Kundalini

Wikipedia–which is of course the most reliable resource for information–defines kundalini as ‘a form of divine feminine energy (or Shakti) believed to be located at the base of the spine…’ There are meditations, tantric practices, and yoga systems entirely dedicated to kundalini awakening, and for many spiritual people it is a thing devoutly to be wished. It is believed to lead to spiritual liberation. In my case, it happened spontaneously as a result of something I didn’t even ‘believe in’ at the time: reiki.

It was around 2011 and I had been spending the day at a small town fair with a friend of mine who was newly into practicing reiki. He had not had any training, and had a habit of rushing into things without preparation and sometimes with liberal drug use, namely LSD (which some people use almost as a shortcut to chemically awaken kundalini), though on this day he had not partaken. I mentioned that I had a sore back, and he offered to do reiki to make me feel better. 

My friend was so adamant about it that eventually I just decided that he could do what he wanted, and I would have a nice nap while he did it. I now understand that he had no business practicing reiki on someone in the first place. He did not know what he was doing, and didn’t feel the need to bother about consent.

I was laying supine on some cushions on the floor of his parents’ sunroom, and he had built a grid of crystals on my body. He put a crystal in each of my hands and started waving a selenite wand over me. Then he appeared to change his mind about one of the crystals, and switched the one in my left hand for a rose quartz. I do not know what he did after that because I, a person with absolute aphantasia, suddenly ‘saw’ the most unbelievable things inside my head. 

I had a vision of the inside of my body as a deep cavern with a magma fire at the bottom where my ilium and sacrum should be, filling the inside of the bowl of my hips. Stacked on top of it were seven huge grindstones, each rotating in the opposite direction from the one below, slowly spinning like rings on an invisible axis. Between them, instead of wheat to be ground, were spaces lit by each of the colours of the rainbow in turn, starting with red on the bottom. Each stone ring was inscribed with symbols that I do not remember. 

As the vision went on, the magma fire began to rise until lava and flames were shooting out of the top of my head like a tornado. White light was spearing from the middle of my forehead, accompanied by a twisting, rotating feeling around my spine. It seemed to take only a minute or so, and all of it happened while my eyes were wide open, but I did not see the room I was in at all.

When it was over, I found my friend at my feet frantically winding invisible threads around his selenite wand and yanking them away from me, but I could feel them like acid-covered strings being pulled from the bottom of my feet. He said it looked like tar, so I always think of Tim Curry’s character from Fern Gully being forcibly extracted from my toes. I asked him how long the session took, because in my admittedly limited experience, it should take longer than one minute to complete a reiki treatment… He told me he’d been working on me for 20 minutes.

After that, for months, I was emotionally raw and cried almost daily for no reason. It was hard to be in crowds because it felt like everyone was thinking ‘too loud’. I had trouble concentrating on anything, and I felt stupid and off-kilter. It showed up in my performance, too, as I became unusually clumsy and dropped things more often. 

I thought I was losing my mind, or that maybe I had nerve damage. One day, I was visiting another friend of mine who practices reiki (but legitimately and with training), and she said it sounded like my kundalini had woken up. She told me that it meant I was probably supposed to be a healer. At the time, I had NO intention of going into health care of any kind, so I asked her how to make it go away. 

Unfortunately the answer I have found in all my studies and experience is that it does not go away. I would need to learn how to live with it, so I did some research.

Much like a lot of gatekeepy religious texts, most of the information I found on kundalini awakening was divided into two camps: ‘I subsisted on bread and water and meditated while flogging myself and abstaining from sex for 10 years begging for kundalini to awaken in me, and eventually it did. Have you tried being more holy?’ or ‘Ring the magic pussy gong while inhaling neroli’ (special thanks to Kirsten Brooks for that quote) seemed to be the most frequent styles of advice I found for how to deal with my newly awakened… ability. 

Susanna Barkataki has said about yoga in general ‘It is ironic that practice meant to free us has becoming (sic) so confining’, and I feel that way about many descriptions of living with kundalini; so much restriction on something that is supposed to be an exchange of energy flow with the universe.

I wasn’t excited about either camp, so I did something worse: I shoved my kundalini back down into the bottom of my spine and I held it there like I was wrestling an alligator. I did that for seven years. One of the things that both advice camps agreed on was ‘never ignore your kundalini or abuse it, it will hurt you to try’. And that’s what it did. My chronic EDS pain got steadily worse. My fascia tightened up. My joints got more and more ‘angry’. My intuition shrivelled.

Until my second year of massage school. Then it started getting away from me and swarming up my spine to kick me in the bottom of the skull (that’s as far as I let it come up, so that’s where it hammered away), over and over, daily. The feeling of it coming up is much like the beginning of an orgasm that doesn’t quite finish, so it was very distracting. Once, I let it out of my hands while I was practicing myofascial work on one of my classmates; he jumped off the table and yelped, because it had shocked him like electricity. So I tried harder to wrestle it down.

At some point this year, I realized that I AM now a healer, and that’s why the kundalini energy was trying to get back up. It’s there to help me be even more of what I already am. So while I was in a workshop with a local reiki practitioner and all-around body-work Jedi, that coil of unused and rejected energy was discovered as an issue affecting a lot of other things. We worked together to bring it up through my body slowly and integrate it with my own energy via Shakti, which is the shape (?) the kundalini-energy showed up as. There was weeping. There was relief. My face looked different when we were done; less heavy. Since then, I’ve been trying to remind myself not to reflexively squash it when it does come up.

I mentioned earlier that being an ex-mennonite atheist witch makes things complicated for me. I am used to being told about the anointing of the holy spirit, and how holy one must be in order to be anointed in such a way, and it was generally an unspoken expectation that only the minister–in that faith, invariably a man–was ever going to be holy enough for such a blessing. 

On the other hand, if I think about it from a Shakti standpoint, as an atheist I am unused to being okay with the idea of god/goddess-energy. It’s tricky to allow for the integration of kundalini into my daily life, and I’m still learning how to work with it. I have yet to find any one specific way that works for me.

That… was a lot. Thanks for coming with me on that journey. If you have had similar experiences, I hope that this resonates with you in a helpful way. If I ever do find ways to incorporate this energy that work well, I’ll be sure to post an update with links to the resources I used.