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This is the forth article of the series "Psychedelics and Kundalini". To read the first two articles, check out our online library.
Kundalini-like energy comes, arching my back. […] I’m suspended […] held in a cocoon […] unable to move. […] I’m barely breathing. […] There’s not enough time - my parents are dead. I cry and connect with other times I’ve been abandoned – at birth, in hospital […]. Somehow, I’ve made a life decision that crying is futile, expressing anger is futile. […] Feelings, caught in a capsule - inexpressible, unreachable. I’m like an infant […] retreating inwardly, almost to the point of death. I’m back in my cot, banging my head against the stiles to block out feelings of rage, despair. A part of me died, then – I will not fight or defend myself. I accept what happens and swallow it, rather than risk losing. There is no hope of winning.
(Holotropic Breathwork, October ’97)
I’ve been trying to make sense of my experiences of what Claudio Naranjo calls the ‘kundalini phenomenon’. This is the last part of my account.
So far, I’ve shared what some people think happens when kundalini is activated – the powerful physical sensations, and the part ecstatic, part terrifying thoughts and feelings that can come up.
Now I want to go further, and explore with you the degree to which these narratives ring true in the light of my own experience of kundalini – first during breathwork, and after that during meditation, psychedelic journeys and spontaneously, during the night.
Grappling with my own experience
To do that, I will share some of the content of my experiences and show how I tried to organise it.
I had been left with a lot of unintegrated material from a time in the late 90s, when I spent 6 weeks in the Amazon rainforest. There, in Mapia, a Santo Daime community, I participated in frequent, all night Ayahuasca ceremonies. Subsequent spontaneous, mostly night-time, episodes of kundalini had also been hard to make sense of.
I mentally ‘shelved’ those experiences, which continued to exist in a kind of ‘psychic holding pen’ for future processing. My training with the Institute of Psychedelic Therapy offered a good opportunity to reconnect. What follows is the outcome of that.
What came up for me is not in any way unique or even particularly interesting, but I hope it will give a concrete example of how one person (me) approached the process of ‘integration’.
Maybe that’s helpful.
I wonder if, in the space for comments below, you would like to share how you have integrated your own experiences, or what you have found difficult to make sense of.
You may remember from an earlier blog that, to try to find an intuitive ‘bridge’ between different theories, I focussed on numinous experiences. I hoped to find a resonance between the theories, as they tried, in different ways, to capture the ineffable.
I went through my notes looking for such experiences, either as they related to potential complexes in my psyche or to kundalini activation, hoping to find a resonance in the way psychological and spiritual theories reflect on them.
This is how I tried to organise the material. Don’t feel you’ve got to plough through it all – it’s just to give you a feel for what I tried to do.
The first column gives what appeared to be possible complexes or COEXs, as Stan Grof calls them. The second shows how they appeared to show up in Holotropic Breathwork and work with psychedelics, and the third, how they were triggered at times of kundalini activation.
Overall, the different theories did help me make sense of my experience.
I can see possible complexes, formed around early childhood circumstances (hospitalisation and treatment) which had been too difficult for my young ego to hold in conscious awareness. Parts of these, and later of adult experiences, were split off into the intermediate field - the area in our psyche where personal and collective unconscious shade into one another. There, they incurred an archetypal charge.
Kundalini seemed to energise these complexes, making me aware of them. This involved a kind of deeply immersive, experiential, dramatized thinking, similar to Carl Jung’s ‘active imagination’. Jung’s way of engaging with unconscious material helped me distance myself from what were, at times, frightening experiences.
The other thing that helped, when I was able to open to that awareness, was having a sense of myself in the context of something vast and numinous, which contained me.
Some questions
Sometimes my complexes seemed to be activated without me having an embodied, physical sense of kundalini. Might we register complexes mentally and emotionally, while being unaware of the embodied, energetic processes going on alongside?
We usually think of integration in mental terms, as a process of making the unconscious, conscious - finding meaning in our experiences, and a place for them within our world view and sense of ourselves.
Might what Lee Sanella calls the physio-kundalini be a non-conceptual, embodied dimension of the integration process? Might psychological integration and experience of kundalini be two sides of the same coin?
Dana Swain suggests that kundalini is a connection between the ego and the Self which presents in the physical body as bodily sensations and experiences, in the psyche as image and feeling, and on a transpersonal level as numinous experiences resulting in psychological change.
Could we think of the point these levels interpenetrate with its dynamic, numinous quality as a complex in its own right – a kundalini complex?
If there is a kundalini complex, perhaps, with exposure to Eastern thought and practices, a Western form of the complex is being constellated. This might make it easier for us to become aware of kundalini, and explain why more Westerners seem to be having kundalini-like experiences.
Further musings
Kundalini is a universal, vital, evolutionary force. It’s active in all of us, so what does it mean when people say it’s ‘domant’ until it’s activated? Why don’t we all feel it?
This is where I’m rapidly getting out of my depth!
It seems our ability to sense the energy can develop, and the energy can manifest more or less forcefully. Perhaps we don’t always register it because we are more or less defended, distracted, or sensitised to the experience. Perhaps different qualities of kundalini find expression at different times in our development.
People practice meditation for years to develop stable access to the experience of ‘classical’ kundalini, as described in ancient Tantric texts. The ‘kundalini phenomenon’ as it’s described in the West may be a looser definition, capturing a wider range of related experiences.
I also wonder whether powerful techniques like breathwork and work with psychedelics might allow us to drop into layers of our psyche where the ego is less active or relevant. Maybe, once we have experienced the energy ‘incidentally’ in that way, the neural networks are laid down so we can find it back more easily.
So what about safety?
If that’s true, that brings me back to one of my original questions - how safe is it to open to such powerful energies in anything but a disciplined, gradual way?
Psychedelics and other ways of entering non-ordinary states of consciousness are ‘kundalini activators’. With our ego partially suspended, we can be caught up in the rip-tide of a powerful, archetypal pull.
We need that Dionysian call to journey, but can it take us out faster and further than we can hold or integrate? Might we sometimes also need our defences to stop the experience of our inner wounding, infused with archetypal energy, from wounding us further?
Might the use of external triggers to loosen our defences make managing the opening more difficult? Might it, for some, leave their egos weakened, so that too much archetypal material floods their everyday consciousness (something Tim Read calls ‘high archetypal penetrance’), triggering a spiritual emergency?
There are no absolute answers to these questions, and everyone must weigh up the risks for themselves.
The importance of good ‘holding’ while we go through such experiences is stressed by many, however – a good ‘set’ and ‘setting’ for psychedelic experience, and good preparation and integration before and after.
In conclusion
When we enter deep psyche, this can bring experiences of kundalini-like energy. It is important that people who use psychedelics know this might happen, as an expression of an inner tendency towards growth and healing. If they don’t know what’s happening, they may try to resist the process, and be unnecessarily frightened.
As kundalini energy has an archetypal quality, perhaps a kundalini complex can form around an emotionally charged imprint, left by kundalini’s overwhelmingly powerful impact.
It might help Westerners to be able to psychologically conceptualise their experiences in this way, as it makes kundalini less frightening.
And there is another benefit.
The lens through which we perceive an experience affects what we see. Not having concepts to conceive of something, makes it hard to see it at all.
Having the familiar concept of a complex through which to understand the kundalini phenomenon (even if language can’t capture the ineffable) may make it easier for Westerners to register the experience. This may help to explain the increase in reports of kundalini-like experiences in the West, and the variations in the experiences described.
Finally, while mental forms of integration and the embodied experience of kundalini may be two sides of the same coin, it may be the experience of being held within something vast and numinous while our complexes are activated, that makes non-ordinary states so healing.
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I would love to know –
· What do you think of the concept of kundalini? Have you experienced anything like it, and were you engaging in psychedelic practices (Holotropic Breathwork or use of psychedelic substances) at the time?
· Do you resonate with the idea of kundalini energy as a movement towards growth and development - an inner healing tendency, part of the individuation process?
· Does thinking of kundalini as a complex make sense to you, and whether that way of thinking about it is useful?
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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