Senior KAP Instructor Tao Semko on a frequent misconception about the completion of kundalini’s ascent and integration…. listening with earphones may be necessary; there is a bit of echo in the audio.
Video Transcription:
Hi I’m Tao Semko for kundaliniawakeningprocess.com
One of the most frequent misconceptions about Kundalini expediences is that when Kundalini rises and hits the crown, and you actually have a stream of sensations going all the way up to the top of the head, that that is a full Kundalini awakening.
The reason for that misconception is that it’s not just where it goes but how it gets there that actually matters in terms of overall integration of the energy and the waking up, and integration of the various capacities of consciousness within the physical and subtle body.
Most frequently, when people have a surge of energy that awakens, moves upwards, may create some bodily movements or kriyas, it’s usually going up the back.
It may not even be going up the spine specifically, it may be going up though the spinal erectors these muscles that go up either side of the spine. They’re spinal muscles. Along what the Chinese call the Yang Qiao Extraordinary Vessels, in Traditional Chinese Medicine or in acupuncture.
Those are usually the areas first carrying signal going up the body. There may be also some signal going up along the back of the spine, up along what the Chinese call the Governing Channel. That said, the energy may surge into the back of the skull. Or it may even surge up and around the back of the skull until you’re feeling it at the top of the head.
But there’s a number of different meridians,, the Gall Bladder channels, the Governing Channel, a number of others, San Jiao, that all move up through the head and can carry a signal.
Kundalini traveling through those various meridians doesn’t necessarily create anything other than a bunch of sensation. You may momentarily get a surge of energy going into the back of the region that’s commonly called the third eye. You may get some visions. You may get some visual intuitions. You may even go into a temporary state of absorption. Meditative absorption. Samadhi.
That said, what we’re really looking for in terms of the long term change, in terms of more lasting change in the way that the body filters perception and is used as a vehicle of consciousness, is for, in the classical metaphysics, Kundalini to go up through the bindu points, through the droplets or point centers at the very center of each chakra, rather than going up the backs of the chakras, or the sides, or the fronts.
In some cases it rushes up just outside of that very central portion of the various chakras. This is metaphysics speak, and remember that metaphysics are just a way for the individual meditator to conceive of, subjectively, their experience, to map out their experience.
It doesn’t mean that there is a physical chakra in the body. It does mean that there’s an experience of energy and consciousness moving through a part of the body that gives sensations, emotions, possibly vision — visual or auditory states.
Again to reiterate, Kundalini integrates and connects the various chakras when it goes through the very center of these regions in the body.
In physiological terms, this requires that energy be flowing not only along the spinal nerves, but also through the vagus nerves, going through the inner depths of the body, and that there be not just the experience of explosive energy, big fireworks, etc., but more importantly an experience of quiescence, spaciousness, beingness, and blissfulness, clear light emptiness perhaps, that occurs when the very central region of each of these nodes of consciousnesses, these vortices of consciousness within the body is pierced, using the classical term, by Kundalini as it ascends.
Just because energy slams into the back of the head, or shoots up the outside of the skull into the region of the crown doesn’t mean that you have pierced the crown. In order to do so, the energy actually has to gradually move forward.
I should say the stream of sensation needs to move forward through the body so that it’s actually going right through the core of everything, along the axis of the body itself. Along the area that’s, at least in the upper body, the forward portion of the spine and the area just in front of the spine as well, rather than going up the skin along the back of the spine.
To reiterate things that have been said in previous videos, if you look at the curvature of the spine from the side, the lordotic curvature of the lumbar spine, that inward curve where it goes inwards from the buttocks and then back up and outwards to the back of the chest carapace into the thoracic spine. In the lordotic lumbar curve, the spine actually moves toward the core center of the body, the axial center.
As it moves up into the thoracic spine, it curves back out to the back extremity of the body. There’s a lot more space in front of it. That said, the heart plexus, cardiac plexus, is innervated by the vagus nerves as they travel up from the digestive system, and below the digestive system up from the reproductive tract, and sensual and sexual experience.
Continuing up from the pericardium and heart, you reach up through the area of the throat and directly up into the cranium. So again, many of the deeper experiences of absorption, Samadhi, where both brain hemispheres are equally active, they is signal moving harmoniously smoothly without perturbations back and forth across the corpus callosum between brain hemispheres, the vagus nerves go right up into that core brain region.
And vagus innervation and harmonization, meaning smoothing of the actual nerve signals that are going up through the vagus nerves as well as increased amplitude, tends to be a big part of these deeper connections and absorptions through each of the centers.
If you truly want integration of all of these different centers and go beyond them, going beyond is not achieved by slamming through the crown and going into the upper realms. Going beyond is achieved by actually going into the depths, the undifferentiated, fullness, wholeness, emptiness, at the center of each of these experiences of consciousness, within and beyond the body.
The transcendent is experienced by the human being by going into the very core and emerging out beyond from within that core. Although there’s a great emphasis, linguistically and otherwise on ascendance in New Age culture, the idea that we’ve got to get above and beyond the human experience.
In older wisdom traditions, universally there is an emphasis on not only wiring in these more sublime experiences, connecting to these more sublime expediences, but also going deep within. Either within the heart space, or within the gut space.
These two other areas of the body that modern biology refers to as a second, and third heart. There are books written by Western MD’s talking about the second heart as either the cardiac plexus or — depending on whether you’re a cardiologist or an internist working with the gut.
The stomach and intestines give considerable feedback to the brain, and can override brain function. The heart, and pericardium also give considerable feedback and can override brain function. A deep part of our experience resides not just up in the skull in the spaces that are flowing along the vagus nerves.
So if you’ve had an experience of a surge of energy, or surges of energy going up your back and touching upon the crown, and you may have had some brief internal fireworks: keep going, gently. Learn how to ground yourself. Learn how to connect in both directions, and to expand the internal experience of that flow of consciousness as energy, as signal.
Learn how to widen your experience so that you’re not contracting and creating discomfort. Remember that contracting for too long, even though it may feel initially ecstatic, can create adrenal fatigue by squeezing and milking the kidneys and adrenals unnecessarily with a lot of muscle tension around them.
So there are a lot of useful skills that can be learned, habituated in a positive way, that can assist you in your integration process. While there are some folks who go through Kundalini spontaneously either as a result of practices or as a result of life events, and gradually over the course of usually years or decades, create this integration through accumulated life experience and shifts in perception.
Having some of this knowledge of the dynamics of the flow and integration can allow you to do it much more smoothly, and much more rapidly, and do much more holistically.
There is the utility in learning skills, and understanding various cultural road maps, as well as modern science’s perceptions of how these various systems of consciousness work as experienced within the human body.
Please visit us at kundaliniawakeningprocess.com for more information. There are plenty of free videos, and free articles there, as well as courses that teach you everything you need to now about understanding these processes. It will help you to understand traditional cultural paradigms of working with Kundalini as well.
The system is a secular system that allows secular, spiritual, and religious people to work with their own body’s’ experience of energy and consciousness so that they can use their own world view and integrate it with knowledge of how these various functions, flows, experiences work.
Much love to you and yours, have a wonderful day.
— Transcription by Spencer Stevens