Stuart Perrin, author of five books, including A Deeper Surrender: Notes on a Spritiual Life and Leah: A Story of Meditation and Healing, teaches spiritual work in the lineage of Albert Rudolph, known to many as Rudi. As he explains in the following essay, he did not actively seek the experience of kundalini; rather, he learned about kundalini through developing what he calls a “strong chakra system,” studying meditation, and practicing kundalini yoga. In the following essay he reflects on his own experiences and shares advice, addressing questions such as: How do life, happiness, and kundalini relate to one another?
The first time I heard the word kundalini, I was eighteen years old and working as a counterman at a coffee shop on 59th Street and Lexington Avenue in New York City. The manager of the shop was an elegant Latino man who practiced Buddhism, and during every work break, we’d discuss spiritual subjects. On one occasion, he lowered his voice and asked me in a mysterious way if I knew anything about kundalini yoga. I shrugged my shoulders and said No.
The next time I heard the word kundalini, I was twenty-five years old and living a Bohemian lifestyle on the Parisian Left Bank. It was three o’clock in the morning, and I was walking on a dark, narrow street behind Boulevard St. Germain with a drunken American friend of mine who got down on both his knees, lifted his hands in the air, and shouted, “Oh, sacred kundalini in the sky!”
The third time I heard the word kundalini, I had been studying with my spiritual teacher, Rudi, for about two years. One day he asked me if I knew the name of the kind of yoga we practiced. I said No. I told him I didn’t care what it was called as long as it worked. He laughed and said we practice kundalini yoga. “It’s okay,” he said to me. “I was teaching this for ten years when someone asked me if I knew that the yoga I teach is called kundalini yoga.”
I never read books on kundalini. I learned about it by developing a strong chakra system and a connection with Higher Energy in the universe. I also discovered that a gradual unfolding of my inner life enabled me to experience the force of kundalini and use it in everyday situations. When I listened to people express fear of the power of kundalini, when I listened to them analyze this unexplainable subject, I used to chuckle to myself, then tell them the word kundalini reminded me of Italian ice cream. It was a way of keeping the subject light, of never taking myself too seriously, of exploring my inner life through meditation without having to understand the results of the process.
I discovered that my experience of kundalini was the end result of chakra development. I also discovered that kundalini was just another word unless its force was integrated into everyday living. It made for interesting conversation, but talking about it didn’t quiet my mind, open my heart, or get me an inch closer to my spiritual enlightenment.
Finally, when I discovered that enlightenment is the living experience of joy and love, of compassion and forgiveness, it became apparent to me that kundalini was essential to the spiritual evolution of a human being. When it is awakened from a deep slumber at the base of the spine, kundalini transforms fear, anxiety, and unhappiness into spiritual energy; it transforms the human into the divine. Kundalini is like an incinerator that burns people’s inner garbage and purifies the soul.
There are seven basic chakras (or energy centers) in every human being, and each of these chakras is a direct link to Higher Energy or God. They are located in various areas of the body; for instance, there’s a chakra at the center of the forehead, and there are others in the throat, heart, below the navel, the sexual area, the base of the spine, and the crown of the head. I often tell my students that the proper use of meditation will strengthen their chakra systems and help them to become masters of themselves.
The question always arises: what do we have to master? The answer is simple: a chaotic mind, emotions that are like quicksand, sexuality that transforms us into horny or repressed children who can’t deal with an energy so intense it wreaks havoc in our daily lives. I tell them that meditation is not a religion or a cult—it’s simply a technique we learn that helps us transform our tension into spiritual energy. First, we have to learn to master the energy of mind, emotion, and sexuality and put an end to the war that has run unabated within us from the time of our birth—a war that doesn’t allow us to enjoy a single peaceful day.
If meditation is a craft, then like any other craft, it has tools, and in this case, they are the mind and the breath. When we learn to master these tools and use them to open and strengthen the chakra system, we take major steps in the process of activating kundalini. The first step is to build an inner foundation and balance, to strengthen what the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese call qi or chi, to know that our center of balance is located in the chakra just below the navel. Then we must use the tools of meditation to gain inner balance, harmony, and a strong foundation.
The mind is like a surgical instrument. When it’s focused on the third chakra, it cuts through thick layers of tension that often create serious physical, emotional, and mental blocks. It gets us in touch with our center of balance, opens it, and transforms the third chakra into a lotus-like base similar to the bases on which sculpted or painted Buddhas often sit.
Then we must learn to breathe into the third chakra; we must learn that the power of breath will expand and strengthen that area and make it possible for us to live consciously in the world. Enlightenment is not just a matter of releasing dormant kundalini energy, because, when kundalini awakens, it could easily tip sanity’s balance. I’ve been told there are thousands of people living in mental institutions who have had strong kundalini awakenings. In fact, drugs like marijuana and LSD will activate kundalini in people who haven’t enough inner strength to support the intensity of the experience. Enlightenment is a matter of building a chakra system capable of handling kundalini—a chakra system developed gradually over a long period of time—and an inner life that has a strong foundation and a quiet mind, an inner life that makes it possible for us to live every moment with an open heart.
In a world where a fast-food mentality creeps into and dominates spiritual practice, in a world where people haven’t the patience to sustain a spiritual practice over a long period of time, there are thousands of teachers of thousands of different methods. Each teacher charges hefty fees to heal us emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and physically, and each path offers different guidelines for enlightenment. The problem isn’t that there are so many paths; the problem is the promiscuous nature of the people who follow them. People skip from seminar to seminar, from lecture to lecture, from spiritual practice to spiritual practice, rarely, if ever, extracting the full benefits of any one path. They don’t have the time and patience to use whatever practice they have chosen to follow to achieve mastery over self, instead all too often worshipping at the shrine of fast-food spirituality.
I meet many people who talk about the great kundalini experiences they had twenty or thirty years ago, but today they are often dried-out, aging, unhealthy people who live in the haze of memory instead of the creative and vital expression of the moment. Without a steady diet of inner work, without a step-by-step building of the chakra system—from a strong foundation to clarity of mind and an open heart—without joy and love and the ability to sustain the highest levels of our own humanity, without forgiveness and compassion, patience and wisdom, kundalini is nothing more than a powerful force that could turn the inner life of a human being to ash.
The awakening of kundalini can’t be an isolated experience fed by a need for something cosmic. It is part of a healthy spiritual evolution of consciousness if it coincides with the awakening of the deepest elements of our own humanity. If it’s the end result of an organic, day-by-day development of one’s chakra system, kundalini becomes a vehicle for the human soul to connect with the divine.
When we come into the world, our hearts are full of trust, love, innocence, and joy. Somewhere along the line, we lose these precious elements of life and have to relearn them. We go to therapists, yoga teachers, gurus, priests, imams, and rabbis in order to regain the exact state of being we were born with in the first place. The whole thing is absurd. It’s also no different from Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden. The rest of the Old and New Testament is a turbulent story on a road that leads to the Messiah.
As long as the mind limits the world to our own meager levels of understanding and creates a killing zone of nonstop conflict in a perpetual war of polar opposites, people will experience chaos, unhappiness, and a desperate need to find inner peace. As long as the mind tries to define the external world as something other than a mirror image of itself, the real battlefield of truth will always remain a mystery—and an ongoing war will rage between our misguided sense of what’s right and the misguided rightness of six billion other people. But the moment we quiet the mind, the moment we allow ourselves to be guided by spiritual energy, we begin to see the difference between truth and illusion; we discover there is no right or wrong on earth other than each person’s interpretation of truth. Whatever we see in the external world is a manifestation of spiritual energy interpreted by our own preconceived notion of what’s right and what’s wrong.
When we learn to live with a quiet mind, the universe will fill us with wisdom we can use in our day-to-day lives. But to attain this wisdom, we have to let go of everything we’ve learned from the time of our birth; we have to trust a logic that defies all earthly logic, a logic that transcends anything the rational human mind can understand, a logic that’s connected to infinite energy in the universe, or God, or whatever one wants to call it. The moment we can keep our minds centered in the third chakra, the force of qi will expand and create balance and harmony inside us. The mind’s throbbing, nonstop, chaotic presence will no longer drive us crazy.
It took me many years to learn that we’re born on earth to develop qualities that make us fully human. It took me many years to realize that the only successful people on this strange and bewildering planet are happy people. And it took me years to realize that the reason I’m here is to develop traits within myself that enable me to live my life as a human being full of unconditional love and forgiveness, a human being who is nonjudgmental and able to sustain an open heart no matter what circumstances I have to deal with.
A quiet mind is a vital step on the path to spiritual enlightenment. It ends the twenty-four-hour-a-day war raging inside just about every living person.
The heart chakra is also a turbulent place where strong emotion weighs heavily on our creative energy. Fear, anxiety, jealousy, and a host of other emotions destroy our ability to see the world clearly. The work of meditation is to transform these negative emotions into love and build a strong third chakra so that when the heart opens, it can stay open—it has a foundation to rest upon. Without inner strength, it’s almost impossible for love to survive the intense battle being fought in the human mind. It’s almost impossible for innocence to thrive in a world full of greed. But love and innocence, joy and happiness are essential ingredients in spiritual evolution. They are what make us human. They are what we are born here to learn. They are the highest language of God on earth.
A combination of a quiet mind, an open heart, and a strong inner foundation is essential to spiritual awakening. When we’ve mastered the movement of energy from chakra to chakra, when we’re able to distinguish between reality and illusion, when the mind, heart, and navel chakras work together to heighten consciousness, we are ready to transform the human into the divine. This transformation takes place in the sexual area (second chakra) where the mastery of tantric yoga is essential to the conscious awakening of kundalini.
As we learn to draw energy from the sexual area to the base of the spine, be it through lovemaking or through meditation, the male and female aspects of ourselves unite and give birth to a force that’s strong enough to activate sleeping kundalini. Just as sexual energy gives birth to every living creature, when it’s internalized, it also gives birth to one’s higher self. In many ways it’s like an alchemical process that transforms life’s lower elements into a spiritual force. It frees us from the blocks that form a strange and difficult inner prison. The energy of kundalini then rises up the spine and accumulates in the crown chakra. After a long period of gestation, the crown chakra opens, and the soul of a spiritual seeker will ascend into the cosmos and enter the bosom of the universal soul. This marriage gives birth to a river of energy that flows down from the cosmos into the third eye, the throat, the heart, the third chakra, the sex, and the base of the spine. It brings with it all elements of a spiritual life.
The process is simple: The first cycle of energy flow through the chakra system develops our humanity. The second cycle begins a spiritual life. Meditation practitioners should be well rooted in the third chakra when a dormant kundalini awakens. This keeps them from being turned into cosmic ash by kundalini’s powerful force. Then there’s a slow dissolution of bloated ego, of lack of patience, of lack of compassion and forgiveness; there’s a slow dissolution of our tendency to judge other people based on preconceived notions of what’s right or wrong. We gradually get close to a state of nothingness that allows Higher Energy to guide our lives. The past and future disappear, and we joyously live in the moment. We enter God’s inner playground: a world full of love and happiness, a world without fear, a world that exists fully and completely in the present. We have learned to let ourselves be. In doing this, we have also learned to let the outside world be. We finally realize that happy people are enlightened people, and that happiness is an inner state manifesting when kundalini energy has transformed the human into the divine.