This is an excerpt from Gabriel Morris’s memoir entitled “Kundalini and the Art of Being”. He has generously offered the book to the public free of charge, which can be found online.
“Late one December night, I lay meditating on my back at a
friend’s apartment in Austin, Texas, though I was far from being
in a state of peace. Turbulent thoughts and feelings were
rushing through me from the past days and weeks of emotional turmoil.
I lay there in silent stillness, eyes closed, struggling to focus my
scattered energy, searching for a place of serenity within myself so
that I might drift gently into the solace of sleep and dreams.
Finding that place wasn’t easy. There was such discordant energy
coursing throughout my consciousness: chaotic, disturbing thoughts,
deep feelings of fear and hopelessness, flashes of internal light, and
random energy coming from somewhere within my mind. I lay unmoving
despite my inner anguish, feeling it all, trying to let it flow
through, willing myself to find that space of inner peace.
Finally, I touched something within myself that felt balanced and
grounded beneath the confusion. It seemed real and connected, like
a sturdy shelter amidst a powerful storm. I entered this place and
pulled myself down beneath the turmoil.
I basked in relief as I ceased my struggling and allowed myself to
relax into this tranquil place. I could feel the storm of my distress still
raging all around me, but, for the time being, I was no longer engaged
in resisting it. Its presence even seemed to diminish somewhat. I even
indulged in this peace, wanting to hold onto it forever and not have
to face the discomfort that I had managed to leave behind. Somehow
I knew this could not be so.
I soon felt this quiet space begin to expand within and around me,
engulfing me entirely. Then, abruptly, I began falling slowly downwards.
At first, I was scared to be falling, but then, I realized that I
enjoyed the feeling of drifting slowly down in quiet darkness and
surrendered to it. The farther I fell, the more isolated my consciousness
became. Soon I had completely forgotten about my previous
turmoil. I only experienced myself falling down what seemed to be a
narrow tunnel of darkness within my own mind.
Eventually I began to slow down. Finally I became still again amidst
a vast darkness. I began moving around within this darkness to figure
out where I was and stumbled across a memory. I was three years
old, it was Halloween, and I was trick-or-treating with my father. We
came to a dimly lit house with a long front walkway. My dad stood
back near the street to let me walk up to the door on my own.
I walked timidly toward the door. It seemed like such a long way
and I was a little scared, especially with the dull front porch light.
Finally I got to the door, reached up, and rang the doorbell.
It chimed pleasantly, reassuring me. The door opened, and a woman
was standing there, reaching into a big brown paper bag of assorted
candy on a small table by the door.
“Trick-or-treat!” I said, proud of myself for having met the challenge,
raising up my own quarter-full bag of candy.
“Why, aren’t you a cute little boy,” she said. “Well, here you go…”
She dropped a few pieces of candy into my bag.
“Don’t forget to say thank you,” my dad called out from the street.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re quite welcome,” she said as she smiled and slowly closed
the door.
I turned to step down from the front porch. Just then, a shadow
loomed over me as a man leapt out from the darkness of a nearby
bush—arms raised overhead, mouth and eyes wide open, and gave
a blood-curdling scream, like a banshee about to pounce on his victim.
I screamed, terrified, dropped my bag of candy and ran crying to
my father.
“Hey, kid, c’mon—I was just joking around,” the man said, suddenly
feeling apologetic.
My dad was furious. He marched up to him from the sidewalk,
shaking a fist. “What the hell is your problem, you asshole, scaring
little kids like that?” He seemed on the verge of punching the guy in
the face, having been almost as surprised and scared by the event as
myself.
“I’m sorry,” said the man, cowering a little, clearly regretting his
actions now. “It was just a Halloween prank.”
“Yeah, real funny, scaring little kids half to death…” He reached
down to grab my bag of candy from the front steps and walked away
muttering, “Stupid goddamn jerk…some people…” as he took my
hand. We walked back home through the night as I cried, still baffled
by what had just occurred.
As I lay on the apartment floor deep in meditation, I relived this
scenario as if I were actually there. I felt the intense fear that had
engulfed me and remembered that it had stayed with me for a long
time. For weeks afterward I had talked about the boogeyman at
night, afraid of going to sleep with the lights out.
I became so involved with reliving this childhood memory, that
I completely forgot about my present situation I was brought back
to my body by a sudden, subtle movement at the base of my spine.
My mind went instinctively to this movement to see what it was.
As I brought my attention there, I felt the ball of energy move again.
Then I felt it rise slightly, as if it were trying to move up my spine.
I had a sense that this energy moving at the base of my spine—
whatever it was—was somehow connected to the intense feelings of
fear I was reliving in my childhood memory. I thought that perhaps
if I allowed this ball of energy to flow completely through me, the
process would dissolve all the unpleasantness associated with the
memory and I would be left with a feeling of contentedness in its
place.
I concentrated on this energy at the base of my spine until I felt it
move again. It felt something like a bubble moving up a straw. It rose
slowly but steadily, as if it were being sucked up by something. It
paused for a moment as it came to my neck and the base of my skull
and then exploded into my brain.
At that moment, I was assaulted by a rush of energy so powerful
that I literally thought it might kill me. It seemed to last an eternity
and yet only for. It felt much like an explosion or and electric shock. I
surrendered to this sudden flood of energy as it engulfed me, because it
was so unanticipated that I had no time to even attempt to resist it.
As the rushing sensation eventually began to subside, I was relieved
to find that I had survived. I hoped that the gentle, peaceful
presence I had anticipated would now replace the terrible and
unexpected shock I had just received, but unfortunately, I couldn’t
have been more wrong. I was horrified to find an overwhelming terror
roaring into my consciousness that, for the moment, eradicated
from my memory my earlier recollection of childhood fear. An evermounting,
cascading, crashing wave of crushing terror overtook me,
as if a dam had broken between my conscious and subconscious
minds and I were being flooded by unresolved experiences and feelings
buried deep within my soul. I waited for these overwhelming
feelings either to render me unconscious or else to pass through me
and then subside. But they did neither.
As the minutes wore on, the erratic energies crashing through me
became only more intense and unbearable. I was soon consumed
by the wish that I hadn’t done whatever it was I had just done. My
previous emotional turmoil—and even the frightening childhood
memory— were but feathers compared to the incredible weight of
psychosis that was now beginning to descend on me.
I soon began to notice within myself more explosions of energy,
like aftershocks of an earthquake. They came as if from the darkness
of my own mind, closer and closer to my conscious awareness until I
was hit by a steady wave of electric shocks in successively increasing
intensity.
As I lay there on my back feeling crushed, bombarded, and overpowered
by something I couldn’t even identify or locate in my consciousness,
I kept thinking, “This has to subside, this has to go away
eventually, this can’t go on much longer.” Yet, even as I was telling
myself this, the force of energy was increasing. Whatever this
disturbing power was that I had somehow brought into my consciousness,
it seemed it wasn’t going away any time soon. The brief
moment of peace and comfort I’d experienced during my meditation
felt now like a fading mirage of some kind—a calm before the storm,
a temporary stillness before the harsh and chaotic reality set in.
Finally, I got up from the floor, where I’d also been sleeping the
past few weeks, and began pacing back and forth, wracking my brain
to make sense of what had just happened. My rational mind tried to
come up with a plausible explanation for my sudden predicament. I
went over what I had just experienced—a ball of energy moving up
my spine while meditating that then flowed into my brain. I came to
the conclusion that there must be some sort of bodily fluid residing
in the spine, that wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near the brain.
Somehow I must have released this fluid, causing it to flow into my
brain, creating a chemical reaction of sorts. Although this flimsy explanation
managed to calm me momentarily, it did nothing to alter
my painful psychological symptoms.
Since it seemed that I wasn’t going to be falling asleep any time
soon, I put on some warm clothes and left the apartment to go for a
walk and get some fresh air. I hoped at least to distract myself from
whatever it was that had just occurred. It brought me some relief just
to get out of the cramped apartment, but when I came back to the
apartment and sat down at the dining room table, I realized that my
symptoms had not diminished. My physical activity seemed to have
increased the flow of energy coming from the base of my spine, further
intensifying the painful sensations within both my body and mind.
Sitting down and trying to relax increased my discomfort as well, as
my mind instinctively focused on the source of the pain, desiring to
alleviate it but, instead, giving it more power by its attention.
I had a fiery sensation at the base of my spine. I felt that I had to
stay continually focused on holding down this fire. I was afraid that
letting it rise freely would mean receiving more overpowering energy
already. My heart was pounding and skipping beats. I was now receiving
electric shocks at the tops of my feet and the backs of my
hands as well as from unknown places within my consciousness. I
felt as if some force was pulling away at my temples, trying to extract
my life essence; and I had a crushing sensation around my head, as
if my skull were in the grips of a large wrench. The fire at the base
of my spine was spreading upwards despite my attempts to control
it, engulfing my entire back in raging heat and pain. And the electric
shocks coming from my hands and feet were spreading throughout
my limbs to my torso, so that it felt as if the nerves, bones, and muscles
in my body were becoming electrically charged.
I decided to lie down on my thin mattress on the floor and try to fall
asleep. I hoped at least that unconsciousness would provide me with
some temporary relief, but I found that, exhausted from a day that
had been emotionally draining to begin with only to escalate into a
state of severe psychic imbalance, I was unable to sleep. Instead, I lay
there through the night enduring my inner torment, tossing and turning,
praying to drift into unconsciousness to ease my pain, or at least
give me some strength to regain my sanity in the following days.
If I had known at the time that it would not be days or weeks, but
years before I found myself in a state of mind that I could call manageable,
I doubt if I could have survived the awesome journey on which
I had just embarked. I had no understanding then of what had just
occurred or what might have caused it. I didn’t know that this was
a legitimate and well-documented spiritual phenomenon. Though I
had practiced yoga and was familiar with the term Kundalini, I didn’t
realize that this intense onslaught of energy originating in the base
of the spine was what it actually referred to. I didn’t know that there
was a positive side to this experience, bringing spiritual healing and
well-being. All I knew was that, for no reason that I could fathom,
my fundamental experience of reality had just been shattered—as if
I’d been struck by lightning out of a clear blue sky, and I was reeling
in shock from its damaging effects on my body, mind, and soul,
struggling to stay alive.”
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