In this week’s free kundalini video, KAP instructor Tao Semko answers the question, “”What is the experiential difference between Kundalini Rising & Kundalini Awakening?”
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Video Transcription:
Audio Transcription of this video by Spencer Stevens
“Kundalini rising is when you start to experience movements of energy which may be reflected as: muscular kriyas or actions, movements of the nervous and muscular system, tremors going through the body, you’re trembling, or the body starts to actually move in undulations along the spine, or the head starts to actually roll if the energy is going up into the skull, or it starts to nod or rapidly [go from] side to side.
Some of those thing can happen just from shifts in the energy. Some of them are accompanied by this quaking feeling, the Quakers and Shakers were doing what they were doing for a reason too. All of that is also related to Kundalini in terms of the Quakers who were having ecstatic experiences. This is Quakers and Shakers in the Americas.
In terms of those particular religious sects, Kundalini as an experience has been experienced in virtually every religion, and by many secular people as well. Kundalini given that name of course, it’s given that name in Hinduism, it’s a Sanskrit name.
But it has other names in other traditions. Some traditions have no names for it because people didn’t experience it that often or didn’t talk about it. But its a human experience. It’s not something that is to be given to you, that you’re not worthy of, or anything like that. It’s something that any human — given the right set of tools — any human can awaken.
But there has to be a willingness to allow the personality to shift in the ways that it will during the Kundalini experience.
Kundalini rising can be Kundalini activating just in the base of the body. It is possible for Kundalini to be activated in other centers other than the root chakra, other than the perineum and the pelvic floor and the tail bone area.
It’s possible for it to start in other centers, but it’s not a complete rising. It usually is a rapid explosion or quivering that occurs for some period of time, and then burns out because the vast majority of this passive, stored energy is in the lower body.
And then it uses that energy to open all the other centers of the body. There are some traditional systems that intentionally try to open the heart first without actually opening the lower centers at all, and I have seen cases where this is possible.
I’ve also heard some of my compatriots argue that “no, that’s impossible, it has to be opened from below.” But it is possible to open it first in the water center, or first in the fire center, or first in the heart center. But it’s not a complete experience, and it’s very hard to get back to a complete opening if that occurs, because without opening a sense of stability and foundation in the lower centers, it’s really difficult to get back to that if you have an ecstatic experience.
You sort of get stuck in the ecstasy, and you’re completely ungrounded and spaced out, and unwilling to get back to down to earth and still be ecstatic if that makes sense.
Kundalini Awakening tends to involve a permanent set of changes from one or more Kundalini risings in the body that results not only in the physical manifestation of kriyas and other symptoms of Kundalini, but also shifts in consciousness, shifts in perspective, your viewpoint will change. Even at the very basic level, you can think of somebody who is always sort of stuck in the same mentality.
They always had to do things the same way. And at some point in their life, something happened to them or they did something and they changed their mind and they realized that they had other ways of being. They could flow a little bit more, they could get instant insights, they didn’t have to plod along in the same way.
Those kinds of changes, and there’s a lot of them that can happen, happen as a result of Kundalini moving through the body, but they can happen just as a result of external experiences as well. Kundalini is just an accelerator.
It tends to bring you through a lot of those at once. It doesn’t clear everything, even though the myths say that it does. It’s very, very rare for it to burn through, sort of, all of your obscurations so to speak, but it can get through a lot of them and there’s generally an opening in the personality.
It’s still the same person, they have a lot of the same personality quirks and traits, but they tend to be a lot bigger. Meaning, not physically bigger, but there’s more flexibility, more fluidity, more intuitiveness about them. They sort of unfold their personality. It can involve emotional maturation. Sometimes not.
Sometimes people go thorough it very rapidly, they have some transcendent experiences, but they don’t have the time to actually mature as a person, and then they want to go around proselytizing and telling everybody how things should be because they’ve had this wondrous experience.
So, one of the nice things about KAP as a methodology is that it actually practices a lot of the things required to unfold an emotional maturity and caring about others, and taking care of others even as you’re going through the process. It wires it into you so to speak, without dogma. It’s just a way of basically engaging those aspects of your personality through experiencing them.
Experiencing increased happiness, and groundedness, and a sense of personal well-being, but also a sense of interacting with others. Doing things for the benefit of everybody instead of yourself. You know, basic ideas — the golden rule. It’s not anything that’s being preached “you must do this, you must do that” not at all. It’s just through going through various physiological exercises, you begin to experience all those things naturally.”
It should also be noted that Kundalini awakening (lower case “a”) generally means the first stirrings of Kundalini from dormancy into activity, often in one of the lower chakras, whereas Kundalini Awakening (upper case “A”) generally means a Spriritual Awakening involving Kundalini activity.
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