Z2: Riding the Kundalini Dragon, Integrating Altered States

First off, see our other presenters here on these dates:

Wednesday 7/25: Julian
Thursday 7/26:      Delia
Friday 7/27:            Christiana
BREAK
Monday 7/30:       Michael
Tuesday 7/31:      Sa'Rah
Wednesday 8/1:  Daate
Thursday 8/2:       Mijit
Friday 8/3:            Jim


I didn't really know how to start this piece, but my awesome forerunners here have encouraged me to realize that there's no definite starting point. The only thing I knew was that it was going to be kinda LOOOONGGG....so, sorry.....:)

As quite a few people here on Zaadz already know, I'm in the process of healing from trauma and this process has made me super-aware of the energies in my body. Or, better put, it's helped me give a name and context to those energies, which have always been incredibly strong and sometimes scary.

I was born in 1977 and am 29 now. As a child, I was intensely artistic, solitary, and independent. I also had the feeling of just having come from somewhere amorphous, and that life was a sea of emerging shapes and forms, but that nothing was particularly solid.

At around age four, I stopped feeling safe in my environment, as my father began to be physically, emotionally and sexually abusive to my sister and I. Childhood was something of a dark nightmare, and I didn't really know what it was to feel safe. My body began to freeze. For as long as I can remember, my spine has felt cold, frozen, and like an electric coil that is sitting somewhere in there, sometimes jangling, sometimes prickling-but I have always been hyper-aware of my spine.

Interestingly though, as a kid I sometimes had access to moments in which I realized things could go another way-that there were alternatives to how I felt. I would wonder to myself about how different it is possible to feel in one's body, and how these states make life look totally different in turn. A couple of these I consider "altered states." The first and one of the most beautiful of those times, I was six and sitting on the balcony of our apartment in Virginia. I remember it was a dark summer night and the woods behind the house were silent, deep and still. I suddenly felt something I'd never felt before-an indescribable peace settling over me. My spine stopped tingling and went silent; my head cleared; the stillness went all through my body and I felt I couldn't have moved if I had wanted to. I felt as if I were being given very clear instruction to stay still and watch. So I did. Being a very visual child, I got a vision of sorts: in the darkness I saw a huge, great, flaming wheel. In the periphery of the wheel were snapshots from life-literally little moving scenes or vignettes. I saw myself as a teenager, a woman, and an old woman; I saw myself with partners and with friends, laughing, fighting, traveling. There was this huge wheel of chaos and messiness and drama and wild motion, and I understood that I was going to partake in all of it. But I also saw what was inside the flaming wheel-a perfectly still and dark center, an endless untouchable silence. No matter what happened in the wheel, the middle would stay still forever and ever; and I also had the inexplicable feeling I had come from there and was going back there. I felt a soothing remove from oftlinethis engaged life I was going to live, as if watching the filmstrip life of someone I loved. It was like saying, "Oh, look, how sweet that they're going to go through all that; they're going to get lost and bound and caught up. How sweet!" while also remembering that the silence was the middle of all of that, that it was going to remain immobile and everpresent.

Afterward I felt deliciously quiet and still for days and days. I marveled at the quiet in my spine. I knew now somehow that the universe was OK-or that I was OK in the universe-because my own personal OK-ness was inextricably tied in with the OK-ness of all life, and the wheel had said that life was OK. Or that OK-ness within life was within my range of possibilities. A bit of the intangible and immense stillness had worked its way into me, and I carried it with me ever after with a sense of curiosity, wonder and expansion that I desperately needed.

Quick note here: a book recommended to me by Julian called "The Hidden World of Trauma; Archteypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit" has helped enormously, even though I do view my wheel-in-the-woods vision as more than simply a trauma-resource.

Over the next several years, life at my parent's house did not improve much, and at 15 I attempted suicide by overdosing. After this I was put on a drug called Dexedrine which treats both ADD and depression, as I was one of the throng of many kids at that time getting put on Ritalin-type drugs. The drug interfered with my desire to do art, which I did not like, and also cut me off from a considerable amount of emotional and somatic awareness, but this may have been for the best, as it prevented me from attempting again before I could get away from my parent's house.

At seventeen I left home and moved as far away from Washington, DC and my father as the country would allow. I lived in Half Moon Bay, California, for two years. During this time I cold-turkey quit the Dexedrine without any therapeutic help, which was stupid and dangerous; but I had not yet met a therapist who I knew could truly help me. My energy was devoted to working, coming home, and feverishly working on a mural on my wall in which I detailed my life. I was intensely suicidal for a year, as I re-adjusted to having feelings again, but was slowly building something else underneath-the understanding that I was not going to take my own life, that my mind was precious, that the returning energies of love and great care and vulnerability-that raw and open beauty that had lived in me all my life despite everything-were returning to me, slowly knocking on the door and trying to integrate themselves. My body was this rich, deep well of sadness and also of joy and seemingly boundless love. I understood somehow that the thoughts of suicide would pass, that they were visitors, and that I could trust that my spirit underneath was undergoing intensive reconstructive surgery.

I started doing yoga at age twenty, once I had globetrotted a bit in Europe and had moved back to America and the DC area. Like many people I experienced a startling change in my thought process and emotional life. I'd had no idea that doing something with my physiology could affect my mind so dramatically. At that time, I considered my life to be more about self-management than growth. My nervous system was not well-equipped to handle sensory input and was easily overwhelmed. I was admittedly afraid of the nervous system, primarily because I was sure mine was hopelessly shoddy. At that time I attributed my intense emotional pain to simply being an intrinsically weak and horrible person, rather than to what I had lived through as a child. In my mind's eye, the nervous system was a delicate beam of electricity inside a person that could be snapped and broken as easily as skin, plucked into a frenzy like that cartoon soundtrack in Fantasia. And you either had a good one or a crappy one-it was the luck of the draw.

But after doing yoga for only about a month (albeit for two hours daily), the transformation spoke for itself. A strange calm had descended on me. It was as though my life had lain frozen in the bottom of my belly like a scene in one of those snow-globes, and yoga had shaken up the globe and the scenes of my life were now free to float up. And I began to wonder about my nervous system. Had I come with all the necessary parts and circuitry after all? I could suddenly think; my head had cleared quit a bit. I realized, with not a little horror, what a frozen ball of rage and terror I had always been, how even my vision had been affected by the constant buzz in my spine. And my spine was getting help, finally, was how it felt-that yoga was taking care to massage it and love it a little, this poor little spine that kept chugging on regardless.

I wasn't doing yoga or anything else I was doing to get or be "spiritual." I hated the word spiritual. It was a word that belonged to the world of my mother, who considered herself a great spiritual yoga/meditation authority yet who had never managed to provide basic needs for herself or her children. No, I was doing yoga and meditating purely to calm the hell down and to avoid ever again being medicated, a thought I could hardly bear.

As far as Kundalini went, it would have been the last thing on earth I would have sought, seeing as I equated it with folks who were less than grounded. I just wanted to feel relatively normal, for starters. I was interested in science, in the science of the spine, in that emerging fusion of science and spirituality-it would have to be that, if I was going to consider spirituality at all.

What I consider my Kundalini experience happened several years ago in DC, when an acquaintance of mine was taking a course to get certified as a hypnotherapist. When she told me her class needed a guinea pig for "practice," I agreed to go (I'm still not sure what made me say yes.) But in that little room, surrounded by ten or so students and with their small Indian instructor, I had one of the most mind-blowing experiences of my life.

I still can't say exactly what happened or why. The little instructor held a dangling crystal above me and told me to look at it, which I did, thinking how hopelessly cliche all this was. He said something else about relaxing before his voice warbled into the background. Then suddenly the room was gone. I was speeding, speeding, zooming down tunnels of cosmic space. I was traveling deeper, ever deeper, stars zipping past me like a screensaver. Just as I thought that there was no seeming end to the depth of me, the speeding stopped-suddenly, abruptly, with a jolt. I was hanging somewhere like a weightless, suspended mass, hovering in a black silence. There was no sound, no breath, nothing to see. I had reached the middle of everything. Somewhere, in the midst of that zooming, I'd left myself and joined up with the rest of space. It was in me, but it was bigger than me; it was an interior dimension that contained the whole world. It was the wildest thing! It was thunderous, ancient, motionless, beginningless, endless, deep, vacuous. I know that I'll never be able to adequately describe that silence to anyone no matter how many words I use. I hung out there for I don't know how long-it literally could have been a year or a day. And then from far away, a voice, unclear as if it were calling me up out of the ocean, was saying my name. Something tugged me gently from behind. I went zooming backward as though by bungee chord at my navel, back up through the endless corridors and tunnels of stars. And then I was awake.

Sitting in the chair in the room, I was immediately so overwhelmed and exhausted that I could have slept for a week. I had the thought that if I hadn't regularly been doing yoga I might have short-circuited.

On the way to the subway afterwards, a very odd sensation began to spread through me, like a vapor or ooze that seeped through my body and beyond. It was an unbelievably warm, golden energy that saturated me and everything around me, a surge of intense, intense love. Something had been pried open and the energy was free to flow and flow. I kept babbling to my then-boyfriend how everything was beautiful, everything was holy, that this was how the saints felt-burning with rapture. Everything was shining. The dirty streets of D.C. were golden; the people around me were busy, unaware extensions of my energy and love; love flooded through and around and between everything, crisscrossing beams of light that burned and scintillated. I was so much more than my body, and people were so much more than people. I had only one desire on earth-that every person alive feel for a moment this powerful and amazing golden love. That desire ached in me the way none other ever had. I sat on the horrible orange seats of the Metro and thought they were beautiful; gum stuck to the window was holy; nothing on Earth fell outside of my love. I was completely, totally at the service of humanity. To be alive was without question to share love: why else be alive?

And in the midst of my heady rapture I was repeatedly and mostly struck by the miracle of the accessibility of this state. It was this experience that led me to become dimly aware that the principle of "enlightenment" or awakening was dormant in every person, which seemed to be immensely important to me. We all have the same brains and nervous systems and the same possibilities available to us. If I, a person who was not yet a practiced meditator, who was not on an intentional spiritual path, who practiced yoga mainly to manage anxiety, and who was leery of the entire New Age community could experience this, anyone could. It was the awareness of the ubiquitous nature of awakening that stayed with me-and to me it seemed more universal than personal.

The bliss lingered for a few days. I was extremely fatigued, and as it began to wear off, my usual thought patterns re-established themselves. The experience was certainly beautiful and a great marker for the rest of my life, but the energy was intense and at times unbearable; I sometimes shook or felt as though electricity was shooting up my spine, that electric hands had reached in and literally begun to violently vibrate my spine-my spine which, let's just say, was still wearing training wheels. It felt safer to "close," as it were, which, at that time, I beat myself up for. I felt terribly unspiritual for feeling relieved to be preoccupied with the "mundane" again.

Several other contributors have touched on Somatic Experiencing Work already. Doing SE work has given me tremendous insight into that experience. (See Julian's Kundalini entry; he delineates this process nicely.) In SE, which is a body-based therapeutic modality for working with trauma, we learn that the human organism pendulates between what you might call expansion and contraction. If the body is out of balance, equilibrium must be restored in the nervous system in order to regain the person's ability to gently and easily pendulate between the two extremes. Too much of either extreme can be dangerous for the person and bring them out of balance.

I can only assume that when integrating an altered state or peak experience, it is useful to monitor and track physical sensations so that if, for instance, the expansion of an altered state is too much for a person to accommodate, they can resource by incorporating a little "contraction," (this can be as simple as actively grounding themselves and returning to slightly more "concrete" reality) in order to give a more grounded container to the powerful energies of altered states. Many altered states, if not carefully monitored, lead away from embodiment and toward dissociation. I'm pretty sure almost everyone reading this knows that.

My body was "contracting" and doing what it needed to do in order to manage and contain the enormity of that experience. So this is my example of what happens when someone has no context or container for an experience like this, and especially if someone experiences something like this while they are still psychologically dissociative and without energetic boundaries. Note that at that time I was not yet in therapy, had not yet processed the memories of sexual abuse, and was still riddled with an anxiety which produced insomnia, nightmares, and fits of shame. I feel it's a wonder I had such an experience without exploding, given those circumstances.

My next experience is more of a radical shift in consciousness (which I've in no way fully integrated yet, but I feel this time that I am sufficiently psychologically and emotionally prepared for it, have been in therapy for a while, that my system in general is more integrated and that my nervous system is more stabilized.)

In the process of healing, I've become acquainted with my mortality in a whole new way in the last six months or so. I've been learning to hang out with Death, and it's so weird, it's the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I always wanted to know what lies in the bottom of me. I had no idea it was Death. And one thing that healing requires is regular visits to the very bottom of myself. In this land there are no barriers, no cushions, nothing to buffer these immense wild winds that sweep at me from every direction. It's so strange and in a way what everyone who has suffered any kind of trauma suffers-an intimate acquaintance with total existential despair. For the trauma survivor, the face of death takes on a bitter irony. For the child who deeply understands that his life is at risk every day, Death is a daily reality and possibility, a truth from which there is no escape.

I think we often assume that meeting and greeting the truth of Death would be awful. I mean Death unmasked-Death without being romanticized, Death without being monstrasized. How interesting, then, that it seems to be that there is no way (for me, at least) to heal fully from long-term developmental trauma than to walk headfirst into this land and confront Death. I realized I couldn't sidestep him, nor did I want to anymore. I'd developed this bizarre, morbidly curious relationship with him. He had haunted me for so long and worn so many grotesque masks that I wanted to know what he actually looked like. No face of his would really be more terrible than those I'd imagined. My spirit, after all, had been spread so wide, my boundaries so thinned, my capacity for pain was so great and I'd been so elasticized that I felt I could hold almost anything-including the real face of Death.

I had also been through a time of denying death, of thinking that the most enlightened and advanced thing to do was to transcend death; I had a brief spell of feeling like this life was a tiny and insignificant terrace on a great ascending ladder that went, well....up to....you know, somewhere better. Somewhere cleaner, where there were no trash trucks, sexual abuse or taxes. This was primarily before I got into therapy and began confronting the monster of my own past, the various survival mechanisms and beliefs I had employed, and pride about the tremendous resources I had managed to accrue.

And it's so weird being here with Death without being dissociated, without being able to zone out on the things I see in the bottom of myself. I see the figures of my past as stark, bleak, standing out in sharp relief against this desolate sky. I see everything that ever happened and with it, the knowledge that I will die. It feels like an odd relief, to be standing here looking at what happened, and seeing that I was right, my body was right, my little uneducated young child's body had an absolutely sophisticated awareness of its own mortality.

And yes, Death is razor-sharp. No, he's not like my little fantasy-critters of childhood who sang me to sleep. Even the fantasy-critters stand there and look at him-I can hardly believe it-respectfully. They know him, they don't fear him. They have a relationship with him. This is a revelation to me.

I feel closer to myself here than I have ever felt before. Standing here holding hands with Death, I find it funny that he had a hundred different names within my soul and not a single one was close. I have sentimentalized him, I have demonized him. And now I see I can bear standing here with Death, without dying.

And so....not only do I feel great compassion for myself all of a sudden, but I feel it for all of humanity as well. Because standing here in this place is the first time I've gotten a grounded, embodied, feet-on-the-ground sense of that great interconnected matrix to which we all belong, and it's the first time it's been made palpable in all its beauty. I feel I've transcended the place in myself that is about me (without dissociating)-that this landscape I'm in is a fraction of the great country central to humanity, that if we were all to come visit the bottom of ourselves we would come parachuting down, peppering down to land in different parts of this land like Magritte's Golconde. And I see how very terrifying a confrontation with your own mortality can be. For a second I see how for most of us this is simultaneously an abstract finale somewhere on the horizon as well as something that is an underlying, subconscious and powerful hum, one that drives our lives as human beings. I see how very many things we do to keep the wolf-winds away.

But at any rate-here with Death things are different, far clearer and sharper and happier and sadder, and the pain of being alive is tender and necessary and precious. And I didn't mean to come here, I didn't think I'd come here. Here is just kind of where I landed once I started feeling safer in my body. And weirdly enough, my spine, the more solid and able to conduct light it gets, is also buddies with Death. My spine is soothed and calm to see that I'm actually finally looking Death in the eye. I'm realizing my body can hold a hell of a lot of stuff; and really, to be perfectly honest, nothing is really worse than what I've already been through. I never thought grounding myself would allow for more light to pass through; that happens unintentionally, as a wonderful by-product of grounding.

So...don't know if that counts as an "altered state"-it feels so wonderfully earthbound and solid, and somewhere in my little head "altered state" still means airy-but it sure feels like something.

Thanks for reading!