The Hard Truth About Kundalini | The Energy Of Awakening

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Exploring self-transformation and holistic healing to unlock your inner potential.

Hosted by Christabel Armsten and Keith Parker.

Hello everyone,

Welcome to this spotlight episode on Kundalini.

And the title of this episode is The Hard Truth About Kundalini.

And you might be wondering why that's the case.

Well,

It's because Kundalini is a subject that is mired in mystery.

It is challenging to understand for various reasons.

And the point of this is to clarify a number of those questions that you may have.

For instance,

Is Kundalini real or is it symbolic?

How about the structure of Kundalini?

What's the underlying energy anatomy?

What about Kundalini and enlightenment?

And the levels of Kundalini awakening?

How about is it safe?

This is a great question.

Is Kundalini just a safe and casual thing?

And what about how to make it happen?

Do you need a teacher?

And what are the best practices?

So we're going to cover a lot of ground.

Hopefully this will clear up some of the confusion out there about Kundalini and also to bring it out of that mysterious realm.

So firstly,

What is Kundalini and why should it interest you?

Kundalini is a force or even a process in a sense,

In which a person taps into a universal energy,

Which is said to reside at the base of the spine or somehow in the lower vibrational,

Lower energy centers.

And when this energy awakens or this force ignites,

It then starts to move up through the centers,

Up through the human being.

And it brings about radical,

Potent transformation.

It is sometimes aligned with the idea of enlightenment or awakening.

But the idea is there's a force,

Kundalini becomes awakened,

And this force then once ignited starts to move up,

Liberate,

Awaken,

Heal,

Purify the person experiencing the Kundalini.

Now there,

I'm describing it as an experience.

But we also want to take a look at the history and the connections in terms of how we might view it as an experience versus a story or a mythological motif.

Kundalini comes from the yogic tradition,

And it's believed to have come initially in Tantric Shaivism tradition around the 6th to 8th century.

And that's where this word is coming from.

However,

Is that idea the beginning of Kundalini?

And the answer is no,

It's actually a universal idea that transcends the Indian or yogic spiritual traditions,

And is actually something that we can see in all kinds of different mythologies and iconographies from around the world.

In India,

Kundalini has a relationship to a coiled serpent.

Many of you will have seen this.

There's like a snake at the bottom of the body or at the base of something.

So in India,

This is really clear.

It's also really clear in the Egyptian caduceus,

The staff of Hermes,

Which is now the symbol of the U.

S.

Medical Corps,

Where you see two snakes spiraling around the central staff and they meet at the sixth crossing.

Remember that,

The sixth crossing.

It's also viewable in something like the Orphic egg from the Grecian tradition,

Where a snake is at the base of an egg.

It's also in the Garden of Eden,

The snake in the Garden of Eden,

Or the cherubim,

Who are the guards to the Garden of Eden.

These depictions of Kundalini in mythological tradition actually bring us back to the idea of connecting with the source of things,

Divinity,

God,

Etc.

The beginning of the universe and consciousness,

And the stories,

Regardless of where you go in different cultures,

Are quite similar in one way or another.

How is this pulled out of mythological motifs and understood as an experience that maps onto a human being,

Maps onto our energy system?

Now the most famous accounting for sure is Kundalini,

Which comes from the yogic tradition,

And they've done an unbelievable job of describing what this is as an actual practice and self-transformational process.

So let's look at the main components.

There is this serpent energy,

Sometimes called the Shakti energy,

Residing at the base of the person's body.

So think of your energy system as having a base and an apex,

And that would be the bottom of your spine,

The bottom of your energy field,

Brute chakra.

That goes all the way up to the top of it,

To the crown,

To the brain centers in the top of the head.

The yogis describe this as having two channels,

That there's an Ida and a Pingala,

A female and a male aspect of this circuit,

If you want to think of it as a kind of a positive and negative pole.

The chakras,

In terms of energy anatomy,

Are the things that are lined up along this central channel.

The yogis call this the Shashumna Nadi,

And the idea is that the energy is sparked or awakened at the root chakra and then works its way up.

It kind of allows this snake-like energy,

This spiralic type energy,

To start to move up these Ida-Pingala channels simultaneously.

As they go up the channels,

They make crossings at the different chakras,

And when they make a crossing at a specific chakra,

It opens up that chakra to some degree,

And then the idea is that that energy continues potentially to ascend upwards,

All the way to,

As we see in the staff of Hermes,

We see it crossing at the sixth point.

The highest point is the sixth point of crossing.

That would be your sixth chakra,

The third eye,

And then that leaves room for the crown above.

This is the idea of kundalini.

The basic idea of kundalini is that there's an ascending energy.

Many people use this word ascension.

There's this ascending or upwelling,

Uprising energy that comes from the bottom,

Moves up through the centers,

Up through the central channel,

Up through the chakras,

And all along the way is creating this transformational experience,

Purificational experience,

Awakening experience.

This is not mythology.

This is not a story.

This is an experience.

This is something you can experience.

In terms of how this relates to enlightenment,

Enlightenment in kundalini context is that enlightenment comes from higher and higher levels of self-awareness and awakening,

Because as these energy centers open up higher,

The idea is that the individual experiences more expansive,

Deeper levels and states of consciousness,

Deeper levels of awakening,

Deeper levels of the release and realization of the nature of identity and the self.

When this happens,

There is quite a lot of fancy lore around what a person might experience,

Psychic abilities,

Supernormal powers,

All these kinds of things go along with it.

Now the yogis called the supernormal powers attained,

They called them the siddhis,

Or the buddhists called it the iddhis.

So it's normal with kundalini for certain kinds of psychic activations to take place,

Visions,

Big openings.

Now there are stages of this,

And there's a lot of nuance here.

The main structure that relates to the stages of kundalini awakening would be called granthis.

And the yogis understood that we had three granthis,

One at the root,

One at the heart,

One at the sixth chakra.

They're almost like bubbles that guard,

Protect or close off the frequency range,

The opening within a person's energy system.

And these three granthis are what needs to burn out or open up as that energy is rising along the central channel.

Now there's a correlation between the granthis and things like the Taoist dantians,

And there's also a correlation between the granthis and the access that a person has to different levels of the energy system.

You could call them subtle bodies,

But in some sense what the granthis do is they denote and parallel the stages of kundalini awakening in that one is kind of granted higher and higher level or more expansive aspects of the frequency range of their energy system as they go forward.

So the root granthi opens up a certain frequency range.

The heart granthi opens up a certain frequency range.

The third eye granthi,

The top granthi in the head,

Opens up a certain frequency range that enables the experiencer to access,

Have perception,

And awaken to certain levels and aspects of reality.

Now it does sound abstract,

But nonetheless that is how this goes.

It is not straightforward to understand the sequence of how this happens in any individual,

And that is because kundalini can be quite complicated to make the ascent,

To go from the base to the crown,

Is not a one-shot experience for many people.

It tends to be that the initial experience is that there is the base is awakened or activated,

And then it slowly makes its way up,

Kind of having to kind of clear or purify things along the way,

And this is where healing or purification comes into play.

Most people will only have the root or the root and the heart open up initially,

And there's usually a lot of work to be done to keep the energy going higher when a kundalini awakening occurs.

However,

It is hard to classify these things in a strict manner.

Is this safe?

Is this kundalini experience something that is casual and totally safe without any side effects?

Well,

I've mentioned some of the positive outcomes already.

Much more access to one's inner landscape,

The potential to heal or work through emotions much more deeply and quickly,

A realization of mind at deeper levels,

A nuanced understanding of subtle energy and consciousness and identity,

Maybe enhanced genius or creativity in some cases.

But those are really positive.

Those sound really nice.

But in fact,

There's a lot of challenges that arise for people who undergo these kinds of transformational processes,

And these come under the classification of what are known as kundalini syndrome,

Also known as physio-kundalini syndromes.

This energy can be so powerful that it radically disrupts a person's sense of self,

But it also can significantly disrupt a person's physiology.

If you think about how this might work in terms of energy and voltage,

In part,

What we're saying is that a person has way more charge,

Way more voltage running through their energy system and indirectly their body.

The body is actually taking on much more energy flow.

And so if we think of how a circuit works,

Like a circuit board,

And we put voltage through a circuit board,

What happens when we put too much voltage through the board?

We can fry the circuit.

And this is what can happen to our physiology as a result of kundalini.

The nervous system and the brain are very deeply involved in kundalini transformation,

But the rest of the body is as well.

Organs,

Endocrine system,

Immune system,

Etc.

And sometimes a person's body is not ready for this amount of increase of energy,

And you can get physiological disruption.

You can have dysregulation,

Emotional disturbances,

And even psychosis.

Now this can be very challenging for the individual because very often kundalini experiences are had where a person doesn't really know what's going on.

They can be very confused.

There isn't a framework in our culture,

In our society for this.

There is certainly not a medical community that knows how to diagnose or to contextualize these things.

So it's very challenging for us to understand how a person may go through this process and how confusing it may be for them.

There is no current medical model of understanding this.

And in fact,

Many people,

Because of the nature of how expansive this can be,

They're talking about visions of the universe.

A person may seem as though they have gone clinically insane.

Also,

If a person's physiology is being disrupted,

A medical expert in general is just going to think something wrong is happening rather than something potentially transformative and evolutionary.

We can see how complicated the mental,

Emotional,

And physiological aspects of this can be.

So it is not to be taken casually,

Not to be taken lightly at all.

In fact,

This is a very serious thing.

So given that it's serious,

Do you want it to happen?

And how can you make it happen?

Well,

Kundalini is something that some people really desire.

They want this depth of transformation.

They want this kind of awakening experience.

But can you make it happen?

The answer is there is no reliable and direct way to make kundalini happen.

This is one of the hard truths about kundalini.

Nobody can snap their fingers and make it happen.

Do you need a teacher for a kundalini awakening?

There are traditions that talk about gurus who transmit shaktipat actually talking about the idea that a teacher basically connects a student to this universal energy to kind of stimulate it in their system.

Do you need that?

No,

You do not need that.

Sometimes it happens when a person has practiced for a long time,

Has been intending,

And supporting themselves in practices that move them more and more towards the conditions wherein they are available for it to happen.

We might say that the fruit ripens,

And then it falls from the tree.

And so kundalini does happen often with people,

Practitioners who are seeking it.

But just as reasonably and maybe as often,

Again,

Hard to get into the statistics about this,

But many people have spontaneous kundalini happen.

It just seems like they're living their lives not aware of this,

Not intending it,

Not wanting this kind of deep transformational process to occur,

And spontaneously this happens.

So it is very hard to understand how to make a kundalini awakening happen.

And maybe that's a good thing.

Maybe there's some safeguarding here because of how tremendously impactful it can be on the person's life.

Kundalini is also complicated because we are left with self-reports.

There is no measurement of this.

There are only what people can self-report,

And then what expert communities and practitioners can do to assess and understand what a person is undergoing.

But that is hard to rely on.

So is kundalini a big deal?

Yes,

This is actually as big a deal as maybe we can get.

You might describe kundalini not as a form of yoga,

But actually as a way of describing the structure of enlightenment at a universal level,

The way in which a person's body and mind get integrated with the awakening and self-transformational process.

And again,

This has been seen and talked about and documented,

Whether it be mythological in nature or straightforward and about describing an experience a person can have.

This may very well be the universal description of the structure which underlies classical enlightenment and awakening.

But there are many hard truths to it.

It is not a casual affair.

It is hard to understand the process when it's happening.

We don't have a society that can accept and integrate a person going through this experience,

Whether it be a psychological aspect or a physiological aspect.

It's also something that can't necessarily happen just because you want it.

And so that means that for those of you who are intrigued and are maybe aspiring towards a kundalini catalyst,

It is to be patient and do the practices that move your process forward,

That bring greater balance.

The idea is the ida and the pingala,

The yin and the yang,

The masculine and the feminine,

Need to be in equilibrium.

And they need to meet at the base,

At the root of your system,

Of who you are.

And when those energies meet in a balanced and a quantum estate,

Like a spark,

Right,

Like the two different cables connecting,

And we get that spark at the root of the system,

And then something magical takes place.

So if you're interested,

Do your practice,

Do it well,

Be determined,

And maybe in the end,

You'll persevere.

So if you're interested,

Stay with intelligent practices.

There's no specific thing that is best for kundalini.

You could claim yoga asana,

You could claim meditation,

You could claim breathwork,

But it's not so simple.

Do the things which bring you greater balance,

Greater presence,

Greater vitality,

And those things will add up to the kundalini experience you may very well intend.

So these are some of the hard truths about kundalini and its related awakening experience.

Thanks very much for listening to this Spotlight episode.

Stay tuned for more.