kundalini awakening, Reiki energy healers?

Swami Kripalvanandji

Q.


I've got one more question for you sir -  What is your opinion on kundalini awakend energy type healers that help the process along?  About a month ago I paid for something called "Tummo" (have not gotten it yet) which is claimed to help the awakening process (karma burn type of stuff), this person also burns off Reiki symbols etc. 


A.

Have worked with "kundalini".  my first yoga teachers' training was with the controversial Yogi Amrit Desai at Kripalu in the 70s.   At that time, Yogi Desai was the preeminent "kundalini" folk in the West.  When his guru, Swami Kripalvanandji, came to the U.S. i was one of the folk lining the road, and going to his first talks.

my second yoga teachers' training was @ the Himalayan Institute with the also controversial Swami Rama, also highly skilled in kundalini practices and associated chakra and energy work.

Swami Rama

As you probably know, kundalini is energy which in some folk is active and intense.  It can lead to all sorts of strange manifestations, including what looks a lot like a seizure with significant distortions of the body into unusual postures and facial contortions.  

Stan Grof

 In its most severe manifestations it has been described as "...the psychological symptoms tend to mimic schizophrenia.  It is very likely, therefore, that such individuals may be diagnosed as schizophrenics..." (Bentov in "Stalking the Wild Pendulum"). 

 Stan Grof described the more severe manifestations as a"...spiritual emergency”, with “critical and experientially difficult stages of a profound psychological transformation that involves one's entire being.”

There are mountains of stuff written on the subject.  Lee Sanella's "The Kundalini Experience", and Gopi Krishna's and Stanislav Grof's works were most useful for me.  There are many active kundalini schools now like Yogi Bhajan's.  

In my own experience, i went through most of the above except i never reached, and  saw very few folk in the "kundalini centers" of the time, who were in an "emergency".  Most that i saw and what i experienced was what Stan Grof describes as "spiritual emergence".  The folk i encounter now are mostly in the "spiritual emergence" situation.

Chakras

The standard "story line" on kundalini manifestations is that there is "blockage", typically associated with one or more of the chakras, impeding the flow of energy from the bottom of the spine to the top. The chakras have a fundamental neuroanatomical credibility, however, as they roughly correspond to where there are bundles of nerves, or nerve plexes.  There are also endocrine glands roughly located where the chakras are traditionally described.  It would be surprising if it were otherwise, as many cultures have found these areas to be particularly "energetic".  There are many terabytes of info on chakras, some of it even useful.  

When i work with folk, or when Reiki folk who i have worked with, work on folk, they typically focus on the chakras.  Reiki folk also do energy work not associated with chakras.   Reiki was developed in 1922 so it is much more recent and less tradition-laden than kundalini which goes back a long, long ways.  Reiki has become somewhat "main stream" as an approach.

Working with folk, energy type healers attempt to determine where someone is likely "blocked".  Then they prescribe different breathing exercises, physical postures, mudras (hand gestures), yantras (shapes) and mantras to facilitate the gradual, "spiritual emergent", opening of specific chakras.   IME, sometimes this works well, sometimes "not so much".  As discussed in a recent blog, it is important to watch for the placebo effect when evaluating therapeutic effectiveness in any protocol.   Just believing that something is a great approach will sometimes be enough to generate significant therapeutic improvements. 

i often use in my personal practice, and in some classes, a variation of the process that Yogi Desai taught us at Kripalu.  Using some type of energetic breathing (pranayama) practices to generate the "kundalini", the practitioner then lets the body go into whatever arrangements it finds appropriate.  This can be a very useful therapeutic approach when one has a non-surgical injury of some sort like a pull, pinch, or misalignment.  

It may be almost impossible to figure out exactly how to access and activate such an area with traditional yogic approaches, but the body really has an amazing "wisdom" and knows exactly how to fix such a problem.  The arrangements that manifest may be very surprising and non-traditional, but it is often a very effective way to deal with such a problem.

This was also my first "understanding" of what is now a focal point of my work, surrender.  Once i learned that i could surrender to the body's energy, and trust it, that opened the path for later surrender of the one who believed he was running the show.


The field of kundalini and energy healing is very active and the purveyors are of widely varying degrees of capability and integrity.  


Ramana Maharshi did not encourage focusing on kundalini or the chakras as he felt it deflected attention from the more useful work on inquiry.  It is very easy to get sidetracked into a lifetime of gathering kundalini experiences and lose your way.  Nonethless, if kundalini manifests for you, it may be useful to find someone to work with to alleviate the "blockage".

That's my take on kundalini and energy work.  

Trust this is useful, or at least interesting.

stillness

gary