One morning I got up and went to my living room and sat on the floor. The thought of Yoga came into my awareness. I attempted to do some yoga asanas (poses). But that was laughable. It occurred to me that hatha yoga was trying to emulate the Kundalini rising on a miniscule scale. The yoga postures attempted to activate the various energy centers through the bending and twisting of the spine, holding and manipulating the breath, inspired by this sacred and spontaneous Energy that was moving through my body like a freight train. Doing yoga postures at this point was completely unnecessary. The Yoga Sutras convey a description of the eight limbs of Yoga, or rather, the eight branches of yoga which discusses the various disciplines that a devoted yogi must master to become enlightened. The postures are actually the least important; service, prayer, devotion, meditation are considered more important in the Yogi’s development.
Finally the Energy reached the crown and I experienced a burst of light that was pure white and red and orange and then black. I felt like I had been shot out into outer space, there was no body to even speak of. Was I in unity with the Divine? Well, Awareness was no longer there as a separate being, I did feel amazing and everything I looked at had light around it and sparkled. Once things had calmed down internally and I felt that I might venture outside my apartment. I cautiously took a little walk; running was out of the question, as I was feeling rather wobbly. Everything seemed to glow; the grass, the flowers and the trees were living beings and spoke. I walked up to a small tree and embraced it and was immediately moved to tears at the amount of love that was pouring from this tree. The rest of the short walk was the same all of the growing things were speaking, singing in a unified chorus of joy.
The following week began to unfold with more than a little humor. When my friend arrived to take me out to dinner at a restaurant, which I agreed to a bit reluctantly, my head began to bang on the wall behind me and we had to take our meal ‘to go’. The first time I got behind the wheel of a car, I began to laugh hysterically; the whole driving thing was so ludicrous. Who as driving? Certainly not me. On the side of the road I saw the body of a deer that had just been hit and watched as its’ energy body leaped out of the lifeless form and gracefully jumped across the highway. There was no death. Everything was eternal Life. While driving I stopped at a stop sign and before my eyes a ’slide-show’ of all of my past lives flashed by. I saw who I had been, ordinary, aristocratic, good, bad, man, woman, different ethnicities; the whole gamut. Life had played all the imaginable roles, cleverly disguising itself as a person.
It took many weeks before I integrated back into the ‘regular’ world and got a job. The Energy still moved through me and does. While I was in what I call the “reintegration” period, the Energy/Life Force would be ‘asleep’ during the day and work hours. But in the evening when my daughter was in bed asleep and once I lay down to rest myself it would begin to move up through the body, but now it took only a few minutes for the movement from bottom to top to complete. The energy never started from the top and moved down, always beginning at the bottom. It is taking many years for the purification of inner knots and old patterns of being and relating. It is still an ongoing process. But there are things that are ‘known’ and these things are what I am sharing with you. To be continued....
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So, what exactly is Kundalini? First of all, it is a Sanskrit term, meaning serpent and defines the energy that begins at the root of the spine, the sacrum/coccyx, and then moves up the central column of the body, the spinal column to be exact. The medical Caduceus, the winged staff in the center with two snakes coiling up on either side of it, is a representation of the Kundalini moving up the two energetic arteries of the left and right of the spinal column, called the Ida and the Pingala, respectively. It is said that once it rises to the top, or the crown of the head, one purportedly has an experience of unification with the Source, God, All That Is.
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The experience of the Kundalini rising was incredible, joyous, profound and yet there I was, still thinking I was a personality, with this life story. This was just the beginning of about 14 years of releasing personal grief, therapy and a deep looking into my own dysfunctional personality. However, many of these problems continued to follow me, I ‘the healer’ hid myself from myself very well. I carried the secret story of my own family troubles and my own impressions of childhood deep under the rugs of my psyche. On the outside I looked like I had my sh*t together. I had a job; I had a great apartment in a delightful village by the sea. I had a boyfriend; my daughter and I had a wonderful relationship. I was having ‘fun’. I also had a healing practice in a Mind/Body therapy center where I rented a room with a friend of mine. We shared the rent and worked out a schedule of seeing clients, she did massage and I did my ‘healing work’.
I did the ‘spiritual’ retreat thing and went for a day, a week, a month to various places to do yoga, see gurus, spiritual teachers, holy men and women. Life continued to live itself through me.
Where are you right now? What do you see, smell, hear or perhaps taste, besides reading this book? That is the divine Presence experiencing Itself. The individual that we try so hard to keep perpetuating is never a separate insulated object apart from the tapestry that is Life. That is an idea in the mind. That is the illusion; that a body identified as ‘insert your name here’, could be a separate form from the One. A very beginning understanding is that form and formlessness are the same thing. In other words, there is no separation from what we know as ourselves and what we think of as space. Ask any physicist; and they will tell you that on the subatomic level everything is basically the same thing ~ energy. There is even a word for this in Sanskrit, Advaita, meaning literally not two.
Something that is said in the Yoga Sutras and what I also believe to be true is that the mind makes the body, the mind/body apparatus or vehicle is a construct of the part of ourselves we know and recognize as being separate or the ego. Why does this happen? The explanation from the Yogi sages of India and the Himalayas is that it is the play of Consciousness, the game of Consciousness hiding and then revealing itself, over and over until the play is finished and the Consciousness that once experienced itself as separate is no more, then there is ‘no one’ who is enlightened. There is just Consciousness.
Meanwhile, life goes on, and there is only One. Your neighbor, your enemy, the other nation is still the same thing. You.
But in the little world of moi a drama continues/d. After this experience of the Kundalini I felt quite amazing, quite tingly and although I had a casual dating relationship one of my clients from my healing practice said I must meet this man; an amazing and extraordinary man, a healer, a teacher and a man of true spiritual grace. She had known him for a long time, rented a room in his house and thought that he and I would hit it off. Well, I was on board for that and after a few weeks, I met him. Mr. D.C.F. was having a party at his house, which I found out later was the hub for community, parties and events and celebrations for sacred holidays and equinoxes and solstices and the like. I went there with the boyfriend of the moment and when we arrived said host was not there. So I went about making myself busy and was assigned to make a loaf of garlic bread. When he came into the kitchen, I was struck by his wildness and friendliness. He was so charming and enjoyable I understood at once why my client wanted us to meet. That night I literally fell in love at first sight and so did he. After a few days he called me and asked me out. We went to dinner and at the restaurant he put his head on my shoulder, I told him about the Kundalini rising. Afterwards we sat on a bench in the warm August night and felt the silence together. Then we went to my apartment and lay on my bed, in the darkness we could both see the sparks coming off of our bodies. To say the least our affair and relationship was extraordinary, I loved him beyond how I had loved any other man. I was completely besotted with this man. But I was still learning about my own internal division and inequities. All at once, I portrayed the part of the enlightened goddess very well. Underneath, I struggled with jealousy, insecurity, my terrible denial about my finances, the bills and credit card debt I was racking up, but still I was this Goddess in that little world. I went to spiritual retreats and sat at the feet of famous gurus.
He traveled to
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