The following article is an excerpt of Tara’s book Enlightenment Through the Path of Kundalini.
There are a number of things that my clients found the least helpful in the event of a kundalini crisis or spiritual emergency.
The following points are not meant to discourage anyone from seeking help from family members, priests and doctors. It is just intended as a little warning that you may not get the help that you are looking for from these people. Unfortunately, there are still very few professionals who are actually qualified to be of real help to someone in the throes of a kundalini crisis.
Talking to family members
Most people without knowledge about the complex symptoms of a kundalini awakening will become afraid and wonder whether you have gone crazy. Your worried family members will often not understand what is going on with you and may also pressurise you to see a doctor or psychiatrist and this will often complicate things even further.
Talking to doctors and psychiatrists
In my experience, there are extremely few doctors or psychiatrists who have even heard about the phenomenon of kundalini, let alone being in a position to offer viable help. They often prescribe drugs meant for mentally ill people that will either not work for you or even aggravate your symptoms even further.
Use of prescription drugs
The widespread use of prescription drugs for depression and anxiety is controversial even for people without kundalini as their effectiveness is questionable and they have plenty of severe side effects. In the case of my kundalini clients, they often make people even worse.
One of my clients was lucky enough to find a retired psychiatrist who had immersed himself in the Hindu religion for many years and was knowledgeable about kundalini problems. He told her outright that kundalini and prescription drugs do not mix well and recommended gentle prayerful meditation, instead. This is exactly my own experience, as well.
The only exception to this rule I would make is in the case of severe insomnia. If you cannot sleep for days in a row, it is important to get some medication to break this negative cycle.
Advice from members of traditional religions
I have had numerous clients who experienced a kundalini awakening while on a meditation retreat. They were often dismayed once they realised that their meditation teacher had no idea about kundalini and could not offer any help whatsoever. The same goes for yoga teachers, Christian priests and clerics from all other religions.
The more fundamentalist the cleric, the greater their fear is likely to be of your kundalini symptoms and the more likely it is they will suggest that you may be possessed by devils and demons. Obviously, this will do nothing to alleviate the fears and confusion of someone who has an acute spiritual emergency.
Reading too much about kundalini on the Internet
The Internet can be a useful starting point for finding out about what is going on within you but beyond this basic information it can be a place of great confusion. There are many people who have posted terrible horror stories about kundalini awakening that will frighten even the most confident person.
I strongly advise you not to read these horror stories. Some of them were written by mentally disturbed people who were unaware of the differential diagnosis of mental disease and a kundalini awakening. Other stories that I have seen were posted by people suffering from sex addiction who wanted to believe that their obsession with degrading sex was something spiritual. Yet other websites about kundalini were written by people who clearly did not know what they were talking about. Generally speaking, the consensus of myself and kundalini experts like Bonnie Greenwell, Yvonne Kason and Phil St. Romain is that kundalini can be challenging but does not have to be a horror trip at all.
Energy healing
In my experience, any form of energy healing like homeopathy, acupuncture, magnet therapy, reiki, lying on of hands, crystal therapy etc. can severely aggravate someone in a kundalini crisis.
I myself tried many of these forms of healing before I knew that I had awakened kundalini and experienced the most dramatic side effects from homeopathy, crystals, reiki and magnet therapy.
My advice is to be very careful and choosy about which healing approach you want to try and to stop immediately when you develop unusual symptoms. In my experience, these symptoms do not constitute a healing crisis (things get worse before they get better) as it is commonly assumed by well-meaning practitioners but will simply aggravate your symptoms.
Breathing exercises
I have had a number of clients who have unwittingly created severe negative symptoms for themselves by trying to use all sorts of breathing exercises.
The most prevalent negative symptoms caused by breathing exercises are fear and anxiety. But I have also seen clients who had given themselves heart palpitations through breathing wrongly for an extended amount of time. The common denominator in all forms of debilitating breathing is breathing too fast and too deeply.
By contrast, the most healing form of breathing in a kundalini crisis is the very slow breathing that I have outlined in the anti-anxiety technique. Many people find it hard to believe that this slow breathing will help them because we are taught to ‘take a deep breath’ in order to calm down. But nothing could be more damaging. Over-breathing is just as detrimental in the long term as over-eating and the key to healthy and anxiety-reducing breathing is to breathe less.
I have found that people who are doing breathing exercises are often quite attached to them and are rather unwilling to give them up. It always takes quite a bit of effort from my side to convince them to give slow breathing at least a try. And the moment they try it, the anxiety becomes less within five minutes and is usually gone after 15 minutes. The same is true for the heart palpitations – only it takes days rather than minutes for them to disappear.
Excessive reading of spiritual material
Along with reducing spiritual exercises, it is also important to reduce reading spiritual books. This advice may seem counter-intuitive for someone who is in a spiritual crisis but it is nevertheless true. Reading spiritual material can increase the flow of your kundalini, so it is wise to leave it for a while until your uncomfortable kundalini symptoms have subsided.
Tara Springett is a fully qualified and licensed psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher who has specialised in working with people who suffer from kundalini syndrome. She offers skype/phone sessions. Find more information here: kundalini healing
Check out Tara’s new book about kundalini awakening here
Find information about sessions with Tara here: kundalini healing
Find more information what kundalini is
More information about kundalini syndrome: head pressure
Find information about the so-called kundalini psychosis
Find out more about kundalini on my second website www.kundalinisymptoms.com
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