It’s clear that a lot of things can happen in an awakening process – weird sensations, a sense of overwhelm, disorientation, lack of grounding, feeling you are losing your mind, surfacing of old emotional issues and traumas, outside-of-the-mainstream abilities and sensing, and so on.
Some people like to call some of this “kundalini”. But do we really know that’s what it is? And is it a helpful label?
The upside of the “kundalini” label is that it’s a shorthand for certain experiences people may have in an awakening process, and I assume that’s why some like to use it. The downside is that this label may make us think we understand what’s happening more than we do, and it can come with assumptions that make us overlook other and more mundane causes and remedies. Equally important, if we use the label as if we know for certain, we train ourselves to be intellectually dishonest.
I wouldn’t be able to call any of it “kundalini” or related to kundalini. I don’t have that type of access to the energy system and what’s happening. I wouldn’t know for certain that’s what it is, even if several people have agreed to call it just that.
What I do know is that a lot of different things can happen in an awakening process. I know a range of specific things that can happen and have experienced a bunch of it for myself. I know approaches that can help people in these situations, depending on the person and what’s happening. And that seems sufficient. I don’t need to put a possibly misleading label on it.
Personally, I find it helpful to be honest about these things. To be honest about what I can know and cannot know. To take a pragmatic approach without being too concerned about labels.
And, yes, I too do what I write about here. I sometimes put a label on something without knowing whether it’s true or accurate, and in a way that can be misleading. And if I look a little more closely, I see that no matter how accurate a label is in a conventional sense, it’s ultimately and inherently misleading. Reality is different from and more than our ideas about and our labels for it.
And it’s perhaps not such a big deal. A lot of the people using the “kundalini” label probably do it as a shorthand, knowing it’s a guess and that they don’t know for certain.
This is so important. One thing the covid year taught me – very early on – is what I don’t know (which turned out to be pretty much everything about medicine, epidemiology, virology, and biochemistry), and to not use words with precise meanings to describe things I imperfectly understood as though I knew what I was talking about. To do so was to add to the dreadful signal that permeated every public digital space, ending in mass c o n f u s i o n…