Spiritual awakening: Enlightenment vs. Self awareness:

Let’s be honest, enlightenment sounds so romantic. We can project any image of perfection and believe that if we reach it, we won’t suffer anymore, we won’t feel pain or confusion, we won’t have to do things we don’t want to do, and everyone will seek our presence, and love us. It’s a picturesque ideal of how to transcend our humanity, our vulnerability, and the lack of control we feel over our lives. 

Herein lies the trap. Enlightenment will break your heart. Think of it as you have a crush on a celebrity, fantasizing about how a relationship with them can be, it is all a projection, all fantasy and it’s most likely not going to happen. The desire to be happy, free, and loved is so very natural, but the fantasy that we create in our minds is not healthy for us in the long run. Firstly, perfection isn’t the goal of spiritual seeking; it is a coping tool our ego uses to feel in control over how we are perceived by people, over getting people’s love and affection, and avoiding judgment and rejection. Our freedom does not lie within the narrow box of perfectionism. It lies outside all boxes, in the allowance to be who we are without judgment towards any state of being we experience; “good” or “bad”, “weak” or “strong”. The pathway to our freedom isn’t through a contracted projection of how we should be in order to be loved or good, but rather via the uncomfortable gateway of our innermost vulnerability and humanity. It does not lie in the neatness of the perfect image of ourselves, but in the chaotic subconscious shadow side of us which we work so hard to keep tamed and out of sight.  

Here is the definition of Enlightenment definition in the dictionary: “A philosophical movement of the 1700s that emphasized the use of reason to scrutinize previously accepted doctrines and traditions that brought about many Humanitarian reforms”.

This might be a less confusing way of looking at enlightenment, not as a state of transcendence but as an inquiry into whether everything we have been taught and indoctrinated with by society is the truth, and whether it serves our inner truth and freedom. Rather, look at it as a state in which we have to examine all of our beliefs, thoughts, and desires. Not in order to become a super-human-spiritual-hero, but in order to become self-aware and free. Our pattern and conditioning can make us feel as if we are never good enough, we always have to be better to be accepted and loved. We go through life carrying a stick we use to punish ourselves with whenever we feel we haven’t measured up or have done or said something inadequate. We also have the carrot in front of us we use to represent everything we need to work so hard to attain, to become worthy of having. If we are not careful, the concept of enlightenment can turn into the biggest carrot yet, dangling a few feet in front of us, never attainable, forever breaking our hearts. It can come with its own stick at our behinds, telling us we have to work at “earning” this state of “enlightenment”, that we may not be good enough, strong enough, smart enough, beautiful enough, or spiritual enough to ever get to that carrot. It could be a trap we don’t notice we have set out for ourselves and is causing us so much unnecessary pain. 

Self-awareness, on the other hand, is attainable. All it asks of us is to get to know ourselves fully and intimately. Attaining self-awareness or self-realization is both within our reach and control. We do not need to wait for a projected ideal of a distant God-force that would determine if we are worthy of it or not. All it requires is a willingness to see ourselves through all our layers, to meet the “good” and the “bad” we perceive in ourselves without judgment, and allow those aspects of ourselves to come out of exile, to “realize” them. Self-awareness takes a willingness and bravery to admit that what we think to be the truth may not be true at all, that what we feel may sometimes be misguided or filtered, and that our subconscious beliefs may be merely a phantom trying to protect us from pain. It requires allowing ourselves to be more human than we want to be, by letting ourselves feel all of our pain, trusting that it won’t kill us nor drive us to insanity although it may feel that way at times. It requires standing on shaky ground for a while having given up on the comfort of having solid core beliefs that may be wrong for us. This path requires immense courage and commitment to truly get to know oneself through all the layers, conscious and unconscious, and meet them all face to face. Yet it is a worthy and attainable path to walk. 

Self-awareness can lead to wholeness through the examination of our inner fragmentation. Fragmentation of our psyche is caused by isolating and shunning parts of ourselves we thought to be unlovable, some of which we hid so well we forgot they ever existed and are unable to access them. Seeing every part of us judgment-free is all it takes to attain self-awareness since seeing something fully is loving it. Loving an isolated part of ourselves allows it to reintegrate and heal the fragmentation. 

True freedom comes from not having to run away from any part of ourselves any longer, from not dreading the stick we carry and coveting the projected carrot we feel we lack. There is no part of us that deserves punishment, nor any part of us that needs to prove worthiness. We are whole, worthy, and divine in essence, there is no one out there keeping score but us. Seeking enlightenment can only lead to further fragmentation and shunning of any part of us that doesn’t fit into the ideal that enlightenment represents for us. 

We don’t need to work so hard at becoming who we already are. So next time you set a spiritual or a self-help goal for yourself consider using words that don’t put so much pressure on yourself, as you are already facing enough pressure merely by needing to survive in today’s society. Define your objectives using words such as knowledge, acceptance, allowance, awareness, and wholeness rather than enlightenment and transcendence. See how much better if feels not to think you are light years away from an unreachable destination but that in every moment in which you allow a part of yourself to be just as it is, you have already arrived, at that moment you are whole and you get to celebrate that. 

For those of us experiencing Kundalini, Self-awareness is inevitable, so rest assured that you are already riding a vehicle on autopilot that is taking you into your every hidden corner. and using that fuel to further your self-knowing, and to actively participate in it.  Don’t doubt you are in the process of attaining wholeness, of realizing yourself fully. Don’t expect to transcend anything, rather descend into your own shadow and pour light and compassion into it, you deserve that, every part of you does. If you are in a spiritual community that makes you feel judged for not “getting there” quicker or self-conscious when you have to spend time in your deep wounding and cannot “reach a higher vibration” for a period, reevaluate whether this community serves you. If not, it might be good to take a break to allow yourself to be “not okay” for a while until you feel more balanced and wish to come back - if you ever do. Any part of us that would not let us “collapse” fully, go into the pain, allow it to be exactly as it is with no sugar coating, can be detrimental to our healing, be it an idea we hold onto, a defense mechanism or an outer voice from a community. 

Being ourselves, perfectly imperfect, yet getting an everlasting supply of inner strength and love through knowing ourselves intimately and recognizing our inherent divinity and worth is a sustainable state, chasing the holy grail of enlightenment is not. Seek to stop seeking, that is what the spiritual journey should be about, not because you reached the highest mountain but because you climbed it just to realize you are tall enough on your own. 

About "the dark night of the soul", spiritual emergency and a healing crisis states:

If you are undergoing a spontaneous Kundalini awakening and are facing some struggles this blog post is for you. Through parts of your awakening, you may feel like you have gone deeper into survival mode. This can make you feel cheated by the universal wisdom. Expecting an awakening to be a beautiful and an enlightening experience alone, when in truth, some parts are, yet other parts can be quite the opposite.

"Waking up" to one's true nature is a beautiful and blissful experience and it takes your breath away. It fills you up with so much love, which you are not sure you can contain. Perhaps, for a while anything that is not love washes away. You feel at one with the universe. You feel divinity in all of life, the birds, the trees, even the air seem to be made out of the same living intelligent quality which feels so palpable and beautiful. You want to melt into the love you feel and never come back. This beautiful essence envelops you, adopts you, and perhaps for the first time in your life you feel that you truly belong, you are undeniably part of IT and IT is part of you. Nothing else makes sense anymore, and yet the whole of life makes sense all of a sudden. There are no burdens or pain or even longing in this state, all desire melts away and you feel whole and holy. Ascending into that space is a true gift and you were granted this gift it in order to wake up to your divine nature.

Once this higher state of grace is over you descend back into the body, into this denser reality space. For some of us, this state washes away a lot of the conditioning and we descend or "land" from it more at peace. For most us though, the contrast between this experience and coming back into our conditioned mind and the "pain archive" body can be utterly jarring.  

A Kundalini awakening isn’t a linear process.  Thus this higher state can be a one-time experience or it could be a reoccurring state. Coming out of “bliss” may feel cruel or ironic; “why would the divine give me all this peace and love only to then take it away from me?” It is very natural to assume we did something wrong. Thinking, perhaps this descent is a punishment of sorts? Or maybe we are not deserving and worthy enough to stay in Grace, perhaps we didn’t pray well enough or meditate hard enough? Rest assured this is not the case. This isn’t the final destination of this journey, but merely a part of the process. 

It is hard when you are undergoing a radical awakening not to try and label yourself and your process. It is in our very nature to name things. Though counter-intuitive for an awakening when you are asked to let go of “labels”, it might help in this case to temporarily give this stage one. This blog is for the purpose of providing you with context, as understanding what you are experiencing may help you through this stage. If it makes you feel less scared and normalizes this process for you, then use it as a tool.

What is the difference between “the dark night of the soul”, a healing crisis, and a spiritual emergency?

1.   A healing crisis:

A healing crisis can occur when you have been wounded or traumatized in childhood and have continually suppressed and repressed the memories. This usually happens when you had no one to comfort you and meet your needs as a child. Therefore, traumatic events are stored deep in the early development of the brain (You can research more online about how early trauma shapes the brain and affects all aspects of self). Learning while at your most vulnerable that you couldn’t lean on anyone, you kept this early defense mechanism of stuffing everything in for most everything else that ever hurt you. This meant that you internalized so much pain and hurt, which your body had to carry for years and years in order to keep you functioning in the world.

At some point, a part of the trauma is released, perhaps because you decided consciously that it was time to heal, or perhaps your being, your soul, or body couldn't take it any longer and you were pushed to start healing. This can also occur as a result of a spiritual awakening. Subsequently all the other suppressed/repressed wounding and rejected aspects of the self, begin to emerge. Imagine it almost as a pressure cooker that once the lid was opened, the immense effort and pressure you unconsciously used to stuff everything down with explodes. This can feel so overwhelming mentally, physically, and emotionally. You have placed this lid on your pain for a very good reason, and part of you is still fighting the emergence. In turn, the resistance is just adding more stress to your being. At this point, your body goes into heightened survival/ PTSD/ fight or flight modes. Your nervous systems can easily go into overdrive. Your body is being flooded with stress hormones (cortisol, adrenaline) as a reaction to the past wounding surfacing in your consciousness. This can trigger depression; grief, anxiety, or panic attacks and even cause physical conditions to emerge. This doesn’t necessarily happen to everyone, but if you are going through it know that there is a light at the end of this tunnel. You may be experiencing a healing crisis, yet try and focus on the word healing in the definition.

Your wounding is coming up to the surface to heal, not to harm you. The more you allow it, the less stressful it will be. Granted, the resistance is so ingrained and unconscious that it’s difficult to switch off. The best thing to do in this instance is to let yourself fall apart. Don’t try to put the pieces back together as it is counterproductive. Your “self” needs to come undone to a certain degree so your subconscious mind won’t re-press the lid on the painful emotions or visceral memories. Easy to say, so very hard to do, letting yourself fall apart feels terrifying, you don’t trust that you can put yourself back together afterward. You may feel like you will lose your mind or even die if you let this happen. All of your survival alarms are on and they are telling you to fight this with all you have; not to let the pain take over, to go back to the denial and the false self that has helped you survive in the first place. Don’t blame these voices inside of you; they are your old survival tapes. Lovingly going against your survival programming, while still validating it and its fear, is possibly the hardest thing you will ever have to do, yet the right thing for your ultimate healing. YOU CAN DO THIS. Even if you can’t stop resisting, it’s OKAY. Give the resistance time to wind down and to start trusting that these old wounds are safe to feel. It’s a reflex you will slowly learn to soften.

 Consider getting help in the form of therapy or any emotional support. Get supplements to support your body through this (adrenal and nervous system herbal supplements), and if you need medication, if it’s too much for you to take, get a Psychiatrist to help you. Ideally, this is just temporary support. Give yourself permission to accept help, to not be strong for a while. The way through this pain is to dive into it with titration, eventually, it will get better. You can and you will heal even though you may not believe it at this moment. Focus on one moment at a time, one day at a time. Be proud of yourself for making it every day, don't plan for the future, respect the fact that you are in survival mode, thank yourself every day for enduring and surviving. This is a sacred job even if it doesn't feel like it. You are healing an entire lifetime or lifetimes of pain and this takes time, be patient with yourself.

2.   A spiritual emergency:

Similar to a healing crisis, a “spiritual emergency” can be an extremely overwhelming experience. In this instance, the focus would be on spiritual experiences rather than emotional ones (see list below), yet these two could overlap. You may be going through a spiritual emergency if you are going through intense spiritual experiences spontaneously, without currently using enhancers such as drugs and/or outside of a meditative state; These experiences feel out of your control; you feel that you can’t ground them or yourself; the experiences are prolonged or keep happening; you may be feeling overwhelmed or as if you’ve lost touch with reality (different from a mental condition, you are still very lucid but feel as if you are in a parallel realm). This emergency can be triggered by a Kundalini awakening or other types of awakenings; meditation, energy healing; the use of hallucinogens (if the heightened spiritual states continue after the influence of the drug has worn off); trauma; childbirth, and more.

“Spiritual emergency” symptoms may include:

• Feeling as if you or a part of you has left your body and won’t come back - or having prolonged out of body experiences

• Feeling extreme grace, bliss and you lack the ability to ground and/or be fully in the world

• Feeling merged with the divine and complete oneness. Feeling a total lack of “self” or boundaries

• Feeling everyone’s energy pass through you, or invade your field, a lack of energetic boundaries

• Seeing people who have passed over without the ability to control it, shut it down or accept it

• Feeling too big or too small for your body, sensing your energy body more than your physical body

• Feeling a sense of grandeur and a calling, feeling enlightened and as if you have to “save” or heal the world

• Feeling the urge to completely change one’s previous life, work, family or friends

• Sensing darkness, as if you tapped into the collective sorrow and pain, you can’t separate your pain from the world’s, it feels too vast for one person to contain

• Seeing energy, hearing guidance, seeing angels, getting premonitions and vivid spiritual dreams
  

The above symptoms aren’t “bad” in any way, in fact, they can be a normal part of an awakening. Yet experiencing too many of these symptoms simultaneously, or with a great sense of fear and lack of context can cause you to feel out of control and victimized by the awakening process. This can be a crisis, an instantaneous and radical change to your sense of reality and sense of self, and be very hard to live with. 

 If you are undergoing a spiritual emergency, know that nothing went wrong that can’t be integrated. This is temporary. The less fear and resistance you feel the better and more grounded the experience will be.

Easier said than done, I know, it can feel frightening especially if this all happened to you in a day. Going through something this radical, the natural tendency would be to desperately try to “fix it”, restore your previous ground. You are not sure who to turn to. You may be looking for a healer or a shaman to help you slow the experience down or stop it, which can work for some but do the opposite for others. Be extremely mindful about who you let near your ultra exposed energy body at this time. If someone doesn’t know what he/ she is doing they can cause you further imbalance. The best thing to do is to use grounding techniques continuously and to pray for help slowing down the intensity, to connect to your inner wisdom for guidance if you can. Try to ask the experience what it is trying to teach and show you. Your system may be out of balance but it will find its way back into a deeper wholeness. At this time, when trust is the hardest, it is most important to cultivate “self-trust” (which includes yourself, higher Self or the divine, and your guides). Be gentle and patient with yourself. Although embracing the extremity of the experience feels near to impossible, what if you just allow for the possibility that this isn’t a mistake, that nothing went wrong. Ask yourself if this isn’t a mistake, what could it be? What can I learn from this? curiosity is a great tool to replace fear with; gentle exploration vs resistance and panic.

If you cannot function in the world at this moment, then please don’t. I know there are a million things you “need” to do. If you had cancer would you force yourself to do a million things? What if your soul and the universe are asking you for this time? What if you give it to yourself and get as much help as you can with the things that absolutely need doing. Lean on the people you love. You are healing. Integration is the purpose of any healing that takes place. Looking at any ailment or imbalance; be it spiritual, physical, or mental, as the final destination is simply not true. That is what our fear believes, that if we allow the experience fully, then we will never be well again. What if falling apart isn't a wrong turn, but is, in fact, the path to wholeness?

3.   “The dark night of the soul”:

During a Kundalini awakening some people can experience what is referred to as “the dark night of the soul”. There are many theories about what it is and why it is common. This is one perspective. Below are some aspects of an awakening that can trigger “The dark night of the soul” and what it may feel like:

• Disillusionment: In a Kundalini awakening every notion and belief that you have accumulated over a lifetime and have identified with, is stripped away. Your “ego" (which is your beliefs, defenses, and conditioning) is essentially torn to pieces. Many of the ways in which you view the world fall apart. Your identity, which is who you believed you were, is shattered. Everything you thought about life, spiritual beliefs and the people closest to you, is called into question. This is so you can break free of false beliefs, which were caused by trauma and/or misguided conditioning. Ultimately, you shed so much of “you”, that it can feel like a death. This triggers a state of deep grief that can lead to “the dark night of the soul” experience. You may feel a sense of complete disillusionment with life. If all you were and thought life was had come to pass, what is left? In essence, it is an existential identity crisis that is indicative to this process, probably the deepest existential crisis that’s humanly possible. In the place where life and your previous self resided, there is now a vacuum. You feel like you are floating in no man’s land. Nothing feels real anymore. From this state, you don’t know how to relate to the world and people around you. This feels very scary; you can lose all motivation and desire to do anything. You can feel as if you’ve lost sight of what life is about and feel purposeless. Despite the quicksand quality of this state, it is Temporary. Before new desires, dreams and an aptitude for life come back to run through your veins, there is a gap, a period of nothingness (and not the full and rich meditative kind). If this is where you are at this moment dear one, the best thing to do is to ride it out. Please hold on. True meaning and purpose will arise after this stage in the form of liberated desires that have nothing to do with what people expected of you and everything to do with your true soul’s purpose. Let yourself feel the desperation, disorientation, and depression for as long as needed. They are true and valid feelings; your entire life orientation has been altered and you can’t expect yourself to snap out of it or to move past this without grieving properly. Know that this too shall pass and that as awful as this time is, the light that comes through at the end is worth your patience. You are worth your patience.

• “Falling from grace”: Another instigator of “the dark night of the soul” is “coming down” from a state of bliss. If you have experienced a prolonged or intense divine revelation; if you spent time in the energy of unconditional love and felt it envelop you wholly; if the divine lifted you up and joined with you in oneness; if you felt the joy of that ultimate connection, that of absolutely no separation; if you knew what being connected to the whole of life feels like, what coming home feels like, then coming back down into yourself can feel like a shock. In the coming back into your body, there tends to be a great contrast and a re-experiencing of the original trauma (which is separation), both of which may feel like a falling from grace. You may in truth not want to come back. After these heightened bliss and grace states, many individuals experience a "dark night of the soul" period. If this is the case for you, let yourself grieve and feel all that you are feeling, including anger at God or at life/ the universe. This is perfectly normal. Know that the divine hasn’t left you. He/She loves you, you haven't been abandoned. You haven't been dropped back into the world because you are not good or worthy enough. You did nothing wrong dear one. This wasn't your time to go home just yet. The divine gave you those blissful experiences not to break your heart, but to remind you what home is, who you are and how loved and connected you truly are. You may not feel it at this moment, but you and life are still very much one. The divine is still inside of you. In reality, you never disconnected or separated, and you are here to embody this truth; to fully experience this connection to your divine self within your body. You can then bring this message back to the rest of humanity in your own beautiful and unique way. Feel the pain of separation as this is healing the original wound. Nevertheless, don’t forget the lesson. Don’t doubt the oneness you felt in the heightened state. In fact, the disconnect you currently feel is distorted, by the ego’s limited perception. Take the connectivity with you to empower you; don’t let your wounding hijack the meaning of it. This truth is your secret weapon for embracing life in the current state of consciousness in this world we live in.  You still have a job to do here. You are still needed. Don’t be a spiritual runaway and seek solace in the higher realms alone, be a spiritual warrior living fully in your body facing the mission in front of you, sharing your light with the world.

• Collective pain: During a Kundalini awakening, some tap into the collective pain of humanity, mother earth and all sentient beings, and/or that of one’s ancestry. If this is the case for you, the darkness at that stage is beyond what you may feel that you can contain or handle, as it is so deep and dense. This too can trigger a period of “the dark night of the soul”. It can feel like a complete shock to your psyche, it can jar you to a point where a part of you refuses to come back and participate in the world, consciously or unconsciously. You have seen and felt too much pain and you don’t know what to do with it. You may feel so overwhelmed no words are sufficient to describe it. Without words, you find it hard to process this deep and highly intense experience. As a result, the self-protection and preservation parts of you might shut down. All I can say in this case is that I feel your pain, I have been there myself and there is nothing harder and more painful than this state. If it’s any consolation, we are all doing our part to heal this collective pain; you are not alone in this. Although nothing seems more brutal and your view of life and humanity may be tainted terribly at this moment, there is a light at the end of this. You may not realize this but you are learning and cultivating compassion and oneness. This may seem like a very steep price to pay for the lesson, yet, if everyone cultivated compassion to the level you are cultivating it now, human suffering would end. In addition, through learning oneness through bliss is beautiful, a higher truth teaches us that our beauty and our human shadow are interconnected, and experiencing the collective pain tunes you into that. There is no victim and perpetrator in this state, we are both and neither. If you truly felt someone’s pain you will never judge him or her as “other” than yourself. This is a sacred journey on which you are helping tremendously in ending suffering and separation.

  Be ultra-gentle and love yourself through this stage. If you need to hate the world for a while then hate it. In this reality of contrasts, the darkness and light are interconnected. Our ultimate growth and expansion depend on integrating this through experience. You are on the right path; you didn’t take a wrong turn. Don’t torture yourself by trying positive thinking at this moment in time, nor blame yourself for not able to think your way out of this. Positive thinking, while a great tool for some states, is only resistance in this case and what we resist persists. You are on a humbling journey. Surrender doesn’t mean acceptance of only what you enjoy, but of what is. You are expanding greatly by allowing and surrendering to all feeling states. Don't let anyone tell you that awakening should be about bliss, joy, and high vibrations only, this is a harmful and false belief that can cause you further suffering or spiritual bypassing. Let the darkness be, it will not swallow you whole. If the darkness seems bigger than you, remember my friend that you are infinite. "The dark night of the soul" is but a painful stop along your journey, it is not the final destination. Get support to help you remember this truth for moments when you are unable to access hope (which is perfectly normal in this stage). Let a good friend read this to you or put it on your bedside table and read it every morning and every night. Reading this isn’t about fighting or shifting out of the darkness, it is just so you won’t add resistance to the great pain you are already in by fearing that it would never end. I promise you that it will. You are well on your way. You are doing such a great job.

Whether you are undergoing a healing crisis, a spiritual emergency, or “the dark night of the soul”, what they have in common is that despite the intensity and hardship of these experiences, they will come to an end naturally. Remember that these processes are not mistakes or wrong turns you took along your path, they are the path. They are an essential part of deep healing and awakening that will lead you to greater peace and alignment in your life. Love your inner child through this painful and rough patch and find adequate support to get to the bright light at the end of this. Despite not always being able to feel it, you are still being lead and are supported and so loved from the other side.

Kundalini and relationships

 Relationships are both the greatest gifts and the hardest lessons life has to offer. They are beautiful yet hard and complex even without the fiery fuel of a Kundalini awakening added to the mix. This blog is about how a spontaneous Kundalini awakening may affect existing relationships and/or the ability to form new ones at its peak.

 A Kundalini awakening can have an enormous impact on relationships since it brings all of our subconscious patterns to the surface. These patterns run under the surface of our relationships. They are the deciding factor as to why we choose to enter or stay in specific relationships: Be it romantic, work relationship, family, or a friendship. Relationships with family members can mask unconscious patterns and unhealthy ways in which we interact with the people we love.

 Letting go of close relationships in life can be extremely painful. Fear not, this awakening does not mean that all of your relationships must end (or that you have to move to Tibet and become a monk). Yet with Kundalini’s fuel, there is a good chance that you will see your relationships in a new light. Armed with new information and a broader perspective, you can then make a conscious choice about whether you wish to keep a person in your life or lovingly let them go.

How Kundalini affects relationships:

1. Healthy vs. unhealthy relationships:

Kundalini will help you see if the relationships in your life are there as a source of unconditional love and support or are chosen out of deeply unconscious reasons or misguided core beliefs. Many of us choose to stay in relationships not because they serve our expansion or highest good, but for these reasons such as:

• A sense of obligation

• Guilt or shame

• Fear of being alone or fear of abandonment

• Fear of social banishment/ exclusion, of being an outcast (which is a fundamental survival fear).

• A need for external validation or codependency

• A need for financial or social security.

• Familiarity: A relationship can reflect a repeated childhood pattern between our caregivers and us and thus feels “familiar” even if it’s not loving.

• A desire to “fix” the past: A relationship can mirror a repeated toxic childhood dynamic that we felt powerless against. As adults, we subconsciously recreate it so we “fix” it. We can’t “fix” it until we become conscious of it, heal the past wound rather than fix the current reflection of it.  

• There are many more unconscious “Velcro” bits that keep us attached to people who are unhealthy for us.

All relationships are an accurate mirror for one’s unconscious and conscious aspects. Thus, with the help of Kundalini, the first step is to recognize an unconscious aspect or pattern being played out. The second step is using healing through one or more of the following tools: self-inquiry, inner child or shadow work, and therapy. This in turn will affect the relationship as the reflection of the unhealthy pattern. If the other person is self-aware and willing, you can also work on healing together. Other people’s unconditional support and love can be profoundly healing.

On the other hand, if the relationship is unsafe or toxic (abuse of any kind, control, or dismissal), it will be impossible for you to heal without leaving the relationship. Get all the support you need and stay strong in your conviction to disconnect from unhealthy relationships.

 Unfortunately, some people will not wish or be able to grow with you or at your heightened Kundalini pace. You can then choose to see less of them while remaining aware of the limitations of the relationship or decide to let the relationship go for the time being.  If this is the case, allow yourself to grieve over the loss of the relationship. This can feel very painful or disorienting at first, especially if you lose core relationships. Even a major shift in the frequency of connection or in the dependency and trust we feel in a relationship can bring about grief. Know that the love you feel or have shared with that person does not vanish; that only the physical connection has shifted for your own wellbeing and sanity. No matter how toxic, or just wrong a relationship was for you, the pain and grief you are experiencing are very valid. Be gentle with yourself. Forgive yourself for being in a relationship that wasn’t right for you. Allow yourself to still love them, but let them go. Fully feeling the grief is the only way to heal and form new and healthy connections with people who are more compatible with you.

 2. Boundaries and needs: Another important Kundalini relationship lesson is about boundaries. Kundalini will help you establish healthy boundaries by revealing how painful it feels to have unhealthy ones. Even if having none to very few boundaries with certain people was fine before Kundalini, boundaries will become essential to your sense of well-being. This need can show up as strong emotional or even physical pain when next to people who violate your boundaries. You may feel utterly drained after spending time with them. You may find yourself unable to tolerate being around someone with whom you previously spent a lot of time with. This may be confusing at first since it is new and sudden. This doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the relationship, but it may mean taking the time to figure out which boundaries you need to establish in order to feel safe in the relationship. Only then can you allow the person back into your life under your new-found terms.

 For those of you who grew up with no boundaries or violated yours, learning how to decipher your needs and boundaries takes time. Some of us learned early on that saying “no” has repercussions. We learned to people please, or to push our own needs aside in relationships in order not to be “punished” or risk losing the people we depended on. We may have learned to suppress our “No”. Perhaps our voices, needs, emotions, desires, or personalities had to take a back sit in our core relationships. Changing that, feeling safe to express those in a relationship takes time and self-work. For us, it can initially feel life-threatening connecting with our “NO” or expressing our needs to another in a close relationship.

Those of us who grew up like this may have formed an entire identity as an easygoing person who is philanthropic with their time and energy or someone who never gets angry, someone who basically needs for nothing, they are a giver all the way. For this person to merely realize that they have boundaries and unmet needs piled up inside, takes a lot of healing.

Be patient and gentle with your child-self in this process. The disentanglement of what is true for you and what is a defense mechanism is a delicate process. Know that a relationship without you being true to yourself, to all aspects of you, isn’t a real relationship, and you deserve a real one. This is why this transformation is so important. In fact, this period of learning who you are and what you truly need symbolizes a move from relationships to “REALationships”.

3. Projected fear: One of the major causes for relational shifts during Kundalini is the fear your loved ones may have concerning your process. People around you may not understand what you are experiencing and are scared by it. They may find their identity threatened by your awakening since it doesn’t fit into their own narrative of reality. Others may not wish to confront their own subconscious aspects and you doing so, healing so deeply - may feel threatening to them as well. They may try to “fix” you, deny what you are going through, or attempt to diagnose this as a mental breakdown or other namable condition. They may abandon you in one way or another or truly disappoint you in your time of need due to their own fears. This is not about you, although it affects you directly and it really hurts. For more about how to bridge between yourself and your loved ones in this process read my blog here. This blog is also for your loved ones to read and understand better how to be with you during Kundalini.

 4. Love and heart openings in Kundalini: When you experience a heart-opening during Kundalini, you love everything and everyone so very much. In those stages (you will learn to recognize them as they may repeat cyclically), try to avoid making big decisions about new love interests. You are sort of in a love bubble state and in this state, the love you feel can be overwhelming and not necessarily about the person in front of you. It can be confusing and you may want to assign a name and a face to this overwhelming love, but things may seem different once the heart opening is integrated and embodied. So, let yourself pass this stage before declaring love to new people or letting them into your heart. Just think of yourself as in love with love at this moment, not with somebody. If the love you feel for them is really about them, it will remain the same when this stage is over, so have patience. Just wait it out and enjoy the ride. Feeling love this deeply is a gift, grant it to yourself and the universe. 

5. Romantic relationships and Kundalini: During a Kundalini awakening you will find that your rhythm of growth and change is accelerated in comparison to others. In the beginning stages of a Kundalini awakening this change takes the form of letting go; de-construction internally and in parallel, and no new beginnings. You are letting go of everything that you are not, all the conditioning, fears, and old wounding. In this stage, it is very hard to know who you truly are and what you want and need in a partner. So, if you are single it may be wise to dedicate this time to your inner work rather than starting a new relationship.

If you are in an existing relationship, it is easy to feel disconnected in this stage, since you are constantly losing your ground and footing while Kundalini is rearranging your being. This may feel really painful when trying to connect and relate to a person intimately. In general, try to avoid making big decisions about your relationships when you cannot feel connected to yourself or your heart. These stages are like the opposite of the heart awakening stages – your heart can feel eclipsed and inaccessible, this too passes on its own. You can share with your significant other that you will go through times where you can’t fully connect to them during this process and that it isn’t personal. It is just your heart center being reworked by Kundalini, or some old pain coming up for healing. This is Kundalini’s way of turning your focus inwards.

 In more advanced Kundalini awakening stages, you are still growing leaps and bounds, but are feeling a little more grounded and may desire increased intimacy in your life. Then, if you choose to engage in a new romantic relationship, make sure you find a person that is willing to grow with you or at the very least allows you the space you grow fast and doesn’t feel threatened or disconnected by your process. You need someone who can support and facilitate all the strange and remarkable aspects of your Kundalini rising. Be it a new or an existing romantic relationship, if your partner can’t grow with you, you will outgrow the relationship quickly. Although it is painful outgrowing someone you love, worry not, Kundalini isn’t trying to get you to commit to a lifetime of celibacy or solitude... You simply have to put yourself and your soul first for a period of time. If your partner can ride your growth spurts next to you and at your speed, they are welcome to hold your hand through it. Your partner doesn’t have to be spiritual or understand Kundalini from personal experience in order to support you. They just need to love you unconditionally and want to see you fulfill this sacred journey and become the butterfly that you truly are.

6. The amplifier effect: Kundalini amplifies all that you feel in order for it to be made conscious, basically to get your attention. “She” will hijack your relationships as a tool for your growth and healing. You can expect heightened situations and emotions to arise on a continuous basis throughout your relationships, in order to confront you with what is unconscious and unhealed within. Kundalini will make everything seem louder and more urgent so you won’t be able to suppress or escape what you are feeling in order to help you learn how to listen to your subtle feelings. They are always communicating with you. You will feel triggered more easily. When faced with strong emotions such as fear, anger or pain sit with the feeling before reacting. These may mean that there are issues in your relationship or they could be a trigger pointing you to an unhealed aspect of yourself. Ask yourself when you are feeling these intense or painful emotions:  

• Is this relationship safe for me?

• What is my inner being trying to communicate with me?

• Is this an old or a current emotion? (It can be a little of both)

• Are my boundaries being respected, do I need to set a boundary?

• Is there something I need to express to my partner/ friend? To myself?

• Are my needs being met? Am I being seen and heard by this person?

• What can I learn from this heightened emotional state?

• If this is an old old wound love it unconditionally, give your inner child your undivided presence to help her/ him heal.

 Your inquiry and self-work will provide you with the answers you need. The work of deciphering the emotional alarm that’s just being set off and what it is pointing you towards can be relentless and painful. Yet if you are in a relationship with someone who respects you, loves and listens to you, and is able to meet you where you are, you can get so much core healing done by using the relationship as a vehicle. If you choose to walk away and not to use the opportunity in front of you for healing, the same pain and patterns can repeat in the next relationship.

* Word of caution, this does not apply to any type of toxic or abusive situation. In fact, not only can an abusive relationship not heal, it will re-traumatize you. One can only heal by leaving an abusive situation and taking care of oneself. You can then inquire why you were in it, to begin with, which childhood patterns it was repeating, and what you need to heal in order to never ever repeat it again.

 7. The core relationship: What Kundalini teaches first and foremost is how to be in a relationship with oneself and with the divine. This core relationship evolves, grows, heals, and expands through Kundalini and becomes the most important relationship you will ever have. It includes all aspects of self; your emotional body (the inner-child), your personality self (the ego), and your Higher Self (your soul and the divine). Kundalini is here to show you how to be in a loving relationship with all these aspects and more. “She” will show you how to love the divine in you, how to love the inner child parts of you, how to love your body, your spiritual and shadow aspects equally. Kundalini teaches you all that by showing you where you fail to be loving with yourself, the parts of you that you have in fact exiled. This is a painful process because you fragmented parts of yourself in childhood. Due to the environment, you grew up in you learned to deem these parts of yourself as unloveable. Unfortunately, a “normal” part of socializing and living in a family system is that whichever parts of us society or the caregivers deemed inappropriate or “bad” we fragment and reject within ourselves in order for us to be loved and accepted. We then only identify with the parts of us that are “good” and call them “self”. This is a worldwide illness that our souls are suffering from, they are all fragmented and divided. It is a source of our own illnesses and addictions. In truth you don’t love all parts of yourself, nobody does. You don’t even like some of them. The mere thought of allowing them to be a valid part of you or to acknowledge their existence hurts. Unlearning this brings these parts back home into your heart. Thus, coming back to wholeness is in fact the essence of this sacred journey. Learning how to love the seemingly unlovable parts of self is what integration is. Learning that in truth there is no difference between our supposed “bad” parts, our shadow self, and our divine essence is what embodiment is. When you meet these fragments with love, you become whole.

Give yourself the time to learn what your inner teacher is communicating and become whole again. This may be the biggest “time investment” that you have ever given yourself, embrace it, you are worthy. Healing and integrating is the one way to get the unconditional love that you want and have always dreamed of, you are so deserving. Once found within, it will be reflected at you from outside effortlessly, and all that isn’t truly loving will fall away from your life as it will no longer fit. Your relationships can then reflect your wholeness and immense unconditional self-love, which you have worked so hard to embody.

Living from guidance

For those of us who are experiencing a Kundalini awakening or those who are on a spiritual path, understanding what guidance is and how to utilize our intuition is vital. Although, we are born fully equipped with an internal guidance system, learning what it is and how to tune into it is an acquired skill.

As children most of us were not encouraged to listen to that subtle voice within. We weren’t taught to recognize our feelings and the sensations in our bodies that alert us if we are to take a wrong turn, or if somebody doesn’t feel right to us. Most of us were directed to listen to the louder voices outside of us, those of authority figures and society, rather than search internally for answers. Being young and dependent upon our parents, we internalized this directive in order to please them and gain the love and acceptance we needed in order to survive. Going against our bodies didn’t feel good, but going against the authority figures in our lives, or risk social starvation felt worse; it felt dangerous to us. It started most likely with our parents lacking that connection with their own intuition, and the understanding of their ‘feelings’ as well. Even if no one shamed us for feeling the way we did, we weren’t taught the importance of listening to our inner voices, and how to work with our feelings and interpret them. We weren’t encouraged to stay connected to our inner-selves as a compass. As a result, we have become alienated and far-removed from our inner voice to such an extent; we wouldn’t recognize it as our own even if it shouted at us. Furthermore, society today favors logical thinking and analysis over listening to our “gut” feelings. Taking action and problem-solving skills are awarded over quiet contemplation and inquiry when faced with decisions.

 Our ego’s voice which is comprised of our social and psychological conditioning took the place of our internal guidance system. We use it to help us navigate through the different choices presented to us in this world. It tells us who we should be, what we should like, what we should fear, want, and even feel in order to be accepted and “good”.

We travel through life abiding by the constant reruns of our programming, which are our thoughts and core beliefs. We feel afraid to stray from their ordinances so that we won’t be dimmed “bad” or unlovable. We identify with our thoughts and live disconnected from our inner truth. We miss out on living a genuinely authentic life until we come back home to our own wisdom until we learn to listen to the subtle voice of truth within. No one else’s voice can represent our truth in full, no matter how well-intended.

Our ego’s voice, which helped us survive or even thrive in society for years, can hurt us when we use it to overwrite our inner guidance. This can get us into difficult situations or cause inner fragmentation. Furthermore, it can cause us a great deal of confusion when we are experiencing a spiritual awakening, and are asked by the universe to start living from our internal guidance system. We can feel as if we are in complete obscurity as to what it is and how to use it.

 In a Kundalini awakening, this disconnect from our guidance becomes a tremendous hindrance for us. Kundalini flushes out our programs one by one, making it impossible for us to operate from our conditioned mind. The universal intelligence is trying to teach us to stop ignoring our inner truth via Kundalini. It delivers this message by knocking down all the false or pre-recorded voices in our minds. This forces us to seek a different voice, a different way of being and interacting with the world. Since we have become so dependent on operating from it, our mind can feel “shocked”, almost as if it has been short-circuited when the programing starts falling away. We can feel disoriented and frozen. Being oblivious to our inherent guidance system, we can feel utterly lost for a while without our programing to run our lives.

This immense transition, living from mind to intuition, can feel scary and overwhelming; the good news is that once we learn how to use our inherent guidance, life becomes much smoother. We then feel safer and less alone in dealing with life. Trust rather than fear and a need to control, is the currency earned by learning to use our internal guidance system.

What is spiritual guidance or intuition?

 Our internal guidance system communicates with us in many different ways. Each of us has a unique way in which we “tune in” to it. We each possess an internal or metaphysical sense that is slightly more acute or simply comes more naturally to us. Some of us can hear a subtle voice (clairaudience); Some of us get visions or dreams (clairvoyance); Some of us sense the truth in our bodies (clairsentience), others get a somatic feeling of a “yes” or a “no”. Some of us all of a sudden know something, without facts or a thought process preceding the knowing (Claircognizance).

 How to connect to your internal guidance:

Discovering how to best connect to your inner wisdom can be an exciting journey. Once you begin to learn how to connect with these senses it can actually be fun. Similarly, to a physical muscle - practice makes it stronger. Once your intuitive muscles develop and strengthen, there is so much more wisdom at your disposal. You no longer have to make decisions blindly or based on projections, fears, or old programming. Gradually you learn how to ask for guidance in the way you hear it best before reacting to life situations. You get to make choices based on what is truly right for you, on what resonates with your innermost precious being and with your soul.

There are many different tools available to help you connect to your inner guidance to explore; Angels, spirit animals, spirit guides, or ascended masters are some of them. They are available 24/7 as tools in your spiritual toolbox and serve as your avid support system. They can teach you how to hear or feel your guidance and help you receive it. These high vibrational energies or beings are unconditionally there for us and without any limitation. Their job is to help guide you on your sacred journey, regardless of religious affiliations or beliefs. You don’t have to walk this path on your own; in fact, you can’t do this on your own, no one can. It defeats the purpose of all of us being inter-connected, ethereal and earthly beings alike.

The different ways to cultivate a relationship with your guidance:  

•   Archangels and ascended masters: If you are unfamiliar with the different archangels and ascended masters available, you can easily research them online. Start small by focusing on one or two archangels or ascended masters. You can’t get this choice wrong; they are all-powerful and helpful so go with your initial inclination. In order to build a relationship with your chosen being, you can play a guided meditation to connect to them (search YouTube), or you can write them a prayer – a request to connect and work with them. Simply write how you feel and what your needs are and ask for help. You can meditate quietly calling on an archangel or an ascended master. Spend 5-10 minutes with your eyes closed and tune into their energy, anchor in your breath and stay open. Do you feel anything? Any subtle physical sensations? Do you see or hear anything?

  You may sense nothing at first, so keep at it for a week or two. Do not get discouraged. You are starting to work with your subtle body and senses and that takes time to develop. Furthermore, the specific relationship with a being grows stronger and stronger the more you call upon them and the more time and focus you dedicate towards tuning into their frequency.

  Even if you are naturally intuitive and are able to hear your intuition most of the time, when you are in fear, having a “heavyweight” in your corner can come in super handy. For example, if you don’t feel safe in the world, archangel Michael can be of great support in helping you to feel safer and eventually to embody the inner protector energy which he symbolizes.

• Angels and guides: We each have angels and spirit guides that we can connect with. The guides can be deceased loved ones or angels assigned to help and guide us through our incarnated lives. Similar to the previous paragraph, you can play a guided meditation to start connecting with your guides (search for angles and spirit guides meditations YouTube) or pray (meaning start an inner conversation with them).

  Ask them to show you how to connect with them in the best way for you, so they can guide you through ideas and inspiration. You can ask your guides to communicate with you in a clear “language” recognizable to you. For example, you can ask to be connected through dreams, songs, repetitive numbers (that show up in random places such as car plates or on the clock), or even physical signs such as feathers, butterflies etc. Don’t be too specific; suggest a method and see if it takes, be curious. Keep asking for help to hear them clearly and strongly.

  Keep an open mind and let this relationship build and strengthen. The key is to keep connecting and to keep asking your guides for help. If you don’t know what you need you can ask for signs that you are not alone or for help in gaining clarity as to what it is that you need help with. You can ask to help clear out fearful thoughts and create positive ones, ask for a greater perspective on a situation, or just for comfort if that’s all you need. Doing this helps strengthen your intuition, but it also helps you recognize your own needs and express your fears, which is healing in and of itself.

• Mindfulness: Sit with yourself every day if possible, even for a few minutes. Spend this time with your inner sensations; be present with whatever arises within you. Give your body permission to feel and learn how to tune into yourself. Build up to it slowly if it scares you, or if your tendency is to avoid difficult sensations. Do not judge yourself, this is perfectly natural. There may have been times in your childhood when you needed to escape how you were feeling because there was no way for you to process it or fix the situation.

  Take time to learn your inner self and that your body is a safe place for you to spend time in. You can set an alarm a few times a day just to take a breath and feel your body for a moment, check in with it, see if there is anything it needs from you. Notice if there are any feelings, emotions, or sensations you can be present with without trying to shift or fix them. Your feelings are a great tool to help you hear your guidance, your inner truth. Suppression is the quickest way to ignore your intuition. A feeling that’s painful for instance might be an indicator that a situation in life isn’t serving you anymore or that a relationship you are in is not right for you. You won’t know what it’s trying to tell you unless you listen to that feeling. Sit with it and let it deliver its messages to you. Your body communicates with you every moment of every day and in time this communication will become a great ally. The practice of mindfulness is the best way to tune into your feelings guidance system. Mind you these painful feelings may be old wounds coming up to the surface to heal and not an indicator of a current issue. The only way to know is to sit with the feeling with presence and compassion and let it show you what it is.

• Internal dialogue: Every morning or evening, ask your body, your Kundalini energy, and your inner child if there is anything they need from you. The response may not be necessarily verbal; it could just be a feeling. It could be that a certain body part is asking for more attention, a breath, a loving word, a few moments of presence. Dialoging with these three parts of yourself daily can make a big difference in learning to communicate with your internal guidance system and in the relationship with yourself and with life. You can include the divine or your soul/higher self in your inquiry if that feels right for you. You can include your heart center if you feel that you have lived more disconnected from it, more in mind. Just place your hand on your heart center when you wish to dialogue with it.

• Dream work: Dreams can be such a great tool for working with your guidance system and subconscious mind. Once again, this is a relationship you can develop and deepen exponentially. No matter how evolved or non-existent your dream world and dream recollection is, it can be improved greatly with practice. We each have a dream guide at our disposal. You can call on your dream guide before going to sleep. Ask your guide to include guidance in your dreams and to help you remember them. In the morning try to write down what you dreamed of. Don’t over analyzing your dreams, that’s a mental game, just feel if there are any massages for you. So if writing feels forced, spend a few minutes in meditation and tune into your dream guide, ask to bring the dream back into your awareness and help you decipher its messages. You can ask your dream guide for clarity when you need to make a big decision in life, to help you be certain that you are making a choice out of guidance rather than fear. You can place a note under your pillow with a question and ask to be shown the answer in your dreams. If you are unclear about the messages, ask for more details the next night or ask to be shown specific steps of how to deal with an issue. You can even learn how to lucid dream and practice it if you wish. There is no limit to how deep and far you can go with your dreams, just keep working and engaging. Some days you may have intense massages and vivid dreams and others none, and that’s okay.

• Spirit animals/ animal medicine: Spirit animals are another great tool at your disposal for support and guidance. You can research the different qualities that each animal possesses online or find a card deck that resonates with you. There is so much support offered to us from mother earth and all the sentinel creatures which we are unaware of, or don’t tap into often enough. You don’t have to have a specific animal you are drawn to in order to establish a relationship or a connection with spirit animals.

  You can ask any animal for help if you need one of their symbolic qualities or traits. For example, If you need help with grounding call upon or visualize a black rhino. You can also choose a protector animal that feels right to you if you are feeling unsafe during Kundalini. You can visualize this animal guarding your bedside every night for instance. The relief is usually instantaneous. In addition, you can utilize this tool when you are looking to embody a certain quality. Say, you wish for a sense of belonging however you don’t know what it truly feels like since you never experienced it in your life; You can invoke the energy of the Kangaroo. Bring this sense of being enveloped in a pouch of love quietly into your being to embody it. Let the animal bring in a feeling signature you have yet to experience. They are masterful in doing just that. You can work closely with one animal or work with as many as you wish. You can invite them into your dreams and search online to see which animal delivered what massage to you.

• Other tools: Tools such as oracle cards, pendulum, and muscle testing can help when you are unable to access your intuition directly due to of overwhelm or fear. The universe, much like a mirror, always matches your vibration. The cards or other divination tools simply help you get a “mirror image” of a question or a current vibrational state you are in. Oracle cards are a great tool to connect with your guides, angels or spirit animals when you are feeling confused. Ask for guidance or help and use a deck that appeals to you. Using oracle cards with the intention of getting support and guidance can be a healing experience, as they are gentle and can lift you out of fear or a low vibration.

  Tarot cards can mirror your fears as well as higher truth; hence I suggest avoiding them during a Kundalini awakening since what is required is gentler support. You can also use a pendulum or muscle testing to access the wisdom of your body; it can bypass fear and help you start building trust with your body’s wisdom. If using muscle testing I suggest finding a person you trust and who resonates with you to help you. The connection between yourself and that person is important in this case. The cleaner it feels, the more accurate the mirroring will be. In other words, if it the person’s energy feels off, don’t use their help.

• Intuitive/ psychics: There are many people out there who possess intuitive gifts and offer their services. Intuitives can be of great help especially if you need to make big decisions when Kundalini is intense or too “loud” for you to hear your guidance. I strongly suggest that you ask your guides and angels to direct you to the right person when choosing to do so. Trust how you feel around them, if they feel good and “clean” to you, go for it, if not, walk away. Gentleness is the key word since Kundalini can make us very vulnerable. Once you find the right person set an intention to receive all the information you need but know ultimately not to give your power away. Intuitives don’t know you better than you know yourself, they may sense things but true knowing is yours alone. They are but a channel to your guidance in this moment. Ask yourself: does what this person say resonate with you on a deep level or does it feel off? This is a good exercise in tuning into your internal guidance system since it will let you know. Just be brave enough to listen no matter how much you value the intuitive person’s opinion.

  Tip: Avoid readings about the future, since the “future” is a projection of your current energy state; it’s one possibility out of many. When you shift, or heal and your energy changes the future outcome will change as well – which would make this a waste of your money. Kundalini makes us shift internally so fast that there is no point in that.  

There are so many tools at your disposal along this journey, all you have to do is sense which one resonates with you at any given time. Explore your guidance channels with an open heart and mind and discover how much support you actually have available for you. Though it may feel so at times. You are not alone in this.

Why is a Kundalini awakening so intense: #3

The following blog is a part of a series of blogs attempting to break down the different factors of discomfort, intensity or hurt during a Kundalini awakening (Scroll down to read blog #1 and #2 in the series).

• Hyper-sensitivity: When Kundalini awakens it can remove one’s protective “walls” and defenses in a day. When this happens, you may experience heightened sensitivity to everything. Stimuli of any kind are no longer tolerated and that can pose a huge challenge in today’s lifestyle. Coping day-to-day with what used to be normal, be it work, shopping or anything that involves crowds and noise, can be taxing on your nervous system. What is happening in a fact, is that you are being “refined” by Kundalini's energy, like a diamond, the “roughness” is being smoothed out and shaped into something beautiful. Adjusting to living without our rough edges (our walls) can take time and be frightening initially. You may feel "naked" or as if your nerves are fully exposed. This can be challenging to say the least. Know that the heightened sensitivity isn’t a mistake or something gone wrong; it also helps you connect to what is beyond the veil and give you access to experiences and guidance that most people don’t have. Protective walls provide us all with a sense of safety, yet true safety arises from trust and from personal boundaries past your awakening. Give your system time to readjust, spend a lot of time in nature where nothing feels offensive to your hypersensitive system. Minimize going to crowded or loud places if possible, by shopping online for instance. If your struggles persist, consider moving closer to nature and away from city life. This may really help. You are changing and some changes will be temporary while others may require an adjustment in life style. This may feel intimidating and overwhelming, as any change would, but time will reveal that the new you is in fact a great fit. Take it slowly and allow your body tell you what it can and cannot do, your mind can take a back sit while you re-learn yourself.

• Resisting our nature to “fix”: Ours minds are problem solving machines. In particularly the left side of our brain, presented with a situation, a pain or a perceived problem it goes into “solution” mode and tries to trouble shoot the issue. When the mind runs out of things to trouble shoot - it can make you into the issue. This will result in you thinking that there is something wrong with you which isn’t in fact the case. The challenge here is that Kundalini requires no fixing. It may change our lives, ask us to let go of a great deal of comfort and stability we are used to, but never without a reason. Initially we may not see the reasoning behind the discomfort and why we need to surrender. Trusting that Kundalini knows what it is even when you don’t is essential to making peace with this process. Educating yourself about Kundalini may help you turn off the "trouble shooting" part of the brain when it kicks in and to find a softer way of being with the different emotions that arise. In life we are accustomed to rejecting the unpleasant emotional states (defining them as a problem state) and only embracing the pleasant ones. Kundalini teaches us that one can’t be separated from the other. This is the most challenging lesson of all.

• Change: We as humans have an inherent resistance to change. The status quo has inertia to it, and alternating that feels very uncomfortable and requires a great deal of effort. This change can feel counter intuitive. Although the changes Kundalini asks of us are ultimately for our healing, it may not feel so initially. All that we have been taught and indoctrinated with is deeply ingrained in our us, in our bodies and minds. The more we have repeated a habit (a belief is a habitual thought) the deeper the neuropath ways in our brain are formed. Changing that takes time and repetition, trust and blind participation on our behalf. Kundalini can bring to the surface what may be a false idea we have held on to, yet it is our job then to consciously try and change the habitual thoughts and be mindful.

• Physical challenges: People view a spiritual awakening as a blessing and as a mental journey of expanding how we view reality. A Kundalini awakening includes the above, and yet it is also a physical journey of embodying the universal truth. Embodying an expanded awareness is experienced as many different physical symptoms. For some, it can feel like an illness or different continuous ailments. These symptoms will most likely not be a diagnosable condition. This in turn, can cause confusion and suffering; it is scary and hard to let go of the need for an actual diagnosis and treatment when your body is suffering. Some believe that the shift in consciousness alters the cells and the DNA (ascension). There is no proof of that, but anyone who has gone through Kundalini can tell you that it affects the body dramatically. Believing that Kundalini is behind physical symptoms, and trusting that they will heal as she progresses, is a challenging task to say the least.

I suggest you see a physician to make sure there is no underlying physical cause for your symptoms. If there isn’t, there is no easy way to accept physical pain or limitations, just know that most mysterious symptoms pass in the same way they arrived. Try not to live in fear of never being able to enjoy your body again(easier said than done, I know), as this will end up shifting as your healing journey unfolds. Lean on the people you love if you are feeling ill or limited during this process and if you have to feel sorry for yourself, let yourself do that for as long as you need to. Losing one’s prior physical capacity in today’s world is viewed as a weakness, and the acceptance of that takes time. Let yourself grieve.

• Severe trauma – If you have been through severe trauma in your childhood, this awakening becomes all the harder to deal with. You are most likely suffering from some form of PTSD, going through life in hyper-vigilance whether you are aware of it or not. You system is most likely to react to Kundalini as if it is an intruder and your mind will kick into fight or flight mode more often than not. All the challenges mentioned in this blog series you might experience in an intensified way or frequency. This isn’t fair in any sense of the word, as you were already handed the short straw in childhood. Developing trust with Kundalini can help you tremendously in making this awakening less of a battle. This isn’t easy, as perhaps the people closest to you have traumatized you. This has left you not knowing how to trust for a good reason. If you can’t trust Kundalini (again, justifiably so), try to learn to trust yourself. Look at all the instances in life when you thought you couldn’t do something but you did it regardless. Use affirmations to promise yourself that you will never abandon you, nor will you betray or reject yourself. Inner child and trauma work is very important for your healing. See a trained trauma therapist to help you process the past wounding. Don’t expect yourself to feel safe in your body and mind on your own; this takes professional help if you have been this badly wounded. More than anything, this healing of a lifetime of pain, neglect, abuse or dismissal takes time. Give yourself all the time in the world knowing that this is the most important journey you have ever partaken. Healing is giving yourself the love and care you were denied of growing up. Give yourself all that the people who were supposed to care for you didn’t. Be it unconditional love and support, care, patience, tenderness or simply consistency. Show up for your own healing everyday, willing and present. If you can’t do this on your own, please seek help. We all need it sometimes.

Kundalini can bring many challenges our way, learning to live differently and adjusting on a mental, physical and emotional levels takes time. Give yourself a break, this isn’t a journey you excel in, this is a journey that is meant to humble you. Change on such a profound level would humble anyone. You will get used to Kundalini’s many different faces, you will learn to know that she is not trying to harm you. You will learn to trust in your immense inner strength and courage. When you feel like you can’t take it anymore, know that you are so much stronger than you think you are. Also know that sometimes falling apart is perfectly fine, and that reaching for help, is a good choice. You can get through this, I believe in you.

For support along with your awakening journey, press here.

Why is a Kundalini awakening so intense: #2

The following is a part of a series of blogs attempting to break down the different factors of discomfort, intensity or hurt during a Kundalini awakening (Scroll down to read blog #1 in the series).

•  Fight, Flight or Freeze mode:

A fight or flight response is a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived threat to survival. This activates the sympathetic nervous system, which in return releases hormones into your body to be able to fight off the threat or run fast for your survival. During Kundalini, this response can often be activated, and this can cause you a great deal of discomfort. Your body may perceive Kundalini as a threat or as foreign, rather than as a part of yourself. This can cause a fight or flight response to occur whenever Kundalini is an activated state. The resurfacing of old pain and wounds can trigger fight or flight response as well. Your body (and mind) perceives the pain as a threat, and then attempts to fight or run away from it. This can play out a cycle in which parts of you are fighting against other parts. All this, is highly draining on your body and emotions. Since you cannot truly fight the perceived threat (that is a part of you), nor can you run away from it fully, you can experience many states of freeze instead. This can feel like numbness and a general sense of disconnect from yourself similar to dissociation. Fear combined with Kundalini energy can be much like throwing a match into a gasoline tank. It makes the whole process feel explosive, since Kundalini is such an amplifying force. 

The first step is to learn to recognize when your body goes into fight-flight or freeze response.  Learning that takes time, but can make a big difference in your experience. Once you become aware of the response, and then use available techniques and methods to switch back into the parasympathetic nervous system (the relaxed no-threat mode in your brain). This requires switching from the left to the right side of your brain. Try techniques such as breathing, tapping, singing, walking, drawing, and physical activity. Try anything that can bring you back into the present moment such as describing items in the room, being mindful of your physical sensations or running warm water on your hands. If you can, engage in any physical activity. This can help release the access amounts of hormones and adrenaline from your system. Experiment to see which methods work best for you.

Once the fight or flight response is lessened and you can think more clearly, you can then start a dialogue with your body and mind as to why this perceived threat wasn’t in fact dangerous. List reasons why Kundalini is trying to help you and why the pain you just experienced isn’t threatening to your well being. For instance; “Kundalini is bringing my old pain to the surface so that I can see it and heal it”; “Kundalini is helping me reconnect with my inner child that is in a lot of pain, it is my job to meet her/him there, not to fight with her/him and abandon her/him.” Practice changing how you view pain during this process, pain may be a necessary means to healing and not a current threat to your survival or an indicator that there is something wrong with you. It very well may mean that there is something right with you since you are on a sacred healing path. 

• Disillusionment:

Most of us imagine a spiritual awakening to be graceful, loving and blissful. We may believe that all our pain will fall away in a day and we will then remember whom we truly are. While one can experience these states during Kundalini, it is also a romanticized and incomplete depiction of an awakening. In reality, when love comes flooding in anything which isn’t love surfaces. What we experienced growing up as “love” is all we know and the feeling of letting go of that is utterly unsettling for us. If the love in childhood wasn’t unconditional, came with strings attached or demanded sacrifices of self, it is natural for us to long for it. While we crave it, we go into fear or terror when actually faced with it. Thus, we carry resistance to love in our subconscious and are unaware of it. We would protect ourselves against “love” since we fear its cost. In this awakening we go through a process of sorting out through our beliefs to realize what isn’t love so we can accept love as safe and let it in. We can go through many unconscious layers before we reach a point in which we are fully receptive to the universal love and embody the knowing that we are worthy of receiving it in every cell of our being. Hence, the process of understanding unconditional love detours through the process of realizing what isn’t love, which feels like a long ride through disillusionment land. Through it, we go through what can be a long mourning process, which will end. The more you allow yourself to question what you hold dearly, the more you will be able to discern between love and pain, between safe love and the conditional substitute we see so much of in society.

•  Expansion:

When Kundalini awakens your consciousness will undergo a great expansion in your physical vessel. Although, ultimately growth and expansion is the purpose of incarnating into this “contrast reality”, it can feel painful and demanding on your body and mind. Despite it not being “physical” growth, your body still feels as if it is undergoing major renovation and must continually adjust to a new form. Your mind also has to recalibrate itself around the expanded concepts of self and at times it can feel shell-shocked. Most every time you release or purge old concepts or wounds during Kundalini, an expansion follows. Remember that these are just growing pains, as your body and mind are readjusting to the new “size” of your expanded consciousness.

• Accelerated manifestation:

When Kundalini awakens the gap between your thoughts, emotions, and physical manifestation shrinks so what you think manifests more rapidly. This may sound good if you want to manifest wealth and wellness, however Kundalini brings our subconscious to the forefront and that’s what manifests first. In the initial stages, it can feel as if you have very little control over what is manifesting into your reality, which can be frightening. You may not recognize that what is manifesting are your subconscious thoughts and feel like life has turned against you. When you feel fear during Kundalini it manifests in the body as terror, panic or anxiety instantaneously. It amplifies the feeling so you can look at it, heal it, and recognize the thoughts that are causing it. This can seem like a vicious cycle, since the amplification will give birth to additional fear.

You can easily at this point feel victimized by the cycle since you are not manifesting any of this consciously. It is your subconscious mind that has “taken over” your life, so there is no need for self-blame. The best thing to do if you feel trapped in this cycle is to engage in self-inquiry and examine which beliefs are coming to the surface one by one. Don’t be afraid of the accelerated manifestations. Generally fear only manifests more fear and not external events. Know that although everything is manifesting at the speed of light for you, you are very protected during this sacred journey. If you are experiencing strong fear and are afraid it will manifest in your reality ask the angels or guides you work with to put it in a vault and protect you from the physical manifestation of your fear.

Don’t try to force yourself to change the vibration you are in, just allow the pain and fear lovingly, it will shift on it’s own. There may be a while during this process that you can’t engage in conscious manifestation. You are working through your shadow and need to spend time with it. Let your shadow work be your priority, work on getting to know your thoughts and practice gratitude, this will help raise your vibration without forcing anything. Write or think of a few things you are grateful for each day, even if it’s just for a rough day to be ending and for you to still be alive.

• Learning to live in the unknown:

Our mind and ego have a comfort zone that feels safest in finding definition and palpability. A Kundalini awakening by nature is very abstract. Our mind can’t find a place to drop anchor in this process. It won’t fit into any box and won’t allow us to flatten it into an idea. This is so that we learn to flex our mind muscle and learn to live outside our contained reality and limited perception. Getting used to not anchoring into ideas and accepting the unknown can cause us a great deal of discomfort. The process is teaching us to get comfortable with the unknown, the mystical, and the ineffable aspect of existence. You can’t fit the ocean in a teacup. We were taught that boxes and names are safe; our identity is safe when it’s defined even if the definition is limiting us. We were even taught to put God in whatever box was passed down to us. Yet in truth the universe is so much more than we can perceive and define and the learning curve of existing in the undefined can take time and a lot of trust work. Allowing chaos rather than order, imperfection rather than perfection, trust rather than control, is where Kundalini is taking us. It is natural for us to be afraid of this change, and try to hold onto ideas, yet even the idea of enlightenment is futile with Kundalini in your system. The more you are able to let go and trust the easier this process will be but give yourself time to get there. Practice surrender work. Learn more about how to surrender here.

Why is a Kundalini awakening so intense #1:

A Kundalini awakening can be highly demanding and intense process for some individuals. The intensity may be experienced as discomfort, physical and emotional pain, anxiety and depression, which can cause an overall feeling of suffering. If you are experiencing such challenges in your awakening, reframing your perception may help you feel less angry, frustrated or victimized by Kundalini’s difficult aspects. In order to do so you need to understand why these challenges arise. This can help make it feel less personal. It can also bring about relief, or at least reduce fear. The more you learn about what you are going through, the more you will be able to recognize that you are not doing anything “wrong”; you haven’t caused these symptoms; your awakening hasn’t gone off the rails; this is merely the nature of Kundalini at work. The worst type of suffering can occur when we think that what we are experiencing shouldn’t be happening. We then start fighting something that is already happening, and which we cannot control; that in turn makes us feel all the more miserable. Accepting what is happening in the moment without fighting against it is so hard when it involves pain, and yet this alone can make the experience much softer, and lessen the pain dramatically.

Use this series of blogs to better contextualize and verbalize your current challenges. Know that despite the intensity of pain or anxiety you may be feeling, you are on the right path. If you are having an intense awakening, know that you are not alone, and trust that it will get better and more manageable as time passes.

Different sources of Kundalini challenges (or what some call a "spiritual crisis"):

• Kundalini and healing the Inner Child:

When we experience trauma in childhood (verbal/physical/sexual abuse or even disapproval or dismissal), if we cannot reconcile what happened to us, we fragment in order to survive. That fragment stays frozen in time at the age of the trauma, since when we were too young to process our pain. That part of us is completely vulnerable and unable to function or survive in the world on it’s own. This vulnerable fragment is then “assigned” a protector part that would do anything to keep our vulnerable fragment out of harms way. Its role is to try to prevent us from experiencing the same devastating emotion from the original trauma. Our “self” is in a sense an assembly of all these frozen wounded parts we can call our “inner child” and all of the protector parts we can call our defense mechanisms or ego. The inner child parts reside in the subconscious and the protector parts comprise the conscious mind and thoughts. These parts dictate our lives according to what has happened to us and what we don’t want to ever happen again. Ironically, whatever we resist we draw into our experience since healing is the purpose of this life. Our ego is just as innocent as our inner child, it is merely trying to protect us, to keep us safe by guarding the vulnerable parts of us at all cost. Some of us would not have survived our childhoods without this fragmentation defense mechanism. Knowing this, there is no value in fighting against or blaming your ego, it only leads to further fragmentation.

Part of the reason Kundalini can feel so intense is that the protector parts are unaware that it is safe to come out of defense mode. Consequentially they fight Kundalini with all they’ve got, making sure she doesn’t reach those vulnerable parts they have sworn to protect. The issue is that Kundalini will not rest until she gets all these parts exposed, since she knows you can’t heal without meeting them with love and compassion. Both forces in you have your best interest at heart, yet their perspectives on how to help you contrast. The result is that you feel pulled in several directions. It can feel like immense internal pressure, anxiety or agitation all at once.

To achieve a sense of inner peace one must begin to integrate the parts of the self.  The goal is to get your protector parts to know that it is safe to feel the original trauma’s emotions. You can assist the healing by creating an inner dialogue between your protector parts, your inner child and yourself (as a grown up or a parent figure to them). The more you try to connect with your inner child, the safer he/she will feel to be vulnerable, thus the less battling the protector parts will engage in. In addition, when you feel an inner battle take place, remember to practice surrender methods as described in the article here.

If this feels too overwhelming, seek help from a therapist who specializes in Internal Family Systems called IFS, or a trauma therapist if you can’t find one.

• Somatic discomfort:

Our bodies hold on to or store old wounds that become integrated into the cells beginning in early childhood. The body absorbs the trauma as a part of the whole. Kundalini asks us to release this wounding. Releasing this energy from your body is similar to having surgery on an energetic level. Your body will most likely contract around the cells that are being “cut” into by Kundalini and fight in it’s own way to keep itself whole. Your body doesn’t mean you any harm; the contraction is merely a protection reflex, yet this can make the physical release more uncomfortable or even painful. In truth the gap between the emotional, energetic and physical bodies is non-existent. These cellular releases of what you can consider energetic “tumors” are very real for your body. Although the release brings healing essentially, your body is still going through trauma and needs time to recover after each purge.

Breathe into the pressure or pain you feel in your body to help soften the contraction. Practice self-care during releases; support your body with supplements, plenty of water and rest. If possible titrate the intensity of the purge by listening to your body and not over doing it each time. Ask your guidance for help hearing your body’s needs clearly through the distress. Dialogue with your body to reassure it that it is safe to release the trapped energy it has carried for so many years. Be extra gentle and patient with yourself in this time.

• “Loss of the self:

When Kundalini pushes against your core beliefs and asks you to release an identity you’ve held on to for most of your life, it can feel very unsettling, as if a part of you is dying. This “identity death” occurs when you are asked to let go of what you perceive to be an integral of yourself. A part of you, the ego, will fight with all it's got to protect your identity. This can feel like an inner battle. Once this part has been surrendered grieving begins. Even if in the bigger picture this loss is in fact a healing and can be liberating for you, any loss is still experienced as a loss. Be gentle and allow yourself the time you need for this grieving; for as long as you need it. Trust that grief ends in due time when you let it be felt fully. This process can be sad, difficult and disorienting, so bare with yourself, and treat yourself with compassion. Don’t try to bypass any of the stages of grief, they are necessary for your healing.

• Shame and isolation:

Kundalini can take you on an extremely internal journey, one that isn’t easily recognized, nor is it experienced by your friends, family or society at large. Experiencing intense emotions and life changing realizations without the ability to share them with loved ones is isolating. Worse yet, being judged or misunderstood by those closest to you, can make you feel alone, different and that there is something wrong with you. We are social creatures at our core, so a lack of connection can feel like soul starvation for us. During Kundalini you need to be mindful to get support from people who understand and can validate your process, in order to mediate the suffering. It would be wise to avoid sharing your inner truth with people who shame or judge you in any way. Surround yourself with the right support system of people who can relate to your experiences or at least love you through them without judgment. To get additional support press here.

• The “Magnifying effect”:

Think of Kundalini as a magnifying mirror. You may have felt “normal” – balanced, sane, and even pretty self-aware before this force woke within. When looking at a magnifying mirror, your normal skin all of a sudden looks filled with flaws. Similarly, Kundalini magnifies everything. The “flaws” are our wounding and conditioning, small or big. When Kundalini brings an issue to consciousness, it overtakes our perception and occupies our experience in its entirety. The reason Kundalini does this is so you won’t have the ability to suppress, avoid or dissociate as you’ve done in the past, therefore you are forced to heal it.

A good visualization is picturing yourself bigger than the feeling, sensation, or emotion that is overwhelming you. Note that sometimes you can feel the intensity without a direct context (If you were too young when the wounding occurred to have any cognitive memory of it). These feelings or emotions may come out of nowhere and you might not know why. It’s hard not to fight and resist these states when you don’t know you are experiencing healing. Yet, learning to recognize what is happening and allowing the feeling to be felt can help heal it faster. All of these feelings inside of you are like a child and need to be treated with the same patience love and care as you would a child. Compassion always comes before context; love it without needing to analyze it. The context will follow if needed.

• Adjustment period:

Kundalini is a force, much like the water pressure coming out of a firefighter’s hose. When released into your system it can be overwhelming for the body and the nervous system. Initially, you can’t control the force of the water coming out of the hose, all you can do is keep grounding the energy and keep practicing self-soothing techniques such as breathing or walking in nature. Your body is doing its very best to accommodate Kundalini and adjust to its force but that takes time. In this time, try to remember that Kundalini isn’t trying to hurt you; she is just “coming on” a little too strong for your body. Leaning on other people who are further along in the process and praying for a softening of this force of nature can be helpful. Be patient and keep reminding your poor body and self that this isn’t always going to be the case.

To be continued.

For loved ones of people experiencing Kundalini:

If your friend, child, sibling or partner is going through a Kundalini awakening process, this blog post is for you. This awakening is happening to someone close to you and it is affecting you and your relationship with him or her as well. You may be feeling worried and want to help them, yet feel helpless and are not sure how. Maybe you don’t even know what to think about their experiences, some of which fall outside the realm of what you know or believe to be possible. I suggest that you start by educating yourself about Kundalini and withhold any judgment until you research it thoroughly. Then I would ask you to have faith in your loved one, to hear them out, to attempt to see them beyond your view of what is within the norm and stay open to their reality. It is their reality after all; you can’t persuade them that they are not experiencing what they are experiencing, so you may as well get on board. Try to leave your heart open and let your mind and prejudgments step aside for the sake of your relationship. (To learn more about what Kundalini looks like click here).

Now, more than ever, your loved one needs your unconditional support. As confused and scared as you are feeling, trust that they feel it tenfold; their experience of life is changing rapidly, without an anchor to ground it. You can be that anchor for them. Your loved one is going through a strange journey and is experiencing a variety of weird symptoms they have to process them without much context and help. Their entire life has transformed and they have to get with the new program without much time to resist it or to grieve the loss of the old one. Remember in your interactions that this is very challenging for them. They have to learn a whole new way of living and leave so much behind. Be there for them with compassion.

I know that fear can get the better of us sometimes; especially when you witness someone you love in pain and can’t fix it. Don’t lead the interaction from fear; lead it from your love of them. It can make all the difference. Believe them when they share their inner truth with you, that this is an awakening and not a nervous breakdown or a mental episode. I know you are worried and are trying to help, yet labeling the process as such can cause more damage than relief to your loved one. This process involves the entirety of a person’s being so at certain stages of it, some symptoms may appear as a diagnosable condition, mental or physical. It isn’t necessarily the case so bear with them. For more knowledge click here.

How to best support your loved one in this time:

What your loved one needs from you is for you to simply be there as best you can. Denying their reality is extremely hurtful to them, so keep your doubts to yourself. Get context to help you learn that Kundalini (home page) awakens in people all over the world, not always because they seek it or have done anything consciously to trigger it whatsoever. Your loved one is trying to learn how to trust Kundalini through months or years of facing internal struggles and the unknown. Many things that were solid for them are falling away and they can no longer hold onto much. This process requires more courage than they think they have, but they will get through it, with your unconditional love and support. It will require that same courage from you. You don’t have to meet them where they are, just don’t try and force them to meet you where you are. If they are facing physical and emotional states that are highly challenging, assure them that you believe in them and in their ability to heal. You can request they see a doctor or a mental health professional if you feel their health is at risk so they can receive the support they need, just be mindful to send them to someone who won’t be dismissive or quick to label them. Know that there is a good chance they won’t receive a satisfactory diagnosis if the ailments are energetically rooted click here for more information, rather than physically. Yet, eliminating any underlying illness or condition would be helpful for your peace of mind. Present it to them in this way and tell them that receiving help and support through some of the stages of Kundalini is more than encouraged and it doesn’t negate the awakening and its spiritual nature.

It isn’t necessary for you to fully understand someone’s experience in order to support them and chances are you won’t. A man will never fully understand what the experience of childbirth is like, it doesn’t mean he gets to minimize it or tell his wife the pain is in her head.  Granted, childbirth is undeniable since the results are tangible. The challenge with this process is its abstract nature as it is mainly a felt experience, but it is just as real, I assure you. Your loved one can’t prove it to you so don’t expect them to. This intangibility can be challenging for the person experiencing Kundalini as well since at times their mind won’t get on board with what they are feeling themselves. Wanting to be accepted and not judged is a basic human need; hence the greater the resistance to their felt reality is from their surroundings, the greater their inner battle will be. There is nothing more painful than being in pain or suffering and being shamed for it by the people you love and trust.

Do not attempt to fix or rescue them, as tempting as it can be since you really want to help. Try not to panic for them, as they are highly sensitive to your energy now and need you to pull it together. If you are feeling afraid, share your fear with them from your heart, tell them you really want to be there for them but are struggling, ask them how you can best be of support to them, ask them what they need of you and tell them what you need in return to feel at ease. Keep the dialogue open but always lead with how you feel.  

I know from experience that the hardest part of going through this awakening can be losing your support system and the people you love. It can get terribly isolating, so don’t let that happen to your loved one. If you are feeling overwhelmed by all of this know that it is normal for you to feel this way. Be there as much as you can but take “normal life” breaks. You don’t have to be their caregiver, just care about them - as I know you do. Don’t become their therapist, encourage them to find one if they are dealing with a lot of wounding. Be tuned in to yourself and establish strong boundaries not to be swept away in their experiences so you can maintain a healthy relationship and not end up resenting them or burning out. If you have a spiritual foundation yourself, you can pray and ask for help with this relationship. Ask how to stay connected to them if you feel as though you are going in two different directions and are afraid of losing them. If you don’t have a spiritual practice, try to be present with them as best you can. Be conscious and communicative of when you need your space and what support you are able to offer. People experiencing Kundalini are in highly vulnerable and sensitive states. At times, they can be as vulnerable as a child; they feel everything tenfold and sense people’s energy so they would know if you are pulling away without you having to say a word. For that reason communicating is evermore important now, they will pick up on all your fears and cues and feel hurt if they don’t understand it. Work on your communication skills so you can be honest with them, but always come from a loving place, start with how much you love them, tell them that you have to establish boundaries is just so you can keep supporting them and stay connected to them, not the other way around. Tell them you are working through your fears so they don’t have to carry them for you.

Your emotional needs in this relationship may have to take a backseat for some time, and that isn’t balanced or fair. Get support from a professional yourself to help you with that feeling of lack and imbalance in the relationship. Talking with someone will help you adjust your expectations and hopefully understand that they don’t mean to withdraw their support from you, they are just entirely consumed by this process and have no emotional resources left for anyone else for a while. This will change eventually. Meanwhile, acknowledge your hurt and work through it so that you don’t carry resentment.

Being there for them without judgment is all it takes, you can’t take away their pain, and you can’t rush through the process or guide them through it. All you can do is stay by their side and believe in them when they lose all faith. You don’t have to understand every aspect of this awakening, just believe in the person you love underneath the experience. The person you know has the strength and the wisdom to get through it. In the darkest moments, hold the light for them, as they may have no access to it, remind them who they are by remembering why you love them.

What to avoid when supporting someone going through Kundalini:

Beware of labels, even if they are going through depression and anxiety for a long period, it does not mean this is who your loved one is or who they have become. Kundalini takes a person through all kinds of experiences yet eventually it always shifts and changes. It takes time for the body to adjust to Kundalini and this can be very intense on the nervous system and manifest as anxiety. The mind takes time to adjust and process this awakening as well and for awhile can feel a great deal of loss and confusion which can manifest as depression. This stage of the awakening is known as “The dark night of the soul”.  Your main job is to remind them there is always an end to every phenomenon on this journey, to be their link back into life as they are experiencing only the shadow aspect of it right now. Remember that depression isn’t their new identity, just another stop on the Kundalini train and remind them of that. Some people get a doctor to prescribe anti-depressants to help support them through this stage so you can gently suggest to them that this is a valid option, that it is but a tool to support them through this temporary dark stage.

I know I am asking you for a lot, and that takes immense strength. All it boils down to is for you to keep seeing the person you know and love underneath the fear and the judgment. Your fear is valid since you are watching someone you love go through something you have no direct experience with and no control over, they most likely feel the same way. Your loved one is changing in front of your eyes and will keep changing and the fear of losing them is very natural. It is also normal for you to experience grief yourself for losing the person, as you knew them, allow yourself to grieve but know that if you let them change the relationship between you can evolve as well. Do not resent them for changing, it is not their choice, the process demands it.

This journey of the Kundalini awakening is an opportunity for growth both for the person going through it and for you. You will evolve together by accepting what you can’t control or change, by expending your definition of love and friendship, by embracing the unknown (which is ultimately the truth of life) and by allowing the person you love to surpass your perception of who they are or should be. Letting them outgrow the role they played in your relationship takes immense growth in consciousness on your part and is the best way to ensure that you sustain your relationship. In fact, Kundalini can help deepen your relationship and love for one another beyond anything you have experienced, by simply loving them through the most challenging yet rewarding time of their lives. Witnessing them morph into whom they are deep inside is a sacred role in and of itself. I promise you that it will leave you in awe of how beautiful and courageous they truly are and that they will be forever grateful for the courage and love you have shown by allowing them this transformation and supporting them through it.