American Kundalini: One Westerner s Unexpected Journey with Universal Energy Copyright 2016 by Aaron Anderson

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2 AMERICAN KUNDALINI

3 American Kundalini: One Westerner s Unexpected Journey with Universal Energy Copyright 2016 by Aaron Anderson First Published in the USA in 2016 by Peacock Proud Press ISBN paperback ISBN ebook Library of Congress Control Number: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Book Cover and Interior Design: Melinda Tipton Martin melindamartin.me Portrait Photographer: Zack Benson zackbenson.com Editor: Laura L. Bush, Ph.D. laurabushphd.com DISCLAIMER: This is a work of nonfiction. The information is of a general nature to help readers know and understand more about Kundalini. Readers of this publication agree that Aaron Anderson will not be held responsible or liable for damages that may be alleged or resulting directly or indirectly from their use of this publication. All external links are provided as a resource only and are not guaranteed to remain active for any length of time. The author cannot be held accountable for the information provided by, or actions resulting from accessing these resources.

4 AMERICAN KUNDALINI ONE WESTERNER S UNEXPECTED JOURNEY WITH UNIVERSAL ENERGY AARON ANDERSON Peacock Proud Press

5 Kundalini is universal, but the context in which it unfolds is cultural. Much of what is written about Kundalini comes from an Eastern perspective. American Kundalini conveys one person s experience from a Western point of view.

6 For my parents Gwen and Richard, and my guides Mable and Ken, for teaching me what it means to show up in one s life.

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8 CONTENTS Foreword 1 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 11 1: Into the Unknown 21 2: Receiving Help 35 3: Unexpected Battles 67 4: Making Sense of Kundalini 97 5: Revelations 119 Appendix: Suggestions for Diet 139 Index 169 Notes 175

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10 INTRODUCTION When I started writing this book in December of 2015, after seven years of living with Kundalini, I didn t know if I was writing a book or a prolonged suicide note. Even after nearly a decade of living with Kundalini, I still had many questions about what it was doing in my body. What were these strange sensations accomplishing? Was I taking care of my condition well enough? What would I become after Kundalini? So many unknowns, coupled with reoccurring bouts of pain, left me confused and depressed. I couldn t see a way forward. Kundalini is a term that describes one of the most primal, transformative, and mysterious components of the human condition. Kundalini is Universal Energy that becomes activated in the body. Kundalini can happen during a particularly deep meditation session. Kundalini can also occur spontaneously to anyone at any time and under any circumstances. Eventually, it s likely that everyone will experience Kundalini in some way and at some time. According to Satyananda Saraswati, founder of Bihar School of Yoga and author of over 80 yoga books, including Kundalini Tantra, Everybody should know something about Kundalini, as it represents the coming consciousness of man. 1 11

11 KUNDALINI Kundalini s fierce flow first struck me after I d been meditating for just five months. Powerful currents overwhelmed my body, putting me into a dark, unfamiliar place I knew nothing about. The intense condition upended my life in every way. As I struggled to understand the peculiar physical and mental symptoms I experienced daily, I often feared that I was nearing the edge of madness or death. Searching for answers about my strange circumstances, I ran into one roadblock after another. Kundalini is universally available to all cultures, yet there is virtually no common understanding of the phenomenon in the West. (It s worth noting, too, that I am not referring to the commonly known Kundalini Yoga, a brand of yoga made popular in the United States by Yogi Bhajan.) Unfortunately, the available assistance in the Western world for dealing with Kundalini is scarce. Few of the resources I could find offered an intimate, detailed accounting of living with Kundalini. Kundalini has a long history in Eastern traditions where it s known as divine energy, evolutionary energy, and energy of consciousness. I turned to the East for answers, but because of language differences, I had difficulty understanding how I should manage my Kundalini symptoms. The information I found was often hidden in hard-to-understand metaphors such as lotuses or a goddess or in ancient texts using primarily classical Sanskrit. 12

12 IntroductIon What I did learn from these Eastern texts is that Kundalini is fraught with danger. I also learned that danger is why these texts were written in purposely confusing ways to keep Kundalini out of the hands of the untrained or unprepared practitioner. With the growing popularity of meditation, however, unsuspecting people like me are experiencing firsthand this powerful force. There could be hundreds of people currently experiencing Kundalini symptoms. There are undoubtedly countless numbers of other people undertaking a meditation practice completely unaware of their possible exposure to Kundalini and its major life-changing consequences. As I reached out to the few available Kundalini resources in the West, I discovered a lack of cohesive, clear, and compassionate instruction particularly for anyone like me, who doesn t fit a traditional spiritual or yogi archetype. The lack of useful advice during my Kundalini process frustrated me, so I ve decided to share my experience here in the most candid, careful way possible. I ve written this book to help shine a light on Kundalini for the general public and to give other modern laypeople an accessible guide that can help them through their own Kundalini experience. I ve divided the book into five chapters. The five chapters describe the first five distinct phases of my Kundalini journey: the beginning, the search for help, the struggle to understand Kundalini, making sense of Kundalini as best as I could, and then the insights I gained from my experience. 13

13 KUNDALINI Chapters 1 and 2 benefited from the time I had to contemplate and more fully comprehend my experience. Having thought about the difficulties I had experienced at the beginning of my Kundalini journey for a long time, I knew what I wanted to say and the words fell easily onto the pages of those first chapters, which serve as a wake-up call to the types of pitfalls someone can experience when they re unaware of the intense and unusual world of Kundalini. Chapter 3 was more challenging to write. It brings up taboo subjects that most Americans, including me, won t usually discuss, but Kundalini has a way of bringing the darkest recesses of the human psyche to the surface. When I started writing the book, I had no idea I would take the path of talking about some of these more private aspects of my life. In Chapter 4, the book became a tool of selfdiscovery. Writing helped me to make better sense of the complexities of Kundalini as it showed up in my life. I try to come to terms with some of the more intimate aspects of my inner life by looking at them closely through the magnifying lens of Kundalini. I share a frank discussion about love, sex, and money as they relate to Kundalini. In Chapter 5, I describe how I went about working on my inner issues, as well as the resolutions and insights I gained from doing such work. I explain the different types of healing modalities I used to help manage the intense emotions that my deep inner work brought to 14

14 IntroductIon the surface. I also wrote about the emotional, mental, and spiritual transformation available to anyone undertaking this kind of work. At the end of the book, I wrote an appendix that contains a compilation of dietary lessons I learned during my Kundalini experience. I spent numerous hours experimenting with nearly every item available at natural food and health stores. In the appendix, I ve listed the products that responded well to Kundalini and the ones that caused me severe problems. I talk about how different supplements, including medical-grade cannabis, interacted with Kundalini. Of course, not all of my suggestions will work for everyone. Each person will need to experiment to find out what works well for them, but my suggestions should give anyone experiencing Kundalini a better chance at easing his or her way through the difficult process. While writing the book, I sometimes struggled to find the right sequence of words to properly describe some of the more poignant moments of my Kundalini journey. My typical writing style failed to capture the essence of the experience. To try and properly convey these moments, I ve adopted a method of italicizing certain passages as a signal for you, my reader, to pause and reflect on the arrangement and content of the words separate from the normal rhythm of my writing. 15

15 KUNDALINI Some topics I write about in the book may be hard for some readers to believe. If you re skeptical about an afterlife, for example, you may have to temporarily suspend your disbelief, so you can be open to understanding Kundalini s process as I experienced it. I tried to provide enough information to give the more unusual events as much context as possible. While reading, it will be helpful to keep in mind that, with Kundalini, fact is often stranger than fiction. Many people reading this book will have had similar experiences with the supernatural. These events can be obvious and pronounced or nearly imperceptible. Science tells us that what we see with our normal human senses is only a fraction of what s actually around us. When we engage in deep stillness and pay close attention to the subtle and not so subtle patterns in our life, we can open ourselves to experiencing a wider spectrum of reality. I ve learned through study and personal experience that we can even heighten our awareness of the natural world and raise our consciousness. Kundalini is part of an unspoken tradition of secrecy. The process is so bizarre and unsettling that it s easy to discount the person who describes his or her symptoms. To protect one s self from a disbelieving public, many people undergoing these unusual experiences instinctively remain silent. This vast silence created one of my greatest hardships with Kundalini, so I ve decided not to participate in the secrecy tradition. If more people wrote articles or books like mine and 16

16 IntroductIon talked intimately about Kundalini, it would have been easier for me and any other person going through the experience to help make sense of Kundalini and to manage its acute symptoms. I hope that my story will demystify the process and reduce other people s suffering. Keeping Kundalini secluded in monasteries, ashrams, and ancient texts no longer makes sense in our open, modern, rapidly evolving society. I know by writing about my experiences that I ve opened myself up to misinterpretation, misunderstanding, and criticism. The book may make it more difficult for me to have the same business relations I ve had in the past with my clients; some friends may look at me with skepticism and a raised eyebrow; the public may ridicule my experience; and fundamentalist yogis may denigrate how I proceeded in my process. I ve decided these risks are worth taking if my book benefits someone experiencing Kundalini, particularly because I offer a progressive, intimate point of view about Kundalini that is almost entirely absent in print or online. I write in detail about the challenges I faced with Kundalini. The process was extremely difficult. And while it contained moments of great pain and confusion, it s ultimately a journey I would take again. I see Kundalini as a blessing because it allowed me to see the world with a wider lens. Kundalini taught me to be less selfinterested and more open to love. Kundalini moved my focus from being centered on the material world to a place that s more oriented to the immaterial aspects of 17

17 KUNDALINI life. Kundalini shined a light on the darker aspects of my life that I had kept hidden deep inside my subconscious mind. I chose the title American Kundalini for its simplicity and directness in describing the context of my journey. The title is meant to be provocative, not patriotic. I hope the book is a catalyst for conversation about what it means to culture jump the inevitable result that happens when one explores the wisdom and ways of someone else s culture and traditions and then uses that knowledge to help make sense of experiences that happen in their own lives. Naturally there are complicated issues that arise, with benefits and pitfalls that should be taken into account when you look outside your own culture for answers to life s questions. I use terms like American, West, and East in the broadest sense possible. I understand these terms are problematic. For instance, when I say East, I mostly mean India. I use these overgeneralized terms for ease of common reading. I also intend for the title to make my book quicker and easier to find by someone who wants and needs information about Kundalini from a Western perspective. I ve written my story to feel as raw and unfiltered as I lived it. The book may have benefited from more technical or editorial input, but either might have created an additional layer of refinement between my experience and the story you re reading. I ve written in the most unaltered and authentic way I could. I ve tried 18

18 IntroductIon to keep the story as spare as possible so that only the most profound and meaningful details are revealed. Some names in the book have been omitted or changed to protect the privacy of those individuals. I wanted to speak frankly about people s influence on me without putting them on the spot. I greatly appreciate all who participated in my Kundalini journey in both positive and negative ways. I learned from both. As I release this most personal story of my life, I m hopeful that the tale will land in the right hands and will be helpful and informative to those who need it most. It s very likely this book will be more beneficial to a generation yet born a generation for whom the terms Kundalini and Universal Energy will not be so alien. 19

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