DarkHorse Ministries

Behold the Kundalini Fire

**IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:** The following account describes an involuntary kundalini awakening that resulted in a life-threatening spiritual crisis. This story is shared for the purpose of bearing witness to what is possible through God's grace alone — not as instruction or encouragement for others to pursue or force kundalini awakening. Kundalini is not a spiritual toy. If you believe you are experiencing a kundalini crisis, please seek qualified guidance immediately.

Sometime in late 1996, I found a book called *Emotional Clearing* by John Ruskan — a guide to somatic emotional breathwork and chakra clearing that would become central to my survival over the next decade. At the time I did not fully understand what I had found or why I needed it so desperately. That would become clear soon enough.

Within several months, I would sit down in a local interfaith chapel and begin meditatively reading the first mystical poem in Lex Hixon's *Atom From The Sun of Knowledge*, I had unknowingly stepped onto the Sufi path. The literature I was playing with was not common spiritual reading. It was direct initiatory transmission — the equivalent of the sacred Sufi ritual of taking the right hand of the Prophet Muhammad. I had become a dervish without knowing what a dervish was. I had no teacher, no container, no tradition holding me. I was an adept on the path home to God without realizing I was on any path at all.

Then came the trauma.

I will not describe the details of what happened, except to say that an unexpected and devastating trauma ruptured my kundalini. I am not sure I even knew I had a kundalini at the time. What I knew was that something fundamental had broken open inside me, and I was dying. I was beginning to sense that I had repressed the maximum amount of negative emotional energy that a human being is capable of. This was manifesting itself in the felt sensation that any moment my arms might fly up and just start striking people. In other words, I was beginning to seriously fear that I might completely lose all impulse control. And who do you share THAT problem with?

The only material I could find was Gopi Krishna's "Living with Kundalini." It was useless to me — not because Gopi Krishna was not a genuine mystic, but because he lived within the culture of India, which provided an evolutionary and cultural container for kundalini experience that I simply did not have. I had no such container. I was alone in the West with a live wire running through me and no one who understood what was happening.

I almost did not survive.

The Remedy: The Face Before I Was Born

What saved my life was a spiritual autobiography I stumbled upon by the Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, called "The Face Before I Was Born. In the first fifteen or twenty pages, Vaughan-Lee described how he had ruptured his own kundalini as a teenager through physical abuse of his body. And then he offered something practical.

He described the Sufi silent heart meditation — placing the words *La ilaha ill Allah* (There is no God but God) silently upon the heart and repeating this practice. What this does, he explained, is shut down the three lower chakras — the survival chakra, the sensual chakra, and the power chakra — and work exclusively through the heart chakra (Anahata). The heart chakra is a bridge between the lower, or earthly and upper or spiritual selves. Working through it makes the kundalini rupture much more manageable.

I want to be clear about something. I do not believe there is any putting this genie back in the bottle! Once this energy is moving, your options are to work with it and go completely toward God, or not survive it. Those are the options as I understand them from my own experience.

And so I began.

The Witnessed Breath: An Original Practice

>Over the next five or six years, I developed an experiential breathwork process through direct observation and experimentation. I did not read about this in any book. I did not learn it from any teacher. I discovered it by paying attention to what was actually happening inside me.

The practice was simple in description and demanding in execution:

I would simply watch my breathing without attempting to control it in any way.

Here is the theory I mentally developed from my background in biopsychology:

On a daily basis, I am not paying attention to my breathing. Therefore it must be my unconscious mind that is keeping my breathing going — expending a certain amount of energy to maintain that automatic function. Therefore, if I simply watch my breathing without attempting to control it in any way, then my unconscious no longer needs to expend that energy on monitoring respiration. It has free energy available to do psychospiritual work.

What does the unconscious do with that freed energy? In my experience, it uses it to extract the spiritual prana from the incoming breath, and directs that pranic energy inward — cutting through the layers of consciousness down into the unconscious self, where it slices off a small amount of psychically repressed negativity stored on the sympathetic side of the unconscious, bipolar autonomic nervous system, responsible for the 'fight or flight' response.

And then that material comes out on the exhale.

The exhale was not subtle. Out of me would come what I can only describe as a roaring sound — enormous force for what was, if you measured it with your fingers in front of my mouth, almost no actual air movement at all. The volume of air was minimal. The force and sound were massive. What was moving was not primarily air. The prana was using the exhale as a doorway.

The force was so great that I was convinced that if you put me on wheels, I would roll backwards. My torso would whip back and forth because the energy was having to come through repressed blockages in my energy body — hitting resistance, breaking through, with the physical body expressing each collision.

I had to find places where there were no other people, where I could make this kind of noise without alarming anyone. I was doing this at least four or five times a day, for years. I was actually being signaled by a stirring in my gut when it was time to do more work.

The Practice Becomes Conscious

Eventually — after years of this daily work — something shifted. The process became conscious inside me in a new way. I noticed that when I arched my back, I would immediately feel an electrical connection along my spine. I came to understand that this meant I had built up enough of a charge over the previous several hours that I needed to go find a private place and do the breath work again. My body was signaling me directly. The process had internalized.

Around this same time, I realized I no longer needed to wear a winter coat. My body was simply generating whatever heat it needed to stay warm, automatically. I would later learn that this corresponds to the Tibetan practice called Tummo — inner heat — which Tibetan monks practice in the Himalayas and reportedly use to dry wet blankets with body heat in competition with one another. I did not learn Tummo from anyone. It appeared on its own as a byproduct of years of this witnessed breath practice.

I barely know the word for what I have. I only know that my body does it.

Halloween 2005: The Heart Chakra Opens

On Halloween evening of 2005, my heart chakra opened completely. I was outside when it happened. In an intuitive flash, I suddenly understood that the stirring in my gut — the sensation I had always interpreted as the signal that I needed to go do my breathwork — was not merely a physiological cue. It was the living Spirit of God inside me. The realization hit me with such force that water shot straight out of my eyes and my knees buckled beneath me. I nearly hit the sidewalk. Because here is what this meant to me in that moment: all my life, in the heat of triggered emotionality, I could never find God. No matter how much head knowledge I carried about spiritual reality, once I was triggered I would spiral into compulsive emotionality for hours, sometimes days. God was nowhere I could reach in those moments. And now I was being given the knowledge that I would never be forsaken. That God was with me. Inside my own body. Tangible. Undeniable. How many people are given that? The certainty of God's presence within their own flesh? I stood there on the sidewalk and marveled. The five or six years of daily breathwork, the roaring exhales in empty parking lots, the torso whipping, the electrical spine, the spontaneous heat — all of it had been clearing the house. And now the Owner had moved in and made His presence known in a way I could never again doubt or argue myself out of.

The promise embedded in that first fleeting glimpse of bliss at Christmas 1992 had finally been delivered on the doorstep of my soul, after trudging uphill another thirteen long years.