Kundalini: Allowing vs. forcing

This theme has been coming and going from my field, But I have not even tried ”making up my mind” about it. But today I found an interesting podcast about it and felt instant resonance. I’ll put the link in comments.

There is something in the whole idea of deliberately awakening an enormous force within the human system that has always made me cautious. Probably because I know, intimately, my own tendency towards forcing things to move. The belief that if something is opening naturally,it’s still not fast enough, maybe I can help it along. This comes again to the shadow of control.

And as I come more aware of this pattern, I can easily say that I no longer believe that these forces should be forced open.

I know someone who, at a very young age, went through an intensive training in India specifically intended to awaken kundalini. His psyche broke under the experience. Many years have passed, and what happened then still affects his life today.

My own story is different, but there is an uncomfortable similarity.

Around 2021, something began opening in me naturally. I would now describe it less as an awakening and more as a remembering. I was not taking substances or trying to produce altered states. Something simply began revealing itself. My perception changed. My relationship with consciousness changed. There was a sense of remembering something that had never actually been absent.

And then my old pattern entered the picture.

I know how to steer this boat. Let’s go deeper!

Instead of trusting the pace at which this process was unfolding, I decided, consciously or unconsciously, to accelerate it. I experimented with kambo and ayahuasca. What followed was not a beautiful linear expansion into higher consciousness. My psyche essentially came apart and had to reorganize itself from the ground up.

Knowing what I know now, I would never approach the process in that way again.

My nervous system was already carrying the consequences of an extremely difficult and traumatic period of life. What I subjected it to was not gentle. Whatever meaning I can now find in what happened does not change that. It was violent to a system that was already struggling to hold what life had given it.

This is where my recent contemplation of Pratyabhijñā, within Kashmir Shaivism, has touched something very deep in me.

Pratyabhijñā means recognition. Re-cognition. To recognize again.

Its orientation feels radically different from the part of spirituality that is constantly trying to get somewhere. To activate something. Open another chakra. Raise the kundalini. Break through the ego. Reach another dimension. Attain another state.

Pratyabhijñā points towards something almost embarrassingly simple:

What if there is nowhere to get to?

What if awakening is not the manufacturing of an extraordinary state, but the recognition of what has always been here?

This does not make kundalini practices wrong. Kundalinī is Śakti, the living movement of consciousness itself, and it has an important place within the tantric traditions from which Kashmir Shaivism also emerged. The distinction I am interested in is therefore not really between kundalini and Pratyabhijñā.

It is between forcing and allowing.

Between trying to make consciousness open and becoming quiet enough to recognize that it already is.

Between treating the human being as a locked door that needs to be broken through and understanding it as a living organism whose unfolding has its own intelligence.

I have become deeply suspicious of any spiritual practice, teacher or substance that suggests the violence of too much, too fast is justified because the destination is called awakening.

The nervous system is not an obstacle to enlightenment. Neither is the ego, your personal mind.

These aspects are part of the intelligence.

When resistance appears, maybe it’s not so much the ego desperately preventing our liberation, but the organism saying: not yet, not like this, not this much.

There is a profound difference between a flower opening because the conditions have become right and pulling its petals apart because we are impatient to see what is inside.

Both reveal the centre of the flower.

Only one allows the flower to remain whole.

This changes something fundamental in how I understand spiritual practice.

I am less interested now in practices that promise to take me somewhere. I am interested in what makes me sufficiently present to notice where I already am.

Less activation. More listening.

Less transcendence. More inhabitation.

Not forcing, but allowing.

This feels like another expression of the lesson life seems determined to teach me:

I can even try to surrender so hard that surrender becomes another form of control.

The same can happen with awakening.

The desire to awaken can become the very movement that prevents us from recognizing what is already awake.

I am genuinely curious about other people’s experiences with kundalini.

Not only the beautiful or expansive ones, but the difficult, confusing and destabilizing ones too. Experiences of spontaneous awakening, deliberate practices, energy moving through the body, things opening naturally, things perhaps being opened before the system was ready, and also experiences where nothing dramatic happened at all.

I am especially interested in what people understand differently in hindsight.

Did you feel that something needed to be awakened, or did it begin by itself? Did you experience a difference between allowing and pushing? And if you have walked with this for many years, has your relationship with kundalini changed over time?

I would love to hear the real stories, without needing to make them either sacred or pathological.

I feel there is something important we can learn from each other about the intelligence of timing.