Something that’s common amongst people experiencing an intense Kundalini Awakening is a desire for things to be different, a desire to fix or change things.
It’s such a paradox but the doorway for a Kundalini Awakening, the portal, is our willingness to meet and embrace whatever’s unfolding exactly as it is.
The paradox is that we don’t want what is. We want it to be different. We want to fix it. But you’ve got to embrace whatever is arising, meet it and feel it and be with it.
The paradox comes because when there is a softening and an opening and an embracing and a meeting of what is, that is what allows transformation and alchemy to unfold. Not because we’re trying to fix or change or heal something, but because we’re simply meeting it.
When we’re in the resistance or the rejection or not wanting it or the avoidance, things get stuck and there’s stagnancy. That’s when people often email me for answers, or to book a Discovery call. They don’t want what is happening to be happening! Fix it! Change it!
Lessons from 25 Years on the Path
After 25 years on this path, there are things I wish I’d known 20 or 25 years ago. It’s so apparent to me now how I am the source of my own suffering, how I’ve historically been the source of my own suffering.
The reason I suffered so much after quite intense Kundalini awakening periods was not because of the awakening per se, but because of the beliefs, the patterns, the holding, the resistance, and my desire to control it all.
Now the focus is softening, surrendering, opening.
Tantric Philosophy and Samskara Theory
For the last seven or eight years, since I did a deep dive into traditional Tantric philosophy, including Samskara theory, I’ve found it so beneficial. It’s all laid out in the Tantric texts: what we’re here to do is digest whatever Samskara, unresolved emotional turmoil, or trauma is arising.
We’re here to devour it, digest it, and dissolve it. Just meet what is, embrace what is, whatever arises, and meet it with loving awareness. In the fire of awareness, everything burns up.
It really is that simple: meet what’s arising, with loving-awareness.
Building Capacity to Meet What Is During an Intense Kundalini Awakening
Part of the work is building one’s capacity to meet what’s arising. Part of it is being able to orient to awareness, to know oneself as awareness, rather than being stuck in conditioned mind or identified with the apparent body-mind.
This becomes the path: practices that support you to know yourself as awareness.
I find myself saying the same things all the time, and I’m deepening into them as well. There’s more softening, more surrendering, more realization that awakeness is always there. Conditioning and identification overwhelm it.
Now what unfolds is faster recognition of when patterns play out. Sometimes that’s more painful because I can see them almost in real time, yet I’m not able to stop them. So the game is to meet it all with loving awareness, to laugh at myself, to laugh at the cosmic joke of seeing a pattern play out and cause suffering.
Awakeness Does Not Equal Virtue
This idea that awakeness leads to some kind of perfected being—maybe in some rare folk. But as Kiran Trace speaks to so clearly in her book, Tools for Sanity, awakeness happens, and yet conditioning and karmic stuff are still there. You can still be a shitty person. Awakeness does not necessarily lead to virtue.
So avoid suffering by meeting whatever’s arising with loving awareness. Know yourself as loving awareness. Increase your capacity to do this.
There’s nothing to fix. There’s nothing to change. There’s just what’s happening.
If you’re not liking the symptoms that show up as a result of an intense kundalini awakening and you’re trying to fix, change, or heal those symptoms, that very way of being is what causes suffering—not the symptoms themselves, but your relationship to the symptoms. You can’t see that until you can see it.
Different Paths, Same Invitation
All our paths are different. For me, this path of awakening has involved a lot of yoga and Tantric yoga, which has been beneficial.
I work with Ucchāra practice regularly. I’ve done it for 15 years now. I did it for a thousand days in a row, and it took 26 years to complete that. That practice supports devouring, digesting, and dissolving. I still do it regularly.
I also do a lot of embodiment practice. I call my approach “Dancing the Dragon,” just to give it a name. That approach is about knowing how to surrender to energy, which is what happens with kundalini.
In an intense Kundalini Awakening, there’s a purification process. Kundalini wants to move. It wants to purify the system. The purification is the symptoms—the things we often don’t want to have happening, the crises that can look crazy and scary.
How we meet, embrace, and support that purification—the foundation we build—can ease it. But again, we’re not trying to fix or change it. We’re simply meeting it fully.
However, as horrific as an intense kundalini awakening can be, it is a blessing, a gift, and the natural evolution of the human being.
‘Kundalini is the name given by the Indian yogis to the evolutionary energy in man. It is the energy which is the cause of the series of transformations which the individual has to undergo before he can attain to the state of cosmic consciousness… Kundalini is the cosmic power in the human body, the ultimate evolutionary force in man.’
– Gopi Krishna (1903–1984) was a Kashmiri mystic, yogi, and writer whose own spontaneous awakening led him to devote his life to documenting and teaching Kundalini as the biological and spiritual force behind human evolution.
And realise this – it’s NOT Kundalini that causes the ‘horror’, or the suffering.
It’s the conditioning, programming, trauma and karma that the awakening human carries.
This is an important distinction to make.
Otherwise, people can blame kundalini for what their intense kundalini awakening, which is a pitfall guaranteed to keep you stuck.
Most humans are unconscious of all that internal material that requires purification, and it stays hidden in the basement of their being.
But once Kundalini awakens, there is no more hiding, no more unconsciousness of it, only the relentless purification and purging process, which can take years, or even decades.
Everybody carries a different load too. Some people don’t carry a lot that needs purifying – for them, Kundalini will be different.
Others carry a big load – and it’s often not all theirs.
Kiran Trace speaks of this in her excellent book, Tools for Sanity.
After her spontaneous awakening, she was in Edinburgh for a work event and found herself in the pits of hell – fear, terror, death, all the things. The intensity was such that she literally collapsed on the street and was found by a homeless man who took her to the hospital.
‘There are so many illusions about enlightenment. So many stories of how it’s all grace and bliss and heaven. Well, this is what it looks like sometimes, pftentimes. It’s a horror show… after awakening to our true nature, many of us experience an unravelling of a dark, hellish pain from larger cultural or global incidents stored in our cell memory… ultimately, this unravelling begins a profound healing, eventually giving way to a sweet and profound liberation.’
Kiran Trace, Tools for Sanity
I can attest to this – having lived through the horror on my path, and eventually integrating into that sweet and profound liberation. Not I have arrived anywhere – this is a process, lived moment to moment.
Hell and horror still visit sometimes – and I welcome them in, and lay a seat for them at the table because I have learned to dance with it all.
How? I know myself beyond thoughts and the sensations, the pain and the suffering.
This knowing of oneself as That and the ability to (mostly) abide in That was the game changer for me.
Kundalini Shakti is the divine presence in every human soul. Really, it is WE who awaken to Her, because she is always, always awake.
’It is the sole desire and duty of Kundalini Shakti to bring us to union with the One so we can enjoy spiritual realisation… she will not rest until that goal is attained. If necessary, she will give the distracted and dawdling errant seeker increasingly strong signals that her agenda is, in fact the prime directive.’
Joan Shivarpita Harrigan, Kundalini Vidya The Science of Spiritual Transformation
And therein lies the instruction that can ease the most challenging of awakening processes.
Surrender to her.
Surrender your worldly distractions, attachments, and aversions.
Ask Her what she wants of you, and do that.
(Notice the objections that might arise in your mind as you read that – can you be AWARE of those objections, rather than identified with them?)
Kundalini doesn’t come to destroy you. She comes to liberate you. And the more you surrender to Her, the more the fire becomes nectar.
Every time I surrendered, She revealed more of who I truly am. That’s the path. Not fighting, not fixing, not forcing—but bowing to Her intelligence and letting Her guide the way home.
Yes, it can feel like hell. Yes, it can rip apart everything you thought you were. But the one thing it cannot do is destroy what you truly are. That’s untouchable. That’s the gift.
Discover that, and the path opens up.
This is not a path for the faint of heart.
But it is a path that will deliver you to the heart.
If you’re ready for that, if you’re longing for steady guidance and a hand to walk beside you—reach out. Let’s walk together.
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