My Kundalini Awakening - Originally Published On Medium

My Kundalini Awakening

There is an entire modern yogic offshoot culture dedicated to Kundalini Yoga and, to a lesser extent, Kundalini meditations.
Uncoiling the "snake" and sending our conscious pranic winds up through the central channel, opening the Nadis, unlocking each chakra, and blooming our energetic potential. The promise of such esoteric practice and process is bliss, enlightenment, or spiritual evolution.

So! What are we really talking about? What really happens when we have a Kundalini awakening, and how do we precipitate its occurrence? I can't speak for others, and I can't speak to the efficacy of the canonized methods and formal settings this happens in, but I can tell you my story, and perhaps it will offer one example.

First, it is a conundrum to discuss one's own spiritual experiences, not only because it can sew ridicule, confuse or enhance jealousy, resentment, disbelief in dharma, or any other number of degrading things, but because doing so with any detail automatically suggests breaking various vows. We are encouraged not to discuss the "higher Jhanas" and the Siddhis that emerge from such an awakening are not in and of themselves valuable in the sense that they are only attributes of a much more important occurrence - the realization of unification between spiritual attributes by blending the mundane with the super-mundane. We are not after power. We are seeking relief from ignorance.

To be clear - I am going to discuss my experience in full! Mainly because after a daily debate with myself around how I share with my sangha and people I work with, I realize that there are always pitfalls to the entire spiritual project of working with others and being a householder, engaged in the worldly dharma with all of its drama and with sharing our process. Here we are, roiling and churning in samsara, trying to help each other out! Projecting and enmeshing with others and attempting to extricate and find objective reality while honoring our subjective lens. We do our best. I believe withholding our unfolding realizations is no longer an option in this quickening age where the dharma is known in at least cursory ways. But little is discussed properly, and the lineages are decaying and mutating. We do our best.

Karma is beyond the comprehension of an ignorant sentient being like me. I can see the effects, I can even track some of the potential causes, but the totality of the karmic seeds and their ripening upon me and others, in our world and within the cosmos at large, requires omnipotence. However, I can say that by recapitulating my psyche and doing depth psychology as a way for engaging with my story year after year, I have unraveled patterns and qualities of my ignorance and gathered my La or life force by tracking its dispensation and the places where I fractured and where trauma dislocated my cohesion and further polluted my senses. I've retrieved something that requires a consistent calling back in, the essential connection we have to dharmakaya. This is one catalyst for the awakening I have experienced.

I was in true spiritual self-denial in my early adult life despite having touched my nature very early. I opted instead towards adventurous, chaotic outer and inner-worldly exploration; this explosive spiritual awakening process re-took hold of me at 37 years of age. It slammed into my life like an uninvited guest that never leaves, never stops giving gifts while simultaneously demanding a toll I can barely pay. It is like making contact with benevolent aliens, and the aliens are our minds and hearts revealed. This was not a discovery of the Id or some realization of underlying archetypal psychic mythology etc. - this was like discovering I had a second more brilliantly broad and expansive body, a second head, and a home in my heart that was waiting for the door to open. The home is bright and weaves across infinite dimensions, a true cathedral, but requires paying the admission price.

The trauma of my early life plays a central part in this. Mine was a quiet trauma. If I told you that my lovely mother not tending to my needs perfectly as an infant, sending me to a baby sitter too early, and not breastfeeding me was central to the spiritual awakening I would have later In life - perhaps many would scoff. Something karmic was at play in this early abandoning of a sort that lodged into my psychic body and initiated a ticking clock where the alarm rang years later. When it did, I was forced to open up to the darkness of spiritual isolation and the desire it demands connection and refuge. This is the alchemy of honoring precious human life. Connection and its value. These were the conditions necessary to set me into the trials and trails from where I would have to dive to retrieve the elixir of light that is the self-initiated spiritual confidence required to stabilize the perspective to engage with the Kundalini.

This particular abandonment was part of my karmic map that suited my awakening path. This is the central point I make- each of the unique pressure-cooker situations that send us into fear and faith loss is a gift. True darkness is the genuine ground from which awakening can blossom if we are lucky to grasp this opportunity on some profound level. In my experience, it is the only way. The roots down to darkness are the path for the tree's ascension to take hold. The darkness of the unconscious cosmos is where the illuminated find propulsion- Shiva and Shakti dancing all realms into realization, Krishna in its singular form set ablaze by the polarity of forces. The godhead reveals the darkness as it gives rise to self-illuminated potential and is given rise to by that shadow soil where all potential lays. The darkness of space is where the light of awareness has yet to take its turn within our own evolving bodies and any other system or mandala we observe. We are each correlated with the levels of actuated realms we can perceive, and by forging into the unknown, we find that all is alive.

I developed that attachment disorder as a very young boy, that numbing of the nervous system, that dislocation from embodied warmth and basic human safety bullied my spirit into seeking refuge for the first time. I was activated by fear to find my inner self directed flame.

I felt this core suffering was also the bedrock of my ability to feel compassion or, more precisely, at the time- empathy. I was acutely aware of worldly suffering, and I felt a dedicated commitment to spreading love in all moments. This was a feeling I had since I was as young as I can remember, but it was a complex set of feelings enmeshed with all types of projection, fantasy, and co-dependence where I also needed acceptance, to be liked, to please or impress others to care for me. This was juvenile or immature compassion and a blend of desire and empathy all at once.

As an only child, I spent my early years in total dissociative fantasy play—day and night conjuring or channeling visions of heaven and hell. This, likely because I was teetering on the precipice of total psychic disintegration and the truth of a bourgeoning spiritual education.  I played out violent galactic battles between gods and demons and used my body as a channel for this exercise. I would sweat and swear and smash, and triumph and die a million deaths in an afternoon, every day in isolated play. I would exhilarate and then deeply still myself into total single-pointed focus rushing my mind into one object and feeling the cascade of voices and energies at play around me. I was expanding and contracting. I was learning my inner terrain and the malleability of mind and reality.

What else was I doing in this play? Mudras and yoga, mantras and invocation, tummo and meditation all "by accident." At night I would hear my name from the corner of the room. I would run terrified to my parent's bedroom, and once marginally comforted, I would float back in terror to face the dark again—my training ground.

Regular night terrors and a sense of haunting visitations, and a physical sense that I was in danger became normal. I had to do battle here in the dark. Only visualization and prayer helped. I had to figure those out myself by trial and error. I found that only prayer that opens the heart and guards the mind works. I generated a method for this to save my soul. I had no guide, no education, and no reference, but I was tethering into all types' diety energy. The mandala is all around us; we perceive it's beauty and compassionate glory when we open up our deep need and softened sensitivity and focus.

Eventually, I learned lucid dreaming. I was sick of being eaten or chased in my dreams. So I woke up and took the reigns. The feeling was of finding my power. I could wake up in my dreams and use my dream body to do battle. Eventually, I learned to fly in my dreams. The great churning of blissful butterflies animating the dream body to rise and drift - a feeling like nothing else. The Qi activated in the lucid space. This was the second gate of becoming in my early training. First was confronting the dark from within; the second was harnessing my astral body, or light body - the form we take in a true lucid dream and the Bardos alike.

This gave way to fully navigating my dreamscape, changing its contents and eventually returning to various realms at will. I started to track the territory and the energetic, poetic quality of each dream world and its inhabitants. I started to meet and learn from beings in this internal astral stratum of mind and consciousness- it was a realm of quick teachings and high stakes. This interlocking kingdom of astral dimensionality is where I cauterized a second sight - An ability to merge the astral/dream realms quality and transpose that unto the waking worlds one- a way of collapsing conventional reality. I see this as a way of recognizing emptiness to some degree.

These were not only archetypal avatars of my own psyche in dream space. I knew the difference. The palpable quality of encountering other minds and bodies was as stark as the difference between a movie character and a real-life friend. I started to experience the mind's ability to tune into frequencies that invited contact with minds from various realities parallel to our conventional one. Like spectrums of light and waves merging - astral realms are simply other levels of form-times' layer cake.

From here, my young life of total sensitivity, extrasensory work, secret adventure, and high energy creativity evolved into puberty, and deeper unprocessed despair took hold. My core psyche's ineptitude to navigate young adulthood began to manifest, and I displayed the common expressions of anger, cynicism, self-consciousness, and fear that finds its container in people who have the shaky interiors birthed by trauma and hypersensitive or attuned spiritual bodies. This challenge was the third gate to stabilizing a platform for kundalini awakening.

This characteristic of an insecure or painful adolescence alone is totally unremarkable, except that I had now been training my subtle body for years through visualization and lucid dream yoga without any discipline or clear path. This new adolescent shadow of sexually energized responsibility and the awareness that I was subduing or repressing psychic components from my self cultivated in a complex and robust way clashed with the social world surrounding me. I was not integrating my truth with my persona. This pressed my mind's capabilities into a pressure cooker of neurosis and warping shame. I didn't see a way to live a life where deep empathy, telekinesis, prayer, and integration with nature was available. In fact, I saw a world that celebrated the rejection of these things, and I lacked the character to counter that. I went even darker and indulged in all manner of sensual pursuits and coping method excess. I see this as further training for an eventual explosion and bottoming out where I would have to make the ultimate decision: Surrender to the spiritual path or die.

All of these early life challenges seem like perfect blueprints to force a kundalini awakening. But they are not the cause of mine. I had practiced music and art, flexing my mind through the noise, body movement, and writing channels. This all pushed my psyche to dislodge from regular societally conforming patterns and was the mark of being sensitive and creative (also not that uncommon). Still, it did not amount to very much spiritual energy at all. In fact, whatever I cultivated, I quickly squandered, still having no idea what I was dealing with.

I had existential philosophy, and I had psychedelic voyages. I could have mind-shattering sex and life numbing boredom all in one day, also not uncommon - I was seeking and becoming let down and dislodged from my nature by the moment. I fluctuated from listless ennui to ecstatic revelry and the heights of inspiration, and there was only my plastered on mundane meaning and worldly reason to guide me. My spiritual focus was nonexistent or smothered. That early cultivated inner darkness had just found a portal to take me over in intervals, leaving me susceptible to the whims of the unseen world around me and to a quickly destabilizing addiction and inability to sustain honesty and any dimension of character. I had rejected all that I had cultivated.

Eventually, out of desperation, I found recovery and a useful and grounded spiritual path. The first glimpse of light and spiritual stabilization began to creep in. I felt like I was a "regular human" for the first time. Clean and part of a community. Accepted by others and humbled to be a part of the world. Grateful. And yet, something deeper was still brewing. Many I knew settled for having an appreciative grip on life and a connection to awe or numinous ideas of the transcendent. This was all I wanted to, but something inside demanded much more. I had to awaken what I had started to generate when I was very young.

Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately for me, an explicit and intense calling from my loins to the top of my head was swirling with anticipatory anxiety. After a decade of meandering spiritual life, Buddhist texts, and some mindfulness training to "make me calm or kind," I could no longer ignore what was calling me or chalk it up to some aspect of my mundane life or ego. It was not some latent or still unfurling expression of ADHD or any other malady of my persona. Something psychophysiological, metaphysical, and beyond words was screaming from within.

I was meditating; I was reading dharma, I was praying, I had love in my life - but still, a deep physical mix of exhaustion and wide-eyed electrical energy called up from something both alien and totally familiar in me.

A voice was about to be heard or re-heard. It was the voice of my cosmic heart. It would unleash something that devastated my life, reordered my mind, and collapsed all meaning and stability into a living breathing dragon of present time awareness needing to feed on its own exploration—the winds from within calling to feed on fire and this fire from within demanding the winds to arrive.

It took simultaneous unimaginable heartbreak and heart fulfillment to trigger my kundalini awakening. And it happened like a thief in the night.

I had somehow built a reasonable life where I stabilized my behavior, channeled creative energy, and lived with principles. It was like an extra-long accidental Ngondro, or preliminary practice with devotional work and regular service to others. I was always "working on myself" and trying to stay humble. I still had no teacher.

I was married and, in many ways, settled. I struggled in the ways we do, money, meaning, health, etc., but I was certainly not spinning in chaos. I was doing sweat lodges in the first nations tradition and reading shamanic accounts and Chogyam Trungpa. Things seemed ok, but something more frightening than chaotic living was happening. I was becoming fertile for the event and process that I am still integrating and navigating as I write this.

One day a woman reached out to me about a film I was shooting themed around the Bardos and played by an all Tibetan cast. The woman studied Mahayana Tibetan Buddhism in the Gelugpa tradition and had seen a post I made online about my film. She was intrigued. I had known her over the years through a series of encounters, but we had never really spoken. She was attractive, so I was nervous about meeting her; something about her message and seeing her face sent me into a mesmerized state of mystical awareness and a dizzy strangeness. I responded anyway.

On our first encounter, I was lit up. I felt like my veins were on fire and frozen all at once. My head was glowing from my crown to my third eye, my heart was unlocking, and I could feel its knots beating from within. I was turned on, but not simply in a lustful way. I was being reordered in some way. It was not romantic love I felt but a sense of acceptance like nonother that rippled through my DNA. This is not hyperbolic.

I had never felt like my voice had activated like this. I could speak and hear my voice in my skull vibrating as if mantra was alive in my body. My body fell into an internal rhythm. I felt loved in the way we do by our mothers, family, people we admire, and people who admire us. I felt loved the way we do by Tara. It was a fractalized multidimensional love that was beyond comparison. I was being activated. It was only getting started.

I can't remember our discussion other than I was impressed with her beyond words, not just our common interests but also the subtle body activation that took hold. It impressed her onto me, and it impressed my self back onto me and sent me into an evolution! This is a conceptual way of describing it, though. In truth, there was a psychic integration of our subtle and luminous bodies occurring that was like two sponges weaving and breathing together. It was overwhelming.

We continued to meet that year. Each time we did, I was in a strange vortex where my mind was open and my senses illuminated beyond description. I couldn't stop thinking about her. The love and infatuation I felt were like that for a long lost relative. Something unlike any notion of romantic love I had felt or known of. It was on a spiritual and psychophysiological level.

One night I had a lucid dream. She met me in this dream space, In a mutually reported dreamscape. It was then that I was aware of our profound karmic link. It was total. I messaged her and told her to stay out of my dreams, out of nervous jest. She responded that she had been in a spiritual ritual at her temple calling out to me all night and the place of my dream was a conjured space visualized by her.

That moment something shifted in me. It was like a fire lit in my root chakra. My head seemed to expand and go into a ringing. The ringing was like a visualization of sound and forms at once, like a silver light beam spun through my head and up to heaven. I felt like my ears could hear for a billion miles, and all was both silent and thrushing in a deafening noise.

My heart chakra started to spin. Really spin like a nuclear reactor or some whirl-pool of light. It spun clockwise to those facing me. This spin has not stopped; it was a warming, beautiful deep feeling in my chest. Not the ache of love. It was a dynamic and complete feeling like a warm tunnel of light within. A milky way in my chest, opening to all dimensions. This was heart activation.

I became instantly aware of all I had studied, thought about, or mused about concerning compassion, Bodhicitta, meta, about the various realms in Buddhism, the nature of the earth, time-space, ghosts, demons, form and the formless, about any manner of human psychological confusions and perceptions - these all seemed illuminated and clear as one packet of accessible information, effortlessly available and to be known in pith deliveries on demand. Not cold concepts but living truths - it was my crown opening—a new speed of thought and knowledge. A kind of awareness that was without doubt and yet non-dogmatic and totally devoid of aggression or judgment - clarity was there - a discernment and care wherever my mind focused. It was vibrant, flowing, and creative in nature. The library of information they call the Akashic records were made available. I sensed imprints of thought and history in people I knew and people I would come across. My own embodied karmic narrative lit up like a map I now was being dared to look at fully.

My body became hot, cold, vibrated with electricity, light as a feather, and moored to the earth. I felt a string tethering me to space. I could see it—silver and luminous. I felt a fluttering wind in my central channel moving in warm, blissful pulses from my root to my crown, regular and every time new and full of inspiring bliss. New layers of awareness seemed to flow with each flutter of this inner wind, like a butterfly gliding up in my system, opening new horizons of inner truth and realizations both small and grand, banal and esoteric. I felt that where my focus landed, a new perspective allowed each subject to be a meditation. I was still and totally animated at all moments.

This didn't stop or slow down for three weeks. I was unable to sleep and didn't need to. I was floating around, and I started to hear or feel the thoughts of those around me, feel and sense the living impressions of environments, and I was totally undisturbed by others and without fear. The world seemed both symbolic and beyond my projection. It was alive. Everything was breathing. It was portrait-like in perfection, like a pure land mandala overlaying the mundane.

This state animated a purging within me. I started to see the trauma I had endured at my own hands and by others, and the true map of my persona's character, the absurdity of it was clear, and I also felt totally compassionate to myself.

I felt both aware of the transient nature of self and the deeply personal nature of my experiences and their value. I was blending this awareness, and I was starting to see the struggle ahead. I realized I had to make serious changes in my life and beyond anything before. I would be sacrificing my current life and stability to allow my new emerging reality, and it's timeline to take over. How would I integrate this totally embodied awareness with my wife, my current life, my culture? I had no idea. There was little choice, though. I felt a dedication to myself in new ways. I felt a dedication to this life in new ways. I felt impervious to danger and very precious about life. My heart though activated, started to break. It was a tension like no other.

This liminal and magical state encapsulated manifold visions and all manner of physical changes from within. A glowing pulsing, energetic swirl, moving up my body, as it is often reported, like a snake. Each uncoiling striation unveiled a new level of shedding and emerging and allowed acceptance of remorse, grief, disillusionment, bewildering impressions, magical inflections, and stabilized realizations and can not be categorized or made into a linear library of topics. It was a synaesthetic cycling of geometric-like inner patterning structures that seemed to turn and build in my body, mind, and spirit, blending them all into a self recursive loop - like a winged inner whirlwind of mind and energy connecting to all points in the cosmos.

My new partner and I grew and enmeshed in profound ways that I had never imagined, unlike any other love. They still are doing so! The rate of this energetic psychophysiological spiritual awakening state - the Kundalini -  started to slow down during this time and enter a new rhythm. Over a few months, I merged my life with my new partner, the woman who had initiated this process in me. My love. My cosmic love. This union is a topic for another story!

I was and am not enlightened or out of the woods regarding how to live in this world! Far from it!
I had just begun a new path with unique challenges now that this experience had blossomed for me. I felt more, not less, from life. The darkness was no longer repressed; the darkness of my own karmic ignorance was shining up into my consciousness at speeds I still can barely keep track of or navigate. Integration is an ongoing trip. I am now almost 44.

Even with the empowerments and connection to Guru, the links to Sangha, the help of fellow travelers, and the knowledge that I am not alone - this path where I am open and receiving and sharing and uncovering at all times is not something I would saddle on anyone not truly prepared…. There's the dilemma; there is no way to prepare for this!

It is unlike anything that can be anticipated, and it is unlike what I have described.

As each being comes with unique karma and qualities of spirit and energy, so does each experience with this kundalini event and process.

A process that no doubt has a shocking event moment like the one I experienced. It is also just another level on the cyclical dance of samsara and form-realms play. Samsara- with its total interdependence of all projections and energies and the truth that the path that is sometimes straight and narrow- is also unique. Unique like a signature written in clouds. Vibrant, alive, moving and beautiful, yet, impermanent and as empty as the tales we weave about its coming and going.


Josh Reichmann
December 2020