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This is the third article of the series "Psychedelics and Kundalini". To read the previous articles, check out our library.
I’m in a cave-like place, which fills me with dread. I encounter […] pointed teeth stained with blood, as though I am entering a mouth. Then I have a sense of facing Kali […] I feel paralyzed with terror. […]
When I face her […] to ask what she wants, I realize this is a totally irrelevant gesture. She is of a different magnitude from myself, a different kind of entity, of pure, impersonal, primordial, radiating power. She doesn’t 'see' me, or not me as I know myself. I can only offer myself to her.
I do not have an experience of dying […] but in that action I lose my body. I still exist, but I am no longer who/what I had been. I feel disorientated, lost, bereft and terrified. I can't 'work' with this, as I no longer exist to initiate action or movement. I feel desperate at not knowing if my 'sacrifice' has been acceptable. I have a sense that whatever happened is not of a 'personal' nature. She does not notice me or my action, like lightning does not notice a tree it strikes. My action has been natural and inescapable, but I do not 'reach' or 'find' anything. I just 'am’ no longer. I am desperately aware of that, unable to affect anything - I am alone and cannot express myself in that state. I feel like I have committed suicide.
(Holotropic Breathwork, October ’98)
In this, the third of my reflections on how we might make sense of kundalini experiences during psychedelic journeys, we are picking up our thread at the question of safety.
Are there dangers in opening ourselves up to the energy by using powerful techniques like psychedelic ‘medicine’ or Holotropic Breathwork?
I have certainly felt drawn into the rip-tide of a field of archetypal ‘gravitational pull’. There is no way I could have wanted to pull out of it, whatever the cost and whatever the damage to me I feared might be done. What is that?
Claudio Naranjo points to three polarities in consciousness, each of which runs between a more Apollonian pole (solar, rational) and a more Dionysian one (lunar, intuitive).
Not Doing – Letting Go runs from restriction and stilling the mind (Apollonian) to letting go and surrender of control (ego death) – the Dionysian pole. Both can result in a suspension of our ego (the Default Mode Network) which brings an expansion of mind beyond our normal, restricted ways of seeing and experiencing. Our awareness opens up to a spontaneous, dynamic, experiential flow.
Mindfulness – God-Mindedness runs from concentration on perception and emotion (Apollonian) to a focus on symbolic content evoking a sense of the Sacred (Dionysian). Experiences of the ‘here & now’ and visionary states can merge, so that we can experience ordinary things as being infused with a sense of numinosity.
Non-attachment – Love ranging from objective detachment (Apollonian) to a fiery love (Dionysian). Naranjo found that certain psychedelics tend to give experiences leaning one way or the other. LSD / Psilocybin / Ayahuasca tend to bring experiences of universal love, while other types of psychedelics, like Iboga and Ketamine tend more towards experiences of cosmic indifference.
Naranjo agrees that meditation and psychedelics are therapeutic because they suspend our conditioned personality and ways of seeing, freeing up a deeper, self-regulating, organismic process of growth and healing, but he warns us to be careful.
Even the ancient, more Dionysian Tantric practices of surrender, love and God-Mindedness presuppose a grounding in Apollonian yogic practices of tranquillity, non-attachment and bare attention.
The ego-suspension from psychedelics, says Naranjo, brings Dionysian surrender through a kind of ego-anaesthesia. Yes, this gives valuable initiatory experiences which are growthful and can form a powerful motivation to develop access to these states, but says Naranjo, these are only states of consciousness with a transient activation of kundalini. It doesn’t bring the kind of stable attainment a meditation practice might.
I also wonder about the risk of (re-)traumatisation at times when, under the influence of a psychedelic, our ego is overwhelmed by memories or other psychic content which is too difficult for us to integrate.
I remember Eric (my Jungian therapist) telling me we can never integrate the archetypes – we can only catch glimpses of them and must let them flow back into the unconscious.
I also know, for myself, there are conflicting feelings and experiences I cannot hold together in my conscious awareness.
The Draw of the Numinous
We saw earlier that what Jung calls the archetypes are universal, numinous, structuring elements in the collective psyche which have a compelling force.
Complexes have an archaic and mythological character, as they form in line with the archetypal structures which confer a degree of numinosity.
Numinosity itself, Jung says, is wholly outside of conscious volition. An encounter with the numinous transports someone into a state of rapture – a state of will-less surrender.
The experience of kundalini can have this kind of ecstatic, numinous quality.
The unitive field
Interestingly, the possibility of having a numinous experience of a field of being which lies beyond ourselves seems to align with new paradigm science. This tells us there is one integrated, interconnected, universal field of consciousness and relationships which infuses all of existence. This non-local consciousness is primary, and everything is informed by it.
David Bohm tells us that all things have two aspects - an explicate, physical and observable dimension is embedded in an implicate, non-physical one.
Ancient Tantric texts already speak of such a continuum of mind in matter.
Kundalini, individuation, and alchemy
Alongside the parallel processes of kundalini and individuation, Carl Jung found a similar process in Western alchemy. All of these processes decentralise our ego as we come to see ourselves more objectively, in context of a larger whole.
Alchemists, Jung thought, projected consciousness onto matter. Dana Swain goes one step further. Alchemists, she says, don’t just project consciousness onto matter – psyche actually infuses matter (including our body), which allows us, in certain states of awareness, to experience its numinosity.
The practice of Tantra and experience of kundalini, she says, are the Eastern equivalent of Western alchemy. Kundalini is what alchemists call the ‘philosophers’ stone’ – the ‘third thing’ that drives the alchemical process towards wholeness.
Through a series of interviews with 5 Westerners, Swain confirmed a synergy between her interviewees’ psychological process and their kundalini experiences.
Kundalini seems to act as a transcendent function, resolving deep seated conflicts and oppositions in the psyche, and grounding experience in a more embodied awareness.
Kundalini, Swain suggests, brings healing and transformation by activating people’s complexes, so that people recover aspects of experience that may have been traumatic, split off and given form in what Donald Winnicott and Donald Kalsched called the ‘transitional’ or ‘intermediate’ realm.
People with childhood trauma may initially experience kundalini as a threat, because they’ve built up strong defences against re-connecting with what they have had to split off from awareness to survive.
Experiences of the numinous are of central importance for healing, Swain says, because of the profound meaning they have for people. That’s what gives them their transformative power.
My experience
I hope this has given you a sense of the different theories and narratives I used to try to make sense of my own experiences.
In the last piece in this series, I will consider those experiences, whether the theory ‘fits’ and whether it helped to integrate them.
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About the Author: Jeannet Weurman, MSW, DipCouns, trained with Stan Grof in Holotropic Breathwork facilitation in the late 90s, and recently completed a two-year training in Deep Relational Process training (psychedelic-assisted therapy) with the Institute of Psychedelic Therapy in the UK. She co-facilitates a psychedelic integration circle in
Cambridge and is a volunteer guide with the Imperial College PsilOCD trail.
In four short articles about psychedelics, kundalini, Jungian psychology, and feminine
consciousness Jeannet will write about her own journey of integration of material she
found difficult to come to terms with. She stresses the need for training courses and
practitioners who offer preparation and integration for work with psychedelics, to be
well-informed about the phenomenon of kundalini, so they can prepare and support
journeyers, should such experiences arise.
She uses the experience of numinosity as an indicator of potential points of intuitive resonance between psychological and spiritual theories and proposes the possibility of the constellation of a ‘kundalini complex’, in the hope that such a familiar, psychological term might be helpful for Westerners in thinking about kundalini. Jeannet’s other interest is developing a trauma-informed approach in hospice and palliative care through the Trauma-Informed Palliative Care Project. She lives in Cambridge, UK.
The artwork, other than her own ‘mandala’ drawings at the start of each article, is used
with kind permission from visionary artist Ted Wallace. https://tedwallaceart.com/
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