Bonnie Greenwell, author of Energies of Transformation: A Guide to the Kundalini Process, personally experienced kundalini and has spent decades working with people who have had spiritual awakenings. In the essay that follows, she introduces us to the different ways in which kundalini can be awakened, as well as discussing the true function of kundalini. Greenwell also explores the relationship between kundalini and the illusion of a separate identity. She shares her findings on how many kundalini awakenings result in true enlightenment and how we may get closer to a genuine spiritual awakening by asking the simple question: “Who am I?”
I had been a meditator for fifteen years, intermittently practicing the teachings of Swami Muktananda, Paramahansa Yogananda, and Zen Buddhism, which I learned from teachers and books, when I first experienced the awakening of kundalini. It was 1984, and I was forty-three, married with three children, and a doctoral student at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.
At that time, I was beginning to do Radiance Breathwork with Gay Hendricks, longing to let go of any barriers to the realization of God. Radiance Breathwork is a combination of deep breathing and neo-Reichian bodywork, aimed at releasing contractions held in the cellular and muscular structures. This practice involves lying on a massage table and doing deep or rapid breathing practices while the therapist presses trigger points in the body.
I had gone to class one day after having had an energy session with Gay. While sitting in that somewhat dull classroom, ripples of pleasurable energy began rolling up my spine to the top of my head. Increasing in frequency and intensity, similar to the experience of labor pains, they became stronger and stronger until I soon felt intoxicated with bliss. I stumbled out of the classroom and found a quiet space to meditate, intuiting that bringing this bliss into stillness was the best thing to do.
This experience initiated weeks of emotional and psychological shifts, through which I felt intensely drawn to meditate, found great expansiveness in silence, and from time to time felt waves of spontaneous ecstasy. Self-consciousness fell away, my heart felt wide open and loving, and I experienced an inner happiness I had never known before. Sometimes waves of emotion would flush through me that I could not explain. Often my body would go into spontaneous shaking and releasing, especially when I was trying to relax, sleep, get bodywork, or meditate. Gradually the intensity subsided, but the energy events continued on a quieter level. It was always internal and felt like a sweet humming, an easy shift of consciousness that produced subtle blissful feelings.
I began to meet people who were personally familiar with the experience I was having—in spiritual circles, in training programs, and at the Esalen Institute—many of whom had difficult and dramatic stories to tell. I began to wonder why I was having mostly positive experiences, by contrast to others I was meeting. As I had to choose a dissertation topic that year, this question became the basis of my doctoral research. I set out to learn everything I could about both ancient and modern experiences of kundalini. This unfolded into many exciting years of meeting people from all walks of life who had known these experiences, and to exploring the commonalities and uniqueness of these awakenings.
This awakening was not the end of my spiritual realization, but rather the beginning of it—the beginning of the restructuring of the energy and quality of perception that self-realization demands. Such awakenings may occur gradually and gently, suddenly and violently, blissfully or with huge medical and emotional challenges. Over the years since this energy came alive in me, it has led me on a marvelous adventure, seeking truth, meeting others who have walked these paths, and pushing me to express my discoveries as simply and broadly as possible.
The term kundalini comes from the Sanskrit word kunda, meaning coiled. In the Indian perspective, the life energy (also the energy of consciousness) comes into the egg through the sperm during conception, stimulates the growth of the fetus, and coils at the base of the spine—where it rests in stasis throughout our lives. At the time of death it leaves the body, returning into the universal field. When this energy opens and moves up through the body before death, this event is called kundalini awakening.
When kundalini becomes awakened within us, it feels like the life force has amplified itself and has suddenly become even more alive. This is felt in its movement up the spine and sometimes as an electrical or radiating feeling in every cell. This sensation can be uncomfortable, pleasurable, terrifying, or ecstatic—or all of these at once. Our natural energy—which has quietly danced through our bodies up until this point, carrying the messages of the mind and senses through the nervous system—has slipped into a higher vibration, completely disrupting the status quo. Along with major energy shifts, the functioning of our consciousness and mind changes, and our ways of defining who we are begin to fall apart. Nothing in our education or previous experience prepares us for this eruption, for it is not spoken about in most spiritual circles, and Western spiritual concepts have succeeded in separating most people from appreciation of the role of the body in spiritual awakening—a role that was probably better understood in early pagan and ancient tribal practices, as well as in secret mystery schools. That is why those who have researched kundalini energy have found their best evidence for explaining it in systems that predate Christianity—such as Indian yoga, tantra, Chinese Qigong, Hawaiian Huna, and the rising of energy demonstrated in some ancient indigenous practices.
Most advanced yoga practices, as well as other systems of energy practice, include activities that have the possibility of awakening kundalini energy. Such practices may include breathing, holding specific postures, focusing one’s concentration, emptying the mind of thought, imagining complex visualizations, chanting, and taking part in specific movements. Some emphasize the transmission (known as diksha or shaktipat) through touch or eye contact or simply the presence of a teacher, while others emphasize devotion and service as a foundation for this awakening.
Because of the powerful upheaval the kundalini awakening may produce—and its capacity to destabilize the personality structure—these practices have traditionally been reserved for those practitioners who have spent many years in preparation. Apparently, the more one lives a healthy and stress-free lifestyle, with reliable teachers and simple daily routines, the more smoothly the process of living authentically with this energy can progress. Most classical ways of dealing with kundalini energy are based on this expectation, and many well-qualified kundalini guides or gurus are simply not available to those who have sudden and unpredictable awakenings, because such guides only work directly with people who are committed to the structure of the system they use.
Unfortunately, many teachers of meditation, yoga, and tantra are not prepared for a student’s spontaneous and confusing awakening of energy, as they have never worked through the process themselves. Moreover, many students who seek spiritual awakening do not understand the dynamics involved and are not interested in making the major life changes that support the process. Many spiritual seekers are naive in their understanding of the major psychological and physical changes involved in spiritual awakening. This can lead to resistance, fear, and other reactions that make the awakening process more challenging.
This lack of understanding on the part of the teachers and lack of preparation on the part of the students leave many thousands of people floundering each year, having had awakenings that occurred spontaneously, were reactive to life circumstances, or were related to practices they did without adequate guidance. As a therapist and educator specializing in this issue, I have met people from dozens of countries, in many spiritual traditions, of all ages, who have had radical awakenings of energy and were unable to find people within their traditions who could offer them useful guidance. Among them have been Buddhist monks, Catholic nuns, kundalini yoga teachers, fundamentalist Christians, young college students, people doing tantric sexual practices, people who had read a book and tried the practices in it, those who did modern breathwork practices, those who had overextended themselves using biofeedback, and masters of martial arts. Aside from practices, this energy awakens for many reasons including devotion, meditation, intense love, shock, childbirth, drug use, sexual or physical abuse, automobile accidents, and being struck by lightning. Does this mean we should avoid all of these things? We can’t, and we shouldn’t. It only means we should understand that we as humans are energy fields, wired to wake up to our true nature, and thus may encounter an awakening at any given time—if our number comes up! We have the possibility to wake up whether we plan to or not.
The reason this experience is so closely tied to the yoga and tantric models is because the positive aspects of such awakenings were recognized in these traditions, and methodologies were developed several thousand years ago to facilitate them. However, the experience is beyond methodology, and beyond any form of spirituality. It is a human experience, a movement within our own energy body that triggers not only energetic changes but a major shift in human identity.
When correctly understood, the process of kundalini awakening can lead us into a profound cellular knowing of our true nature, which wakes itself up and puts us in touch with a wisdom that lies beneath personal identifications and the conditioned mind. This is the internal process through which the human race can evolve into a kinder, more wise, and more compassionate species. That is why this energy awakens not only in those who undertake kundalini yoga or other energy practices, but in many who do Buddhist meditation, Christian contemplation, intense psychological introspection—or nothing at all.
Some systems and individuals have thought of kundalini awakening as a way to gain powers, referred to as siddhis in the Indian traditions. Working with energy is also recognized as bringing personal power in the Chinese Qigong systems. As kundalini heightens and transforms the capacities of both the energy system and brain, it is not unusual for individuals to experience sudden psychic or healing abilities, a much deeper quality of presence, and intuitive responsiveness to formerly stressful situations. As presence increases, the senses become more alert, and the body feels more alive and harmonious. Gopi Krishna, an Indian sage who wrote extensively about his own awakening experiences, felt that kundalini was the energy responsible for genius, and encouraged scientific research to study it. I think it is more correct to say that as the life force heightens and clears away old patterns of thinking, making the mind more clear and open, a more direct form of intuitive wisdom becomes available when needed. There is a heightened perception of how things work on the collective level and an impersonal capacity to address issues or situations with an intention to support the common good. It is also possible that, in some individuals, formerly inactive energy patterns in the brain become activated that increase intelligence, or at least broaden the understanding of human experience.
It is important to understand, however, that the ultimate capacity of kundalini is not about creating powerful people. Rather, its power has to do with stripping away our illusions of separateness and our attachments to our own personal history. Kundalini leaves us with a sense of vastness within and a connection with the entire field of consciousness—both in its essential stillness and in its expression as form. Another way to say this is that it ends in a sense of being one with all, appreciative of all, unattached to any form or experience, and thus in great peace. Fully awakened people may fall into many roles but have no attachment to them, responding to circumstances from an authentic movement within that feels impersonal. They are unlikely to tell you they are awakened, because they know the form they appear to be is just a shadow or an illusion based on a conditioned mind, and that what is really awake, is this force of consciousness within that has always been awake and is the same force in everyone and everything. Those who think they are special and deserve special attention for their spiritual attainment have not honestly fulfilled the possibility of this process, but are caught in a cul-de-sac where their separate identity has usurped the natural unfolding into Self.
For most people kundalini awakening continues over many years and includes challenging experiences—both crushing and ecstatic, paradoxically—before there is a sense of completion. You can find evidence of this in the biographies of people like Gopi Krishna, Krishnamurti, Muktananda, Motoyama, and other individuals who have recorded their stories. During this process there may be a lingering attachment and a periodic return to a sense of a separate “me.” As the kundalini energy unfolds itself throughout the energy system, there can also be a sense of doing battle inside. The ego may glimpse its own irrelevance and fight to preserve itself in both gross and subtle ways. As the life force intensifies through our subtle body field, we can have problems with old physical wounds, latent illnesses, appetite, and sexual urges, as well as the upheaval of emotions, heightened sensitivity, sudden memories of repressed history, or sudden waves of anger, grief, fear, or love that feel beyond the personal. Some bodies occasionally feel electrified, overheated, or chilled. The adrenal and hormonal systems may go haywire. Some people may not be able to tolerate crowds or negative energy in others. Psychic openings and other paranormal experiences can occur. Some feel at times that their heart has stopped. Startling images, lights, or symbols may appear in the twilight zones of consciousness, such as before falling asleep or when thoughts are drifting inattentively. Some report visions or internal music and sounds. It isn’t surprising that many people feel they are physically ill or dying, and that often their doctors search vainly for evidence to support this and end up attributing their symptoms to a mental illness.
In rare circumstances, kundalini energy may be present from birth. In these individuals, the energy system was always more open and receptive than the average—less in stasis, less focused. These people may be more prone to what we label “mystical” or “psychic” experiences. Such children may report or demonstrate unusual capacities, which might be labeled genius or mental instability, depending on the perspectives of their culture and families. Others simply grow up with a perception and openness that are far beyond the norm of their society.
In others, kundalini energy opens itself gently and over time. This type of gradual awakening seems to move slowly through the chakra system, which is a series of vortexes located in what is called the subtle energy field along the spine. Gradual movements of kundalini can almost be charted, depending on where the transformative energies are active at the moment. For example, there may be intense sexual activity, heat or vibration in the lower chakras for a while, and then stomach gurgling and jerking and eating issues, and later a great awareness of the heart contracting, followed by a release into expansiveness and love. The arising of old emotional memories and even apparent past-life memories is usually correlated with energy in the third chakra (solar plexus), which seems to hold a cellular bundle of old hurts and injustices. It is also common for people to have blockages around the throat, because most of us have many contractions related to things we felt but never said, or moments when we were silenced, slapped, or shut down by fear. If this is the case, there may be a twisting of the neck, trouble swallowing, or just simply a sense that the body jerks and vibrates up to the neck and no further. Great creative outpourings sometimes occur when blockages are released in the neck, while kundalini is flowing there but hasn’t yet penetrated the chakras above it.[2]
Spiritual experiences occur in many ways, including an overwhelming feeling of loving or being held by love (heart chakra), or visions of gods, goddesses, or other beings and also light phenomena (third eye). As the brain begins to respond to the heightened energy, we become opened to the possibly of merging into a sense of being that is unbounded, with inexplicable vastness, universal consciousness, or being one with everything and having no separate self. Blissful vibrations and ecstatic sensations may occur from time to time.
In her remarkable book, My Stroke of Insight, Harvard-trained neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD, describes a stroke she had at age thirty-seven, in which her left brain shut down and she experienced clear awareness of dominant right-brain functioning. This caused significant changes in her personality and world perspective. Her descriptions of right-brain activity include many phenomena described by mystics, such as having a realization of herself as one with everything and as a consciousness that has eternal life. She tells us her “right mind character is adventurous, celebrative of abundance, and socially adept.” She also says it is empathic, accurately identifies emotions, is open to the eternal flow, and is the seat of “my divine mind, the knower, the wise woman, and the observer.”[3]
In reading this, I was struck by the fact that almost all spiritual practices are activities that would stimulate right-brain functioning and discourage left-brain dominance. So it appears to me that kundalini awakening, among other things, activates the dormant potentials of the right brain, “lighting up” these capacities, which then makes it possible for consciousness to experience itself in a new and greatly expanded way. Once activated, the brain is no longer dominated by the divisive and separating intellectual tendencies of the left side. This is not to say that left-brain activity is not useful; it allows us to function in many practical ways in the world and understand how to interact with the details of existence. But in this narrowing of perspective, or excessive activity in the left brain, it is easy to fail to recognize the source from which we arise, and the joy and appreciation of the oneness we share with others.
Kundalini energy, or the life force, may expand gently and quietly in some people, or move steadily, like an overflowing river bouncing up the chakras in others, bringing shifts in consciousness along with physical and psychic eruptions. But in a few people it explodes like a geyser, and they feel like they are blowing apart.
Adyashanti, a modern nondual teacher, experienced such an event after five years of Zen meditation, a practice which he is inclined to say was a failure because the awakening occurred when he had a moment of completely giving up hope in his meditation practice. It is clear he experienced a shift of the ground of consciousness, for after this event he felt himself to be essentially the whole of life or source of all, not the separate self. In a personal interview we recorded in 2002, he described his experience this way:
Adyashanti has described this experience as the beginning of a series of awakenings; the others were more subtle and related to shifts of identity and consciousness rather than kundalini. In his teachings he does not emphasize kundalini, but rather the realization of true nature through stillness, sensing into the nature of awareness, or inquiry. Few people have the kind of dramatic and explosive energy awakening he describes.
The sense of losing the separate “me” and knowing oneself to be essentially nothing, but recognizing a mysterious sense of existing that continues nonetheless, is the equivalent of the words of Jesus, “I am that I am,” or of the Indian Master Nisardagatta’s expression, “I am That,” or the Buddha’s insight, “There is no self.” Although it cannot be described in a way that allows the unawakened mind to understand it, this experience is pointed to by mystics of every tradition. To know it beyond considering it as a concept—instead, to know it as if consciousness has fallen out of all identification with time, structure, and the body—is called awakening to our true nature in the Buddhist tradition. Systems of nondual teachings such as Advaita Vedanta in Hinduism, or Zen and Dzogchen in Buddhism, emphasize this aspect of awakening rather than the kundalini energy aspect.
I have listened to the kundalini stories of more than a thousand people in the past twenty-five years, and it is clear that many have experienced sweeping life changes, but few have actually found themselves fully awakened. Many have had glimpses of their true nature along with all the other phenomena stimulated by this energy movement. Some spiritual systems recognize this “glimpse” as what they call satori, or identify it as an early stage of samadhi. In the Christian tradition it is perhaps known as union with God or Christ consciousness. It appears in near-death literature in descriptions of people who are dying, so it seems that most of us may have that moment of opportunity as the personal attachment to living begins to fall away in the dying experience. This is clearly implied in the various versions of the ancient Book of the Dead that chronicle the interior process of dying.[4]
I have noticed in many spiritual practitioners that when spiritual emergence happens, there is such delight—such joy in the phenomena of bliss, merging, and expansiveness that occur at certain points of a kundalini awakening—that the practitioners become attached to repeating these experiences, and despair arises when they pass (as all experiences do). Their minds then take on the task of finding the perfect experience, a moment of transcendence that will not pass, so they can stay in this vast sense of being more than life, or in a place that is so much better than life, forever.
It is a great moment when kundalini has moved through its passages and given us even a brief taste of transcendence. As humans we find these moments very seductive, for they are higher and more ecstatic than any other experience we have in our lives. But this is not the completion of the awakening process—a fact rarely discussed in spiritual circles. Becoming attached to these moments pulls us back into the separate sense of self, makes us vulnerable again to disappointment when the moments pass away, and can make us think we are special. This is because it feels like “I” am having an experience that “I” need to have, or want to have, often. But the natural fulfillment of this process is actually the recognition that there is no real “I” and that the term is only a subtle, felt sense that acts as a locater for a movement happening in apparent time.
I didn’t notice until I moved deeply into the teachings of Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism, long after my own kundalini awakening, that some wisdom teachers have emphasized the nonexistence of a separate self. This is horrifying from an individual’s point of view, especially in someone who has spent decades developing and individuating this separate self. Our minds hold numerous concepts that define who we are, and our emotions become very dramatic whenever we feel this conceptual “me” is threatened. Of course, there is a sense of a separate me, which I have called “the locater,” that represents consciousness contained in an individual body. But if we really search inside to find the source of this “I” we think we are, instead of just taking it for granted, we open a true portal into the nature of life itself. As Adyashanti often says, what spiritual seekers need to question is “Who is the seeker? What is it that is looking for enlightenment?” If you do not go to thought for an answer, what is this “I”? Ramana Maharshi, the sage who inspired modern Advaita Vedanta or nondual teachings, had only one suggestion for practice—asking “Who am I?”[5]
In the kundalini process it is easy to miss this questioning because we are struggling so hard to deal with the deconstruction of personal self that kundalini creates, with its intense and relentless shaking of both body and consciousness. Whether we are trying to stop what is happening or are working hard to encourage it with practices, we are strengthening ourselves as someone who does something, and feeling ourselves to be a someone this is happening to. I feel like “I” must take action! Some people spend their lives struggling against all the challenges of kundalini, fearful that they are being invaded or destroyed by a relentless intruder that has overwhelmed them with an energy that will take away their life as they know it. And in many ways, they are right. This energy process is stripping away many of their identifications, and can make them feel physically uncomfortable or disoriented for a long time. But if even for a moment they can get a glimpse of what they truly are, a pure consciousness beyond the confines of the dreamed-up and conditioned separate self, they will know that it is this that wants to take them over: the real Self, the Self of openness and universal stillness that is beneath all existence and holds a possibility of unlimited love, wisdom, and compassion—because it knows it is the source of All.
The mind cannot hold this, cannot possibly accept this. So this falling into truth has been called surrender. How it feels and what it means cannot possibly be described from one mind to another, so teachers of nonduality can only offer pointers and encouragement. It is much more simple, comforting, and fulfilling to directly recognize what I am than to collect beautiful and dramatic spiritual experiences. And once this recognition occurs, the kundalini experience, along with the attachment to a personal life and the spiritual searching, are simply seen as aspects of the nature of human form and the mystery of existence. After this, kundalini usually settles down into a quiet hum.
When we rest as consciousness without an attachment to “me,” kundalini may unfold itself, and we are not troubled by its methods, just as the world unfolded its appearance and we are not troubled by that either. This is what has been called by mystics and teachers “the peace that passes understanding,” or interior happiness without a reason, or mystery. We could make guesses about how this releasing of personal attachment occurs through specific energy movements or patterns in the physical or energetic bodies (either gradually or suddenly) as the person’s karma or conditioning may dictate, and perhaps this would offer some comfort to the academic or scientifically structured left brain. But when kundalini has completed its journey and consciousness has been directly known, freed from its entanglements with our separate identity, there is such a sense of truth and of seeing existence as a joyous mystery that analytical approaches to it seem burdensome at best.
After the kundalini force has opened us into awakening, it may complete itself by settling back into the source (of energy and consciousness), which Ramana Maharshi described as being on the right side of the chest parallel to the heart, a few finger-widths from the sternum.6 Some systems of yoga emphasize that after the transcendent knowledge of Oneness, kundalini energy needs to fall back into the heart, its source, so that one is reconnected to form, to life. Buddhism emphasizes awakening as a here-and-now realization of what is, not being lost in a transcendent space. In Qigong, the chi energy is said to be circulating and harmonizing when the process is complete. This is a time of returning into a full acceptance of the world as a play of the divine. In less spiritualized terms, we know that all the forms of life are no less beautiful or sacred than the experience of the formless, and our sense of needing to change anything about ourselves is gone. Instead, we feel we have access to wisdom when we need it and harbor a sense of quietness deep inside. It has been called living outside of time, or being in the flow of the moment, or being in the unknown, all of which suggest that we are no longer tied to past memories, personal agendas, or mental conditioning.
Clearly, most people do not dwell continually in this state of Being, not even those who have had lifelong kundalini activity and profound spiritual openings. Awakening can be clear and true, and is always real, even when it lasts for only a moment. But relaxing into the living of it can take many years of seeing through and abandoning our old patterns and concepts and structures, which will arise often or occasionally, following the realization of Self. Kundalini is the way the energetic body deconstructs these old patterns and brings them to awareness, so we can see how insubstantial they are. It also seems to activate new potentials in the brain, or brain centers, as the yogis say. For these purposes it accompanies our evolution into living from the truth of what we are.
We can call this kundalini activity spiritual awakening or simply the way the universe is playing itself into conscious recognition of its own roots.