I'm not an expert on scripture. I'm writing from my own experience of things waking up in my body, and from what I've learned through my own meditation practice.
Much has been written about Kundalini awakening. Either in traditional Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, or more recently in the New Age yoga community. Less so about coming into your 'light body' though. Daoism intricately covers a lot of something like that if you know where to look. What the difference is, I sense, but even having gone through a few years of it, I still couldn't quite explain it. These are different systems and as much as we'd like them to neatly overlap, from what I've experienced they're related but not quite the same, and that has real implications when these energies actually start to come alive in your body and it stops being theory.
I'm also in a position of having had around forty ceremonies with Hindu tantric deities directly in the driver's seat, plus a few from Buddhist and Daoist angles. This maybe makes me biased. Or maybe it gives a more direct perspective for people like us. I don't know.
My experience doesn't neatly fit into one box and it's not complete. I'm four years in from when it really kicked off. And when I say 'it', I mean some combination of Kundalini activation, the Daoist version — I was doing a lot of qi gong at the time — and what I generally think of as 'energy body activation'. I'm offering it because, although still pretty rare, it's not just me going through this, and first-hand accounts out there are generally pretty thin. Either people don't want to share anything about it, or it's wrapped up in over-inflated claims about how much of a 'guru' they've become after their mystical experiences.
But the two extremes reveal an important point about what the energy actually can do. On the positive side, it integrates to make you a genuinely more awakened person with nothing to prove, and on the negative side, it fails to integrate into a healthy ego structure and you're prancing around on TikTok wafting incense. It's a fine line.
The sensational stories get traction. The people who have a sudden awakening, go through a sharp crisis and come out transformed are probably more interesting to read about than someone whose life gradually slipped into obscurity and spent years sitting on the sofa with a box of tissues while a slow and painstaking process took place. But if you're in that boat, I hope this offers some comfort. And if you're not but you found your way here, well, there's probably a reason for that.
Shaktipat
In Hindu tantra they have the term Shaktipat or when spiritual energies begin to wake up. It's typically transmitted by a guru and a lot will claim that's the only way that it happens, but I suspect that's just patriarchal and hierarchical bolster. These forces don't give a shit about what your guru does — when it's your time it's your time. Yes, they might be the mechanism, but plenty of people who haven't been near a guru 'get activated'.
What that looks like initially isn't necessarily fireworks and orgasms, as much as the Shaktas in Bali would insist otherwise. It's your life falling apart. Again, I'm not an expert here. But I think I'm on solid ground when I say it includes the phase where you simply have the disturbing feeling that the safe and acceptable life you've been living up till now isn't going to cut it.
For me, it was sitting at my desk in Microsoft dreaming of mountain ashrams. For others it's an illness, or a death in the family. Many people have this phase one way or another. People come to me all the time for readings wondering what to do, not fully conscious yet that that's what's taking place. Fewer, though, actually listen to that call. And fewer still act on it.
I don't know if this is the only way. I think it explains why a lot of 'people on that path' don't have kids. But I also see other types of paths — people who spend their whole lives in an ashram or monastery in daily devotion, parents or caregivers and people who serve their community who are doing very real spiritual maturation work in the process — so won't offer any fixed answers here, just thoughts.
Anyway, my own leap of faith was to train as a yoga and meditation teacher and quit my job. I already had a practice, but I had to make the leap. It's a test of commitment and trust and it felt necessary to progress. Not just to be an 'armchair philosopher' or 'weekend gardener' version of a spiritual practitioner. To actually risk something.
The spiritual practice was necessary too, as I think it is for many people. Sure, your karma might be so strong that you were a Saint in a previous life, and you were destined to spontaneously awaken. It happens. But for the rest of us, or at least for me, I needed some time to build the 'Bodhicitta' in Buddhist terms — the spiritual will — and to prepare my body and mind. My diet changed. I quit drinking. I stopped hanging out with some friends. I became more boring in many ways and even erred towards being a painful green juice person as I reorientated towards a more 'spiritual' framework for being. I call this the Lulu Lemon phase. It's ok. There's still something real behind it. And they do make good leggings.
Tapas
As the tapas phase, the 'fiery cleansing', starts to kick in more, you can feel driven by something you can't name. Something that feels like it's coming from outside.
I wasn't ready to run off to India. Not yet. But I enrolled for another 500hr yoga teacher training with Sianna Sherman — a well-regarded American teacher with a decent background in actual Hindu tantra. The course was in London and she weaved that work just comfortably enough with contemporary vinyasa-style asana to make it tolerable for the part of me that was still clinging on to my normal life. I didn't want to disrupt my new comfort zone of regular classes and events I was hosting across the city in my Lulu Lemons.
I was in class with her one morning and a girl started convulsing. It looked like epilepsy. Few of us really understood what was going on, but this was her having a Shaktipat in the deeper sense — her whole body was rewiring energetically. Later that module, I had a breakdown. I was in a flood of tears and Sianna saw what was happening. "Your soul knows this journey very well," was all she said. I lay down in savasana once it had died down and heard a voice say to me "you've earned your spiritual stripes." I didn't know what it meant.
Kick off
A month later, the week before Covid happened, I lost all my work and over those next few months ended up moving into a van to begin my 'soul wandering' phase. I've written about that elsewhere so I'll skip it here, but it was the next level of the game for me. More tests. All of it driven by a force that felt like constant 'pressure' — as well as these very visceral zaps that felt like they were coming from the sky blasting my crown every ten minutes. But was really a deeper part of me calling me home.
I found myself in my first ayahuasca ceremony in Wales and set the intention to clear my 'shakti block', which was feeling very real now. The next day, in the supermarket, was the first time I felt the 'energy' moving through my system in a way I wasn't controlling. Something was making me dance to the background music. It was weird.
As I got to Peru and found myself at the ayahuasca centre, I began a rigorous schedule of spiritual practice and drinking regularly. Within a few months my shakti was going nuts. My arms were flying up into the heavens every thirty seconds, I was getting blasts of energy up my spine, making spontaneous mudras at the mere mention of a spiritual word, and randomly just dropping to the floor. I looked like a crazy person. This went on for about a year, accompanied by a whole weather system of emotions — bliss turning into rage and depression on an hourly basis. It was really destabilising and hard to be with. My only comfort was that a couple of the others I was with were also going through a similar thing, and so, at least there, it was 'normal'. I hate to think what that would have been like in the 'real world'.
Slowing down
My energy channels began to open. I had the unique fortune of having this happen by a new automatic action of my head turning from side to side all day long, using a strong pulling movement as leverage to begin reorganising my channels, tissues and chakras. It looked like a neurological disease from the outside but on the inside I could feel the intense movement, pops and cracks as blockages were being burned through by the heat of the energy and the movement. My bones began to move, my skull cracked open, and all kinds of 'supernatural' looking stuff came and went. All I could do was sit for hour after hour, month after month, tracking what was happening with my mind and letting it do its thing.
I learned that effort was counterproductive — it just creates tension. That was a very big diversion from the yogic approach, which is all about practice and amplifying what's there. Much less than the stimulating kriyas found in Kundalini yoga and the like, my system was so overheated that even gentle pranayama was too strong and I found that, with a spine and channels newly bursting with all the energy, even a simple cat and cow was too intense. I stopped any other practice than just sitting, tracking. In a ceremony around that time I asked Kali what was happening. She said, 'we're doing this, but gently. The human psyche is a fragile thing.' I knew what she meant.
Integrating
All my chakras were transforming. Not just 'opening', but restructuring. And over time they viscerally went from the double spinning vortex shape to expanding out into giant spheres, bigger than my body, and beginning to overlap. I noticed how a blockage in my third eye chakra could impact my toes for example, and learned a lot about the energy system that isn't in the books through my own healing and tracking. Various other healing and psychic capacities opened up.
A few years into this process and things are still unfolding, but more calmly now than before. It's become more about the steady inner work of recognising my patterns of thinking and feeling that I'm outgrowing and letting them go. Very ordinary. Same as before. I track where I might be getting inflated by it and remind myself what Kali showed me; that it's not about anyone being special — we all are — but it's about it being special. All of this. The chance to wake up more and more to the experience of Being. I still feel like I have a long way to go but I'm also grateful to feel more connected to the larger cosmos now in a way that's physical not just conceptual.
