My introduction and experience with Kundalini

[Guest guest]

Hello, I am Justin, a 21-year undergrad student from New Jersey.

 

I am new to the forums, so please forgive my long post, but I am wondering if

you could weigh in with your thoughts on what I believe to be a kundalini

awakening. Obviously it remains to be known as to whether or not I'm truly

awakening or developing a mental illness, yet knowing that others have had

similar experiences or words of wisdom might be of comfort for me.

 

My Experience with Kundalini

 

I believe that I have had a Kundalini awakening that was initiated in early May

of 2009. This manuscript will be my attempt to explain the circumstances of this

awakening and the effects that it has had on my life.

 

My awakening was initiated by the ingestion of a psychedelic drug, morning glory

seeds. Upon taking them, I noticed that I had felt very drowsy. I must have

fallen asleep and blacked out, because the next thing I knew, I was outside of

my apartment with my ego rapidly dissolving. In short, I felt like I was going

to die. I was in a state of terror, and I had a pulsating vibration at the base

of my spine that I could not explain. My memory of this night is shoddy during

the most important parts, as I was blacking out, but I am told that at one point

I was on the ground and it appeared as if I was having a seizure. When I came

to, I was laying on my side on a bench, and a certain understanding clicked in

my head, and I felt a tremendous urge to meditate. I began to do so, but I was

instructed by the EMTs to lie on my side to avoid another seizure. I complied at

first, but by then this urge was so strong that I bolted from the bench towards

my apartment, where I wanted to meditate. It took several EMTs and

policemen/women to restrain me. I was then placed in an ambulance, where I

experienced what I believe is referred to as ego death. My consciousness had

been reduced to a triangular triumvirate pulsing energy at the base of my spine.

It pulsed in threes, with each " corner " of the energy being the vibrating spines

of myself, my girlfriend, and one of my other friends. At this point I had

blatantly accepted that I was dead; I was nothing more than this eternally

pulsating energy in the void. I was no longer connected to my body. I saw images

in my head of my obituary and funeral, and the pain that my death would cause my

family, but there was nothing I could do about it. There was only surrender and

complete acceptance of my fate.

 

When I arrived at the hospital, my ego reintegrated itself, yet began dissolving

again from another " wave " of the drug. I felt the presence of a divine force

that I can only call God within and without me, and my thoughts then turned

mystical. The idea of the Middle Way was impressed upon me in such a way that I

saw the balance of opposites in every placed that I looked. I felt the karma

that I had created for myself by this night. I believed that I was going to go

to jail, but I was going to end up being one of those reformed criminals that

spends most of their jail time in church and doing community service because my

faith in God would be so strong after this experience. I was told by a nurse to

drink activated charcoal, to balance the acid the seeds had produced in my

stomach. I felt as if I had aged several years, and I recognized the fact that

at some point in the future I would likely be in this same position, confined to

a hospital bed without control of my bladder (I had a catheter), stripped of all

dignity and completely vulnerable. The idea of the life cycle impressed upon me

the understanding that all souls will " meet God " as I just have at some point,

and that this night just happened to be my time. I felt that the point of karma

was to show us that all suffering can be reduced by God/Love.

 

After my awakening, I had an intense desire to " dive into " spirituality, except

my perspective had changes. Prior to this experience, I had yearning, a

searching for something higher than myself, or maybe just something other than

myself. But afterwards, all the desire to search and been completely

extinguished. Instead, there was just an interest in learning about my chakras,

because I really had felt that I had undergone a kundalini awakening, so I

wanted to prepare myself.

 

The following months were very hard for me. I fell into a depression, and did

not have much motivation to do anything. I also was having intense derealization

that reminded of when I was in the hospital. During these moments I was again

struck by the idea of balance and karma. This period can be understood from two

perspectives: the kundalini perspective and the ego-reconstruction perspective

(though these perspectives may not necessarily be mutually exclusive).

 

From the kundalini perspective, the " serpent " was working through my second

chakra, which deals with emotion and duality. This episode had unearthed a lot

of issues for myself and obviously made my family know more about me than I had

wanted them to know, and I also from that point began recovering from a

marijuana addiction. I realized that I had been covering up depression by

smoking, and now that that was gone, I was left with only my emotions to deal

with. This was a struggle for most of the summer, but towards the end of August

I was exercising somewhat regularly and starting to pull out of my depressive

funk.

 

From the ego-reconstruction standpoint, I was in the beginning stages of

reconstructing my identity. My ego-based identity had been ripped from me, and

now I was in the process of creating myself. The shaky new foundation of my ego

led me to still have some trouble differentiating between myself and the outside

world, which is what led to the derealization. I was stuck in the view of the

absolute, in which there is no such differentiation between self and other. This

sense of integration with the outside world left me very easily swayed by the

outside conditions of my life, which led to my emotionality and depression. As

the summer waned and school was approaching, I began to be more optimistic and

starting gaining the sense of self necessary to stop dwelling on my outside

conditions. I also started taking 5-HTP, a herbal supplement that boosts

serotonin in the brain, for my depression.

 

Now the kundalini started to work on my third chakra, which deals with a

person's sense of self. During this time my self-confidence grew and I began to

be less concerned with what other people thought of me, though I still had a

certain degree of social anxiety. I began to feel more comfortable in my own

skin. I no longer felt like my identity was associated with anything, but it was

rather whatever I created it to be at any particular moment. I felt a sense of

connection with my identity as nothingness and having total malleability. At

this point I also started pondering the idea that I was developing a mental

illness. I would research different mental disorders such as schizophrenia,

bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, etc. and comparing my

symptoms of depression and derealization. There were also times where I felt

like other people could read my mind, as well as moments when I would think of

something right before someone else said it, to the point where I felt somewhat

psychic. Overall, I just felt as if I was starting to go crazy. I was not used

to the changes in consciousness that I was experiencing. However, while this

anxiety was starting to get at me, I also told myself that it was just my ego

search for an identity of " mental illness " to latch onto so that it could

rationalize my changes in consciousness. I refused to let my ego attach to this

idea, although I admit that it still concerns me to this day to some extent.

 

From the ego-reduction view, my ego was simply now integrating itself enough for

me to rebound from my depression and restore my self-confidence. This just

allowed me to function like a normal human being, especially with the 5-HTP

working wonderfully. With my ego being restored into place, I was becoming less

concerned with different possibilities for my past and potential future, and

instead focusing on my actual goals in the present moment.

 

Towards the end of October, I started getting the feeling that some significant

change was going to be taking place in my life. I could not tell what the change

was going to be, but I just felt like change was coming. I could tell that this

change was going to be good, and looked forward to it with excitement. I believe

this change was the progression of the kundalini towards my heart chakra. I

started looking at my relationship with my girlfriend and realized that I loved

her, but was not actually in love with her. This caused a lot of stress for me,

because I knew what true unconditional love was and how a person is able to love

any other person, so I couldn't understand why I wasn't happy with the

relationship. It also became more and more difficult for me to suppress some

feelings that I had had for a friend of mine. I had these feelings for a while,

though they were so deep-seated that I felt like I wanted to end my relationship

to pursue this other girl, even though she was also in a relationship at the

time. These loving feelings became harder and harder to keep out of my

consciousness, leaving me in a very uncertain state regarding my current

relationship. At the end of semester in December, I quit smoking pot again (I

had started smoking again when the semester started) and made my main focus of

winter break to be to practice compassion and unconditional love. This month was

very transformational for me, more and more often I started disregarding the

egoic desires that kept me from loving, and there were several times where I

felt myself in a deep state of connection with the world, which overwhelmed me

with joy and bliss. During this time I also deeply felt a sense of where my life

is heading, to the point that I added a major onto my coursework so that I could

pursue a career in psychology.

 

When school started again in mid-January, my relationship with my girlfriend

ended. We both talked about our feelings and realized that neither of us really

felt as if the relationship was going anywhere, and they we were both sure we

weren't going to fall in love with each other. The break-up was quite amiable,

and now that I was no longer tied to my relationship, my feelings for my other

friend have soared to the forefront of my consciousness full-force. She broke up

with her boyfriend about a week after I broke up with my girlfriend, leading me

to (perhaps delusionally) believe that the way is being paved for us to be

together. I have for several months felt as if the flow of life is bring me in

her direction, and I think movement of the kundalini to my heart chakra may have

a significant impact towards bringing us together. During this time I am also

recognizing opportunities for love more and more often, allowing my ego to be

the source of my suffering less and less.

This period has also been a time of increased anxiety for me. Although my ego

has been being reconstructed since May, the kundalini process is also a

dismantling of the ego. So as soon as my ego is being integrated into my life,

it is also breaking down again. There are still times when I have trouble

separate myself from the outside world, though sometimes this is because I feel

like the world is a dream, and other times when I feel deeply connected with the

universe. I have also been having more moments of synchronicity and intuition.

Sometimes I feel like I search for synchronicity in places where it does not

really exist, which leads to me having some delusions of reference. There are

moments of real synchronicity, though there are also times when I may feel like

a song on the radio might be playing so that I can derive some sort of deeper,

perhaps personal meaning from it, though I can usually tell myself that I'm

being somewhat delusional and rationalize myself out of those kinds of ideas.

Moments like these are when I start worrying that I might be becoming

schizophrenic, because I am starting to believe in things that are outside of

the ego/mind-based control that I am used to. The rational mind starts noticing

that I'm believing in the irrational, like following my heart when it comes to

my friend and I being together or moments of synchronicity, so the mind tells me

that I'm become delusional, therefore I must have a mental illness. The number

of similarities between spiritual experience and mental illness are astounding,

and I have researched it and the results have been so non-conclusive that any

further reading on the subject mostly only serves to generate anxiety within me.

This is why I have decided to have faith in the idea that I am having a

kundalini awakening, because that is the only way I can be okay with not

trusting my mind without worrying for my mental health. I am just going to

surrender to the process and let my ego go. This surrendering has been the most

difficult part for me so far, because doing so means having complete faith in

something completely outside of my control, which I am not used to at all. I am

trying to accept the fact that if I am developing schizophrenia, it is not

affecting my life at all, and that I should spend the rest of my sanity doing

nothing but loving, which is what I would be doing anyway if the kundalini were

working on my heart chakra.

 

One reason that I have to doubt that it is truly a Kundalini awakening is the

speed with which I seem to feel the energy working through my chakras. It has

been less than a year since the awakening, and I think it is a bit too soon for

it to already be at my heart center. Don't awakenings take much longer than

that?

 

 

 

If you took to time to read this and wish to weigh in, I would be very grateful.

[Guest guest]

Justin,

 

Welcome to the group.

 

Yes, it sounds to me like Kundalini. Speed is not an issue for Shakti; She

works wherever She wants to whenever She wants to, so do not let any predefined

notions of how an awakening " should " proceed deter you. To some extent, once an

activation starts, you pick up where you left off last time around, so maybe for

you this is at the heart chakra. Also, do not be surprised if you revisit the

chakras again and again, each time encountering new, more subtle things to

surrender.

 

If you haven't done so already, I would recommend studying the safeties offered

on the KAS1 web site. These protocols will assist you greatly, as will reading

through Chrism's articles and through the back posts on this group.

http://www.kundaliniawakeningsystems1.com/the-safeties.html

 

I would avoid spending time reading material that compares or likens the

spiritual journey to insanity. Everything that you put into your attention

stream will color your moment-to-moment experience, so you must become very

discriminating. Instead, look for material on yoga, bhakti, love, surrender,

bliss, etc. With your heart aflame as it is, you may want to see what you can

do by way of selfless service and radiating for others. Let the energy light up

others around you.

 

I have no idea what 5-HTP is, but I feel you're better off practicing the

safeties than taking mood-altering chemicals, however natural they may be.

 

Try not to dwell on the recent past: the trip to the hospital, various chemical

involvements, anxiety about your sanity, recent relationships, etc. Instead

dive into the worlds of spirituality and let your heart and the Goddess lead you

wherever you may be destined to go.

 

Don't be surprised if you move through various relationships quickly as you meet

and finish whatever karmic interactions are needed. Don't worry if no one

around you understands the rapid changes you are undergoing - few can unless

they are also Kundalini-active. One of the blessings of this supportive, loving

community.

 

Everything will speed up for you now, especially confronting your own karmas and

blockages. Your reality becomes a mirror for your own advancement and

self-transcendence, sometimes painfully so. You learn detachment as well as

joy. So hang onto your hat, make the safeties a daily practice, and enjoy the

ride!

 

Love,

 

David