Living With Kundalini

One of the most neglected aspects of kundalini is not the mystical aspects associated with awakening it, but rather the aftermath and the challenges of living with an active kundalini. Each time I reread what I've written about my own tribulations and the accounts of others, I have to admit there's a lot I don't know. After 50 years of living with it, I still learn everyday.

Yes, there are synergies and similarities among adepts. The feeling of unboundedness is universal and immediate, on the other hand, there are so many health variants. Can any one person know all there is about kundalini? I doubt it; the topic is too vast. In fact, if someone claims they know it all, beware...

Still, I keep writing about the euphoria as well as the dangers. Here's a 2014 excerpt from my book The Biology of Consciousness: Case Studies in Kundalini.

How do you live with a Close Encounter of the Third Kind? Answer: You live differently. In the case of Kundalini, you may not build a giant mud castle in your living room, but it will change your perspective, your thinking, your temperament, your body, your outlook, your very soul — which mixed together constitute what I call your being.

In the first place, if you activate it, you will have to adjust to living with it, and that, sad to say, is something many don’t consider beforehand. Too bad, because once it arrives, you’re stuck with it.

Now I didn’t think Whoa, I’m stuck with this. I welcomed it! But I had to learn to live with it on its terms. And that takes time. Kundalini affects your being, your consciousness, your emotional compass, and perhaps, most immediate, your sexuality.

If you are already stable and mature, you stand to gain immediately. You will make better judgments and better decisions. If you are unstable and immature, it may take a while to clear old conditioning. Not the fault of Kundalini, you may simply need more time to recognize that you can’t control it because you haven't been able to control yourself.

You must listen to it and adapt to its dictates. What kind of dictates? Kundalini doesn’t like foreign substances, including alcohol, all kinds of drugs, prescription and otherwise. It doesn’t want you to “waste the seed.” It needs your vital energy for sublimation purposes, to nourish your brain. It doesn’t like heavy food and overeating. You might even experiment with a largely vegetable and fruit diet, just to see how you feel and then compare it to your previous diet. Yes, I had to learn this bit by bit, to live with it, to integrate it into my daily life (aka: on-the-job training).

It helped me improve my relations with others, helped me engage in mature interpersonal relationships, especially with a spouse or partner. It’s a long, tiring journey from the rim to the center; you need all the life skills you can muster — all the support systems available, which means acting and responding to others as the Golden Rule dictates: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Not all paths are for you. However, some are, especially the one that is yours. But others are not. In fact, you may be better off not taking any path rather than taking the wrong one. In the final reckoning, it’s not questions and answers or intellectual analysis that will guide you, but your heart — that little voice inside you. But that, too, may be changed — you may not recognize your emotional responses during the initial period. You may even feel hostility, paranoia, and detachment — before the force is able to break down your resistance and show that you are not a separate being, unconnected to the rest of creation.

The one thing about that little voice — the more reliable you are, the better the voice serves you. And that means life-skills mastery: knowing right from wrong, listening to your body, treating others as you would be treated.

If you're struggling with this, there's some timely help out there in the form of a self-paced course by kundalini adept, Corinne Lebrun.

Corinne is a great resource; she puts her heart and soul into this course.