My awakening was not a standard text book experience. Because awakenings are happening in these ways that are different from what some of the guru’s of India are familiar with, I think that it helps to point to a range of possibilities for those of us in the West who are awakening in large numbers, spontaneously, without a guru, and often without a practice. What works for one culture may not work for another because I observe, there are very real cultural beliefs in place that direct and also favor certain experiences over others. Awakenings in the West without the benefit of a guru are changing currently held views in the East about this phenomenon. And yet, we can learn a lot from the older traditions, too.

Awakening, or kundalini, for me, was triggered as the result of working through an old feeling that had tied me up in knots for years. When this knot was removed, I began having a whole range of odd, even bizarre experiences over a six month period that were all directly attributable to awakening symptoms. I just didn’t know that it was kundalini at the time. In a real way, I was able to witness awakening without any biases built into it at first.

My awakening came in stages so that there was less of a chaotic beginning associated with the experience. It all began with the initial catalyzing moment that removed an emotional/energetic block from my awareness that immediately shifted an emotional block and I began feeling a whole range of effects from it from that moment onward. This was prior to the text book”rising” event, though, which came five months from this first initiatory event. The thing I want to point out here is that this initiatory event I am describing was simple. I got over a decades-long issue I had between me and the universe that had unwittingly had me tied up in knots. It had also, unwittingly, also tied up my own awareness of energy in a fuller way as well.

Three days after this release happened, I had the first moment of nondual experience. This was very simple, light, and beautiful. Sublime, actually. It was three in the afternoon and I was walking alone during a slow period at a festival where I was selling my work. It came over me as this hard to pin feeling that grew in me like a flower blooms. I suddenly knew that I belonged and that I was part of this really vast “family” that included….well…everything…all the way down to the subatomic particles in atoms in the universe.

It was novel how it anchored me in the moment while instantaneously setting me free. This was a clear and pristine experience. There are many others who have described just such an experience, this light sublime moment that can move you to tears. When first touched, it is light and delightful. It softened my heart as I was moved to tears. I am unable to accurately describe such an experience.

Only later does the energy, more deeply situated, begin to churn into the body of the self, at least this was how it happened in my experience. This intensity is also often associated with the “rising” event. Kundalini can approach you for many months before the rising, you see, and I think it’s important to point this out since it can indicate that awakening is close by.

You can live with all kinds of unusual symptoms, unaware of what is taking place, but knowing with a certain degree of inner certainty that something is up. I know that I did. it is a bit like seeing a puzzle being assembled right before your eyes, but being unable to put together what is all means when the symptoms (puzzle pieces) are all so disparate from one another. Only later do the pieces begin to knit themselves together into a cogent image sometimes.

The next stage after this initial epiphany experience was a six month period I called “high strangeness” that included hearing sounds, music, and voices as I lay meditating in the near-darkness of my bedroom each night. These effects were all so scattered apart that it was hard for me to pin them down as even being related. I could have thought that something was wrong with me, but I have been having things like this happening to me since I was a child, and there was nothing about it that pointed to any serious issues like psychosis or, say, a brain tumor.
After this six month period, I had an initial rising event that placed me squarely into another world energetically. It was very much as though I had gone from using gasoline to jet fuel. It all happened very quickly and while it was not disorienting, it was a lot to keep up with, to understand in a big picture way.

My dreams during this period changed dramatically. I had what I called my “A Christmas Carol” dreams which would last all night and would involve detailed reviews of my life and its contents and would leave me waking drenched in sweat. These were dashes through my life that would take up all night. These dreams began to usher in hidden or submerged knowledge that often were precognitive, containing information about a number of events that would take place during my awakening that were pivotal events for me spiritually. Some of these precognitive elements were seven to ten years in advance of the actual events themselves.
I had dreams of water that was filled with this sparkling inner light and symbols flowing through it that I could not decipher. Many others describe a “light language” whose symbols all feel very familiar to me. I saw how this “water” flowed into a building, my house, in the dream, where two fountains were in the middle of the house, which were clearly representing the Ida and Pengala currents of the kundalini (I just didn’t know yet about these channels except as shown in the dream).
In another dream, I walked into a video arcade full of games with horrible images playing across them, a world that was in black and white and sepia tones while I saw a brilliant golden shaft of light emerge in the center of this arcade where people were being fed from a loaf of bread that did not diminish each time it was cut. There was a voice that said, “Out of the One, many, and out of the many, One.” this concept would emerge in the form of an awareness of the holographic nature of reality, the soul, and matter. And this golden light, which has accompanied throughout my life, was centered in a world full of violence, like games that we play in life.

My awakening pushed physical events in my life so that I had to face that the relationship that I had been in for close to two decades was in truth abusive to both me and my children emotionally. Through a series of bizarre events, my life was arranged in a way that it was impossible for me to continue with the blinders that I had on for so long. My own awakening catalyzed a shift between me and my spouse that was…bizarre.
As I began to progress in the removal of karmic threads and knots, my spouse went in exactly the opposite direction. On the one hand, so much of what was happening was behind the scenes, releases that represented lifetimes of stored material, and material that had served as the platform on which my wife and I had formed our relationship, as I softened, she hardened even though she did not know about the many blocks I had been clearing within me. In my case, this system of blocks was being taken down rapidly, so fast that there was no way for it to manifest in my behavior, but had an effect on her, even though she never knew this at the time. I was able to watch as she would go into these rages after these threads would drop in me. It helped me to see how these energetic effects have a very real impact on the people around us. In my case it was clear that I had someone who very much wanted to cling at all costs to her old patterns. In fact, her patterns hardened even more so as I quietly continued with my inner work and watched as each release in me created an opposite reaction in her. If ever I needed a sign about what kind of person I had been living with all those years, this experience certainly illustrated it loud and clear. In a broader way, this experience along with a second person later, helped me to see that for as much as I might want to help people out of their messes, the only person we can truly do this for is ourselves. While healing in one person can help release the other person from their blocks at the same time, my experience has been that this is an inside job and not everyone is as ready as we might be to just get on with it. I have seen this with people I have known who are awakened, too. We shed our illusions in layers despite this notion that once kundalini comes, it all just goes away. Only by preparing most of your life with methods like kundalini yoga, might such an outcome happen. We, though, awaken without the eastern methods that have been known to make awakenings calm and easy. You could say Westerners are doing it the hard way. We are all waking up very fast!

All of my healing during awakening has been to unleash the power of the mind and the heart and the sensuality that is native in all of us without the burdens of our shame. My awakening meant that I was not as controllable as I had been in the past by my spouse. This made life very hard and ended, ultimately, in divorce. This was a saving grace for me, but it had come at a great cost to me and my children, who were thrown under the bus by their mother as a way of getting back at me for what she believed was my being unfair to her during the divorce. But like so many things in my old life, I had been engaging with a person who was so “off” that when I woke up and began operating according to my inner guidance and soul compass, my very fair determinations were turned against me as an effort was begun to try and alienate my children from me. I am not saying this for your sympathy. I am saying it to point out just how much awakening worked in my life to turn me around, as well as how turning to the truth can impact those who just aren’t ready in the same way. And, also, awakening can lead you to having a new life where some do not or cannot follow.

When I felt stuck, I had events that happened that forced me to examine my life. I was seriously injured in a fall that put me out of work for an entire year, requiring intensive physical therapy. It was a depth charge in my life that forced me into slowing down from my very hectic and even frenetic life as a production artist. To put a fine point on it, as I lay on a therapy table with a woman who did Kahuna healing many years later and who was clairsentient, when I mentioned something about my accident, she said that she heard one of my guides explain, “That was no accident!” How true. When I got up from my fall from the ladder and saw what had happened, I had this very odd feeling like all of this was part of a design. A hard design, meant to match my own hardness, all intended, in the end, to get me to soften. The truth was, if I had not taken this life-changing fall, I might have had the blinders up for many years to follow. I would not have been forced to look at my life in the way that I had to.

It was during this time of my forced sabbatical from my busy professional life that I was able to look at my life with my spouse and just how bad things had gotten. While I gained a new life, I also lost a child to this process who was turned against me in what I can only describe as one of the more cruel forms of betrayal that happens between divorcing parents. it also underlines just how people can get swept up in their karmic glitches, too. It also showed me just how easily it is to brain-wash people, how powerful our own beliefs are about what we think our lives are about, and how easy it is to accept beliefs about ourselves that are based less on what is true or real than on what it is that we feel about ourselves.

I was able to see other people who came into my life who were just as stuck in their illusions about who they were even though they were also awakened, and all of this has helped to remind me of how important it is for us to examine as honestly as we can, our deeper beliefs about ourselves. This is a form of radical self-honesty that is the only way that we can free ourselves from the more troubling aspects of our own inner neurosis. At the bottom of each of these inner discoveries I have found that all of my problems were each self-made.

I could say that my wife did XY & Z to me, but the truth is, they would not have happened had I not had this splinter in me that served to attract a complimentary energy to me. I had surrounded my self by miserable people and had tried to make their lives better for years. Instead, I have learned that everyone is responsible for their own happiness, their own heaven and their own hell….and no one else. I have had to let go of all of the deceit and lies that have been told about me in order to attain something more treasured than any wrong done to me. I am telling you this only to help you to understand just how thoroughly the force of prana running in your awareness is, and how it can relentlessly clear you of prior fault about yourself as anything less than a wonder-filled creature worthy of the best love there is. I am telling you this, also because some have tried their best to explain that it was just not possible that I was experiencing what I was.

I have had people writing me from India who tell me that this is NOT kundalini…that I cannot “get” this without a guru, without “diksha,” without sitting at the foot of one who already has it, a guru, and worshiping them. It is a new day, folks, and we are the ones who will unveil its light to the world without so many beliefs holding it all down or coloring it. But the fact that we have many people waking up this way without a guru really says something about the insistence that the old way is the ONLY way. The intelligence of the energy will guide you, so you need to be very clear about your relationship to it. It is your life raft. I say to you that it is time to cast off the lead coat of the past. Awakening remains perennial in its freshness. You do not need a tradition. You only need a capacity for awe. Do you have this?

When kundalini rose, I was driving down the highway. I was not meditating. I was deep in thought when it moved. I was not sitting up straight. I was not in full-lotus. Nor was I suddenly shocked into a perfect form of posture, either. I had been having all of these symptoms previous to this which I knew intuitively were conditioning my body for something…I just didn’t know what. It was coming, I knew something was coming, but it was so beyond my previous experience that I could not have known what it would be like. I felt the serpentine force rising up inside of me. I felt my mind bloom.

The activation of my third eye that had taken place in rather spectacular fashion five months previously, which made it easier for me to relate to what was taking place. I had been guided directly to how to effect my third eye opening/activation. It took the form of a quiet voice or thought inside of me that told me to do certain things. I obeyed, often wondering if all of this was real or imagined. One side of me poo-pooed it while another side of me thought, “What’s the harm?”My third eye awakening was a fairly involved affair that began with seeing a blazing eye emerge into my mind’s eye while my physical eyes were closed. This was accompanied by a spreading pressure across my forehead that first felt like my head was being held in a vice. Bands of force began to radiate outward from my third eye around my head. Each night as I lay down to meditate, these bands would resurface and expand, effectively picking up where they had left off the previous evening.

I wound up with what felt like a three-form column of energy shooting up from my third eye up towards my hair line and then powerful pressure-based bands that spread out horizontally that wrapped around my head until they encircled my entire head. My head had the odd feelings as though it was a walnut that was being cracked open.

I was shown a portal in the middle of my third eye region where I saw images begin to form. I was told to focus on these images. This was akin to watching a slide show. I was shown a series of about five different images, each I understood were physical locations that I was to try and go to using a method of bilocation that was different from any other method I had ever heard of previous to this experience. All of this happened automatically and I was along for the ride. It was through this particular stage of the experience that I learned about how to shift my consciousness and to harness the energy of the complimentary energy in consciousness that is the compliment to the rational mind. I found that as this focus improved that events themselves changed as I learned to keep the waveform of energy moving. This in turn served to build the energy that I observe led to the full-on rising of the energy.

The day before kundalini rose, though, I had been feeling this sweeping energy moving over my skin. I had goosebumps and chills that came and went for weeks on end, coming and going according to no known schedule or reason. This had gone on for a solid month, coming and going according to a schedule that entirely eluded me. It reallyfelt as though someone was taking a feather duster and was sweeping it all over me with no pattern….firs it would run up my leg, then it would brush over my shoulders, then my arm, then my back, then on the top of my head.

It was I was at work one day I felt this sweeping energy stop after it entered my solar plexus. To be completely accurate I felt the sweeping energy that was on my skin dive into my navel. When this happened, the energy effects stopped completely until the following day when tit re-emerged as the full rising of the energy. This sweeping energy (often described by some as the “medusa effect”) felt as though something was preparing me for something. All of this happened automatically. It took place naturally. All of this, after I had removed this one big block from my consciousness. Everything flowed out from that and was nurtured by some meditation I was doing at the time. Everything about it fit neatly together so that this event moved forward. It was as though some unknown part of me was conspiring “against” me. And truthfully, it was conspiring FOR me!

My awakening also included a soul connection, which was another wrinkle in my life and experience with this new chapter in my life.

A flow of information began to come through me, images that were connected to someone half a world away who I had not even met. I was seeing images of things I did not at the time understand. In a few weeks I had a series of bizarre events that led me to realize that the images I was seeing at my initial awakening had to do with this person who I did not know. It was like stepping off into a strange world. I pinched myself. Was I going down the rabbit hole? This story took off in the direction of releasing a parasitic etheric life form from someone whom I would also become connected to etherically. It was so strange a turn of events that it would be hard to believe that any of it happened the way that it did….except that it did.

This person would become a soul connection, what is commonly termed a twin soul or twin ray, which is itself another story in and of itself. After this initial experience, I moved into a territory that has continued to be….different. For about nine months, I was not entirely sure what had happened to me. It was just so….unusual. I knew that whatever was happening, nothing was really the same. If I thought about something, it had an uncanny habit of happening. Over and over! If I described to you some of the synchronicities that happened to me, you just would not believe. And yet, they all happened. This is how we bring dream to waking. This is what the ancients spoke about. This was magic. It is a hitherto poorly understood quality of ourselves and of reality…..and HOW we and reality can mesh to allow for the amazing to happen. We call it magic because we have not had a good enough model for explaining what is actually happening.

The moment of awakening was for me part of a process. The awakening was itself one step among many steps. Waking up like that did not confer upon me perfection. I had to work that part out, and it continues to this day. Abilities that I had prior to my awakening have been greatly enhanced and have assisted me a great deal in being able to extend my comprehension of what is happening to me energetically to a considerable degree.

Do I think preparing could be of benefit? I think so, but how do we know who will awaken? And honestly, some of the things that I encountered and then released, I don’t think I would have been able to release without the stirring effect of prana so alive in my awareness and my body. My awareness was trebled so that I kind of laughed at the considered and examined life I thought I had lived up until that time. Really, I was humbled by this increase of awareness, coming away shaking my head at what it was that I thought I knew. Awakening joins two currents in awareness that had been disconnected. As a result, you live a half-life and see only half of the picture. So much of life is through agendas, beliefs, and limited views. How do you help anyone see the bigger picture unless they themselves begin to see it for themselves? The formula, most likely, is one of many lifetimes of growth and “ripening” to the moment when the fruit drops from its old life into its new life. What is happening today, though, is that these awakenings are coming at the greatest rate spontaneously. This is with minimal preparation. As a result, preparation is done while in the midst of the flow of this powerful force. While it can be difficult to do, the force of awakening is itself a grace that can be harnessed if one is willing to devote ones self to this work. It requires humility, perseverance, a little faith, and self love. I will say based on observations of others, that if you are interested in awakening and are a very rational “mental” person, you should do work to loosen yourself up or else this will be a very hard experience for you. Awakening opens up the channels of awareness and consciousness that are the opposite of the rational mind. For the rational mind, this can feel like madness, and certainly neurosis can ensue for those who force this experience before they have prepared. Instead of having a soul filled with facts, live your life as though your life is filled with poetry. Flow, do not be rigid. Flow. You don’t need to know how everything will be. Submit yourself to a larger force. For some of us, especially those stuck in ego, this is very hard.

My awakening continues to unfold. Like a flower, it has many petals. I have worked hard to be where I am, and I have also learned the art of surrender…..and I relearn it every day. It is true. As I enter into the eighth year of the phenomenon, I am seeing things very differently then I did in the beginning. I see how limited I was, but how even in my limited view, it was perfect for the time to do what I needed most to do. A voice which came to me and revealed in spectacular fashion through a series of synchronicities what this is all about; love. One of the greatest acts of love for me was in letting go of relationships that did not serve me or that mirrored an old outmoded way of being limited and engaged in always trying to shift blame and thus hold off on the act of radical self-honesty I have mentioned earlier. Not everyone will be ready for this level of honesty, and when you come up against it in yourself, it can result in really bad behavior in them. I saw this in several people in my life, all captured in the old karmic junk, and I can tell you how awful it is to just be around them. At each step I am shown how my understanding of this love expands as my own embodiment of it expands also. Like a petal unfolding. Even as it has meant moving on without those who once mirrored something in us that we thought was real. If everyone tended to their own stuff, there would be no more finger-pointing and nothing but self-honesty. Worry about yourself, take care and tend to your own garden. You will not be lugging another person’s garden back into heaven. You will be carrying your own, see? You will then inspire others along the way through this authenticity that you will quite naturally embody in your process.

However awakening comes to you, it is perfect. It will behave in direct proportion to who and how you are. If you are hard and rigid, kundalini will kick your butt. if you are soft and bending, it will flow around you and become a bliss-filled blessing. If it is a blast up your spine that leaves your reeling, well perhaps you needed the blast to open you up and shake you out of your old state. But it is also possible to have a gentle awakening as well. It can be relatively calm and gentle and done in pieces. It can. It did for me. It can for others. Like the water from a stream that has been dammed up, we can learn how to let this force open itself up to itself so that a large channel of energy can flow. In the beginning it will seem like a lot, but in time you will see that the “big amount” one year is eclipsed by the flow in another year or season as you naturally evolve to learn how to be a conduit for this energy that is you and that is the universe. Your understanding will improve with time and experience perhaps as it has done with mine. It will be your teacher, it will enliven your mind, it will heal your soul and support your body. It can come like lightning, or it can come more gently. I prefer gentle since it can help eleviate psychosis that can take place in its wake.

There were times when my awakening was like a curse because it was so damned hard. It was hard because I was so stubborn! But I see it more as a great gift that shows me its great potential when I surrender…..over and over I hand it the reins and let it do the driving. Here, the mind, heart, and soul bloom in the lovely presence of the light that is the blast that changes our lives forever and for the better.

The story continues….