Initially I did not have a section in this on kundalini – for the very simple reason that I know almost nothing about it. I have read a lot of contradictory things about it and talked about it with Charles Berner. But actually what I am writing below is largely speculation.
Kundalini is the name given to a specific type of energy that, when released, travels up the sushumi nadi (the central energy channel running up the middle of the spine). It seems to me that people have given the term kundalini to a much wider range of energy phenomena than this – but I am restricting myself to this yogic definition. In simple terms the kundalini is a store of energy at the base of the spine that can be released under certain conditions. It is a very powerful energy flow and will rise up the spine. If there are impurities associated with any of the chakras then the kundalini energy flow may get stopped or blocked. When the energy is stopped or blocked then it can cause problems for the individual.
According the Charles Berner there is always some release of kundalini whenever a person has a direct experience. It is the kundalini arriving in their head that causes the characteristic pink flush to occur – it looks as if the person has just enjoyed a good orgasm. If this is the case then the release of kundalini is small enough and the body is clear enough to handle it because I have never witnessed people running into kundalini troubles as a result of having a direct experience. I speculate that this means that the kundalini is released after the direct experience and that there is something about the change of state of consciousness (or the openness required for the direct experience) that prepares the body and individual adequately for handling the energy released.
Powerful kundalini experiences that are not associated with direct experiences do cause trouble, often serious trouble. The trouble arises because of impurities (or energy blocks) and these are present when the body has not been prepared for the kundalini release. This has happened to me when I have been powerfully affected by someone else’s direct experience – the participant was ready for their own release of kundalini, but that release triggered a release in me, and me and my body were not suitably prepared. In the Introduction I described the difficulties I have run into with four major releases (ruptured colon, food allergy, crying for months and frozen shoulder). You can almost trace the passage through the chakras in my case (starting with the colon, then the stomach, then the heart).
Here is an account of a person who had a release on the six week Intensive but who handled it without difficulty or damage. She awoke at 3 a.m. one morning for no reason with a severe tingling and sharp pain at the bottom of her spine. She could not get back to sleep and was frightened by the phenomenon. This person had had a period in her life when she was psychic. This was extremely difficult for her to accept and live with. The psychic period ended when she fell off a ladder and landed on her cocyx. This pain was similar to the pain that occurred then and she feared that she might be starting a new psychic period of her life. I treated her by giving her a zero balancing session – with the aim of allowing the energy to flow past any block. At one point I felt the energy flow and she started sobbing very deeply. Over the next three dyads she faced a major issue in her life. It was extremely important and very profound – in my view it was the block that the kundalini had run into. She came back to me and then I used the acupuncture grounding points to try to ground the energy. Within another two dyads the pain at the base of her spine had disappeared and she had no further difficulties.
There are a number of indicators of a kundalini energy process starting
(a) a tingling or itchiness between the genitals and anus or at the very base of the spine
(b) an inability to sleep. This is not just insomnia, it is like a manic wakefulness.
(c) overpowering emotions, especially of love towards others
(d) the desire to groan or make strange noises
(e) extremely powerful sexual feelings and urges –to the point where it feels overwhelming and impossible to control
I do not normally communicate these symptoms to people because they will then fabricate them (unconsciously). It is best to keep them to yourself and use them in evaluating whether someone is in kundalini difficulty or not.
As far as I can tell the best a person can do is to surrender to whatever the kundalini wants to do. It also appears that energy management techniques (such as acupuncture or zero balancing) helps this – but only if the person is willing to surrender. The difficulty in the context of an EI occurs when the person is charged sexually. Follow the advice Charles Berner gives in the Master’s manual, but if this fails and an energy grounding technique fails then you have a potentially serious problem. My own experience with kundalini says that it is not to be messed with. If the participant decides that they want to face it and deal with it in their own way that is fine, your job is to warn them that they may suffer physically, emotionally or mentally as a result.
Basically you want to aim to get the person to surrender to whatever it is the kundalini wants them to face and to assist the person in calming the energy flow down. The surrender may involve freaking out emotionally or allowing their body to move and convulse in an involuntary fashion. All grounding exercises will help calm the energy down; this includes getting the person to walk barefoot outside, standing on their feet, getting them to do intense physical exercise, eating meat, drinking alcohol, having sex – and acupuncture, shiatsu, zero balancing and similar treatments.
Incidentally as far as I can tell danger arises on Intensives because the kundalini can be released when a person is powerfully affected by another person’s direct experience, but does not have an experience of their own. This is clearly quite likely on long Intensives – and it is also quite likely for you as the Master. On the six week I consciously held back from diving into people’s experiences in order to reduce the chances of having another kundalini episode. It also seems to me that the more releases I have had then the easier it is for them to be triggered again – which is another reason why I am now more wary of throwing myself into other people’s direct experiences.
For someone who knows nothing I have speculated enough!
Note added 2024. The discussion below is updated in the Zero Balancing Appendix. As stated earlier, it was a gross error to include this as part of the six week Intensive.
However it was my concern with kundalini that persuade me to introduce Zero Balancing (a gentle and minimalist intervention type of bodywork that helps align energy and structure within the body – it is described in detail in an Appendix) into the six week I ran. It seems to have worked – in the sense of preventing any major kundalini releases. However it also had a profound effect on the level of contact and type of experiences people had on that Intensive. The external symptoms were
(a) there were comparatively few dyads within which there was a very intense contact between the participants
(b) experiences came very quietly and gently and without any significant energy phenomena.
(c) it was extremely difficult for me and the participants to gage the depth of experience. Some very experienced people thought that their experience was just a shallow glimpse – but it continued to develop over the next day or two and became a major experience!
(d) some people had “realisations” whilst having the Zero Balancing (ZB) sessions. These were indirect experiences of Truth that were somehow triggered by the ZB process. In one case the person had the same “realisation” when treated by a different person after the Intensive.
I was concerned, both during and after the Intensive, that the ZB had undermined the Intensive in terms of inhibiting “deep” direct experiences. However it is now (four months later) clear that this was not the case. Many of the participants, including some I know very well, have been changed, and changed their lives, far more profoundly than ever before – and in all the cases I know well the person had previously had a deep experience on a two seek Intensive. Indeed these same people have found it easier to integrate their experiences than previously. So my current evaluation is that the combination of Zero Balancing and Long Intensives is a good one that produces more profound changes in people than a long intensive without ZB. Here is what I wrote to participants after the end of the six week;
“The last time I wrote I was particularly preoccupied by the role that the Zero Balancing had played during the six week. Shortly after writing to you I became quite sad, then depressed. I found myself crying for no apparent reason. Eventually during my meditation the reason surfaced – in my own estimation I felt that I had failed to achieve what I wanted in running the six week. In particular I wanted to have several people end up in the state I found myself in after the six week in which I participated in 1982. That did not materialise and zero balancing certainly had a large hand in that. The zero balancing virtually eliminated any chance of a kundalini release and also substantially changed the nature of the direct experiences that occurred. So, based upon the criterion I had set up for myself I had failed. That was what I became depressed about.
However John Hamwee – one of the zero balancers on the Intensive – challenged my view that the ZB had in some way undermined the Intensive. We had some exchanges of e-mails and finally a long conversation about enlightenment, kundalini and zero balancing. The outcome, at least for me, was a deeper understanding that
- there are significant energy effects associated with direct experiences, and one of them is a release of kundalini energy
- when a person has a direct experience their body and energy system is altered so that they can handle the kundalini released.
- when a person is energetically affected by another person in a direct experience state (the so called contact high) their body is not prepared for any kundalini release – and it is then likely to cause the person to run into difficulties
- the zero balancing seems to do two things. First it significantly reduces the energy released when direct experiences occur – including the kundalini energy. Second it seems to allow all energy to flow more easily throughout a person’s body – including energy picked up in contact highs.
The reduction in energy associated with experiences changes their nature quite significantly. This was something noted by Charles Berner when comparing Zen experiences with EI experiences. He noticed that in Zen the physical stresses were much greater so there were generally greater energetic phenomena associated with Zen experiences – but the essence of what was experienced was the same. The subjective sense of the experience is different, so too are the observable effects. Thus the differences between Zen experiences and normal EI experiences are of the same nature as that between normal EI experiences and experiences with Zero Balancing. Inadvertently I had been using features of the energetic phenomena to gauge the depth of an experience. This is why I could not evaluate experiences on the six week effectively. It also caused me to examine a lot more carefully what I meant by the depth of a direct experience and why I valued it.
To cut a long story short I realised that it all came back to my own experiences on the six week in 1982. That Intensive really did transform my life totally, and my way of explaining the transformation was that the experiences were particularly deep. But that is a gross oversimplification. There were four ingredients that caused my life to change; the self inspection; the direct experiences, the kundalini release and my decision to make changes in my life.
There is no way that I can untangle these factors, they all contributed to the process of unfolding that is continuing even today as I write this letter. And of course what I really wanted for the people participating in the Intensive I Mastered was for them to set out on a similar process of transformation. When I reached this conclusion I reviewed the letters I had received from participants and also looked at the evidence I had from my contact with participants since the Intensive. My conclusion is, overwhelmingly, that the six week was a resounding success. In fact I am bowled over by the changes in the participants I have seen and been around since the six week. This means a great deal to me – not least that I have succeeded in passing on that which was given to me in 1982. It reverses the conclusion that I made after last writing to you. My current view is that adding zero balancing to a long Enlightenment Intensive is a successful strategy. It changes the nature of the process to include more healing at the physical and energetic levels, and it seems that this makes it easier for people to integrate what they gained from the Intensive and hence make changes to their lives.
One of the difficulties of assessing a process like the six week on the basis of the changes it makes to participant’s lives is that all such changes are controlled by the individual’s choice. It is therefore all the more surprising that so many participants have been making profound changes.
My own understanding came to a resolution last weekend when I was delivering my last EI lecture on day 3 of my last EI. I found myself saying “an enlightenment experience does not make you a better person. What it does is shows you what you can become, how you could relate, how you could live. It provides you with compelling evidence of what you could be if you allowed yourself to make the necessary changes. But you still have to make the decision to make those changes – it just gets a hell of a lot easier if you know where you are going and how wonderful it will be when you get there. So the experience does not make you a better person, it shows you what you have to do to become a better person. But you still have to do the work, and you have to do it continually, every day. ”
This also makes it clear why it is appropriate that I should stop running Intensives. The focus of my own interest has shifted away from having experiences towards more steady growth work aimed at perfecting the way I am in the world. It is now more important to me what daily practice to use than having another enlightenment experience. This is just where I have got to – but I find that it undermines my energy for pushing people towards having experiences on Intensives. I did not understand any of this when I made the decision to stop running Intensives about eighteen months ago. It is therefore all the more surprising to me that events should have unfolded in the way that they have to show me these things that I needed to learn! The universe is remarkably efficient!”
Note added in 2006:
If I were to run a very long Intensive again I would not include zero balancing as a core part of the process. Talking to people who have taken a range of long Intensives it has become clear that the zero balancing did profoundly affect the experiences people had – to the point where they were unable to recall them after a year or so. There were significant shifts in people as a result of taking the six week – but less associated with the actual experiences themselves. However I would make zero balancing available to people who wanted or needed it – indeed I now do this as a standard part of all the EIs I run. I have trained enough to be able to give a basic ZB to someone and have found this sufficient to handle extreme energy or physical discomfort phenomena on Intensives. I would also organise some form of physical treatment to assist me in coping with the stress of running a very long EI. I was probably the greatest beneficiary of the ZBs given during the six week in 1998.
A Master's Path 