I have shared how I calmed the kundalini fire brought on by meditation, and how I began to get more insight into some of my strange experiences.

As it turns out, I was lucky. My experience was relatively mild compared to what could have been.

Four Stories

1 — Kimberley had a series of “other worlds” experiences, after which she became physically ill and exhausted. In this period of spiritual emergency, she was unable to work and lost her home. She moved in with family for a time. Although she eventually established an independent life again, including getting a new job and place to live, she remained unwell emotionally and physically. She ended up collapsing after a few weeks at the new job. (From In Case of Spiritual Emergency by Catherine G Lucas)

2 — Dan Lawton was “an unabashed evangelist for mindfulness” for over a decade. He’d had a regular meditation practice, including attending a dozen silent retreats, and for four years was a full-time teacher of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. Dan had experienced a number of significant benefits from his practice.

But then in the midst of a retreat in North Carolina, he “split apart,” experiencing a “hellscape of terror, panic and paranoia.” While the retreat leaders were kind and offered suggestions for altering his meditation practice, as he explained to them, “I couldn’t stop being mindful or aware of everything that was going on within my mind and body, and the awareness felt like it was choking me to death.” The effects of the retreat did not abate as he recuperated at his sister’s for a week, nor when he returned home.

“In the months after the retreat,” Dan writes, “I suffered from symptoms diagnosed by a therapist as post-traumatic stress disorder. I frequently experienced involuntary convulsions and simple tasks like cooking a meal induced panic attacks. I was occasionally so overwhelmed by my bodily sensations that I was unable to speak, and sometimes had problems differentiating myself from my surroundings.”

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​Dan had no history of trauma before the retreat, nor any psychotic episodes. Through a variety of means — including, crucially, stopping his meditation practice — he found his way back to stability in time. He still uses the tools of mindfulness. He also strongly advocates transparency about spiritual practices, including their negative effects. (Dan’s story, When Buddhism Goes Bad)

3 — Seeking a restorative experience, Megan Vogt went to a silent retreat at a vipassana meditation center in Delaware in 2017. A week in, the twenty-five-year-old was experiencing bliss. But soon after, her mental and emotional states began to unravel. As she left the meditation center with her family at the end of the ten day period, she was overcome with a compulsion to end her life. A week in the psych. unit of a hospital seemed to help stabilize her; her psychotic symptoms were receding.

Her family kept a close eye on her when she returned home, and tried to connect her with psychiatrists for continued support. Megan resumed meditating. But things still weren’t right with her. Tragically, a few months after her intensive meditation experience, she was found dead in her truck, a suicide note left behind for her family. (David Kortava relays her story more fully in this 2021 piece in Harper’s.)
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4 — Another young adult, David, told writer Tomas Rocha about a divine experience he had at a meditation retreat, describing the process initially as “the best thing that had ever happened” to him. He turned down a spot at law school while on this high. But over the ensuing months, the meaning drained out of life.

​Trips to Asia seeking guidance made no difference. Still trying to re-center himself, David went to a retreat at a nonsectarian Buddhist meditation center in Washington. It was a wild ride for him — including confusion, terror, and thoughts and feelings he did not want to experience but could not stop. Retreat leaders had only verbal reassurances to offer. For effective support, David wound up at Cheetah House, “a community invested in the recovery from, and reduction of, adversities resulting from meditation practices.” (Rocha’s 2014 piece in The Atlantic)

Not Just Outliers

But those are only anecdotes. Some might suggest they are the outliers, the exception to what usually happens.

As researchers like to say, correlation does not equal causation. Just because a few people who meditated went on to have difficult experiences does not necessarily mean meditation caused those experiences. Such instances are easily dismissed by supposing that the individuals in question had latent psychological problems that happened to come to a head during/after their meditation experience. What about hard data?

I was intrigued to learn of research on Transcendental Meditation (TM). I had some early exposure to TM, and that method of meditation is in some ways similar to the kind I practiced for years.

The German government completed a research project on TM in Germany in 1980, spurred on by ex-meditators (and spouses and parents of meditators) reporting troubling symptoms to authorities that they believed originated with their TM practice. Per Aryeh Siegel, the German study is “the most thorough study of TM regarding the comprehensive study protocols used and the preparation of interviewers who conducted the study” (Transcendental Deception, 2018).

As Siegel relays, “many meditators experienced severe mental disturbances, including disturbed sleep, anguish, problems with concentration, hallucinations, and feelings of isolation, depression, and over-sensitivity… [as well as] detrimental effects on decision-making… Whether they were ordinary meditators who had little contact with [the TM organization] or more committed, many of their complaints were similar.”

The investigators wrote: “The mainly positive experiences in the earlier stages (pictures, feelings of happiness) are replaced in time — according to reports of the ex-meditators — by terrifying images and feelings of fear or anguish.”

​A majority of meditators (63%) noted physical complaints associated with meditating, including digestive issues, headaches, insomnia, and neck pain. Psychological problems were even more prevalent, occurring in 76% of cases.While a small number had pre-existing illnesses — which got worse after starting to meditate — most of the cases were new disorders or illnesses, with 43% of participants requiring psychiatric or medical treatment to address them. The most common issues were fatigue (63%), anxiety (52%), depression (45%), nervousness (39%), and regression (39%). (Transcendental Deception by Aryeh Siegel, 2018)

To me this suggests that if a person took up TM for stress relief or emotional support, the cure is liable to be worse than the disease. Yikes!

Dark Nights in Mainstream Meditation

But TM is only one form of meditation, and not among the most prevalent forms practiced in the West. Plus, it is arguably quite culty. (Patrick Ryan says as much here, or check out Aryeh Siegel’s aforementioned, thoroughly researched book to assess from fuller information.)

Mindfulness is all over pop culture these days. It’s not just a thing at Buddhist retreat centers or sanghas anymore — ‘secular’ versions are widely promoted in mainstream health and mental health fields, and the language of mindfulness has filtered into everyday lingo. The meditation and mindfulness revolution could not have gone on this long if it had the same sort of shadow side as TM… could it?

Fortunately, the question of adverse effects is starting to get some attention among researchers. Clinical psychologist Willoughby Britton is a pioneer in this area, investigating the effects of contemplative practices on the brain and body in the treatment of mood disorders, trauma, and other emotional disturbances. Although they look at all kinds of effects, she and her team at Brown University’s Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory have become particularly known for their work on adverse effects — likely because attending to undesired effects has been relatively uncommon among researchers.

Britton was herself an avid meditator, leading her to choose a meditation-related topic for her PhD dissertation. She studied the effects of a meditation practice on sleep quality. At that time, it was commonly believed that meditation improved sleep quality. But what Britton found when gathering data in the sleep lab was that people who meditated more than thirty minutes per day slept worse — with less total sleep and lower sleep quality. In fact, the more they meditated, the worse their sleep.

​As an evangelist for meditation, Britton was flummoxed. For years she opted not to publish her data. In 2010 — a few years after a meditation teacher told her at a retreat, “everyone knows that if you go and meditate, and you meditate enough… you stop sleeping” — Britton decided to share her data publicly. (as relayed in Kortava piece)
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From there, she started talking more to the people who ran retreats, curious about what else she didn’t know about potential adverse effects of meditation. She heard horror stories at every center, with common threads being impairments in cognitive functioning and psychotic breaks — either short-term or long-lasting.

Britton and her colleagues at the lab are best known for their groundbreaking study, called The Varieties of Contemplative Experience (originally the Dark Night project). They surveyed the range of meditation-related effects described by Buddhist practitioners in the West. Their aim was to learn about how these effects impact practitioners’ lives, and to gain insight into the causes, prevention, and integration of experiences that might include unexpected, challenging, difficult, distressing, or functionally impairing effects.

Subjects consisted of meditation practitioners and experts in Theravāda, Zen, and Tibetan traditions of Buddhism. People whose challenging experiences could be accounted for by other causes were excluded, as were those with mixed practice histories beyond the three forms of Buddhism named above. Since the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study was designed to shed light on the adverse effects that other research may not ask about, and that are often under-reported by practitioners, people with no adverse effects were also excluded. (Notably, only 4 of 73 meditators who initially completed interviews were free of adverse effects to report — this means that 95% of the people in the original pool of meditators and teachers HAD experienced adverse effects.) The final sample size was 60 people.

The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal PLUS ONE in 2017. (One lay-friendly article summarizing findings is here.) A key deliverable is a taxonomy of meditation-related experiences that can be distressing or associated with impairment in functioning. Researchers identified seven domains, each including up to 15 symptoms, with a total of 59 symptoms attributable to meditation.

​Some examples within each domain:

1. Affective: flattened emotions, irritability, depression, traumatic flashbacks, dramatic mood swings, fright, suicidality
2. Cognitive: poorer executive functioning (concentration and memory), heightened clarity, vivid imagery, disintegration of conceptual meaning structures
3. Somatic: fatigue, headaches and pressure, involuntary movements, pain, energy sensations, hotness or coldness
4. Perceptual: derealization (the world feels unreal or dreamlike), hallucinations, extreme sensitivity to sound or light
5. Sense of self: feeling disembodied, loss of sense of agency, altered perception of boundary between self and other
6. Conative: loss of ability to experience pleasure, loss of motivation, change of goals
7. Social: difficulty transitioning from intensive practice to normal daily life, increased sociality, impaired ability to work

For a complete list of symptoms in each domain, and narrative summaries, see Cheetah House’s Symptoms List.

Beyond Symptoms

Besides the development of the taxonomy, notable findings include (quotes directly from the study):

• “The vast majority (88%) of participants reported that challenging or difficult meditation experiences bled over into daily life or had an impact on their life beyond a meditation retreat or beyond a formal practice session.”
• “Each category was reported by an average of 20 practitioners and 5 experts, indicating high consistency across participants.”
• Whether people regarded the experience as positive and/or negative varied, depending in part on their frameworks of interpretation.
• “The associated level of distress and functional impairment [ranged] from minimal and transient to severe and lasting.”

• ​“In order to determine what variables affect the valence [positive or negative] and impact of a given experience, the study also identified 26 categories of influencing factors across 4 domains, including factors related to the practitioner, the practice, relationships, and health behaviors.”
• The results challenge “common causal attributions, such as the assumption that meditation-related difficulties only happen to individuals with a pre-existing condition (psychiatric or trauma history), who are on long or intensive retreats, who are poorly supervised, who are practicing incorrectly, or who have inadequate preparation. However, this is not to say that these and other factors do not play a role.”

It’s worth reiterating that 95% of the initial interviewees (not the final subject pool) had experienced adverse effects from meditation.

Things That Make You Go Hmmmm…

So, adverse experiences are not just rare results of meditation when practiced in extreme ways or by particularly vulnerable people.

Challenging experiences are well-known in traditions with a long history of contemplative practices, where such effects are an expected part of the spiritual journey. Even casual users of meditation apps have been showing up at Cheetah House programs needing crisis support. (Dan Lawton met a number of people who suffered after using Sam Harris’s Waking Up app.)

And while more study is needed, adverse effects are now increasingly documented not only anecdotally, but through well-designed research. (That includes the “weird energy stuff” I described from my own experience in previous posts… the researchers call them Energy-Like Somatic Experiences and they were reported by over half of people interviewed.)

​That leaves the question, why is there so much talk about the potential benefits of meditation and other spiritual practices — and so little acknowledgment of the predictable, potentially problematic effects that many people will experience?

Given that adverse effects are common among serious or long-term meditators, why don’t we hear more about them — and before we are in deep? Why don’t meditation programs come with a list of possible side effects and contraindications, similar to prescription medications, so people can make informed choices?
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In the next installment in this series, I explore further five common problems in the ways meditation is often taught.

​Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. ​I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up.

Here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
Is This Normal? My Close Encounters with Kundalini … Hidden Levers and Dissolving Dissonance … Surprises, Blinders and Lies … What I Found

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

In my last post, I described my experience with kundalini and (as I would come to think of my particular experience) Kundalini Syndrome.

The people who were ostensibly my meditation mentors did not know what to do with this, and the helper they referred me to was primarily helpful not for resolving the underlying symptoms, but for providing someone with whom I could speak freely about this strange kundalini fire. I came to recognize that I needed to change my circumstances — to return to some baseline of basic safety — before I would be able to stabilize myself physiologically.

​I left my job at the meditation center, moving back to my previous community, work, and social support network. There were no more incidents of having to RUN as if my life depended on it. And the depression I’d fallen into lifted with the change of settings. My energy, however, had not evened out.

I would get surges of energy and enthusiasm, pouring it into projects at my new job. Eventually I would hit a wall and be spent. Then after a while the cycle would repeat. I remember describing it to a friend as like bi-polar disorder, except not the emotional content — just ups and downs of energy.

I must’ve said something to my mother about all this, because I remember a point in my first year back when she requested that I see a psychiatrist, to rule out any issues requiring support. Mostly to put Mom at ease, I did that. My minister gave me a referral to a local professional she respected.

I told the psychiatrist about my experiences, and my belief that it traced back to a long-term meditation practice. She went through her usual assessment process. She found no cause for concern. In retrospect, I wonder if she’d seen this sort of thing before. In any case, she sent me on my way.
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So I went about readjusting to a “normal” life. Along with beginning to untangle my ashram experience — and moving outside the spiritual box they had taught people to stay in — I experimented with what felt right to me in my spiritual practice now. And I paid more attention to my body.

​Here are some of the things that seemed to help calm my energy cycles and stabilize me:

• While I still meditated off and on — still grieving the deep peace I used to reach reliably, and wanting access to it again — I came to favor meditating while I was walking, rather than sitting. That way, as the energy rose up to my crown, I could pour myself out into the canopy of trees. Simultaneously, I experienced a feeling of belonging to a larger whole, my sense of personal identity melting into that. I felt more balanced meditating this way than doing just sitting meditation.
• I went to a reiki practitioner off and on for several years. She described opening up restricted places so energy had more room to flow through me.
• She also recommended “grounding” myself in the earth, such as walking on the ground in bare feet, and putting my back against a tree. As a nature lover, this was welcome advice which I put into practice. I also continued my regular nature walks and hikes, which felt more important than ever.
• I used water imagery in a purposeful way, to counter the fiery feelings of the excess energy inside me. Salt baths and other literal contact with water also felt helpful.
• In time I also started eating more animal food. I had been a vegetarian for a decade, and never missed meat — so it was a surprise when I started craving animal flesh. It wigged me out at first; meat had long ago ceased to be appealing to me as food. I had favored “eating low on the food chain” as a choice consistent with my values of care for the planet and the poor. (I was aware of the ashram’s moral stance on vegetarianism as a nonviolent diet, too; this may have influenced me subconsciously, although I had chosen that type of diet for my own reasons, long before I started meditating.) I did feel better when I snuck some chicken into my salad bar salads (Bloomingfoods, I still miss you and your hot bar / salad bar), and had the occasional piece of fish. Besides the messages my own body was giving me that I now needed an omnivorous diet, a B12 deficiency and other medical test results confirmed that shifting my eating habits was a necessity.

Returning to “safe” relationships and community supports was also an important part of stabilizing myself. In addition to old friends, and my church community, I eventually looked for and found a life partner. The instinctive sense of safety I felt with him was a significant influence in my choosing the partner I did. I remember vividly the hug my now-husband gave me at the beginning of our second date, and the visceral feeling of safety and comfort. “Hmm, something’s different about this one. {contented sigh} ”

Within a couple years of returning home to the Midwest, circa 2008, I found resources online, on kundalini awakening and kundalini rising, safety protocols for kundalini activation or treatment, kundalini signs and symptoms, etc. Though the links where they were originally posted no longer work, I saved some articles to my computer. (You can also find plenty out there now — more as time goes on, it seems — if you search on these terms.)

A piece on techniques and pitfalls of kundalini yoga had this to say: “We are treading sacred waters here. To plunge in recklessly is to risk self-annihilation. When Kundalini awakening happens to people who are not on a spiritual path, the experience can leave them fragile and fragmented. As the Kundalini process involves a redefinition and reintegration of self, it adds extra pressure when people wish to suppress the transformation and insist to lead their lives normally.” [emphasis in original]

​I was a person “on a spiritual path.” But I was not one who had been particularly seeking illumination. Nor had anyone warned me, at any point, that a regular meditation practice could eventually lead not only to the positive daily benefits I valued — improved discernment about life decisions, enhanced relationship skills with others, greater patience, emotional stability, etc. — but that regular meditation could also lead to becoming “fragile and fragmented.”

An article on Kundalini Signs and Symptoms, by someone named EL Collie, included the following list:

The following are common manifestations of the risen Kundalini:

• Muscle twitches, cramps or spasms.
• Energy rushes or immense electricity circulating the body.
• Itching, vibrating, prickling, tingling, stinging or crawling sensations.
• Intense heat or cold.
• Involuntary bodily movements (occur more often during meditation, rest or sleep): Jerking, tremors, shaking; feeling an inner force pushing one into postures or moving one’s body in unusual ways. (May be misdiagnosed as epilepsy, restless legs syndrome (RLS), or PLMD.)
• Alterations in eating and sleeping patterns.
• Episodes of extreme hyperactivity or, conversely, overwhelming fatigue.
• Intensified or diminished sexual desires.
• Headaches, pressures within the skull.
• Racing heartbeat, pain in the chest.
• Digestive system problems.
• Numbness or pain in the limbs (particularly the left foot and leg).
• Pains and blockages anywhere; often in the back and neck.
• Emotional outbursts; rapid mood shifts; seemingly unprovoked or excessive episodes of grief, fear, rage, depression.
• Spontaneous vocalisations (including laughing and weeping) are as unintentional and uncontrollable as hiccups.
• Hearing an inner sound or sounds, classically described as a flute, drum, waterfall, birds singing, bees buzzing but which may also sound like roaring, whooshing, or thunderous noises or like ringing in the ears.
• Mental confusion; difficulty in concentrating.
• Altered states of consciousness: heightened awareness; spontaneous trance states; mystical experiences (if the individual’s prior belief system is too threatened by these, they can lead to bouts of psychosis or self-grandiosity).
• Heat, strange activity, and/or blissful sensations in the head, particularly in the crown area.
• Ecstasy, bliss and intervals of tremendous joy, love, peace and compassion.

Psychic experiences:

• extrasensory perception; out-of-body experiences; past life memories; astral travel; direct awareness of auras and chakras; contact with spirit guides through inner voices, dreams or visions; healing powers.
• Increased creativity: New interests in self-expression and spiritual communication through music, art, poetry, etc.
• Intensified understanding and sensitivity: insight into one’s own essence; deeper understanding of spiritual truths; exquisite awareness of one’s environment (including ‘vibes’ from others).
• Enlightenment experiences direct Knowing of a more expansive reality; transcendent awareness.

I had experienced most of the “common manifestations” of risen kundalini, as well as some of that “increased creativity” and “intensified understanding and sensitivity” listed in the second grouping.

Lists like this online supported my sense that this was not just a positive experience of awakened kundalini that I’d been having, but that there was a common, well-known shadow side to it — the headaches and pressure inside my skull, the pain in my neck, the energy cycles. Indeed, these were all a direct result of the spiritual disciplines I had undertaken so faithfully for years.

While any of the above listed symptoms might be “normal” in the context of spiritual development, it would not be normal to most of the people around me. After I left my job at the meditation center, I was no longer bound to silence on these topics due to the subtle pressures of ashram culture.

But treating these experiences as a secret, to be shared with only a trustworthy few, was now a strategy for blending in in mainstream culture. Kundalini awakening was not exactly a topic of conversation at Chamber of Commerce mixers.

It was helpful to have the lens of kundalini rising to make sense of my experiences. I wished I’d had it sooner. I remained curious to learn more, and open to other frameworks for interpreting my experiences. Periodically I came across a new resource that was helpful to me.

I left the ashram and returned home in 2006. Importantly, I found new spiritual companions on the page — not only Peace Pilgrim but Rumi, Karen Armstrong, Etty Hillesum, Tara Brach, and the historic UU spiritual sisterhood, among others. I bought a house in 2007, and met my now-husband in 2008. The process of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering was perhaps the most grounding experience of all (and the most exhausting, too); our daughter was born in 2010.

By 2012, I was starting seminary, as the first step in the process of becoming an ordained minister in the tradition of Unitarian Universalism. That began a second round of life review. I was still trying to make sense of my experiences at the meditation center, in particular.

During that time, I read a 2011 book titled In Case of Spiritual Emergency: Moving Successfully Through Your Awakening by Catherine G Lucas. I don’t remember how I found it. It pointed me toward other resources, including the 1989 Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis (edited by Stanislav Grof and Christina Grof) — indicating that the kind of experience I’d had was recognized, not only by yogis and mystics worldwide down the centuries, but by the field of psychology for at least several decades. I also reached out to the Spiritual Emergence Network in my country; alas, I never heard back.
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I found it helpful to use a series of writing prompts from Lucas’ book, based on Joseph Campbell’s model of the hero’s journey, to take a fresh look at my life’s journey and spiritual journey. I shared it fruitfully with the spiritual director I was working with at that time.

​Reviewing that telling again now, what stands out to me is the repeated lesson of trusting my own needs and my own knowing, rather than too readily adopting others’ advice or perspectives — particularly by learning to listen to my body, including my energy.

This breakthrough started with realizing I needed to leave the ashram, as the insistent kundalini symptoms were telling me to do. My recovery process after I left included much self-care and self-listening that was specifically body-attuned. When it came to childbirth, I felt a deep trust in my body’s innate knowing and capacities. I had a swift, smooth home delivery (6 hours vs. the typical 12–24 hours for a first birth). And what made me trust the “aha” moment of recognizing the call to ministry was the clear, calm, joyful sensation of my crown wide open and buzzing at the idea.
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A few years ago, when reading up on trauma and somatics, I recognized my urge-to-run experiences in Peter Levine’s descriptions of trauma discharge (In An Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010). As I recall, in a moment of danger, the fight-or-flight response may turn into freezing instead — because it is not safe to run during the time of actual threat, or in some cases, because playing dead may give the animal a better chance of survival. Later, when a person is safe again, letting this urge run its course (literally) is a healthy way to release the stress of that event, which would otherwise remain embedded in the body. (Shaking it off, again literally, is another method. Animals instinctively do either of these things.)

This is what some animals do when a predator has it cornered: the gazelle freezes, and if the tiger picks off another member of the herd instead, or is distracted by a competing predator, like a hyena, the frozen gazelle can spring back into action and flee. By using the adrenaline for its intended purpose — to fuel the vigorous exertion required to escape danger — the stress energy of that life-or-death encounter is discharged. Aha! At last I had an explanation for those times when I’d just HAD to run.

This still left me with a puzzle, however. I had a happy childhood, with no traumas that would lead to such frozen energy, no date rape in college, or anything else I could point to as an obvious origin for this. Where did the threat come from? When had I ever been prey to a predator?

While the source of my “frozen energy” remained hazy to me, I learned that the phenomenon of spontaneous movement is familiar to some in medicine and body work fields. An occupational therapist, upon hearing me relay the movements that still sometimes happen, and feel therapeutic to me, told me that she had been taught to call this “unwinding.” In myofascial teaching, the fascia, where trauma is held, unwind as a way to move you through that trauma to release it. This is regarded as a natural, self-healing phenomenon with which practitioners can collaborate.

Most recently, as I learned about high control groups — and with no small amount of shock, recognized my old group in the descriptions — I concluded that it was actually the one-size-fits-all meditation practice and the ashram community that my body recognized as unsafe. That passive-aggressive, patronizing, untrusting, judging, not-caring-as-it-first-seemed, not-actually-equipped-to-support-me community was the threat I had cause to run from.

I now consider the meditation center’s founder a predator — a malignant narcissist and serial user of the “gazelles” in his midst. And the organization he founded is one designed, not to accomplish the mission of service it outwardly proclaims, but rather to cannibalize people — their minds, bodies, time, money, labor, skills, and idealistic fervor — for the aggrandizement of the founder. (It doesn’t matter that he’s dead. That’s the cultural DNA and it’s still playing out now, as it was when I was there.)

If only I had known how to listen to my body while I was there working at the ashram. It was telling me — literally — to run away from that group. At another point in my year there, depression communicated the same thing: this place isn’t good for you, you need to GET OUT.

I did get out. I calmed the kundalini fire. I created a life I love. Surely my experience of troubling, unexpected “side effects” is the exception among meditators, right? Surely mainstream champions of meditation effectively guide and safeguard people?

Well, not so much. Next up in this series: adverse effects of meditation and mindfulness. Not from spiritual teachers or ancient religious writings, but from contemporary study using the methods of science. Fascinating stuff, offering necessary knowledge for practitioners.
​

​Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to get every new post sent directly to your inbox. ​I also post on Bluesky when a new piece is up.

Here are some other articles you may enjoy 👇
What I Wanted ... What I Found... What I Lost

Please read this disclaimer carefully before relying on any of the content in my articles online for your own life.

Eventually I would come to know it as Kundalini Syndrome — language I had to go out and find for myself. What I almost didn’t notice at first became as much a part of my life as brushing my teeth, and equally solitary.

It started with my head tipping back, imperceptibly, during meditation. This was ~2003ish. I would notice it sometimes when I came out of meditation in my darkened room at home. The topic came up in a retreat workshop — I don’t remember now whether I asked about it, or whether one of the leaders observed it during our group meditation sessions.

In any case, I was encouraged to see this as a positive sign — not something to be concerned about, so long as I did not allow myself to be distracted. No particular framework was shared for understanding why this would happen or what it would mean. At the time, I took that as consistent with the organization’s general attitude of downplaying woo-woo stuff in order to focus on the positive, practical benefits of meditation.

There was also a period, around the same time as I recall, when violent images would frequently arise in my mind during meditation. I wasn’t sure what to make of it — it felt troubling. As I’d been instructed, I just continued to bring my mind back to my meditation focal point whenever it was interrupted by such imagery.
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​My sense of what was happening was that my mind was cleansing itself of all the negative imagery I had taken in over the years through television and movies. A kind of vomiting up and out from consciousness, not pleasant in the moment — but better afterwards.

Again, I don’t recall being offered any particular lens for interpreting this experience. The founder of the meditation center had long taught to take good care of your mind, with healthy recreation and mental inputs, just as one should offer sound nutrition to the body. Eventually it stopped happening. Okay, I thought; the purging is complete.

The head-tipping continued, though. I had been meditating for several years by this time, and completed an intensive six-month program at the meditation center. Not long after I made the decision to move across the country to work for them — but before I had made the move — I also happened to go in for a massage. My massage therapist suggested I might benefit from a session with her fiancé, who practiced reiki and other forms of energy medicine.

Curious, I decided to give it a try. While the body worker was doing something called “energy dowsing,” my head and neck began to move around. It was strange, though not unpleasant. It felt vaguely therapeutic. I wondered what this was all about.

I asked him what he was doing with these movements, only to be told that he was not moving me — my body was doing that on its own. I didn’t know what to make of this; I felt like the receiver of the movement, not like its initiator, similar to receiving a massage. I was not consciously choosing to move my head around. Ummmm… okay?

The body worker encouraged me not to be freaked out by this. “It’s a good thing,” was the message. “You have spiritual energy rising. Trust your body and its knowing.”

Thereafter, when I got into a zone in meditation, my head wasn’t just gently tilting back — it was moving around in all sorts of ways. It was hard to keep my mind on the intended focus of meditation with all this movement. But it felt unkind to suppress it. So, I got up from my meditation chair and let my body do what it wanted. Now it was not just my head/neck, but my whole body moving in and out of various positions, holding certain limbs or muscles taut, swiveling, sounds, emotions sometimes… I went with it, and my breath became deep, coordinating itself to the movements.

​Perhaps, I thought, like the troubling imagery that had come up for a while during meditation, this was a phase that would pass. I felt lighter after I stopped a session. A bit tired, but good. I think it was when I followed up with the body worker to share these bizarre (to me) occurrences that I first heard the phrase “spontaneous movement.” It’s all good, was again the message. Just go with it.

I let the spontaneous movement become part of my life. When I had time and felt the urge, I would go to a quiet room and just allow the energy to do what it wanted. It was like having a flip I could switch — if I told my body it was okay, it would start to go. When it had run its course — or more often, when I just needed to do other things — I flipped that inner switch back to “off” and my body quieted down. How long would this last?

I got through giving notice at my job, selling my house, packing my stuff, saying goodbye to my friends, moving across the country, settling into a new apartment, and starting my new job at the meditation center. Some weeks after the spontaneous movements started, it was still going.
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I talked to my designated “mentor” at the center — I’ll call him Brad — about these and other unusual experiences, which I attributed to the energy released through meditation. What should I do?

Apparently this issue was beyond the long-term meditators at the ashram. And the original teacher at the meditation center was deceased. So Brad referred me to a yoga expert in Berkeley, someone with Himalayan lineage that the center trusted.

In advance of my first visit with him — much like preparing for a doctor’s appointment — I wrote up as complete a description of all my symptoms as I could remember, and sent it to him. (Perhaps I was also giving him a chance to say — um no, you need a psychiatrist or a neurologist, not a yoga specialist. But he took it in stride and scheduled the appointment.)

Here’s what I wrote to him in September of 2005:

It started with neck pain which I attributed to a poor ergonomic situation in my workplace. Seeking relief, I went to a massage therapist I’d been to before and she did something new she’d been learning called “quantum touch,” where she chased the pain around with her hands. It does not involve massage-type touch. I could feel that it was definitely doing something though. She spoke of it more in terms of energy and chakras rather than just something muscular. She referred me to a healer that I ended up going to 3 times over the course of my last month in [Indiana] (July) before moving out to [California].

He also did quantum touch, and Reiki, and something called dowsing. Now my first session with this guy, Chris, ended with the dowsing and my head and neck were kind of rolling around and stretching. He wasn’t actually touching me but I thought it was his doing but not really, he said this was just how my body was responding to the energy thing he was doing, in its own way. This was maybe the last third of what became a 2-hour session.

After that I started having these movements occur at other times spontaneously-first in the state toward falling asleep, and then in meditation it wanted to start going, and then anytime I said the mantram very much [outside of meditation], and then under just about any mundane circumstances, it was like if I just mentally released the brake the movements would go. It was focused on the neck just at first. It will go for a short period of time (5 minutes) or a long period of time (several hours on some occasions until I got too tired), just however long I let it. Chris consulted his teacher and said this was something called “spontaneous movement” and a good thing, releasing energy blockages and maybe tied to emotional stuff too. I am a pretty practically oriented person … but feeling is believing. Stuff has just been happening.

It escalated from my neck to my whole body, rotating movements and yoga-like alignment movements and poses, kicks and flicks of my limbs, and just strange things, breathing things. I have felt things releasing some (muscles?) but also there is pain, especially in my neck but other places too. And some emotions, groans and laughter if I’ve let it go for a while at home, crying at times (some has definitely been grief and release from an old relationship). Anytime I mantram or give it permission it’ll just GO and I’m not doing anything, I just get out of the way and my body is doing these unpredictable movements. Neck especially (“throat chakra”). Chris had pronounced me unblocked at my last session in [Indiana] …

I had consulted Brad because I was concerned about how this was affecting my meditation practice (sometimes it is hard to disallow the movements during meditation, that feels unkind to my body) and I thought he might have advice. Brad thought this sounded like what can happen with Rolfing and similar modalities and that rang true to me from what he described. It feels like layers of muscles or something are getting loosened through these movements and sometimes I end up kneading specific tender spots too and there have been vocalizations and sharp outbreaths and emotions released as well.

I allowed the motions during the last two sessions with Chris and he said it looked like yoga moves, “spontaneous yoga.” I don’t know many yoga poses (I just have these two Rodney Yee tapes I got last year, on Brad’s recommendation to strengthen my back for meditation) but I did recognize Child’s Pose and there have been motions that seem dance-like as well. Other times it is much less graceful! Sometimes the motions have been rather painful at the time, sometimes I feel sore and tired after (not unlike after a deep massage where toxins have been released from muscle tissue?), there have been a few cycles including how it feels just today where it had flared up and been painful but then the same motions after a few days came to feel smoother, still intense but unknotted somehow.

Also by the time I was leaving [Indiana] a frequent modality was just this kind of crunching motion that feels like it’s on nodes around my neck and really under my skull from ear to ear in the back, and shoulder blades and at points all down my spine. And the back of the shoulder above the armpit, right shoulder mostly (I can’t help wondering about mouse hand, back to the work-station situation). It’s like my body is giving itself this internal massage that is working intensely on these spots, kneading them with whatever layers of muscle and tendon and bone are above the nodes.

Another symptom which I think is totally related is just a feeling of great pressure in my neck and head, that same place at the base of my skull in the back, and sometimes in my ears like my Eustachian tubes hurt and it hurts to put in earplugs for meditation, and sometimes on my crown, and even above and around my eyes at the worst. For several of my worst days in [Indiana] I felt like a pop bottle that had been shaken up but not released. Head-neckache and fiery pain that just made me want to cry. I also have had for about a year and a half this thing where my head tilts back in meditation and I feel like energy is moving up and out and that seems somehow related as well, although I had experienced that as positive if anything and not painful.

What else? The face and eyes have had movements that reminded me of Kathakali [dance] I saw in Kerala [India]. And the hands and fingers are really doing things sometimes, some of the same motions I recognize as recurring, like some kind of sign language to which I do not know the code (what does it mean). Also wailing. Wailing coming out of me sometimes.

The most dramatic perhaps was during the weeklong retreat I attended after I first got to CA. It was intense in the usual ways of [meditation center] retreats firing up one’s sadhana, plus personal stuff going on (a challenging unresolved relationship situation, entanglement), plus a kind man who was in our retreat died during the week and it just hit us all. Anyway one night after that driving home from the retreat house the wailing just surged out of me. This was not the first for that kind of thing (there has been breathing stuff and grunts) but the most dramatic.

Also once in the Penske truck on the way here [to California] (one of few times during that week I had any space at all from my parents who helped me move), along with the neck-crunching motions and loosening-breathing things, there were vocalizations that had intonations, like singing. I am actually a singer but this was the purest sound my body has ever produced and I wasn’t doing it, it was just coming through me. It was pretty brief.

Perhaps the other most dramatic thing that has happened besides that grief-filled wailing was earlier on-I think was the peak of excess energy if I had to pin it down… I had been really finding vigorous exercise quite necessary and felt that the energy was just taking over me when I went speedwalking, my body was propelled forward and I wasn’t doing it, and some of the swinging motions would go on and on if I let them, if I was in the woods where no one could see (right shoulder especially, this is still a hot spot).

Anyway sometimes in the evening I would find I just HAD to go out and exercise. This was even though I had done my 45-minutes power-walking in the morning with the hand weights and all. Once it was 11PM and found myself just pacing around my house and I had to go out and my body just ran at top speed, I couldn’t keep doing it for too long and ended up speedwalking but it was this tremendous burst of energy that had to GO, I could not hold it in
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It’s so surprising for stuff like this to happen to ME because I am a practically-oriented person in my sadhana, I have never been chasing after strange experiences, I would have been rather skeptical to hear someone else describe the things I am telling you. I never read about chakras. I was primarily analytical about religion and theology, and had a more materialistic view of the body, for a long time, until [founder of meditation center] brought me to the mystics. He won me over on the idealistic and practical qualities of sadhana, being an instrument of peace in the world, not seeking after unusual states during meditation or whatever. Anyway you’ve probably heard it all, but it’s just ironic if you knew me that this has happened to me.

If I give it permission, the motions and whatever else just come out of me, my body does things and it’s like I’m a third party, I just kind of let it happen in bewilderment and curiosity and eventually weariness. And laugh and look at [teacher’s] picture-what is this all about?! But I have taken folks at their word that I’m “working through” some issues that have gotten woven into my body somehow and are being released and that that’s good. I have a good inkling of what some issues and samskaras might be. But I just wonder how long this is going to last and it bothers me to be not having my evening meditation and to have these burning sensations in my body and this pressure in my head and need to keep accommodating this activity of the body.

Regular, vigorous exercise helps (I speed walk about 45 minutes each day-really power walk; and some occasional Rodney Yee yoga). Dropping evening meditation helps; or more accurately, doing evening meditation increases the pressure and energy and exacerbates it all. I think it helps to allow time and a private setting for the movements to happen. Sometimes mantram singing seems to be a good outlet (letting it get very buzzy like Tibetan monks or something), although other times the mantram seems to egg it on…

But I had the expectation that this was going to “run its course” before too long. I am through my big transitions (pretty much) now, I have let go of [my old city] and my life there, made peace with an older relationship break-up, gotten [other stuff resolved], and settled in here in my job at [the meditation center] and my new life and my intensified sadhana, and though there were quieter periods when I thought maybe it was about over, it keeps resurging.

I am getting the burning sensations in my neck and head and digestive system. I am finding the movements want to go at bedtime every night and in every morning meditation. I just wonder if there are things I can do that will facilitate the positive aspects of this, working through whatever inward stuff I need to work through and letting the energy be released through these body things. And I wonder if there are things I can do that will just help the experience meanwhile be more mellow, the energy be more mellow so it does not require a lot of management and so the need to allow motions and the head-neckaches and build-up of pressure does not interfere with my ability to concentrate at my work. I’d just like to be able to go about life like a normal person.

The yogi gave me some breathing exercises to do. I practiced them diligently for many months, especially on my regular walks. I could not tell if this made any difference in my symptoms; maybe it would’ve been worse without the special breathing?

Meanwhile, the spontaneous movements continued. I specifically remember having a couple more of those my-body-MUST-run experiences, when I left my apartment in the evening and just let my body GO in the dark, until I was spent.

Nothing much changed for the duration of my year working at the meditation center. I found some relief just in having someone I could speak plainly to about these experiences — something I implicitly knew I should not do with other meditators, per ashram culture. He seemed to know what I was talking about and feel confident we could handle it.

However, along with other unsettling experiences, I was still having the movements and the persistent energy-neck-headaches. I remember, after work, carpooling with a couple others from the meditation center, back to the nearby town where we newbies lived. I opted for the back seat, so my companions would not notice me squeezing out tears, the base of my skull feeling on fire, as the others chatted up front.

That spring, while perusing used books in the basement of a local bookstore, I came across a slim volume that immediately caught my eye. It had kundalini in the title — a word I’d heard in retreat workshops, which I knew was associated with spiritual energy — and likely with the strange energy experiences I had been having, though I’d had no such forewarning.
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Sure enough, the chapter on “signs of the arousal of the kundalini” included, among its long list of signs, all of the bizarre experiences I had been having with spontaneous movements (“certain people feel as if a spirit has taken control of their bodies because they can assume various yoga positions involuntarily”), big energy, electric sensations, positive emotions like joy and release, unusual sounds and more. (Kundalini: Discover the Secret Wealth of Energy in Your Body by Vikkar Tagor, 2003.)

​However, the author treated all of this as wholly positive. The only mention made of any potentially painful aspect of the process was that some people get awful headaches on the way to self-realization. This was attributed to new areas of the brain becoming active, beyond the 10–20 percent of utilization that the author said most people use. He likened that to labor pains, “since the yogi is now giving birth to spiritual awareness.”

I didn’t know whether the strange, sometimes painful things I continued to experience with kundalini would run their course on their own. But I had long since come to realize that the spiritual community I was in was not healthy for me — was not healthy, period. I was in the process of creating a way out.

Until I changed my circumstances, I did not expect these symptoms, including the painful ones, to resolve. After all, for a person on fire, what would be the point of dousing the flames on themselves — while still standing in the middle of the bonfire?

Next piece in this series: Calming the Kundalini Fire - How I Stabilized Myself.

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