Chapter 5 Discovering Kundalini

In the renovation and restoration phase of spiritual transformation, the unconscious actively unloads deep laden stored impressions and desires resulting in the individual feeling strong mental tendencies and emotions going by.  The unloading process may also result in memories of the past coming forward, vivid dreams, and synchronization occurrences.  To counterbalance this outpouring of unconscious material, there is an equally strong ability to be objective, centered, and unaffected by the material going by.  Thus the clearing out of mental residue is very efficient.

Joan Harrigan: The Science of Spiritual Transformation 

During the final week in Arizona, and after the retreat, we did some travelling in the area to visit some of the local sites.  Since I was only at the beginning stage of this rather substantial internal renovation of my subtle body, the beautiful sites we visited were not what I remembered most about this final week of travel.  With the rapidly increased flow of energy from my pelvic area into my brain, I began to have what I now call psychotic experiences which I will not go into detail here although I describe some at length in my journal.  I now attribute these experiences to the increased level of energy to my brain that affected my subtle body, particularly the mental sheath.  These experiences were fascinating at the time, but were the first to go, and I see them now as only side effects of all that was happening.  The only point that is interesting to note is that they did not give rise to much concern at the time despite the fact that they were very unusual and would certainly have been a concern if expressed to a psychologist.  Of more importance were some remarkable other changes that were happening that could not be ignored.

In the day before returning home, I noted in my journal:

“I’m noticing psychological changes in my attitudes. I have more acceptance and love for strangers, greater appreciation for my wife, a greater love of nature and creation.  The world seems different.  My attitudes in respect to the importance of diet and exercise had heightened considerably.  And more important, many of the things that before would have been annoying, frustrating, embarrassing, causing me to react or withdraw, no longer exist.  The negative emotions triggered by certain people or events seem to have lost their charge.  And the positive emotional connections to (say) nature or people are enhanced.” 

It was as if the emotional charge was taken out of the many imprints and impressions left in my sub-conscious by my past conditioning and trials.  Even though I could still remember incidents that had happened that left their mark on me, the emotional connection with them was gone. 

But more strangely was the growing absence of what I will call “self-definition”.  The ways I defined myself in the past, my self-concept, seemed to be gone.  This not only related to the way I use to see myself in respect to my work, but also in respect to church.  My memory continued to be there in respect to all of these things, but I did not have an emotional connection with them.  They seemed to have crumbled away along with the sub-conscious visions of trucks, buildings, earth, churches and crosses.  Even my previous concepts of God had vanished, and there only remained the undefined, mysterious, expansive “Other”, beyond description and name.   

Because of all of these very unusual occurrences, I continued to surrender to this new reality taking it on as somewhat of an adventure.

On Saturday, December 17, we returned home.  This was during the period when the largest amount of energy seemed to be flowing into my brain which continued to cause some of the bazaar psychotic incidents mentioned above.  This coupled with the unusual phenomena of spontaneous high pressure cyclical breathing, my body going through twists and contortions, both to facilitate energy flow, and the often excessive built-up of blissful energy in the crown of my head, made for a very interesting return.  As I attempted to become engaged again in some church activities, I soon discovered that I would experience what seemed like an excessive brain overload, and would have to discontinue and just rest.  

My wife was becoming very concerned with all that I was experiencing.  She began to do some research on the internet in relation to the symptoms I was experiencing.  She discovered something that neither of us had any previous familiarity; something called Kundalini Rising.  In all of my reading of Christian literature over the years, I had never heard this term before.    So now I began to turn my attention to something that seemed to fall completely outside of my Christian tradition and experience.  It was strangely there that I would discover a new language and an archetypal image that would help me to understand this experience.