Everyday Enlightenment:
Principles for a Divine Daily Life
We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions, so we have to know how to act.
—Swami Vivekananda
Once we’ve experienced a kundalini awakening, is our life now transformed? Certainly. But even butterflies have to land on solid land, if only to sip nectar, rest a bit, and maybe chat with fellow butterflies. In the same vein, there’s a saying about what happens before enlightenment:
Chop wood, carry water.
There’s another saying about what occurs after enlightenment:
Chop wood, carry water.
It is common to believe that once we are enlightened, our life completely changes. Not so. It’s also tempting to believe that our job is done, but this is anything but the case. Integration is an ongoing process; as the Zen proverb wisely states, “After enlightenment, the laundry.” It is more like one leg of a journey has ended and the next leg has begun. The total kundalini process is like going on a trip around the world. Imagine you start in Dubuque, Iowa. You purchase an open-ended airline ticket, one that lets you fly anywhere you want, whenever you want; you pack your suitcase and take off. The only thing you are absolutely sure of is that you are never going to return to Dubuque, Iowa. Imagine further that your goal is to learn about sculpture, a similar goal as that of freeing your true self from an imprisoning life.
On the first stage of your journey, you fly to Paris and are taught about the lifestyle necessary to become an artist: what to wear, how to eat, how to select the right tools and marble. This is comparable to purifying and preparing yourself for the kundalini process. You now integrate the knowledge into your life and journey on.
Next you fly to Italy, and you study with a teacher who shows you how she sculpts. You suddenly realize that you also can become a great artist. This is the equivalent to the kundalini awakening. This part of the teaching must also be integrated.
Then you fly off again, this time to Moscow, where you apprentice with an experienced sculptor. First, you chip away on a preliminary work, and over time, you finally create your masterpiece. You have “risen.”
Are you done? No. You turn over your flight coupon and read the small print: final destination, dubuque, iowa. You now fly back to your starting point and learn how to be a world-class sculptor in an everyday town.
Energetically, integration is part of every stage of enlightenment. During purification, we must adapt to the idea of change. We must become accustomed to thinking that we are responsible for these changes. During the preparation stage, we have to incorporate our new standards and attitudes and live by them. During the awakening, we must quicken our ability to shift, flow, and learn, instituting different ideas as we go. During the rising, we have to draw on our integration skills even more speedily, as each day might bring a new and different opportunity. One day we are cold and get out our long underwear and sweaters. The next day we are hot; now we get out our shorts and sandals. When finally we reach the plateau stage of the kundalini experience, we realize that we are the same person we have always been, just more so. Now we have to get used to that idea—and sustain everything we have learned and become. We must “walk our talk,” as the Lakota would say. And we must feel our feelings.
Integrating Emotions: Finding Freedom in Feeling
One of the most common questions I hear about kundalini reactions is what to do with the emotions. The simplest (and perhaps most profound) answer I can give is this: feel them.
Having said that, the process gets a little more complex and can take a great deal of courage. Enlightenment is not for cowards.
I have been dismayed by how many individuals are told that they are not “doing spirituality right” because they have feelings. In fact, a woman client of mine who had experienced a kundalini awakening shared that she was embarrassed about how many more feelings she had had since becoming “enlightened.” She had been told that a true sage is able to completely detach.
I have not found this approach among the great kundalini authorities, Eastern or Western. In my view, this attitude is an offshoot of the patriarchal nature of many Western religions. Stripped of the divine feminine aspect, these religions have also been sanitized of emotion, true passion, and the importance of relationship and connection. Opening to kundalini provides equal access to the feminine and the masculine energies, the intuitive and the logical, the physical and the spiritual, and the emotional and the thoughtful. This is about relationship, about connection. Our ability to be intimate, internally, with others and with the Divine, is dependent on our ability to be emotionally vulnerable.
Relationships bring up emotions. A successful kundalini awakening and integration involves continual relationship interactions. This means we will probably experience even more involvement with our emotions as we proceed toward enlightenment.
An emotion is actually composed of two parts: a feeling and a thought. Together, a feeling and a thought create “energy in motion,” or emotion—the energy we need to get and keep moving. Feelings speak for our body. They tell us what we need. If we listen to others’ feelings, we are able to perceive what they need. As a language, each feeling carries its own message. Following are a few examples:
Anger: I need boundaries.
Fear: This situation is threatening, and I need to move toward or away.
Sadness: I cannot sense love right now, and I would like to.
Happiness: I can sense the love present, and I want to increase it.
Disgust: This is not good for me, and I need to get rid of it.
Guilt: I have goofed up and need to have more integrity.
Shame: I think I am bad, and I need to let in more love.
Blame: I think someone else is bad, and I need to forgive him or her and myself.
Thoughts form the basis of beliefs. Beliefs are great—as long as they don’t get stuck inside of an emotion and continue to recycle to our detriment. The thought “bees make honey” and “honey makes me happy” will give us a joyful, tingly feeling when we see a bee. Thinking “bees sting” and “pain makes me sad” could cause us to run away whenever we see a bee.
Emotions arise because they help us make decisions. When the existing emotion is not helpful, we need to reframe it. How can we enjoy a garden if we run from every bee we see?
I can promise that a kundalini process will bring up emotions—probably more than you knew could exist. How beautiful! When we feel our feelings and listen for the true message, the Divine smiles. When we separate truth from fiction and operate from emotions that support rather than detract from our lives, the Divine beams.
I usually recommend that my clients practice these five steps when emotions arise—especially strong ones, which will present us our deepest learning.
1. Accept the emotion.
2. Feel it.
3. Listen to it: what is its gift?
4. Ask for divine input.
5. Be open to meeting the need under the emotion.
These five steps can help you heal and flourish through the emotional states the kundalini process elicits.
The Living Principles of Kundalini
The ancient yogis never meant for kundalini to be relegated to an ashram or lost to the everyday person. The idea of yoga, a practice wrapped around kundalini, is one of self-discovery, a continual exploration of life by the living of it.
According to yogic understanding, we already are the self we think we must become, whatever stage of the kundalini process we’re enjoying. Whether we’re concentrating on purifying, coping with a rising, inviting an awakening, working on integration, or doing a little of all four, we are already our real selves; we might, however, be unaware of this fact. Consequently, we are not experiencing optimum health, joy, and self-realization.
To help us manifest ourselves authentically, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras defined the Eightfold Path, principles for pursuing enlightenment while living life. Two of the eight paths, the yamas and the niyamas, are composed of ten ethical precepts that invite peace within ourselves, within our families, and within the community. When we find practical ways to employ these ten principles in our daily lives, we begin to embody the spirit of kundalini, as yoga expert and author Donna Farhi says in her book Yoga Mind, Body & Spirit.59 These principles will help you create an appropriate and dynamic response to your kundalini, as well as an overall life plan that directs your inner energy toward outer goals—and invites outer life experiences that match your inner self.
Ten Principles for the Good Life
The yamas are concerned with ways to use our energy (including kundalini) in relationships. The niyamas increase our soulfulness and ability to make ethical choices. The combined ideas enhance our success at our endeavors.
What is success in terms of health, relationship, and work? It is not about having a perfect body. Nor is it about creating constantly calm relationships. (If it were, no one would have children.) Nor is it about having control of massive amounts of money, huge mansions, and an unlimited succession of servants. Life might hand us moments of any or all of these so-called measures of success, but what really matters is who we are and how we express this self on a daily, moment-to-moment basis. As you read through the ten principles, consider how they might provide insights for the real reason you are alive—the living of your divine life.
Yamas: Wise Characteristics
The yamas help us cultivate wisdom in all things we do. Here is a plain and simple presentation of each characteristic, along with a few tips on integrating them into your kundalini practice.
(1) Compassion for All Living Things (Sanskrit: Ahimsa)
An adherence to nonviolence, this concept is not about being a pacifist. Instead, it encourages us to abstain from criticism, judgment, and prejudice directed at both ourselves and others, as well as everything in the natural world. The attitude of harmlessness is not an excuse for repressing or denying the so-called negative emotions. Every unsettling sensation can be a call for love—to give, receive, or become the love that we are.
An easy way to further the practice of ahimsa is to catch yourself when thinking mean thoughts. When you can’t, get thee to a mirror. Really. Stare into the eyes of the beautiful person looking back at you. Now speak those previously muttered judgments aloud. Watch your reaction. Notice the hurt and pain. Now say “I’m sorry” and start over. Speak from love instead of fear.
(2) Commitment to Truth (Sanskrit: Satya)
Central to satya is a single truth: honesty. This is the secret to healthy relationships of every sort, whether they be with a lover, child, parent, business associate, or even a pet. Anything less than being truthful harms the self and others.
How do we know “truth”? We start within our hearts, cultivating an awareness of our inner values. Internal integrity leads to external ethical behavior. Sometimes following our truth is hard. We might have to leave a bad relationship. We might have to risk being rejected by our “crowd” for refusing to gossip or drink. If we listen to our true self, however, we will know what to do—and what not to do.
One of the ways I commit to truth is by using the Freeze-Frame method to read what’s really in my heart. Doc Childre of the Institute of HeartMath in Northern California developed this technique to reduce stress, but it also opens us to our inner knowledge. Consisting of five simple steps, synthesized here, it also helps us live from higher truths, including faith, hope, and love.
1. Disengage from stressful thoughts and feelings.
2. Focus on the heart area, bringing your breath in through your heart (fourth chakra) and sending it out through the solar plexus (third chakra).
3. Activate a positive feeling, such as appreciation for someone you care about.
4. Ask yourself what might be an effective attitude or action for balancing your system (and decide to take action later, if you need to).
5. Sense and sustain your change of perception or feeling.60
(3) Not Stealing (Sanskrit: Asteya)
All misuse and abuse arises out of a feeling of lack of abundance. We feel as if we do not have enough. We make happiness contingent on external circumstances and material goods. Following the advice of asteya begins with refusing to accept anything that is not freely given and to not give ourselves away needlessly.
If we “give ourselves away” as an adult, it is often because we unconsciously formed a codependent bargain with another person, usually Mom or Dad, when we were young.
A codependent bargain is an energy contract that psychically looks like a garden hose that energetically attaches us to another person. Energy flows two ways through this connection so that we can swap energy with someone else. These connections are usually established for survival purposes, such as: “I’ll give you my life energy (kundalini) in exchange for you loving me/keeping me alive/feeding me/not rejecting me.”
Frequently, the cost of the connection is our own life energy. Moreover, what we gain in return is usually another’s negative energy—feelings, ideas, problems, or even diseases that interfere with our life. Not only does this connection continually renew itself, but it also becomes our model for relating to our subsequent life partners.
While we can establish these connections—or cords, as they are often called—between any of our chakras and another’s, first-chakra bargains are the most detrimental. The first chakra is the in-body source of most of our kundalini, or raw life energy. When this life energy is siphoned away in a codependent bargain, we can become so disempowered and exhausted that we are often unable to actualize our life purpose. By giving away our life energy, we are actually stealing it from ourselves.
If you think you have a codependent bargain with someone else, consider working with a trained professional. You can also employ prayer or meditation to intuitively examine your chakras for cordage. If you perceive one, ask the Divine to help you determine the origin of this bond, the nature of it, and the reason you might have unconsciously believed you needed it. Feel how you felt at the time of its inception and then ask for further insight about how to forgive yourself and all others involved. Now ask the Divine to provide you (and the other/s) with a true source of energy—divine love—as you release this attachment. Ask that both of you be united fully with the Divine and that your own life force be safely renewed and allowed to flow where it needs to, within and around your body.
(4) Merging with the One (Sanskrit: Brahmacharya)
This precept is usually considered a call to celibacy. Being celibate is not equivalent to sexual suppression; rather, it is about using our sexual energy for regeneration. Manipulating or using others with sex, or even sexual energy, creates pain, jealousy, and hatred. Our goal in raising our kundalini is to merge with the Divine. We can do so within the context of a loving earthly relationship or not. The ethical standards are the same.
For guidance, I like to turn to the truth of Tantric kundalini, which recognizes the feminine and masculine energy within each individual. Most Tantric texts outline eight aspects of intercourse, which guide a couple from developing sexual thoughts in the brain through full physical intercourse. These steps include activities such as thinking about sex, sharing words, playing games, touching each other, and more. Having sex is the last ingredient.61 Think about eight steps that would enable you to have truly “safe sex”—sex that isn’t hurtful, abusive, or a power play. The ultimate rule is this: if we follow our true value system in sex, we will naturally value our partner and want to be valued by our partner.
(5) Not Grasping (Sanskrit: Aparigraha)
Holding on and being free are contrary states of being. Our ego is trained to manipulate in order to hold on to something or gain security. Sometimes the more certain we try to make ourselves, the less adaptable we become and the less secure we really are. To resist change by grasping is to stop transforming. What matters is what is essential—appreciating what we have and who we are.
Want a demonstration of how this principle works? Think of a problem. Now hug your arms to your chest. Imagine yourself in the center of a circle of loving friends and angels. When you have your arms folded over your heart, it is difficult for them to help you, isn’t it? It is also hard for your kundalini to keep rising.
Now extend your arms and throw your chest out. Look what happens! Your visible and invisible friends can hold your hands. It is also so much easier for your life force to rise and fill you with light and love. What might happen if you walked around with this much love in your heart, your hands open to what the world has to give?
Niyamas: Codes for Soulful Living
Following are descriptions of the niyamas, the yogic codes for the spiritual life, and how practicing them encourages a healthy, kundalini-filled life experience.
(6) Purity (Sanskrit: Saucha)
Pure living involves cleanliness. There are many ways to keep ourselves clean. These include taking care of our body, mind, and the environment. Healthy food and water are only two parts of the formula. We become not only what we eat, but also what we see, read, and who we associate with.
Adhering to this precept is one of the keys to inviting a healthy relationship with kundalini energy. Pure, organic, nonchemically influenced food and water nurtures our cells but also assists in toxin removal and prevents waste buildup. Physical blockages, like energetic blocks, can inhibit the upward spiral of the kundalini and create damaging side effects, such as illness, emotional reactivity, and loss of sexual control. More ideas on pure living are featured later in this chapter.
(7) Contentment (Sanskrit: Santosha or Santosa)
To be content is to be satisfied with where we are. Contentment is not the same as complacency or happiness. We should not tolerate abuse, nor should we believe we are always going to be joyful. By accepting the current situation, however, we sustain hopefulness by inviting it to become something greater.
Here’s a really fun way to experience santosha. It starts with chocolate.
Most likely, you already like chocolate, but you may not know that it—like everything—can be energetically programmed for a higher effect. In fact, a new brand called Intentional Chocolate, infused with positive intentions, has been proven to enhance mood, general well-being, and focus, and to reduce fatigue and stress in a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment.62 Your natural love of chocolate can be transferred into situations that are less than appealing.
There are three stages to this experiment.
First, select a choice piece of chocolate. Holding it, think of the kundalini energy in your heart and pour all the goodness into the chocolate. Now eat the candy, taking time to savor it.
Next, try the same thing with a food that you do not like. “Yuck,” you think, holding the food. Suspend judgment and focus on your heart before empowering the food with all the positive qualities you can embrace about your true nature. Concentrate on excellence while tasting the previously undesirable food. Does it taste different?
Finally, select a situation, person, or activity that you have never enjoyed. Deliberately participate in an interaction, but before fully engaging, follow the flow of your kundalini energy into your heart. Infuse the situation with all the love, goodness, and virtue that lie within your heart. Notice your feelings. Is there more contentment?
Continue this practice in all you do.
(8) Burning Enthusiasm (Sanskrit: Tapas)
Tapas means “fire.” In yogic terms, this niyama calls us to direct our fire toward a good cause in a disciplined manner. Conviction and excitement generates movement.
It is not hard to produce energy for things or activities we like. It is more challenging to do so for things and activities we do not like. How about those house chores that you keep delaying? Or filing that large stack of papers in your home office? Discipline is sometimes the only way to turn up the flame, ignite a passion, and, in the end, get something done.
The key to tapas is really a form of disciplined awareness. When we are in the moment, whichever moment it is, we bring all of ourselves to a task. When we apply all of our being to something, we become all that we can be in that moment.
To transform a dreadful activity into a task of joy, select a job that you hate doing but that must be done. It might fall under the homemaking or landscaping category—like cleaning the bathroom or removing dog poop from the lawn. It could involve a personal habit, like scheduling dates or ironing your clothes for work. It could also mean buckling down on a work project in which you find little merit. Whatever task you select, take a few moments before starting and breathe your kundalini energy upward through your body, practicing safe and gentle techniques. Access the spiritual energy atop your head and merge the physical and spiritual energy in your heart. Then throw your whole heart into the chore.
(9) Self-Study (Sanskrit: Swadhyaya)
Our souls are naturally drawn to activities that reveal our true nature, whether those activities are hobbies, work, or simple expressions of life. We may not even know that by engaging in these activities we are engaged in self-study.
For a pursuit to be considered soul study, we must persist with it regardless of the outer or inner resistance or problems that arise. By doing so, we learn about our strengths and also our limitations. Often the pursuit reveals our fragmented self or soul, which we can then seek assistance to reintegrate into a divine whole.
As we form a relationship with kundalini energy, we also create a relationship with the various aspects of our self. These aspects can be represented by the chakras, each of which represents a certain quality of being. For instance, our first chakra corresponds to our physical self, and our second chakra relates to our emotional and creative self. As the kundalini courses through a particular chakra, it accentuates the related self and its various strengths, limitations, or needs. If we desire, we can now focus on that particular self and change what needs to change, heal what needs to heal, and embrace and accept what simply is.
Kundalini isn’t trying to transform each of these individuated selves into a perfect human specimen; rather, it increases our self-awareness and invites us to make different choices, if desirable. This is an ongoing process, but we can practice the art of swadhyaya, or self-study, and gain optimum benefits through an exercise such as the following:
Select an activity and deliberately observe each of your “chakra selves” as you undertake this task. You can study each of these aspects, or selves, one at a time, while carrying out the project, or do the project several times and monitor a different chakra each time. For instance, I might choose to study my chakra selves while working in the house. How is my first chakra, my physical self, relating to the project? Does my verve pick up when I’m moving around furniture, only to dip down when I’m scrubbing the toilet? Does my second-chakra self perk up when I’m redecorating a room and get depressed when I’m vacuuming? As I move through my efforts, either in one fell swoop or during separate cleaning episodes, I watch for each chakric reaction.
I might figure out that I like being innovative and creative, but I hate dealing with dirt. I can now decide how to best deal with my tendencies. Maybe I can add more play to every task or put one chakra self in charge of the most dull endeavors. Maybe I can even hire someone to do the worst work. By being ruthlessly observant and honest, I better understand myself and can act accordingly.
I encourage you to choose an activity that will enable this type of soul study and watch each chakra self as it performs the related tasks. Any chakra system will work for this. I provide an outline for my own extended twelve-chakra system in chapter 2, in case you want to really explore all your character traits.
(10) Celebration of the Spiritual
(Sanskrit: Ishvara Pranidhana)
When we celebrate the spiritual self, we open a doorway for the sacred. Using ritual, celebration, solitude, or sacrament opens us to our true self. It also helps us examine our sorrows, regrets, or bitter moments for the sweetness that can lie beneath. The trick is to distinguish the difference between willingness and willfulness. Are you willing to open to the Divine’s will, or are you simply willing the Divine to become “full of you”? It’s easier to discern the difference if you “go to God” with your concerns.
Try setting aside a time, at least once a day, to ask the Divine for input about how to live a kundalini-infused life. You might also set aside a special space in which to connect; you might establish an altar space, choose a particular place to meditate, or sit under a special tree. You could read devotionals, stretch, write poetry, or draw funny pictures. You can use prayer, which involves sending a request to the Divine; meditation, which involves opening yourself to receiving answers from the Divine; and contemplation, which is simply basking in the presence of the Divine. This is your time to touch the omniscient and lean into the absolute.
exercise
God Glasses
All of the ten living principles interweave with this exercise. Spend a few moments every day wearing a special pair of “God glasses.” These are eyeglasses made especially for you. When you wear them, they enable you to see the world—and yourself—through the eyes of the Divine. You can wear these glasses as often and for as long as you like.
These special eyeglasses will also help you compose a practical plan for a kundalini-embracing life, the core ingredients of which are covered in the next section.
Pranamaya Kosha: The pranic sheath is the stage when we employ proper breathing to raise our consciousness and also focus on truthful speech.
Ingredients for a Kundalini-Infused Life
The best six doctors anywhere
And no one can deny it
Are sunshine, water, rest, and air
Exercise and diet.
These six will gladly you attend
If only you are willing
Your mind they’ll ease
Your will they’ll mend
And charge you not a shilling.
—Nursery rhyme quoted by Wayne Fields, What the River Knows
Kundalini energy can be directed toward any end, good or bad. When encouraged to flow toward our spiritual center, it will inevitably arrive there, bringing the rest of us with it. The more we train our kundalini toward higher ends, the easier it becomes to make decisions based on love, hope, and truth. Bad habits, cravings, and addictive tendencies begin to slide away.
Intention is the principle that directs our energy. Intention follows attention. If you obsess about what bothers you, including problems, issues, or angers, your perception will reinforce your challenges. They’ll grow stronger. You’ll become unhealthier. If you attend to positive goals, such as achieving optimum health, satisfying relationships, and meaningful work, you will achieve these. You’ll become healthier. Your kundalini will reinforce your attitude either way.
The following section introduces activities that allow us to apply the ten living principles—the yamas and niyamas, covered in the last section—to our everyday lives. These activities are the cornerstone of every part of the kundalini process, from purification to integration. Practical and doable, they encourage the kundalini to support our best health and highest functioning.
Each recommendation is explained as a “proper” way to act. The word proper is not to be confused with perfection. Instead, it relates to the idea of suitability. Something that is suitable “suits us.” It fits us hand in glove, protecting, decorating, and augmenting our lives. To enable enlightenment, our behaviors, actions, thoughts, attitudes, emotional expressions, relationships, and work must reflect our true self. The word proper, therefore, acknowledges that we have a right to act and live in such as way that respects and honors our inner self.
Proper Diet
The most important way to ensure a healthy kundalini experience is through diet. A suitable diet involves eating pure and nutritious foods, which are those that contain a high amount of prana, or life energy. A basic rule of thumb is that the closer a food is to its own life force origin, the better it is for you. For instance, just-harvested carrots will carry more prana than canned carrots.
When selecting protein and milk sources, consider the number of hormones, antibiotics, and other additives, as well as the state of the protein source when it was butchered, milked, or raised. Undue stress raises the levels of natural cortisone and adrenaline in animals, and these hormones become a part of your energy when you eat the animal products. No matter what your preferred food or beverages are, you are always better off with luminous foods—those that exclude additives and preservatives.
An effective way to assist our kundalini climb and healing prowess is to eat a chakra-based diet. As chapter 2 explained, the kundalini can get stuck in blocked chakras. We can entice it to rise in a smooth, healthy way by eating the foods related to various chakras. Deanna Minich, author of Chakra Foods for Optimum Health, suggests special foods to support the seven in-body chakras. Here are some of Minich’s recommendations:
First chakra: Eating issues often come from the desire to protect yourself. This chakra thrives when you eat with others. Try foods for grounding and protection: protein, minerals, root vegetables, edible and medicinal mushrooms, and red-colored foods.
Second chakra: This chakra opens us to flow, or movement, including the flow of our emotions. We may become prone to overeating to stifle our emotions. Spend time creating your meal and paying attention to your senses when eating. Use foods for flow and feelings: fats and oils (especially those rich in omega-3s), fish, tropical fruits, seeds, nuts, and orange-colored foods.
Third chakra: This chakra transforms energy. That is why we need to keep its flame bright. It goes out when we deplete ourselves with sugars, soft drinks, and artificial sweeteners. To reignite your energetic fire, try low-glycemic carbohydrates, including complex carbohydrates, fiber, whole grains, legumes, and yellow-colored foods.
Fourth chakra: Sometimes we give more than we receive, and we eat to make up the balance. When we share food in a mutual exchange (and with love), we become healthier. This chakra flourishes when we express gratitude when eating, donate to food banks, and infuse love into our nourishment. Foods for love and compassion are vegetables, sprouts, raw foods, foods rich in chlorophyll, and green-colored foods.
Fifth chakra: This chakra is where our food first enters our body, as well as the energy center related to our breath and words. This chakra becomes imbalanced if we do not clearly articulate our food choices or if we are not mindful of how we take in our food. Eat mindfully, chew carefully, and get rid of distractions to create optimum fifth-chakra conditions. Focus. Foods for communication and truth are sea vegetables, soups, sauces, juices, and fruits.
Sixth chakra: This chakra loves it when we listen to our intuition rather than external pressures or our intellect. Foods for intuition and insight include herbal tea, blackberries, and blueberries.
Seventh chakra: This is our site of interconnection, deeper meanings, and the essential. Eating is a divine act. Eat foods that create a connection between the body, mind, and soul, as this act will underscore the purpose of the seventh chakra, the integration of all aspects of our self with divinity. Use foods that will foster unification and interconnection with the sun and moonlight, clean air, and unconditional love.63 Do this by selecting foods that align with your value system. If you follow a spiritual path that is biblically based, consider diets described in the Old and New Testaments. If you support animal rights, consider becoming a vegetarian or vegan. Acknowledge divine grace before or after eating, using prayer or meditation. Bless your food and all who prepare it. Cook with a serene heart. As the Hindus shared thousands of years ago, the Divine is everywhere: food, sun, water, thoughts, care—and us.
Proper Exercise, Physical and Energetic
We need to m-o-v-e. Movement is the idea behind yoga asanas, but any exercise can help clear out blocks, encourage the upward climb of our life force, and integrate our spirit into our body. Waste matter and toxins build up over time, as do the negative energies from our self and others. These toxic blocks interfere with the flow of kundalini and create everything from physical traumas and illnesses to mental conditions. Moving every day alleviates energetic blockages and encourages the energizing effects of kundalini to circulate throughout the body and energy system.
Physical exercise is vital, but so is energetic exercise. As I’ve said, I believe that up to 80 percent of our irritating or even life-threatening conditions, from physical to mental, start with energies that we absorb from other sources. What others do not deal with becomes part of the energetic environment. If we are energetically codependent, we take on this free-floating flotsam. We might do this to help someone else, create safety for ourselves, or simply to alleviate the pressures of everyday life. These energies are not our own, and we are, therefore, unable to process them. What cannot be cleared becomes stuck. Exercise is one of the most vital methods for freeing ourselves from our own stress, as well as the stress resulting from this assumption of others’ energies.
Proper Breathing
Every type of yoga teaches life-enhancing breathing techniques. That’s why I keep stressing the importance of breathing, a topic covered throughout this book. Besides trying the breathing practices provided in chapter 6, remember to use abdominal breathing and abstain from chest breathing. Only the former enables diaphragmatic breathing, which allows the lungs to expand and contract. Also remember, the stronger the exhale, the more toxins are released.
Proper Habits
We have all developed patterns that leave us exasperated. The worse we feel about our bad habits, the harder it is to change them—even though we know that they interfere with our relationships, self-esteem, bodily functions, and spiritual well-being.
If we are really stuck, especially in an addiction, it is imperative to get help. Many therapists understand not only family dynamics but also the effects of soul issues and energetic problems.
I’ve found it helpful to pinpoint my own or my client’s addictive tendencies to the causal chakra. This way, I can focus my kundalini on that particular chakra or determine exactly what outside help I need. Want to know which addictive tendencies are located in each chakra? On the following pages is a chart featuring the twelve-chakra system.
Proper Environment
Geopollution is a relatively new term that underscores the challenges of living—or trying to stay alive—in the current world. Several studies are proving that being continually bombarded by electromagnetic pollution—from power lines, computers, x-rays and microwaves, cell phones, and even plugged-in kitchen appliances—negatively affects us.
Some of us are more sensitive to these energies than other people are. If you are one of these ultrasensitive people, do some research and find out what you can do to alleviate some of your stressors. Sometimes it is as easy as unplugging electric appliances when you are not using them. Other times, you might need to consider relocation.
Another way to lessen environmental stressors is to transform your home into a sacred space. Noise can also be a huge environmental stressor. Too much noise can cause heart problems, ringing in the ears, high blood pressure, sleep disturbances, emotional imbalances, and immunological and metabolic disorders, according to a report by the World Health Organization.64 The benefits of consciously activating our kundalini energy will not last long when we are exposed to blaring radios, screaming and yelling, loud televisions, or rock and roll pumped directly into our heads through our iPods’ earbuds.
As part of a good environmental strategy, consider employing practices such as feng shui or Baubiologie (building biology), which show how to place objects to decrease negative and increase positive energies. Do not forget to spend some time outside every day.
Proper Expression
Emotional hygiene is important. Whatever feelings we incubate or explosively express will inevitably turn into a problem for others and ourselves. This applies to both feelings and thoughts; the latter is the subject of the next section.
On the one hand, we do not want to repress our emotions; otherwise, we’ll become sick. Fortunately (kind of), a rising kundalini energy can trigger all unhealed emotional and physical traumas. Not only should we deal with these, but we should also want to. We deserve to be freed from the events or emotions imprisoning our soul. On the other hand, flinging our powerful emotions at others only injures our loved ones and us. The key is to experience, rather than only express, our emotions. Fully experiencing our emotions will open the flow of our kundalini and cleanse us of the beliefs that caused us to repress them in the first place. For tips on embracing and learning from our feelings, see the section “Integrating Emotions: Finding Freedom in Feeling” earlier in this chapter.
Proper “Impression”
Most of our supportive or destructive tendencies start as negative thoughts or beliefs that have been impressed upon us. In other words, we have all been repressed, depressed, compressed, and recessed by beliefs that do not serve us. Where do these unhelpful beliefs come from? Parents, ancestors, extended family, culture, friends, religion—you name it.
We are painfully unaware of most of the impressions that determine our reactions. Of the roughly 50,000 thoughts that we think each day, about 98 percent are exactly the same as those we had the day before.65 Of these, about 80 percent are negative.66 How can we clean up our unconscious thinking? In everyday life, we must manage the external information we expose ourselves to. We have choices. Abstaining from porn, the news, dark movies or books, and even negative conversation leaves us less to clean out later.
How about clearing out what’s already inside? To accomplish an inner housecleaning, try the following advice from the Mayo Clinic:
(1) Identify your negative thinking. Common types include:
- Filtering, or automatically screening, out positive aspects of a situation and concentrating instead on the negative twists
- Personalizing, or blaming yourself even when you are not responsible
- Catastrophizing, anticipating the worst
- Polarizing, seeing only good or bad—no shades of gray
(2) Focus on positive thinking. Here are some new ways
to think:
- Check yourself. Evaluate your thoughts every so often and transform them from “not nice” to “kind.”
- Try humor. Smile and laugh. It helps.
- Adopt a healthy lifestyle. Exercise at least three times a week and eat a healthy diet.
- Connect with happy people. We become who we hang around. Negative people think they have no power to change their lives; do you want to think like that?
- Talk nicely to yourself. Do not say anything to yourself you wouldn’t say to someone else, and remember to be kind to others! 67
Proper Stress Relief
Stress is more about our reaction to events than the events themselves. The entirety of the kundalini process invites stress relief in that it encourages us to stop, think, and reframe according to higher principles, such as the ten living principles shared earlier in this chapter.
Proper Relationships
We become like those with whom we associate. We also tend to treat others as what we think they are rather than who they actually are.
If we were hurt as a child or in an important relationship, we may think that everyone else is as hurtful as the perpetrator of the abuse. We might see every potential friend as the same person who gossiped about us in seventh grade, every possible girl- or boyfriend as an extension of an abusive parent. It is imperative that we conduct the personal-growth work necessary to clear up our past and see clearly in the present.
We do not return to the past to become trapped; we visit the past to free ourselves from the misperceptions that created alienation and unworthiness.
This cleansing is a process, one often necessary during both the kundalini purification and awakening stages. Quite simply, the more aware we become through the kundalini process, the more aware we are of our problems and projections. Achieving ease often requires a great deal of work.
We must consciously decide whom to hang out with on a daily basis. If we are trying to stop drinking, we have no business sitting around in bars or spending late-night hours with drinking buddies. If we want to be treated well, we have to treat ourselves with respect and commune with people who treat themselves respectfully.
As well, it’s helpful to engage in the type of healing activities covered in chapter 3—activities for dealing with a spontaneous or challenging awakening. Performing regressions and doing our soul work and the like frees us from the past and opens us to the life and relationships we’re dreaming of.
Proper Livelihood
There is the thought that a truly awakened person divorces him- or herself from the world and lives either in solitude or in selfless devotion to duty. For most of us, a kundalini awakening stimulates the opposite. We must be in the world, walking our talk.
Some people yearn for a true kundalini awakening because they want the icing on the cake, the gifts accompanying the experience. Upon reaching the crown chakra, the kundalini energy activates the siddhi, or magical spiritual gifts. Nearly every culture and religion promises the stirring of miraculous abilities upon union with the Divine. Jesus Christ performed healings, walked on water, and raised the dead; Buddha carried out the equivalent. While there are great powers—about forty siddhi, according to many Hindu sources—they are not the goal of enlightenment. Says Swami Sivananda, the siddhis are actually “obstacles to Realisation … He who runs after siddhis will become … a worldly minded man.”68 Naturally, we want to use our spiritual gifts in order to live meaningful work lives. But the gifts do not make us who we are; we make the gifts into what they can be. Ultimately, we are to serve through them.
Every one of the ten living principles is relevant to right livelihood. It does not really matter what we do for a living; what matters is how devoted we are to it. It does not matter how much money we make; what matters is that we accept payment and share with others. To receive fruits for our labors is to respect ourselves; to give to others is to respect them. It does not even make a difference if we have a job that reflects our “whole” self; what matters is that once we show up “on the job,” we work with integrity.
The same is true of every part of our life. No matter who we are, we must show up to live it.
Breaking Through the Koshas: Following the Ayurvedic Stages of Enlightment
