Types of Kundalini Awakening

Posted on December 14, 2019 by George Boyd

Q: Are there different types of Kundalini awakening?

A: There are three basic categories: (1) when someone else induces the Kundalini awakening in you, (2) when you use a technique to awaken it, and (3) when it awakens spontaneously. These three categories break down into seven major types:

Volitional induced type – An Initiate uses a higher octave of will to awaken your Kundalini. Yogi Preceptors use the Cosmic Octave of will to raise your Kundalini into cosmic consciousness; Cosmic Masters tap this same octave of volition to fix it in the Astral Soul. Supracosmic Gurus employ the Supracosmic Octave of will to draw the Kundalini up to the Supracosmic seed atom on their Path, and in rare individuals, will anchor this energy in the Supracosmic Soul.
Intentional induced type – An Initiate uses intention from their attentional principle to send forth the Light (Shakti) and anchors it in one of your higher spiritual essences. Yogi Preceptors make this attunement with your cosmic consciousness. Cosmic Masters attune with your Astral Soul. Supracosmic Gurus establish an attunement with either your Supracosmic seed atom on their Path, or your Supracosmic Soul, if it dwells within that Path.
Short circuit imbalance type – As a result of moving a nucleus of identity—e.g., your cosmic consciousness or your Supracosmic seed atom—or an ensouling entity, such as the Astral Soul, out of alignment with the axis of being through a transformational technique, Kundalini becomes fixed in the essence that has been moved off the axis of being. We have also observed this misalignment taking place with spiritual essences in the Planetary Realm: the Psychic Seed Atom, or the Moon Soul or Solar Angelic nuclei of identity. When Initiates employ Light Immersion to transform a spiritual essence utilizing volitional and intentional attunements (types one and two), this type of Kundalini syndrome can be generated. Typically we see this type emerging when you use a transformational method such as bija mantra or Kriya Yoga; in rare cases, raising the Kundalini and engaging it to burn away karma behind a spiritual essence can produce this type of imbalanced spiritual development.
Hyperventilative breathing induced type – As a result of using hyperventilative breathing methods for long periods of time—e.g., more than three minutes of practice—you can kindle your Kundalini to rise into your cosmic consciousness, your Astral Soul, or a selected Supracosmic seed atom. We have seen this type of Kundalini awakening occurring when people perform “re-birthing” style breathing, sustained breathing into chakras of the Cosmic or Supracosmic Sphere, or “breath of fire”—or similar forms of rapidly inflating and deflating the lungs. Osho’s dynamic meditations, and 3HO’s breathing methods, often done in synchrony with mantras, apply this strategy to awaken the Supracosmic seed atom of their Path; in susceptible individuals, they can precipitate a full-blown Kundalini syndrome, where the energy rises into a higher spiritual essence and you can no longer bring it down.
Astral striking induced type – Through activating chakras of vehicles of consciousness on the Cosmic Astral, Cosmic Causal, and Cosmic Ideational Subplanes of the First Cosmic Initiation through the use of striking chakras with a mantramic syllable, Kriya Yoga Yogi Preceptors raise the Kundalini into the Divine Eye center. Other Yogi Preceptors use chakra-striking techniques to awaken your cosmic consciousness. Some Supracosmic Gurus awaken Kundalini into the Supracosmic seed atom of their Path through training their disciples to employ similar chakra-striking methods.
Force Field of Shakti/ Purifying Fire Type – Some Yogi Preceptors, Cosmic Masters, and Supracosmic Gurus have the Divine Light Fire anchored in an inner center within them, and radiate this effulgence through their aura. Whoever enters their presence when this Holy Fire is burning within them (a) may have impressions in their unconscious mind purified, (b) may experience spontaneous emergence phenomena, or (c) may experience their Kundalini drawn up and fixed on a spiritual essence of the Cosmic or Supracosmic Sphere. Anointed Yogi Preceptors lift your Kundalini into your cosmic consciousness. Empowered Cosmic Masters raise it to your Astral Soul. Shakti-filled Supracosmic Gurus elevate your Kundalini to the Supracosmic seed atom of their Path.
Soul induced spontaneous awakening type – In this type, your own ensouling entity draws your Kundalini up into its essence, using the octave of will established within it. We see this most commonly Subtle or Planetary Realms, where your transpersonal will operates lift the Kundalini to awaken each of your vehicles of consciousness of the Superconscious mind and bring it right up to its presence. In this variety of awakening, this octave of will keeps the Kundalini raised for an extended period of time, and does not permit you to ground this energy. If your cutting edge of spirituality is in higher octaves, you may experience a similar auto-chthonic process: the Monadic Will raising the Kundalini into the Monad; the Cosmic Will, into the Astral Soul; and the Supracosmic Will, into the Supracosmic Soul. The key marker of this type is your own Higher Self awakens the Kundalini within you; no external power induces your Kundalini awakening.

Types one, two and six are induced Kundalini types. They are activated through an empowered Initiate’s conation or presence. You do not experience these types of Kundalini awakening as being under your control.

Types three, four, and five are technique-driven types of awakening. You can kindle these through spiritual practice, utilizing techniques that actively awaken your Kundalini—and in the case of type three, concurrently transforming a spiritual essence. You experience these types as voluntary, in that the practices you perform can generate them. Once you have produced this Kundalini awakening, however, you may not be able to bring it back to ground.

Type seven is spontaneous awakening. This operates under the aegis of your ensouling entity. You also do not experience this as a voluntary process—your attention or attentional principle does not practice any technique to awaken the Kundalini; you encounter this awakening as a force that acts upon you from within.

When awakening your Kundalini Shakti leads to Kundalini syndromes that interfere with your ability to function, there are some general strategies that you can employ to ameliorate your symptoms and improve your functioning:

Types one, two, and six require you to break your connection with the Initiate who inducing this syndrome in you—and when the connection has been severed—to bring your Kundalini back to the ground state.
Type three calls for dynamic rebalancing or recapture through spiritual unfoldment at your cutting edge of spirituality. The Kundalini typically returns to ground after you have rectified the imbalance.
Types four and five necessitate that you stop using whatever meditation techniques that are precipitating your syndrome, and practice grounding methods to bring your Kundalini back down again.
Type seven involves you establishing a dialog with your Soul—or higher octave ensouling entity—that is generating the Kundalini syndrome, and getting it to agree to lower the Kundalini.

If you think you are having a Kundalini awakening, and you are having unwanted symptoms, you can contact us for a Kundalini Syndrome Reading. We can identify whether the Kundalini is playing any role in the symptoms you are experiencing, and discover which of these types of awakening is producing your syndrome. We can work with you to find strategies to ameliorate your distress, and teach you methods to assist you gain a greater sense of control over this energy.

Stages of Relative Grounding After Kundalini Awakening

Posted on August 16, 2019 by

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Stages of Aberrant Kundalini Awakening

Posted on September 22, 2017 by

In some people, the Kundalini energy is partially awakened, and this core energy of the mind awakens their awareness through the Subconscious mind and up into the Self at the core of the personality. When the Kundalini awakens your awareness to this stage, you are said to be Self-aware.

In a few other individuals, their Kundalini rises through the bands of the Superconscious mind to awaken awareness up to the level of the Higher Self, or Soul. When this state dawns, you become Soul-aware. There are a group of spiritual teachers who regard this state of ecstatic union with the Soul as the state of enlightenment.

These first two stages represent normal Kundalini functioning: the Kundalini rises up, you gain union with the Self or Soul, you gain some insights and understanding, and then the energy goes back down to ground.

Where the Kundalini begins to cause problems is when:

It remains fixed in a higher state of awareness, so it does not go back down to the grounded state of awareness, and your attention is locked in that altered state of awareness.
It is lifted into states of awareness beyond the presence of the Soul—nuclei of identity or ensouling entities of the Cosmic and Supracosmic Spheres.
It is lifted into states of awareness beyond the presence of the Soul, and there is concurrent unfolding of the spiritual essence in which the Kundalini becomes anchored—this creates a spiritual imbalance, moving one or more vehicles of consciousness out of alignment with the axis of being.

There are many well-intentioned spiritual traditions that emphasize Kundalini awakening that produce these three types of problems through the practices they disseminate. Moreover, many of the Supervising Initiates in these traditions actively use spiritual attunements to actively awaken the Kundalini in others—this induced awakening is called Shaktipat or Deeksha.

What we see—when people contact us with Kundalini Syndromes generated through either using techniques that create these three types of aberrant Kundalini awakening, or having this awakening induced through the attunement of a Kundalini Master—is that these syndromes appear to express in seven levels of intensity:

Very mild – The Kundalini energy produces some spacing out and mind wandering, it is possible to refocus the mind and function normally. You find yourself readily drifting off into trance or reverie if you do not keep re-focusing your mind on the task at hand.
Mild – The Kundalini energy produces states where your body, your mind, and the world around you seem unreal. This is the stage of derealization and depersonalization. You can function, but you feel like you are functioning in a dreamlike state.
Low moderate – The Kundalini energy begins to deaden your emotions, and you begin to lose motivation to perform any action or pursue your personal goals. You may begin, at this state, to want to continually meditate. You may feel you have no personal purpose other than to realize God: most personal pursuits seem fruitless and meaningless. This is the stage of dissociation and detachment.
Moderate – The Kundalini begins to produce somatic symptoms. You start to have sensations of heat moving in your body, unexplained aches and pains, strange perceptions like your head has disappeared. As you deepen into this stage, you may find your hands move into spontaneous postures (mudras), or you cannot move the body at all (catatonia). This is the stage where some people recognize something is wrong, and may start asking for help. You may find it difficult to carry out the activities of living at this stage. You may spend a lot of time alone, and feel immobilized when this energy surges within you.
Moderate high – The Kundalini lifts your attention into an altered state of awareness and you cannot return to your waking state of awareness. Action occurs, seemingly by itself, and your life seems to seem unreal, like you are watching your life in a movie. You do not sense that you are the actor in your life.
High – At this point, your personality functions begin to shut down, and you experience profound inner silence and stillness. When you do speak, you speak from your spiritual essence. When you feel, you feel the spiritual essence in which you are fixed, in others. When you think, it is revelation about this spiritual essence. You no longer identify with a separate Self; only the spiritual essence with which you are identified seems real. Carrying out the responsibilities of a job or raising a family become extremely difficult at this stage. You may require the care of others to help you function in the world.
Very high – This stage appears to take two tracks in individuals. (1) The first track is the track of dissolution—here, the Kundalini energy continues to burn upward through the vehicles, and you are unable to function; some experience terrible physical pain in this state. (2) The second track is the track of empowerment—in this scenario, you reach that stage of advanced unfoldment on the path upon which your spiritual essence dwells; you become able to awaken the Kundalini in others.

By the time you reach stage five or six, it is nearly impossible to intervene in the complete take over of your personal functioning through a progressively totalistic absorption in your Kundalini experience. You will benefit from identifying these different levels of intensity for Kundalini awakening, and seek assistance before your energetic profile shifts into a state that is irremediable.

We offer Kundalini Syndrome Readings to the public on a donation basis—if you think you are developing a Kundalini Syndrome, you may wish to obtain one of these readings.

We also encourage you to read our articles on Kundalini, “Dealing with Kundalini Emergencies,” “Illusions about Kundalini,” “A Kundalini Arousal Scale,” and “Reflections on Kundalini.”

There are also additional articles on this topic in our Library.