It took a bit of courage to photograph and then publish the marks that showed up when kundalini rose a decade and a half ago. It was an odd thing to witness these marks, one on my right hip and another that emerged after a clearing of karmic material tied to my heart center several years later. The posts about this are in the archive. I include one from the heart below.

At first when I wrote about it, there was little comment about them, but after about a year comments began to come in with people describing similar marks who had been running searches for burn-like marks after spiritual events, and voila—they found me. Many tended to be either on the hips or near the shoulders. Then, a few years ago, a Japanese graduate student shared photos with me of his own marks which were nearly identical to my own, also on his hip and another like my heart center mark except at his throat chakra which following a kundalini awakening.

I thought that someone or something had done this to me, but as increasing numbers of people have come forward to describe their own burn-like marks, it seems to me that these marks may simply be what happens when strong energy is being released (because of its proximity to the energetic event tied to kundalini awakening). Intuitively it seems right that the marks could happen when energy is trying to move up the legs to the torso, and vica versa, and like an energy bolt used to traveling in a more or less straight line, it has to make a sudden turn and becomes impeded and marks result (this is my theory at this point). This could result in a burn or iritation to the skin. For me, I know that this is nothing mystical or “woo-woo” but serves as a physical trace of the energy in the physical. I also have not just marks that emerged around the time I awakened, but I have a persistent mark over my heart and recently that mark has moved.

It would be helpful if science were to take an interest in this observable phenomenon. Absent that, I am left to investigate and collect accounts by others with similar effects that have happened to them.

Three days ago, I noticed that the mark over my heart center has moved. It started at the lower sternum as you see in the photo. It has moved up by about 2 and a half inches, and the mark, which has tended to be circular, and which has been constant in its presence for years now has grown three times in size. It is less noticable but can be easily seen in the right light. It hasn’t waned in that time and resembles two semicircles that sit opposite each other along the vertical axis of my torso. The end of each semicircle doesn’t touch the semicircle beneath it, but the effect is seeing a near-perfect circle being formed (or at least suggested). I am observing it to see what it does after this move, if anything.

I often find it hard to describe what I feel because while I know that it became a novel but continuous state compared to how I felt previous to this experience of awakening, its constancy has led me to find it to be a new normal. How do you normalize supreme bliss? I spent years learning how to appear normal while speeding through another world within. It’s progress now that I can keep from needing to sit or lie down for an hour or two because the bliss is so strong. There were periods where I would be so blissed out that I would forget from one moment to the next what I was thinking about or even doing. It didn’t even matter in many cases. I can’t say that I handled it all that well in the beginning, but over time I learned how to carry that bliss while being able to focus on the kinds of things that would normally get wiped away by the thick blanket of bliss.

The effect of the bliss is that it has had a significant effect on dulling or eliminating a lot of pain in my body, and softening emotional pain. While this is helpful, even miraculous, I am concerned that it could make identifying a physical problem difficult in the future. Pain is an important feedback when things go wrong that need attention. I sometimes worry a little about this. Could I miss important signs of my imminent demise? The bliss says, “pipe down, it’s okay, just chill…” What’s behind the bliss? A cocktail of chemistry, I have found. It isn’t all just dopamine, but a good portion is based on my experience and investigation into it.

I disagree with Jana Dixon in her assertion in the Physiology of Kundalini that dopamine does not play an important role in the symptoms of kundalini. I have observed that high dopamine levels are responsible for being able to take part in the release process because while dopamine is a natural pain killer, the effect it had on me psychologically was that it made it possible for me to let go, and to stop “grasping” for the old familiar psychological patterns that were the basis of old beliefs and programming. What I experienced fell neatly into the realm of high dopamine levels. Additionally, I have found that in people with schizophrenia, the condition involves an inability to properly metabolize dopamine, resulting in a build-up in the brain resulting in the psychotic break if nothing changes. I found an online conversation of a group of schizophrenics who had gone off their medication just to see how long they could go without serious problems. One person said that he discovered his symptoms after a week were identical to kundalini. For me, this was proof that at the right level, dopamine is directly tied to elements that makes kundalini feel the way that it does. It may also be responsible for boosting psi ability in the brain by allowing the self to tune out the usual signals through the sensory cortex in favor of tuning in the nonphysical senses. Dopamine, it could be said, gives peoole a pleasant rush at one level, but could do much more at higher levels.

When I read accounts of people who smoked opium (a dopamine analog in plant form) many of the accounts described symptoms very similar to my own experience with dopamine. When the self lets go and surrenders, the chemistry instantly shifts away from the stress hormones of norepinephrine and adrenaline and into the softer more dreamy dopamine/oxytocin range of the spectrum. And who among us haven’t felt intense feelings of love during awakening? I am not suggesting that dopamine production is kundalini, I am suggesting that dopamine is the concoction that creates part of the experience of bliss in the body. This is all being coordinated at the nonlocal consciousness level. Dopamine doesn’t get produced or released until the signal from the consciousness comes. I will also add that I am aware that other compounds are in this mix, it’s just that the effects of dopamine were so easy to identify with some simple online searching. I do think that without a little adrenaline, dopamine tends to make me want to lie down for considerable lengths of time. It slows motor response, it has even slurred my speech and gave me the stereotypical “Buddha gaze” where eyelids are often at half mast. I wouldn’t rule out the presence in small amounts of DMT since in small amounts it has been shown to create bliss. I for one would like very much to test this in a clinical setting to see how DMT bliss compares to my own physically produced bliss compounds.

When this shift in the heart happened, what I count as the fifth in a five-layered process (tied to the koshas—each chakra is like an onion, kosha meaning “husk” and each layer aligns with the five major aspects of the energy body: emotional mental, physical, energetic, and spiritual). This means that each chakra can be cleared by kundalini up to five times as it acts on each aspect of the chakra and its koshas.

At this time, just a week before the change in location, I inquired in meditation to find out the nature of a hitch that I had for most of my life, which is a habitual tendency to move into poverty consciousness. This never made much sense to me in the past because I always had a capacity to get whatever I needed in life, so what gives? Just ask and it will be given.

I realized in the course of the inner inquiry that there were no limits that existed within, and what was causing it was a vestige remaining that came from growing up in a family where this issue seemed front and center. I was myself taken on a very fast journey through a space that I knew was my being and what felt curiously similar to a spaciousness that I experienced in the wake of the third clearing of my heart center in 2008.

In my recent meditation, my inner guidance took me through this vast open space and there was simply nothing there that would impede it (it was completely clear—a vast brilliant white space–my own connection to and experience of the divine white light capable of being anchored here by me in this life). Huh.

This was new to me because over the years this inner space was always cluttered with something. I grew accustomed to feeling the “remainder” of the stuck energy that had yet to be resolved, with the process always being where I saw, noted its presence (after a while of getting used to this process), knew it was there, but relied on the energy to get to it in its own time. I, as a result, never second-guessed the energy in terms of which block it would get to next because it was much better at getting it done than I could ever do on my own. That said, I did practice Qi Gung and meditation in order to ‘soften the ground’ so to speak in a hope of making things go more smoothly for this intelligent energy. It was my “project” and after years of doing this work sudden it became a wind-swept silence of a space.

“There is nothing there” my inner guidance said to me. There was nothing in my way, whatever that hitch was that I had was now gone. Looking back I realize that most of it was the result of other people who either expressed a poverty consciousness, or it was people near me who tried to connect me with it. Luckily those people have edited themselves from my life now and for the last three years I have been actively engaged in bringing my studio business back to life (with the greatest growth happening during the pandemic).

Within days events changed. I had cobbled together work from last month’s production in the studio, held an event, and in 20 years of doing shows and events, this one wasn’t just better than anything I had done before, it was head and shoulders beyond anything that I had ever done since I began the business in 1997. I thought it was a fluke until the next week’s event was just as crazy as the first. This was repeated a third time for good measure and the result was the same. The whole tenor of the business has changed. I am hiring part time help and the truth is, it wont be enough. A new chapter has opened up. The heart mark had shifted during this time, signaling a readiness to step into the next phase of the journey.

The curious thing about this is that I keep hearing that abundance is tied to the root or base energy center. I feel that for me, it all happens in my heart as a pivot point, a mediator, between root and crown centers. For whatever reason, this was the most natural outcome for me. How is that possible? Is it that when we do something with love, it can only really emerge best from the heart? Would it then be an outcome mediated by it?

All of this is the culmination of years worth of work, so while this recent development was a pleasant surprise, it was one step along a long line of steps. And why am I even saying this? It’s to show that there are different ways of doing this work, to convey that the moment someone says that something must happen a certain way, you can know there are many paths that lead to the same summit. The other side is my sense that none of this is supernatural but is, I think, natural. It’s physioligical and driven by an energetic force we unfortunately don’t know much about in a scientific way because so few researchers are willing to delve into it. We do have reams and reams of accounts both current and ancient by the people experiencing the phenomenon. It is described as a serpent in India. Based on how the energy rose up through my body, I can understand why. But there is no snake, there isn’t even a Shiva and Shakti meeting at the crown. Those are apt descriptions to say what it is like, no one thinks it actually is that. This is much the same as Jesus saying the kingdom is like a candle, or a treasure in a field. The kingdom isn’t literally those things, it is like those things. Based on my observations it is more likely that this energetic even is the result of the two brains, the left and right hemispheres finally synchronizing in a very particular way which leads to a sudden rush of energy and bliss flowing into the crown and radiating throughout the body. That may not sound terribly exciting, but how the mechanics sound and how it feels can appear quite different. Prana is just electricity?? It might be that a slight “over-volt” in the body is enough to supercharge the brain and kick the endochrine system into high gear where a host of hormones kick into high gear resulting in better health, sharper physical senses, and an expansion of cognition even into intuitive abilities. Clearly these burns or marks are the result of a real physical force, and the best explanation is an arc of electricity perhaps coupled with resistance at critical points where energy flows from and to the torso to the legs. It would help if someone with a technical background were to take an interest. How to rouse those in slumber?

Personally I suspect that the phenomenon represents an area of inquiry scientifically that would likely serve to challenge materialist views long held about consciousness as arising from matter rather than the other way around (which is what I think this is). It also has the potential to vault us into a new understanding of ourselves, and our potentials If only we can break the log-jam of enlightenment-era thinking (namely Descart who championed the idea that we are just biological machines entirely driven by the matter assembled that we call biological life). The incidence of marks that show around energetic events like awakening is one such example of real physical traces that help to anchor the phenomenon in something more than “woo-woo” and gets us all closer to “how-to” through an investigation of this field as a once-rare event that is fast becoming a more common phenomenon.

I know that it is entirely possible that my heart mark could help show the physical traces and existance of the chakra, not as a belief or notion promulgated by Eastern philosophy and esotericists, but as a reality that could serve to point to the system most directly tied to the forces of consciousness.

Additionally it could help us to understand the size of the chakra in the energy body. The fact that the mark on my heart emerged immediately after a heart clearing event, was the size of a dime at that time (in 2011), only to change size while also moving up my sternum by about three inches may have a lot to tell us about how this system behaves. While we may not have dozens of people for a half-decent study, we may be able to glean information from the few who do exhibit these markings as a response or reaction to the energy. Is this mark, which persists, the result of a strong energetic pathway that opened up in the wake of awakening and the release of emotional baggage? It feels electric to me, so that would be one clue for future investigation. I also sense that what might be increased electrical activity in my body may well be felt or read as bliss in consciousness. I see a connection with this energy serving to stimulate my endochrine system which has led to a host of positive physical results. It also, not surprises, has pushed libido a good deal, and with so many experiencers describing kundalini as a sexual energy, this effect may help us to understand why, while helping us to see how this energy impacts the body in a positive way (while understanding better how to support the physical organism so it has less chance of burning us out or experiencing negative side effects from the energy).

Currently most materialistically inclined thinkers think that the idea of the chakra is just speculative hogwash. I think that by upping our game on this front we could begin to show anecdotal evidence that this is more than mere speculation.

The problem I face is finding the people who are affected in the same or similar ways as I have in regards to the marks. While I have a handful of people who have reported having had simkar marks only one has been willing to share pictures which he took before the marks faded after the surge of energy that likely produced them faded. While I had a hip mark, my Japanese friend developed a mark at his throat chakra which is not that different in size and shape as my heart chakra mark. At this point, these kinds of numbers are not enough to convince any researcher that there is anything to it.

If you have experienced this type of phenomenon, I would like very much to know because it will help us to better understand this phenomenon and without data, there isn’t any interest. If you have images you can send them to info@staffordartglass.com. Your info will be held in confidence for any contacts that you make.

~Parker