My Kundalini Story

Beginning in middle of 2021 and lasting for about 6 months, I under went a series of expansive experiences. These started relatively small, in the midst of meditation, but escalated over the course of months until a powerful culmination and energetic “explosion” in early 2022. 

This came on me unsought and unexpected. I’ve been meditating and practicing yoga since for some 20 years, but I never expected this.

I have since learned the language of Kundalini and find that its frameworks and working models are most useful to me. I have not gotten any sort of “official analysis” or “diagnosis” but I figure as long as it’s working, that’s all that really matters.

During the first 6 months, I was experiencing what I now call “siddhis” and was led to find a therapist with specific sets of credentials, just in time for a huge amount of dissociated trauma to surface. It all felt strongly of divine timing.

She and the rest of my care team were my lifeline through the culmination of this energetic explosion, which caused dissociative barriers to crumble away or at least thin. Thankfully it was temporary as the content was entirely overwhelming and confusing, triggering paranoia, mania, and all manner of dysfunction. During this time, while the walls were “thin”, I was barely able to move due to pain levels. Old injuries, dissociated and poorly healed, along with a huge collection of body memories flooded my nervous system. 

It sounds awful, and in some ways it was, but paradoxically, I have never experienced bliss like I did during the worst of it. Periodically, I’d be hit with what I learned were called “kriyas” in the Kundalini community. These seemed to help realign and repair some of the worst of the injuries, including several poorly healed joint “dislocations”. I also slipped in and out various siddhis, especially Purna Brahma and Dharma Jnana. These were moments of profound grace, contextualizing and “defanging” the horrors I was finding in my past. 

After that peak, which lasted about 1 week, the barriers re-instated themselves (which was a mercy) but now I knew they were there, and the types of things that lay beyond them. It was then that the real work began.

Since then, I’ve been working through the mountains of mental, physical, and spiritual healing work I glimpsed from the proverbial mountain top. 

To understand and map my progress, I have come to rely on the book Kundalini Vidya. Based on my own self evaluation, I believe I entered the "restoration phase" in mid-2024 and remain there now, working primarily through an "Upper Vajra Nadi Process". My mind, body, and spirit are healing.

Spontaneous kriyas are a major part of this healing process. In this series of posts, I'll be sharing how I'm working with this energy as a sort of "Intuitive Inquiry" research process. Hopefully it will be helpful to others.

Getting to “here”

In the 2.5 years between the big reveal and now (Jun 2025) I have changed a lot. I don’t want to under-represent what has gone into this healing journey and make it sounds like “pure magic”. The magic of it has been primarily on a spiritual level - the experience gave me profound compassion and appreciation for my body by showing me what it was carrying around outside of my mental awareness (Van der Kolk, Bessel A. The Body Keeps the Score : Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2014.).

The experience invited me into a new sort of collaborative relationship. That was the most powerful thing. I learned, and am still learning, to hear/feel (e.g. interoception) my body after years of just looking at it in the mirror and seeing everything that was “wrong” with it. 

For almost a year and a half I could really only eat 1 meal. Everything else refused to digest. I had to strip out all meat, dairy, gluten, sugar, alcohol, caffeine, and ALL things processed for about 2 years. This devastated my social calendar.

After a protracted recovery period, some of these changes seem to be permanent, but in other cases I’ve been able to slowly reintroduce more variety, bringing my system back online with greater understanding of what is good for me and what is not. In this way I’ve learned intuitive eating, and to accept that what works for me one day does not mean it will work for me the next. I am now more flexible AND always listening.

Current Steady State

These days I dedicated 1 day a week to my "Kriyas". For now, it’s what works and what feels good for my body.  When I’m regular and committed, my body seems to feel cared for, seen, and its needs acknowledged. It knows I’m paying attention, and will hold onto the painful material that needs worked on for scheduled time. At that hour, on queue, it comes up to be worked. 

When I’ve missed my appointment, things decompensated, and it takes a while to come back to my center.  So I think consistency and having a certain amount of regularity is important. Bodies seem to appreciate that. But there’s no one size fits all. 

Eventually I expect / hope that I will be able to spread out my sessions throughout the week, and shorten them. Instead a weekly 3-6 hour session…perhaps it can be a daily 1 hour? But at present that feels very far away…maybe someday.

For now, and what I’m posting here as “Practice Logs” are my notes for each weekly session, however long it lasts. These are holistic sessions - mind, body, spirit - and I also find them scholastically fascinating. My research training has kicked in and I’m documenting them as such in hopes that others may find them interesting, or useful. 

In Closing

I believe there is something here, something ancient waiting to be "rediscovered", about how working with the body with intention, as a co-equal, co-conscious peer (rather than a meat bag that carries a brain and must be dominated). I believe this relationship shift can lead to significant personal and societal transformation. 

My experiences lead me to believe I am tapping into the very origins of Yoga (union), which is so much more than a “workout”; it is about reuniting the mind/body/spirit realms after any sort of separation. I think they knew how to heal trauma in a way that we have forgotten, or has been occulted. 

I hope someone out there will enjoy reading about my experiences, and perhaps consider joining me in this rediscovery of the ancient “spiritual science”. If it speaks to you, or if you are on a similar journey of Self discovery, I’d love to hear from you. Email me at aa@onebloomsigning.com .