Finding Kundalini

My spiritual education was guided by a series of uncanny circumstances––dreams, chance encounters, and unbelievable synchronicities. For over a decade, I surrendered to this guidance and allowed it to lead me to different paths, teachers, pilgrimage sites, and friends from lifetimes long past. I eventually understood that I was being guided in a course of study. A course I have come to call "Mysticism."

The first major lineage I was led to was bhakti, or devotional, yoga, which pursues the opening of the heart to direct relationship with God in the personal form, the form of Krishna. I was, in perfect fashion, led to the path by a rebel, a former monk who was both deeply devoted and also completely liberated from all its formalities. But I discovered when I hung around the "orthodox" community that Krishna devotion is considered an end it itself and all other learning is thought to be a distraction.

I greatly respected this path and saw the purpose of its injunctions, but, it was just after I took initiation that I was undeniably guided to another system that would provide me with a different vantage. That path was one that bhakti rejected. Yet the timing made me question if they were really at odds, or if I was just being taken to another layer of understanding. Seeing the relationship between these paths, I also had to wonder if I was being called to make a bridge...

It was 2006, when I had just met Narayan Maharaj, a guru in the Gaudiya Vaishnava (Hare Krishna) tradition. I had taken mantra initiation with him at a festival, and then I then traveled across India to one of the tradition's home temples with about a hundred of my new spiritual brethren. It was on that 3-day train ride that I had an interesting dream.

In the dream, a young woman with long brown hair came onto the train and told me she was going to give me her “shaktipat.” I woke up thinking those words sounded vaguely familiar, but I didn’t know what they meant.

Just three weeks later, I was on my way back home to New York via Israel, when an Israeli waitress with long brown hair gave me a very powerful hug.

She said to me, “I just felt like I was giving you Shaktipat.”

“What is Shaktipat?” I asked her, stunned.

“It’s the initiation my guru gives,” she said. “It’s the awakening of the kundalini.”

As often happened in my travels, dreaming about someone before meeting them made me pay extra attention. I had to wonder if this was a call to meet her guru. But I was on my way home, completely broke, and ready to call my adventure complete. This traveling I'd been doing had been against my parents wishes. I’d recently graduated from college, had loans to pay and a career to ignite, and my family was waiting for me to do something productive. My upbringing made me believe I was being irresponsible. I had to return. And I knew that once I did, it might be a long time before I would be able to travel again.

As often happened on this pilgrimage, the moment I thought I was going to land in normalcy, the moment I was truly ready to give up, something incredible would happen that would cause the journey to ramp up, my flight off the ground to head into new atmospheres, and the learning to continue. Meeting that woman would put into motion another unbelievable set of circumstances and my pilgrimage would continue for many years hence at full throttle (but I'll save that story for another time).

Within a year I was back in India, in the ancient city of Varanasi, with its medieval sandstone palaces and stone alleys flanking the Ganges river. I was there to meet the guru. But I was also at one of those “junctures” once again. I had decided that I was going to get on a legitimate path, and I was in the process of applying for a Fulbright Scholarship. I saw meeting the guru as being the one task I had to complete before I could, truly this time, land my journey in "real reality."

Guruji as they called him, otherwise known as Dr. Vagish Shastri, was a stout, upright Indian man around 70 years old. A staunch traditionalist, Sanskrit grammarian, multiple PhD holding retired professor, Guruji knew Indian philosophy front to back. He’d been awarded many great honors and was known as an expert in Sanskrit language––clearly known even in some western circles as Madonna had consulted with him before she recorded “Ray of Light.”

I would later discover that Guruji had awakened his kundalini through Kashmiri-Shaivist tantric mantras and kriyas when he was in his early 20s. He once told me that when he recited his newly initiated mantra in a cave, he received such a bolt of energy that he literally flew across the cave. He’d been told that he had to wait 50 years before he could transmit his energy to others, so he turned to academia until those years passed, and then he hung a sign outside his door that said, “Vagyoga, Voice Consciousness Institute. A tantric way to Enlightenment.”

I didn't know what "Vagyoga" meant and, holding my reasonable skepticism, I decided to just begin with some innocuous Sanskrit lessons.

Just a few weeks into those lessons, Guruji went away for 10 days to give a lecture during the Hindu festival of Navaratri, the Nine Nights of Durga.

In my guest house lived several of his students who were planning to observe that holiday with ritual offerings to the goddess. I didn’t want to participate, but at the last second--more out of boredom than interest, or perhaps from something far more unexplainable--I decided I might as well join them.

I will share with you here a few excerpts from a book I have been writing about those years of pilgrimage, during which this experience took place.

About halfway through the puja, I found myself mesmerized by the sound of the mantras and the circular action of picking up and tossing the flower petals. I discovered, to my chagrin, that I’d let down my guard. While most of me desperately wanted to return to normalcy and a respectable life before it was too late, I was instead praying to remember why I’d come here and to be renewed in my intentions. Somehow my rational mind had gone slip-sliding off its precipice. I was asking to be led deeper down the rabbit hole!

When we completed the 108 mantras, and a string of “om shantis”, I fell into a deep meditation. My thoughts had lost their grip on me for the first time in months and I surrendered to the feeling of levity that overtook me. After a long while, I laid down on the floor and pulled myself deeper still.

In my inner awareness, I focused on the shape of the yantra. I could see it before me: the geometric form of the Goddess. The six-pointed star. I let myself absorb in this pattern until there was no mental chatter––no distance between me and the form. I dove deeper and deeper into this meditative state until I felt myself bowling my consciousness into the yantra.

Then, I began to hear a high-pitched tone inside my ears. It was as if I was actually hearing the yantra! I had never been aware that anything like this was possible. The surprise caused me to lose my concentration.

That night I had a dream. It was one of those dreams. The kind of dream that lays out the road ahead, giving clues to a deeper layer of significance that would become clear when the pieces showed up in waking life.

In the end of the dream, I saw a bright golden cobra that was standing up straight as an arrow, looking at me right in the eyes.

When I woke the next day, everything changed.

It began with a tremendous energy coursing through my body. I did the morning puja and was fully engrossed in it, present with the Goddess through every flower petal and prayer.

As I walked down the gully later, I observed myself having become very sensitive, but it was not as if I was sensitive, it was as if this newfound energy responded to things that I, as myself, couldn’t even see.

I suddenly felt the vibration of the temples that had just yesterday been so exhaustingly unimpressive to me. I was drawn into the Kedar Temple, and into the Shiva shrine. I placed my hands on the stone, and to my shock, a powerful current flowed from the rock into my arms causing me to vibrate. I took my arms off several times to see if what I was feeling might just be coming from myself. It wasn’t. The rock was vibrating. I checked again and again. I was baffled.

I looked around the shrine. Indians were pulling flower wreaths out of plastic bags and draping them around the stone. Others were circling and praying and the priest was spreading sandalwood paste on their third eyes. Did these people know what was happening here? Or were they indeed just making empty rituals? Certainly, whoever built this temple must have known the power of this rock!

Even when I’d had my own sense of reverence toward the statues and deities and what they represented, I never had the concept that an object could conduct tangible energy. I simply had never had the sensitivity to perceive it.

Don, my advisor, was waiting to get my essay for the Fulbright, and I had planned to spend that day working on it. I entered the internet shop and sat at a computer sensing some resistance from the energy. After a few minutes, it was completely agitated. It raced around my body. The more I tried to ignore it, the more enraged it became. I could feel how, rather than finish my essay, the energy would have preferred me to pull the computers out of the wall and smash them to pieces! I had to leave. What on earth was happening to me? Previously I had afraid to even touch the Ganges river due to its polluted state. Now, I wanted nothing more than to walk by the banks, observing what appeared to be a kind of ultraviolet luminosity glinting off its surface.

The next day, I forged ahead, determined to complete the application. I sat at the computer, watching as the energy revolted. Soon, I could feel a fury swirling around my perineum, along with a great pressure just under my tailbone. In moments, it burst upwards like a flickering light released from a tight coil. I finally had to give up on the application. I burst out of the shop into the alleyway both burning with frustration and silenced with awe.

This was kundalini.

As the energy increased over the course of those 10 days, I could ocassionally see through walls. I saw visions of other lives when I closed my eyes. Those visions blasted me with shakti. They were so intense that I could barely keep my eyes closed for more than a few seconds. I barely slept. I could hardly tolerate doing anything but meditating and visiting temples. I participated in the now vital rituals of Goddess worship every morning and night. And the Ganges river was a cooling balm for the increasingly uncontrollable energy. I even brought a towel to her banks and dove right in.

Apparently, those breakthrough experiences are an indication of the movement of Kundalini, but they are rarely a permanent awakening. But though that experience was temporary, it created lasting changes. Most significantly, it set me off on another layer of my path. I decided to stay in India and continue my pilgrimage.

Guruji hadn't yet officially given me shaktipat when the awakening happened; I had simply received his blessing and the kundalini awoke itself. But I soon took his 10-day course, which introduced the philosophy of kundalini from the Kashmiri Shaivite perspective, the practice of mantra meditation, and the practice of laya yoga - or dissolution of the elements to achieve awareness of the subtle.

I was amazed to discover that Vagyoga meant the yoga of subtle sound. And one of its core teachings was attuning oneself to the subtle sounds that appeared in ones ears as the kundalini began to awaken. This explained the sound that came from the yantra.

I'll add here that this kind of Kundalini Yoga had nothing to do with the "Kundalini Yoga" that was becoming popular in the west. It was several more years before I'd heard of that practice. But when I later researched it, I discovered that it was based on a Sikh person's experience with a tantric guru. What he taught was his own interpretation through the lens of the Sikh religion, culture, and language.

During guruji's course, I received my first official transference of his awakened energy, by the use of subtle sound. The effects of this "shaktipat" transmission were milder than my previous experience, but it always created a sense of levity within me.

I studied with Guruji for several more years and took mantra initiation with him in 2011. I helped him to edit several books, write an introduction to his philosophy on Kundalini yoga practice, and eventually assisted him in giving his introductory class and shaktipat initiation to visiting students.

Guruji empowered me to offer these teachings, yet it has taken me over a decade to offer his class because of the discomfort I felt giving myself permission to integrate the paths I’d found along the way that I had come to through my greater teacher––the unseen benevolence that guided my pilgrimage. From the outside, the paths I found rejected each other, but I always found them to be complimentary. And it took me many years to find the courage to stand by that discovery.

Guruji left his body in 2022 and now feels like the right time to honor his legacy.

I have been initiated in both Vaishnava and Shaivite lineages––as well as having studied western mysticism––and I present these paths as complementary. They each bring necessary ingredients to walking the sharp edge that is sometimes called the Middle Way, the way of the tao, the way of the heart, devotion, non-duality, tantra, and the way of the mystic. It is that path that runs through every tradition in its innermost core.

This path is often secreted as it is only for those who can hold paradoxes and delicate balances. It is the path for those that can reside in the heart's knowing and not be swayed by the need to wrap the mind around it all. Because ultimately, love isn't rational, and neither is reality.