As I look over our history as a species, from the Middle East and the religions it spawned, to the East and the philosophies, the almost-religions that stopped short of being those because they do not espouse worship of a deity or a god of any kind, I see a pattern emerge as it relates to our creative energy and all of its relatives; except under very specific conditions creative energy is only allowed to be expressed in certain ways. I am dealing with creative energy in a very broad sense here, so if you thought creative energy was that part of us that solved problems or helped create new things like cars or rockets to the moon or music and art, hang on. Creative energy, I have come to see includes all aspects of our being, from our desire to create art to our desire to build bridges and civilizations. Our creativity also includes the forces that maintain our bodies and it also includes our capacity, our ability, to create more of ourselves through sexual intercourse between men and women. All of this to my mind and experience is part of a cosmic strand that divides out in numerous ways in our consciousness but has at its root an energy that in its origin is wild and free.
The problem in our world today is that except as noted previously, creative energy has been tamped down, controlled. Churches have done this by instilling a sense of shame about our sexuality. We were to not trust our sexuality or our urges least of all so we relied on our religions to tell us what was what. And you know, I am not convinced that it was for good. Look at the scandals rocking the Catholic church and they don’t seem to stop. The Pope speaks out about it, but its like it is some monolithic structure with little accountability or willingness to change. If you doubt what I am saying here, just do a historical church of the scandals that have taken place with the Catholic church over the years and you will begin to see how difficult this issue is. Part of it stems from requiring priests to be chaste. I am just going to say that when our creative fires are so narrowly focused there will always be trouble. Creativity was meant to be wild and free, not tamed, and here we are with our religions trying to tame what really was meant to set us free. And instead, we are prisoners.
I will admit that what I say about prana is my take. People are keen to try and point out that our perception is just perception, so human, so frail, so likely to be distorted. But you know, this time, I don’t think so. As I read about the hundreds, thousands, even, of experiences describing the bliss of the flow of prana, I see the same thing. It’s seen as a goddess, perhaps, wild and free, powerful. But this energy is in all of us, the place where our inner man and inner woman meet, the explosion of opposites. That is the definition of kundalini….which is nothing more than this: prana in supreme abundance (finally!). What I observe is what everyone else observes. People may have different reactions to it. Some might close down, some might open up. Some might open and close in turns. Some will be highly insightful, some will realize there is more to their ability to plumb their depths. All through it, prana is the wild child to me, a liberating and spiritually lubricating force.
Torus form with multiple sheathes/fields
Prana is creative. It stimulates all centers of the body when there is an abundance of it. The ancients described bliss that was off the charts due to the increased flow of this energy. As I sit writing this, I feel a steady-state experience of bliss. I came to this level of bliss as a result of a lot of inner work. I instinctively knew that if I followed what kundalini was doing that things would get easier. They have. I still have my challenges that I deal with, but they change with every realization or inner breakthrough. I know that in my case that prana has fueled wildly vigorous creative energy. In fact, I had to be creative in the arts in order to build enough of a flow in my body to sustain the current level of bliss that I feel. When I go into the energy I can feel its wildness. I can feel that it was never intended to be tamed. yes, it is like water and will flow into any container in which it is poured, but the vessel itself is what limits or allows the flow of this force.
As someone who deals with awakening on a daily basis for over a decade, I luagh at the videos of teachers telling people how to awaken the kundalini. The “Sat Nam!” breath that is one part hammer and one part release into the Mystery. i know that if I had to depend on an exercise like that to awaken I think I should wait a very long time. Maybe someone figured out that it worked for some folks, but I direct the flow of prana by way of feeling only. This has always been what has opened the gates….always. Even teachers who say prana is breath are wrong; prana is a fine energy that is in no way contained in the air. No, prana moves by way of feeling. In fact, feeling is how we actually communicate to the cosmos. it is how the dream is made manifest (I write about this extensively in the blog so do a search to find out more).
The chakras are energy centers and every one has an emotional vibration connected to it. This “emotive power” inherent in the chakras is born out of this feeling quality I am talking about. No, people shut down their chakras and thus prana when they feel a hard feeling instead of a soft opening feeling. And even if a million teachers say prana is breath, it does not make it right even once. It just means that they themselves do not understand prana or have not been able to stimulate prana with anything other than breath (and this tells me as the observer that they may be lacking in their ability to connect with their feeling side of themselves to boot!). I know it might sound pedantic, but I promise you that it isn’t. When we understand something so simple as prana responding to feeling, we can get ourselves on the right track in our own work for bringin in more of it so that its flow can heal (which it does).
Breath, when properly used, has a stimulating effect on the body which in turn stimulates prana. It isn’t even that the chakras respond to thought, it is deeper still than that. Feeling….the whole world is lacking in feeling and awareness of their power to feel. People who are not awakened will laugh at this, but trust me, the world carries a level of numbness in them…..even awakened people. The journey to full feeling can take some time. I know that I have been gifted with a kind of energetic “reset” by a healer who revealed the true depth of my woundedness, which sent me into a very real sense of physical pain (which was itself emotional/spiritual but now boosted by the presence of prana so it feels physical), so I know that we can go merrily along with the work of awakening only to find, “holy bejebus! there is so much more!” even years later. So this is why all of this can become such a journey for people. This is a journey to realization. Realization comes about as a result of awareness. Sometimes, once in a great while, we can meet people who we connect so deeply with that they share something about themselves that can spark all sorts of realizations within ourselves. Some are direct, some tangential. Some are unintended. But this is why relationship has been so important in awakening and is also one aspect that is largely denied by the world’s religions as a bona fide religious or spiritual “practice.”
Yes, prana is creative. There are stories of how women who have undergone awakening have experienced a sense as though they were pregnant, that they were going to birth something. A close family friend confided in me during one of our talks about her awakening process that she went through a period of time when she could feel her body wanting to physically birth something. She sensed that this was part of her awakening process, but it was a curious experience to her. When I explained to her that many other women have reported the same experience it made her feel a little less crazy. The experiences have all been extremely similar and I think that it points to powerful energies that are creative in nature but that operate at higher dimensional levels and are having their effect in our day-to-day lives (because it’s all connected now).
So I think that when we are faced with the spirit and the higher self, it is quite natural for higher-order experiences to be transmitted into the language of the body, to be related to our bodies as well as all other levels of ourselves. I have noticed that at a certain level the self knows itself to be One with all things, so naturally the creative energy of prana is the same as the creativity of our personalities, the same creativity of our physical bodies in making babies, and who knows what other forms of creative output there are in other realms of experience that we have yet to discover as sentient beings. What is universal is that creativity always feels blissful. When we create babies in the physical our bodies provide us with an orgasm to make the experience that much more filled with reward, but creative energy also brings chills and goosebumps to creators of music and art. It at once expresses and evokes powerful feeling. People who have awakened almost all go through intense creative bursts. As an artist I can say that my awakening has fueled a number of new directions in my work that would have never existed before. It’s a little crazy in a way just how crowded my inner landscape is with ideas. My only challenge is in bringing these ideas to fruition. And, in the way that prana also works, it speeds up manifesting many-times over. For example, when I began thinking about how close I was to reopening my studio practice after teaching, without saying a word, but thinking how I would like to have some good assistants, I received one highly qualified request for being involved in some part-time capacity at the studio making work as well as two beginners who expressed a sincere desire to learn the discipline. The interesting part of this is how well-timed it was. By now, I am not surprised by any of this, but I know that when my prana flow increases, it accelerates manifestation of desired outcomes. That said, it might bring me a person who WANTS to work in my field, but it does not guarantee that they will be excellent or that they will decide to stay with it a year or even a week later. Sometimes, you have to dig deeper to find where these glitches exist. But that is for another time.
But here is the problem as I see it, at least as it relates to many of our institutions on earth, which is that our creativity has been hijacked. It’s not some demonic conspiracy to enslave humanity, just a desire to tamp down creativity because it scares people who are in positions of power. One thing I know about power is that the vast majority of institutions and the people within then have a great need to control. This control on the one hand may have been intended to keep people from killing each other or behave badly, but the other side of the coin has been that it also limits freedom. It limits our creativity. When I look at what I have seen in my meditations about creativity and how wild and free it is and when I look at the human race, I see a big disconnect. And the problem? Here is your problem…..
We value war and destroying in the name of greed and the usurpation of land and wealth through military invasions and keeping our race held hostage by the fear of the next fabricated threat that the military industrial complex decides to come up with next (read your history on this—most of our wars have been coups on the part of the CIA or an effort to fool us into war, this didn’t start with the invasion of Iraq, this has been going on for a long time). We are taught that to be a man we must be warlike, unfeeling. Women have their place, perhaps one of the greatest fonts of creative energy alive on the planet and our women are shut down to such an unbelievable degree. Their thought process mimics men in their rational approach, with that fabulous intuitive and feminine character of soul nearly gone. Really, you have no idea. But so are the men shut down. We all are, so don’t think I am picking on anyone in particular. But men are shut down in such a way that it creates this rage and it just keeps feeding their desire to go to war so they can just kill something. This, my friends, is creativity turned into itself. This is the dark side of the creative force. Do I really need to point this out to you? Men who don’t know how to command their sexual energy, women who are afraid of these men, and then women who aren’t in command of their own sexual energy too, and use their emotional forces of manipulation to work things in their favor. It is a crazy mixed up mess if you ask me.
Our institutions by and large forswear sexual expression as a necessity to make babies, but by and large, we have incredible taboos placed on our sexuality. While there are good reasons for governing behavior in theory, my observation is that our attempts to govern sexual energy result in greater dysfunction than ever. Men pitted against women, the war of the sexes, men not in possession of their source of power and women not in full possession of their source of power either. All the while we are taught that our sexual nature is dirty, that lust is not redeemable, and forget having sex if its lustful. In fact, most of our institutions teach us how to sublimate sexual energy as a convenient way of side-stepping the issue altogether. In many parts of Asia its as though the teaching of Zen Buddhism and Taoism and other strands of Buddhism would rather deal with packaging bliss so that its no longer sexual as their axis mundi for solving the problem. Women no longer in possession of themselves will never engage a man at the level of his divinity for very long, but the exact same can be said for men with their women. I ask; how did we get here? I feel like I am in that video by the Talking Heads for the song Once In A Lifetime where a clearly out of control David Byrne seeks to illustrate the chaos of our lives as controlled beings while desiring finding the flow of life.
When I step back from this madness, I can feel a world within me swirling with the forces of creation in a way that I had always hoped to be able to feel, actually. I had always hoped prior to awakening that creative energy was this vivid and strong (and it is). But when I look at the world I see we have a long way to go, baby. We have a long way to go because we have squashed the creativity of the feminine and masculine both.
It’s interesting to me how as men begin to soften, kundalini is coming onto the scene also as women are learning how to find their own strength and their own sovereignty. I observe that on a collective level humans are reaching across the aisle and integrating more of their opposites into their lives especially over the last twenty years (which also corresponds with the sudden increase of awakening (I could be wrong, but I don’t buy that these awakenings are due to someone decided it will be, but are the result of a myriad of factors all resulting in the changes we see today. If you know how awakening is itself defined by the fusion of opposites in consciousness, then you can perhaps appreciate how it is that we now have a mass awakening taking place on the planet. Right. Now. And honestly, I observe that the progress we have made not just for hundreds of years, but especially during this last century, just happens to be of a kind that favors the fusion of opposites. What if instead of this being some grand cosmic event as many want to say it is, we are simply glimpsing the natural result of people having reached a kind of threshold point in their development with awakening being the result. This period has shown us more possibilities and people have been able to shrug off the control of their institutions just enough to begin to evolve in new directions, directs that favor awakening.
I think we need to be less concerned about how others will react or treat us. We already are made into a kind of outcast by the differences in our experiences moment by moment from the average Joe and Josephina. I mean, admit it, even as you go through your life undercover as the awakened being on the planet, you also find that this makes you feel so singular and lonely. Social things for social creatures. I think that the teachings of Tantra have a lot to explain about bliss. While tantra is itself not necessarily sexual, the parts of tantra that are do not seek to shy away from confronting issues in our consciousness (well, it is the same with white tantra or black, both head straight-away right into the center of the fire which is how all emotional release work is done in fact). The lesson is that you never skirt the briar patch, you head right into it and liberate it of whatever hitches that reside within the self. Free yourself from shame, guilt, and repressed emotion. I know that in my life I have worked to dissolve as much of it as I can. I have more to go, but as this last block rears its head I am reminded that if I am to be able to hear the voice of my intuition and my inner guidance as clearly as possible, I have to continue to be clearer. Don’t be tamed, friends.
Waking The Infinite 
This is beautiful and your posts add something positive to my day; thank you.
I want to say that while I agree that most people are nowhere near awake, our people (I speak of those of European descent) are waking up. Asatru is my tribal path (yet I believe in pretty much everything, have studied bits of Hinduism, Taoism, Gnosticism and so forth). It’s growing, and our government doesn’t like it because it empowers the Individual and the collective Folk. Our men are men and our women are women, and we all create “things,” we all find a craft. Our people are very industrious and there will be no squishing us out. It’s a fire that is spreading, and it’s untouchable from the outside as you know.
You said something that was most interesting about women feeling pregnant. I LOVE sunlight, I need it, even in wintertime, I’m out on the back deck with my face to the sun, and I realized the most curious thing: after some time in the sun, I get an urge to “bear down” like birthing a baby, and I contract my abdominal muscles over and over. I could never explain this. Sorry, I do talk a lot sometimes. Enjoy your day.
I just read your comment, after posting a very long comment, to see that you too have experienced this bearing down. It feels to me like there’s something about this action that helps us integrate something in the energetic realm. To bring it into our bodies so it can be expressed through us. Or it’s an action that helps us clear out something that’s long overdue to leave. Not quite sure. Possibly both.
and I just read your beautiful comment below, and then this one, and I thank you for your insight. For what it’s worth, when I’m out focusing on the radiant sun, I’m also focusing on my belief that we all have a sort of inner sun, similar, a microcosmic version, and I’m out connecting the suns. 🙂 It’s a head-scratcher, to be sure. I also use the sun to “cook out” my negative energy, and when I’m feeling too watery. I think you’re right with your conclusion: a bit of both: in and out, a swelling and a flow. Thank you! ❤
I have no doubt that it does! I think I was actually responding in like kind to Literata about this very thing.
Im up late before going to bed and responded to a comment of yours and then realized, I was’t sure that I knew your writing. Had I read your blog? When I went and tried to post a comment, I kept getting sent to a different post…which was weird. I wanted to tell you that I grew up dyslexic, or labeled that. My Mother was all in a tizzy about it as I remember. She was upset that I would copy a picture backwards and tried to write backwards. I found that as I grew what made me different afforded me with a kind of mind that was able to capture things that many others didn’t. I didn’t see nor thought what made me different was itself a bad thing. It was….just different. And you know, it really has helped me a lot. And as for anxiety, there is something at the root of his feeling and if you can get a really marvelous inspiring therapist s/he might be able to help him identify what it is. I am going to guess it has a lot to do with his awareness of his differences and also the way he is perceived (by himself and others) as struggling. Im not judging here, so don’t think that is what I am on about. Your son has things he is really good with and its likely there isn’t a soul around who can teach him how to tap into it. if he is brave, he can learn on his own. I know I did. Anyway, I wanted to say how much I feel for you and the challenges you face just going through awakening but also with the love you have for your son and how hard it can be to see him go through what he does. there is an answer in there and its one that is marked by an inspired approach, I am certain, but I don’t know your son and I am not a psychologist. I am just very hopeful for you!
You are very welcome! I didn’t see this cluster of comments because they were clustered so close that they didn’t show up right away. I am glad that you connect with my yammers and musings.
You know, I have come across some interesting things related to Egyptian esoteric practices that involved Ra the sun God and initiations into the mysteries by women. Actually had an experience earlier in life that was a past life or in-between life experience where I watched an initiation rite. It was very odd… in that this room full of women, they were all facing this wall….it was a very plain room but there were these openings in the wall. Maybe it was a crypt on the other side and they were accessing the soul energy of someone who had died physically? There is a story of a woman who went into her husbands crypt and spoke to his spirit. He had died without an heir…and as she connected to his spirit, she spoke with him and he said she should be pharaoh. I am blanking on her name, but she had the courage to say what she had been told. I don’t know if this was a crypt that I was looking at, there was so little context other than the scene unfolding. But what is so odd is I stumbled across this exact same description by a woman who was having a past life regression in which she was part of an initiatory rite in Egypt. She described this sun-like energy filtering in through the room…there was no visible light, but this sun-like essence that beamed through the room and then became like a fire. This was itself kundalini. My sense is that we experience the opposite most strongly in our psyche’s so that for men we often experience or sense kundalini as feminine whereas some women will encounter the masculine (if so inclined). Not always, and there are some traditions that say kundalini is feminine even though I know my experience was that it was both (this was what gives it its force). So when I heard you describe this joining to the sun with the sun in you, it sparked this memory.
I think it quite interesting how we access these old things in our present and sometimes we even are aware of information now long lost or not well-known either from our past or through what Jung called the Collective Consciousness. Anyway, I think that these energies become so real for us (because they are) but they become so powerful that the engage so many parts of ourselves that we can feel as though there is this mystical birthing taking place. I always sense that what is happening is we are experiencing a larger reality just out of range of ordinary consciousness (or accepted consciousness or awareness) and these ways of experiencing the energy is the only way we can understand them, integrate them, to bring them down to earth. I know that for myself, my whole task has been for me to prepare and then embody to the degree that I can and to be this conduit. I know that a lot that I do in my studio practice here in Virginia has been to learn how to incorporate these energies into my work. So far what comes of it has been immensely rewarding. I don’t know yet about how they will ressonate with the public at large, but for me, developing a moving therapy that involves creativity is probably a lot like what you have described…..So how is THAT for talking!?
I so appreciate your posts! You wrote: “There are stories of how women who have undergone awakening have experienced a sense as though they were pregnant, that they were going to birth something.” It reminded me of something that happened to me during the first few months of my awakening, when I had experiences of having a rush of energy in the form of memories of sorts, come back to me, accompanied by a short period of involuntary deep panting which crescendo’d into physically bearing down, as if giving birth (but lasting not even a minute and not nearly as intense as actual childbirth). As I’d been doing healing work with my hypnotherapist, there were several sessions when I regressed so far back in time that I popped into other lifetimes, and one theme that kept coming up was having been killed because of my intuitive abilities. I created great healing to these lifetimes during the sessions, and it felt like with Kundalini energy, I was reintegrating stuck energy and information from these lifetimes as I “birthed” it back into my awareness.
In one case, during a hypnotherapy healing session, I unexpectedly popped back into a previous life and witnessed my being an herbalist back in the late 1800’s, who was hanged. During the session I not only saw myself hanged but got the story around why – it had to do with my being very intuitive. At one point, I was able to see through the eyes of the man who had me hanged, to understand his motivation, and great forgiveness happened. With that, I was finally able to let go of persistent unconscious fear of being killed because I was intuitive, which had transcended that lifetime into this present one. One day, well after that session, I was looking out into my yard, thinking about the wild plants around my property and realized a lot of them can be used medicinally (I’ve read a bit about herbal/plant medicine). All of a sudden, a thought hit me that energetically connected me to this other lifetime, and it felt like through this panting and pushing action, I brought back energy from that lifetime that had been stuck. And when I say energy, this feels like a stronger connection to my higher self – to my own intuition.
This involuntary experience of panting and pushing happened to me a handful of times, all relating to past lives (that had come up during healing sessions) when I was killed because of my intuitive abilities. It feels like a significant part of my Kundalini Awakening has been to complete the healing from these past lives, and in doing so, increase my intuitive abilities.
Isn’t it interesting that you used your intuition to breathe in a way that works for you? For what it’s worth, I had an experience that began to connect me more deeply to the energy which involved visualizing a panting leopard…I just thought about it and it moved energy like crazy. But I think we know if we all can follow your example.
You also described beautifully how old karma was dissolved through being able to change your mind thinks and feels about your having been persecuted even unto death in another lifetime, a release that many report frees them in the present as well as changing outcomes in the future (obviously) but also the probable pasts too, which is a deep mind-bender, but I know I have seen it’s effects enough to know it works. But imagine; it’s possible that the man who killed you may have experienced his own release in that moment, wherever he is. If you want a really cool example of how this works, check out the interview of Dr. Hu Linn (sp.?) who speaks on Ho’oponopo in a series of YouTube vids from the folks whose name completely escapes me now….great people, a husband and wife team.
Hindus do a kind of stomach pumping that is meant to help shake and clear the nadi in the abdomen. Maybe a little of that or no?
I think that you will find that you will puck up on the herbal stuff quickly this time around, although I think that the power you have bubbling up through you, prana, might be a larger focus for you, for it is the healer of souls…
Thanks for reaching out and telling about your story. I find it fascinating how people of our time are making their way through this experience, and your experience is certainly a part of that!