Someone recently wrote to me and described a harrowing process he is going through in awakening.  No doubt, he is caught in this tight vice of an experience and is having trouble getting to the other side of it.  And yet, the process he is locked in is what kundalini does to us.  It rewires us, remakes us. It really does. Its easy for me to forget what it was like before awakening. Its getting easy now for me to forget what it was like that first year when I felt awakening stirring in me. It was so obvious how I had changed.  I write in my book, which is based on many journal entries during the awakening that it was as though I woke up one day speaking a different language.  From another planet. Just like that.  Boom.  Transformation underway.  Bye-bye Kansas!  But what my friend helped to remind me about is how we can get caught up in others’ feelings without realizing its them that we are feeling.

There is a curious capacity we develop when we awaken which is the ability to feel a person’s emotions and feelings so strongly that they feel like they are our own.  It is disorienting sometimes to have this happen, but the key to coping with this part of the experience is with awareness. Having the ability to stop and ask yourself a few simple questions is all that you will need to begin to discern between what is truly yours and what is someone else’s. Or perhaps, your engagement with another’s energy whether conscious or not….

People whom I know who have had this happen to them, most often speak of it as though it is now what they must do, that they are now suddenly more empathic.  But this is not correct.  It isn’t. If you are feeling others’ feelings around you, I want you to try an experiment in awareness and next time it happens, I want you to stop for a moment and ask yourself if you are feeling EVERYONE’S energy in that moment or if it is just one or two people in the room or the place where this is happening.  I have spoken with people who have observed decades worth of experience who have had the ability to really question as well as observe what has been happening to them and what I have found is that we attract what we are at the time.  For example, I know a therapist who has noticed that the issues she has in regards to ghosts, she will have clients coming to her in large numbers who will have similar issues.  Another person who has a major glitch from his past finds that he keeps attracting people in his work that has the exact same issue that he is still dealing with in his life from childhood.  I do the same thing and have attracted people into my life who have similar traits to people I have never gotten over.  What is interesting is when you clear the issues, and I mean really clear them, the ties can release from these people.  It is also possible that you both reach a place of healing and begin a new chapter in each of your lives (in the case of close connections in personal and intimate relationships).

You see, the experience of feeling this is so powerful and often overwhelming that it distracts us from what is actually happening, which is that we aren’t feeling EVERYONE, we are just feeling certain people.  And there is a reason for this, and it goes straight to the work that kundalini does in us, that is, if you are ready for this level of awareness to come into your experience.  What I am talking about is that in every case, we feel another early on in the kundalini process because we share something in common with them.  We are harmonized along a specific range of experience or karma.  Our energy is the same, but most often, it is about the things that remain in us that (we hope) kundalini will help to purify or release in us.  I actually had a family friend react incredibly harshly to my suggestion that she wasn’t just channeling everyone she was around as she thought she was, but that she was in fact, in each moment, channeling those people’s energy who shared something in common with her on an energy and karmic level.  When I felt her begin to pull on me energetically and I remained unmoved, she quickly got angry and shut me out in a pretty stark and hard manner.

I discuss this here because I went through the exact same thing and I now know, I was not channeling everyone in the room.  I was channeling one person only.  It was when I identified this fact that I was able to take this experience from being one where I had no control to one where I did have control or a choice.  Not only that, but after my decisive experience with examining what was at work and being honest with myself, I not longer was “captured’ by the experience like this again.  This was an experience that was different from that of the karmically joined “twin” experience, whatever you choose to call it (twin flame, twin soul, etc.) which can have a more enduring aspect and appears to also be karmic but with a sense of mission and self-work involved where feeling others randomly in public can be just…weird or off-putting.

In awakening you go through a whole range of new sensory experiences.  If you think that it’s all in your head, you will need to realize that this is simply not so.  It IS in your head, but it’s also in all things.  And the power that is now alive in your head now has the capacity to move the power latent in all things….which is to say that by connecting into the energy in all things you can more effectively get things done that need doing. this is a radically different approach to anything most people know about.  It touches on the idea of manifesting but it’s also different in how immediate and strong that it is.

Jesus, the so-called Gnostic Jesus, described this phenomenon.  He said that “once you are destroyed [ego death], when you say mountain move, it will move.” [Gospel of Phillip]  These are the siddhis or abilities/powers written about in the old Vedic texts that come about as a result of spiritual development or awakening (siddhis are one symptom of awakening).  It is also what many say should be ignored, lest they seduce you.  Well, yes, you do need to be careful with this stuff, but if you can approach it all with the innocence of a child, you can direct this power in the same way you direct an arm or your voice in order to get what you want or need.  I suppose that some feel its wrong or bad because it is an unfair advantage, but really all it is, is what you gain when you finally grow up, go through this spiritual puberty we call awakening.  Thus, everyone can inherit it. It is an ability that is of a higher order, and so with this power comes great responsibility, most certainly.  I have always asked for what I needed the most and most often in the eleventh hour.

One of the experiences is how you can feel others around you, near you emotionally, or who are connected to you spiritually, or people who are complete strangers who happen to mirror something in you.  Some of these senses are so strong that the experience is that you are yourself experiencing something as though it was your own when in fact it is from someone else.  Let me explain that for a time I would pass people on the street and I would feel their buried sense of sadness, broken-hearted feeling, their depression, their sorrow, their anxiety.  I would walk by someone on the street and I would double over from the heart pain.  Why?  Because I was more sensitive.  I was a vibrating tuning fork.  There was also another reason why I was feeling some things over others; I was not yet finished with something that was present also in these people. So for example, a man who had been injured by his spouse in his heart I would feel because he and I had the same pain in us.  I didn’t JUST feel EVERYONE.  I felt certain people. There was a rhyme and reason.  It was about mirroring. Why hadn’t I felt the lady who was walking down the street with her kids, why hadn’t I felt the old man who was walking with his wife?  Why hadn’t I felt the college student’s energy?  I had to realize I was not feeling EVERYONE.  Just certain people.  Sure, I may have had the potential to feel or read everyone the same way I read auras, but I would not ever read or feel them as deeply or as closely as what this kundalini conferred.  The events in our lives are no accidents. They follow an inner directive from us.  And if that seems impossible to you, consider that I have watched and observed this and have seen so many correlations with this that I can no longer dismiss it.  This is not a need for me to dwell in magical thinking.  It is a realization that either the world is chaos rendered into order by way of natural forces and its all just chemistry and nothing else, or everything is here because of consciousness and that everything IS consciousness.  This would be on par with what some have called this world; A Dream. It also suggests that consciousness is engaged in our physics and our world in helping to bring about certain events in our lives.  Accidental or miracle?

So it came to pass that I was at a dinner party. As I was talking with some new people I had met I began to be seized by a feeling of desperate anxiety.  I have been anxious before like this in the past.  I knew what that felt like.  It felt entirely as though it were my own.  I was feeling an energy within my own cocoon of awareness, within my own etheric sheath or auric field. It was mine, no?  Something in me said that maybe this wasn’t mine.  I thought about it.  It made no sense that it would be mine.  For one, there was no reason why I should be feeling so incredibly anxious. None. So I let my reasoning mind take some rope and try to lasso this thing some.  This is one instance where the rational does well!  So  I sat there and took stock of myself. Instead of JUST reacting.   If this wasn’t mine, then whose was it?  I asked the energy in me to show me the way.  And by golly, it did.  In a room with about seven people, the energy in me pointed me toward a man who was sitting in a chair off to the side.  He had been talking to my mother and he wasn’t someone I knew.  I decided to just be bold and speak to the man about this.

“Excuse me, but do you have a problem with feeling anxiety?”  The man pulled back in his chair, like a turtle pulling in its head. He was entirely taken off guard by my very forward question.  He had stiffened.  But as I looked at him, it was clear that I did not mean it in a hard or mean way.  I was more like a kid.  His face softened and he replied, “Well, yes, I have had some issues with anxiety.”  We both paused for a moment and he looked at me, something clearly on his mind.  He added, “In fact, I have had so much of a problem with anxiety that I have gone to therapy for it and have taken medication.”  He stopped for a third time and did the same thing; he looked at me like he was pondering something else and he said the magic words: “In fact, I was feeling very anxious the moment that you asked me about it!”  I smiled and thanked him.  I explained that I seemed to be picking up on stuff like this for some reason.  This interaction was the first case where I began the process of discerning between what was mine and what was others’ feelings.

After that incidence, the tendency to feel people like this waned somewhat. Part of it was that I tended to limit my focus more.  For some reason I had to be as open as a parking lot I think in order to begin a process of clearing, which began in earnest around that time.  As I Have cleared these old blocks, the things that I have mirrored or attracted have also changed substantially.  I once had students that were of a certain character and they have, largely, changed.  My behavior has also changed.  This results in a different kind of day and life for me. It’s an incremental process, this, but worth it because what it does is it gives me an energetic vehicle that I am in command of instead of being in command of a mass of karmic blocks and knots in my energy field….serving to distort the energy coming into me and also distorting the events that get manifested because of all those competing knots that send out bits of competing code signals to the universe.  They are me, but they are parts of me I wish I was not….but that I have not fully released.

When people say things like “She is haunted by her demons” you can know now that they are old blocks that are doing it.  These blocks act like subroutines in your psyche causing you to behave in ways you really wish you hadn’t.  Some people are entirely governed by these things. In the Gospel of Philip in the Nag Hammadi, this is what Philip describes as being the evil that must be pulled out entirely by the roots if it is to be freed from our being. It is also said in the same gospel that It is [the evil] that keeps us from doing what we want to do and it makes us do what we do not want to do. Substitute “evil” for karma, and I think you can begin to understand not just the root of evil, but also how to remove it. which requires going deep down into the very source of it.  “You say I have to go deep within myself to root this all out, but how do I do this?”  Everyone wants a method, right?  Everyone wants a way to just do it, maybe an incantation or something.  In everything I say here on this blog, it is the same; learn to feel deeply within yourself.  When you can feel deeply, you have actually begun to activate your inner sensory awareness.  Got that?  You need this awareness and you will find that the deeper you go inside of yourself, the more this sensory awareness will open up.  It is in truth, the axiom that the Greeks used to say in the temples: “Know thyself.”

You may not believe it, but once you learn how to look beyond the curtain of your own denied emotion, you will be given power over all your demons (or you will gain this to the degree that you are able to face which means that once the door is open, it is open and you don’t go back where you came from but you may only have incremental releases until it completes itself…it being a matter of time but the point being that it does not happen all at once, it can also happen incrementally).  Until you are able to adopt this childlike sense, you will be tempted by them.  Until you are the master and no longer the slave.   If you want to know about releasing blocks from your own field, I suggest you search this blog using those terms.  A lot has been written about it here. It is, in every case, based in learning how to feel deeply.  The reason why this is so important is because the deeper you can feel, the more aware you are of the occulted or hidden emotion that has been shoved down.  It is this emotion that forms the basis of so much of our karma, our difficulty in relationships, as well as our reactions an even our personal (non-religious) belief systems. With something that has such widespread influence over you, you would think that people would want to get a better handle on it, right?  One of the hardest things that we as humans do, is to be honest about those things that we have shoved down and do not want to face.  Carl Jung once famously said in effect that the self will run from facing the source of its own pain and resist changing it at the same time.  In this way, so many people become like graveyards for their cast-offs.  Search this blog using “healing blocks” and you will get many posts on this topic, from exercises that can help release stored material (like TRE for example) to ways to meditate using breathwork as the entry into the field.