Stages of Relative Grounding After Kundalini Awakening

Q: I had a Kundalini awakening and I have found it is extremely hard to ground myself again. Is there a solution for this?

A: Since 2006, people have contacted us with Kundalini syndromes of varying intensity. We can characterize the eight stages we have observed from full groundedness to full-blown awakening where normalized functioning is compromised—and in severe Kundalini syndromes—not possible:

1. Full groundedness – The Kundalini has fully returned to its seat in the perineal center of the system of chakras of the Subconscious mind, and animates the ego, reason, feeling center, deep body awareness center, and the waking state of consciousness. You are fully present in the room, and you sense you are fully embodied, connected with the important people in your life, your reality testing mechanism of reason is operating, and your ego appropriately senses its roles and the continuity of your life narrative.
2. Withdrawal of single Conscious mind functions – here the Kundalini withdraws one of its five rays from a Conscious mind function. (1) If it withdraws the energy from the waking state of consciousness, your attention is fixed in a higher state of awareness, and you have difficulty returning to the ground state. (2) If it withdraws its energy from the deep body awareness state, you may become aware that you have multiple vehicles of consciousness and that you inhabit them simultaneously—it may be difficult for you to sense the solidness of your physical body. (3) If it withdraws from your feeling center, you may regard others as spiritual beings and have a difficulty feeling normal emotional bonding with others. (4) If it withdraws from your faculty of reason, you may live in a trance state and be extremely suggestible. (5) If it withdraws from your ego, you may sense that you are a spiritual essence—ensouling entity or nucleus of identity—and your life seems alien, dreamlike, or unreal to you.
3. Withdrawal of multiple Conscious mind functions – in this scenario, the Kundalini simultaneously withdraws from two to five of your Conscious mind functions, and you experience the symptoms from this concurrent withdrawal. At this point, you may feel you are going crazy.
4. Core activation of the chakras of the Subconscious mind – when this occurs, you become aware that each chakra appears to govern certain actions and you will attribute your actions, not to your ego initiating behavior, but to the activity of the petals of one of your chakras. For example, you might experience your drive to exercise to be the activity of one of the petals of the chakra at the base of the spine, or your engaging in courtship as the activity of one of the chakras of the navel chakra. You may experience intuitive revelations from your chakras, and feel that your true essence dwells in the brain chakra of this vehicle of consciousness. At this stage, you may experience out of body experiences (OOBE) or the sense that you are a conscious entity that dwells in the body—as a result, you may begin to identify as the attentional principle. Your ego, reason, feeling center, deep body awareness center, and waking awareness center feel distant, alien, and unreal—you may experience difficulty in carrying out the tasks of daily life at this point or engaging in normal social communication with others. At this stage, you are meditating during every waking moment.
5. Entering the Void – When the Kundalini withdraws up to the top of the Metaconscious mind, you experience the voidness of Being. Here your ability to initiate behavior using your volition, to think, plan, evaluate, imagine, and make commitments shuts down, and you passively experience life. You are not able to change anything; you just go with the flow in the present time. You may feel that action arises of itself: there is no doer. You may experience deep inner silence at this point. You just follow the Tao: your life seems to unfold by itself.
6. Archetypal encounter – As the Kundalini rises into your Superconscious mind, you may experience hallucinations and voices, similar to the experience when you ingest a powerful psychedelic drug. You may have remarkable experiences of gods and goddesses from different cultures. You are immersed in a downpour of revelation from your Superconscious mind. Were you to divulge these revelations to others, they would assume you had developed schizophrenia. At this stage, your mind and emotions become unstable, and you have difficulties making simple choices—you may act on the guidance of archetypes that appear to you. You would have difficulty in carrying out even basic activities—you would likely need someone to take care of you when the Kundalini rises to this level and stably operates here.
7. Integrating vision – Here the Kundalini unites with the Soul. You will experience yourself as a godlike being, which apparently has a mighty power to influence reality, express unconditional love, and is a source of great wisdom and illumination. You may experience states of grandiosity and omnipotence when the Kundalini reaches this stage. You may feel your knowledge is infallible and you are all knowing. When you make decisions from this state of grandiosity, you may find that you are sometimes unable to accomplish what you intend—when this occurs, you may blame others for your failure or formulate paranoid conspiracy theories. You may believe you are capable of miraculous creation. You can become very delusional at this stage.
8. Higher octave integration – In this stage, the Kundalini rises and becomes fixed in a spiritual essence—ensouling entity or nucleus of identity—at a level beyond where your Soul is. Common levels of this higher order fixation include the Moon Soul nucleus of identity, the Mighty I Am Presence nucleus of identity, the Cosmic Consciousness nucleus of identity, the Astral Soul, a Supracosmic seed atom on one of the Supracosmic Paths, or your Supracosmic Soul. At this level, you feel that you are this essence separated from the form of the Divine on this Plane, and you are actively engaged in some type of transformational practice to move this spiritual essence closer to this Divine Being. Your life and personality seem irrelevant at this stage: only your spiritual quest is important to you. You may be capable of pilgrimage, living in an ashram or structured monastic community, or doing holy wandering, but it may be next to impossible for you to function as a parent, an employee, or to assume positions of responsibility in your society—your personality is barely functioning at this level. It is common for people at this level to experience emergence phenomena—you begin acting on impulses that arise from your unconscious mind, you may be absorbed in perpetual processing of deep emotional issues, or you may experience continual visions and voices.

The challenge for those of you in whom the Kundalini has been activated is to bring it back down to stage one, where you can resume normalized functioning. Many of you have told us about the creative methods you have found that help you cope with this energy and at least temporarily ground it. We have given you some general guidelines for grounding in our article, “Grounding: Coming Back from Altered States of Awareness.”

The key to grounding is that you need to being the energy fully back into the Conscious mind, all the way back into your body, and down into the core of the earth. If you are able to successfully do this, even once, it will give you hope that you can begin to gain greater control over this energy, and not let it lift you into states of consciousness where you cannot function.

We teach the practice of safely awakening the Kundalini in our intermediate courses, the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation and the by-mail and online Accelerated Meditation program. One of the things we teach and emphasize is the practice of returning this energy to the fully grounded state.

We suggest that those who have learned to guide others to awaken this energy, or have been given the gift of awakening the Kundalini in others through attunement (Shaktipat), need to train their students in how to bring this energy back to full groundedness. If this were the case—that this recommendation were more widely implemented—we would likely not see so many people absorbed in stages two through eight, with compromised personal functioning and varying degrees of madness.

If you have unfortunately had the experience of becoming stuck in one of these ongoing Kundalini-generated altered states of consciousness, we sometimes can help you. If you are interested in these services, please see our Kundalini Recovery Services page.