and fraught than if your upbringing was a happy one, because blockages that run dark and deep take that much more force to dislodge. (On the flip side, people who had happy childhoods seem less attracted -- anecdotally at least -- to spiritual quests because if life in this reality hasn't upset you all that much, why change, right?)

So when Kundalini -- which is inherently intelligent, by the way -- decides it's time to wake you up, it's as though that "battery" at the base of the spine suddenly discharges its energy, and the roto-rooter process begins. This is good news! Life may feel very chaotic for a while, but it's all for the best possible cause. If you don't have a spiritual teacher or are not already part of a sangha (spiritual community) when it happens, do seek out that support if possible. Be kind to yourself and find a guide through the wilderness.

My own Kundalini unleashed itself in earnest a few years ago. I've been working with a spiritual teacher for much of that time, and over the course of our work we've cleared a lot of my psychological "gunk."

My big energetic cleanings/releases are almost always preceded by a day or two of intense agitation, and one day recently when I felt all fired up I decided it might be a good idea to meditate.

No sooner had I dropped in than I suddenly saw the layers upon layers of habit and conditioning (shells made of thoughtforms, really) that have defined my human experience and how utterly flimsy, fleeting and arbitrary they were. (What is a thoughtform, ultimately? Nothing, projected onto nothing — just some quanta of energy flying around and describing various patterns, none of which have any intrinsic meaning. And yet these patterns of thought energy create and sustain everything that we live, work, love, fight and die for.) I saw the residue of everything I had ever believed, every cultural impression, every word spoken by or to me, every memory of an experience, expectation, or judgment, and every story I had ever incorporated or assembled from those thoughtforms ... adding up to this vast, shimmering “mist of context/identity” that we take so seriously, when the only Reality is our awareness of those things.

When Kundalini awakens, everything -- and I mean everything -- that you think you've already processed psychologically will come up one last time as though to say, are you sure you don't need me anymore? This grudge, this memory, this fixation, this mistaken identity? And you say no, I don't need you, you can go. Some of the goodbyes are sad, some are joyful, some are even a little angry because you realize how totally duped you were by them. But you bless them anyway, and in the end, the energy gets to flow freely again. You are then free to shape the flow of your life independently of anyone's expectations, including your own.

It requires diverting a certain amount of energy to keep these layers of belief about ourselves and our abilities “alive.” We already need a steady flow of energy just to sustain our physical forms, and more to think, say or create anything — meanwhile every invisible layer of our mistaken self-perception drains off a tiny bit of that energy just to sustain the illusion of itself, like resistance in an electrical wire. Over time it adds up to a massive loss. Thoughtforms devoted to upholding ideas about yourself that aren't real divert energy away from your ability to create.

It’s no wonder that as we dissolve those layers, with or without the dogged persistence of Kundalini rising, our vibration increases, health improves, and we have access to all sorts of new perception to assist with manifestation. It’s basic physics: Once you've released your darkness, your heaviness, you can float.

...And imagine if all people everywhere suddenly awakened and released their own blockages. Would our bodies then last longer, perhaps indefinitely? Would we finally release our attachments to dysfunctional activities like war and hoarding unnecessary wealth and piles of material goods?

Or would there finally be no point in taking physical form at all? ~Rishika