Kundalini: The Creative Pulse of Consciousness

One of the paradoxes of kundalini awakening is that it is simultaneously an expansion process that brings greater perspective and the ability to access cosmic consciousness, as well as a contracting or individuating process that allows us to realize our individual potential as human beings.

— Mary Shutan

Kundalini awakening is a term that is often used in spirituality to describe various psycho-somatic processes and experiences that range from subtle bodily trembling to dramatic energetic openings that bring access to superconscious states that can be life-altering, terrifying and deeply inspiring. But what is kundalini, exactly? Force flow of consciousness? Uninhibited creative power latent in the human body? We don’t really know. 

This mysterious energy has been central in my awakening process and I consider it the true agency that actualizes the path. This kind of awakening is often romanticized, but the real process is quite messy and can oftentimes feel brutal, solitary and highly demanding. There are countless ways to get stuck in self-delusions, personal wounding and trauma, but also enigmatic blessings that come from encountering our demons and gods and expanding our capacity to assimilate the shadow. Despite its challenges and multi-dimensional complexity, this path comes with tremendous beauty and capacity for aesthetic attunement and ecstasy.

The first wave of my journey was heavy, to say the least. Despite the occasional plunges to the immensity of shining blackness and profound regenerative silence that kundalini had opened in my being, in which the temporal identity and physical world dissolved and I knew my nature to be not from the world of time and space, I still experienced myself as an individual being, although the individual expression seemed to be rooted in underlying immensity. My “baseline” was fixed on the surface visible level of reality, and I was only able to dip my toes to the depths from time to time. 

I started to become physically aware of the buried unconscious material that would suddenly surface with unexpected intensity and color the experience, without understanding what was happening. I turned towards the bliss that the energetic opening had brought to my life, and instinctually avoided and resisted the transpersonal darkness, inner sense of vacuity and repressed shadow emotion that was slowly bleeding into the experience. After three years of oscillation my life collapsed, and the underworld pulled me in. The dark night lasted all in all almost a decade, even after profound awakening shifts. In retrospect, this phase of the journey was absolutely vital, and inseparable from the realization that weaves into it.

The way I experience kundalini nowadays is grounded and non local, playful and neutral, luminous and spectral. I inhabit the liminal spaces in a way that is unfixed, fluid and intuitive, and deeply embodied. I’m a recluse, and find bliss in solitude and communion with the elements. Despite the sadness, helplessness and repulsion I feel about the toxicity and immaturity of human species and the self-absorbed bubble in which so many of us live — including many prominent spiritual teachers teaching others the path of non separation — I feel irresistibly bound to connectivity and service. I see the basic goodness in people that often comes out when we are forced to face the rock bottom, when we are broken thoroughly down by life, cracked open by our own suffering. I sense the absolute perfection, deeper order and intelligence within the texture of fragmentation, chaos and ignorance. I feel the heart of reality that is open, empty, pulsating.

For a while I have been wanting to share the story of my initial kundalini upsurge. I have not really talked about this before to anyone, not in this way at least. Energetically, it felt like being imprinted by the absolute. It felt like being claimed. My life was no longer my life.

There is a lot coded in the fundamental breakthrough. There is no guarantee that the seed will actualize. There is no knowing. There is no linearity. So this strange event is not really something that happened in the past, it’s not something that actually happened, but more like a living reverberation, kinesthetic blueprint, fabric of reality that is innately awake, self-transforming, kaleidoscopic ... that I access in the heart.

How it all begun (or so it seemed)

When I first went to Kauai, Hawaii in 2011, a fascinating book which contained a translation of an old Kashmiri text called Spandakarika fell into my hands. I read it with curious awe and inner thrill; the play of ancient cryptical words evoked something familiar and deeper than deep in my being. 

The text, which comes from the Pratyabhijna school of shaiva tantra, gave instructions for a natural state of self-liberation. This gentle release dissolves artificial boundaries and conceptual overlays in the perceptual flow. A subtle pulse of something unspeakable, sweet and simple, yet powerful beyond comprehension, takes over and moves through you, as you. 

What takes over is nothing but the vibrancy of one’s innate divinity, experienced as ever magnifying aliveness, impersonal yet almost shockingly intimate by its flavor. One’s own consciousness is discovered to be a limitless field of pure potentiality, absorbing the exterior world in its mysterious womb. This reality of open boundlessness is dynamic, radiant and blissful, and by its nature absolutely free. 

Cradled by the lush soul space of Hawaii, I felt deeply touched, and my mind softened in raw unknowing. The pervasive sense of existential alienation lightened. I felt a silent non-conceptual voice, a movement of intuition. I experienced the kind of deep peace I had never felt before, and I knew I would come back and spend more time here, for reasons I did not know or need to know. 

While exploring the island, I decided to do retreats alone in a secluded jungle valley. I would pack food for one week and go deep in the valley, camp next to a flowing water, and dive deep in my practice which was rather intuitive and shamanic at that time. During one of these retreats something unexpected happened that put my life on a track that it has been on ever since. Still to this day I find it hard to describe in words, yet never has it ceased being alive in me.

On the fifth day of my retreat, it started off as sudden and intense angst, terror and a desperate sense of grasping. It felt as if the foundations of my being were violently shaking and disintegrating, and the body responded with raw survival instinct and nausea. My mind spiraled down into an irrational fear I might be dying. 

Next, I find myself falling into the center of the fright and it's pure openness, infinite space. The struggle evaporates and the energy surges upwards through the body like an all-pervading impetus, penetrates my mind. 

When I then open my eyes I encounter an incomprehensible reality: there is no outside world, only my ‘own’ consciousness shining forth as everything. What before had appeared as something exterior is now interior. The sense of contracted separate self is gone. In fact, the interior has somehow poured outside and is now shimmering as undivided field of ‘presence’. The world is nothing but luminous boundlessness, gently pulsing with quiet joy beyond comprehension, wordlessly re-cognized as ‘what I am’. 

My heart felt like it was penetrated by a lightning bolt.

My sense of self shattered, and revealed a kaleidoscopic display of open spaciousness and ease, expanding and contracting, fluidly like breath.

The shock came with waves of gratitude, awe, relief, tears, leaving behind an ever lingering taste of unconditional presence that had unknowingly been so deeply yearned for. I possess no adequate words to describe this blazing taste of eternity — closest comes perhaps absolute love — but nothing was ever the same for me since. Even though I many times resisted the process that followed, after encountering this radiant, self-transforming design of ´what I am´ ... I always knew my life belongs to it.

It turned out that I had been living a mechanical life that was weirdly alienated from direct experience, and thoroughly dictated by social and cultural conditioning. This was experienced as heavily rooted ideas and beliefs about what life is and ´what I am´, and how my life was supposed to look like, which generated a murky cloud of worry, panic, confusion, craving, expectation, hope, fear and dissatisfaction that pervaded the experience. This made the ´I-ness´ appear tight, limited and blocked, a victim of life, unable to experience its vibratory freedom, coherence and creative potential.

The mind created world that the ´I-ness´ was inhabiting had an artificial, dim and suffocating order that never really seemed to flow, and was characterized by pervasive resistance to life. The struggle would only really cease for a short moment when the mental angst (that had become so normal that it was not even perceived anymore) spontaneously paused, such as while dancing, taking a drug or going for a nice hike, but it would kick right back in afterwards, and the bizarre distortion resumed. In this mode the thoughts, needs, impulses and emotions that fueled the mind created reality appeared very original and authentic, as if they belonged to an actually existing entity, even defined him/her, when in fact this compressed experience was nothing but a habitual display of compulsive patterns and behaviours, originating from who knows where, having nothing genuinely individual about it.

The break down of the mind world did not happen over night, and initially it literally felt like being annihilated. That is what I nowadays refer to as kundalini awakening. The essential shift for me in this process, just before the great death, happened when I ceased seeing this energy as an antagonistic force within me ... and became Her.