Kundalini and the Inner Journey to Being Awake

Session 1 — Kundalini: A Methodology for Awakening

Kundalini is your life force energy. When it awakens, it initiates a clearing process designed to dissolve your identification with the stories of your personal life and bring you to the full realization of your true nature as the universal ground of being.

In this recording, we’re introduced to the three primary functions of the kundalini process, which opens up new potentials for love, compassion, creativity — and sometimes healing or psychic capacities — on the way to allowing you to live from an awakened place.

Dr. Greenwell explains The 7 Categories of Phenomena, a diagnostic framework for kundalini awakenings that she originally developed during her doctoral research that included extensive interviews with people in kundalini processes. The session closes with her personal experience with the ever-deepening fruition of the kundalini process: enlightenment.

Session 2 — Classical Kundalini Science

Dr. Greenwell introduces us to the classical kundalini science that originated in India and was developed by practicing yogis over many generations. This is a brief overview of how different yogic systems try to activate and aid the progression of the energy through the body.

Many experiences and emotions are stirred as kundalini energy rises through and opens each of the primary chakras on it’s way to the crown to stabilize awakening. The yogic systems provide a map for how the energy moves through the body’s energy system of nadis (energy flows) and chakras (energy distribution centers).

Session 3 — Energy & Awakening

As kundalini energy flows through the body during the clearing process, the energy and its side effects can often become overwhelming. 

Here, Dr. Greenwell discusses what causes the energy to intensify and provides tips on how to deal with common side effects including heat, involuntary movement, insomnia, thyroid imbalance, fogginess, headaches, mysterious pains, and out-of-body experiences.

Woven throughout the recording are some personal experiences of those that attended the live talk. They share tools they have found effective in soothing the energy that arises, including everything from diet to meditation, breath work, EFT tapping, exercise, spiritual texts, devotional practices, and grounding practices.

The clearing process can be uncomfortable and can take time, but be patient with yourself and know that you’re in a transformative process that will bring you to a profound, centered peace and presence.

Session 4 — Ways to Calm the Energy

This episode goes a layer deeper than “Energy & Awakening”, providing a few more tips for quelling the energy and moving it through the body, but also explaining the ways your life affects and is affected by the process of awakening.  

Dr. Greenwell and participants share their personal experiences dealing with the repressed emotions and the repercussions of abuse or trauma that are stirred during this process, as well as useful directions for empaths that find themselves holding onto energy that doesn’t belong to them.

Things like body work, breath work, and energy work do help the clearing process but, often, major life changes are required as anything that is inauthentic for you will be much more emotionally and energetically uncomfortable once the kundalini process is activated. 

Grounding and embodiment are essential to the fruition of the enlightenment process, and this section goes into detail describing why grounding practices, tools, and foods is an especially important tool for those who have a tendency toward transcendent experiences.

Session 5 — Dealing with Common Challenges

Many of the common difficulties that you will experience while moving through this awakening process are often overlooked in spiritual circles, such as the fear that arises in the face of losing our sense of self.

In order to nurture the kundalini process, you must deconstruct old beliefs and ways of being in order to create space for something new to arise — this includes the attachments and identifications that brought us comfort for most of our lives!

This can feel threatening as things start falling away, and you may experience a sense of loss. However, if you can stay with the process, you will develop a sense of deep connection to the core, or the source, of what you are. 

In this recording, Dr. Greenwell addresses this and other common difficulties associated with the process, and participants share their personal experiences with these challenges and what it was like for them to come out the other side of the kundalini process.

Session 6 — Unusual (and Surprising) Experiences

In most western cases, kundalini is stirred through meditation or energy work, emotional or physical trauma, or even by watching advanced YouTube videos or reading books. 

If you have worked with gurus, shamans, or esoteric teachers, you may open up particular abilities related to that lineage, but, without the roadmap of different traditions, experiencing things such as psychic or healing capacities can be very overwhelming, powerful, and confusing.

In this recording, Dr. Greenwell shares the more unusual effects of a kundalini rising and introduces some tools for coping with these sometimes surprising experiences.

In most western cases, kundalini is stirred through meditation or energy work, emotional or physical trauma, or even by watching advanced YouTube videos or reading books. 

If you have worked with gurus, shamans, or esoteric teachers, you may open up particular abilities related to that lineage, but, without the roadmap of different traditions, experiencing things such as psychic or healing capacities can be very overwhelming, powerful, and confusing.

In this recording, Dr. Greenwell shares the more unusual effects of a kundalini rising and introduces some tools for coping with these sometimes surprising experiences.

Session 7 — Cul-de-sacs in the Process

There is no direct, linear route to awakening. It is normal to get caught in cul-de-sacs that slow down or apparently interrupt the process. These aren’t necessarily mistakes — awakening is a life process that often comes in stages.

Here, Dr. Greenwell shares a model that can be used to divine what you need next if you feel your process is arrested because of patterns, beliefs, and habits that distract or entangle you. She also describes many of the most common cul-de-sacs in the process in order to help you identify what may be happening if you are feeling stuck.

Session 8 — The Heart Chakra

When the heart chakra opens, we become much more present, sensitive, and at peace with everything that arises in our worlds. Consciousness is what is waking up inside of you, and it allows you to tolerate things that you would not have been able to take in stride when you were still entangled in the separate self.

This recording details what to expect when you’re first experiencing a wide opening of your heart, including overwhelming love in unexpected directions, grief breaking open your heart so the armoring falls away, sounds, quickening pulse, and other things.

It is also believed in many traditions that when the heart breaks open, speech becomes inspired, you develop better control of your senses, your thoughts and desires materialize in the field, and you develop the capacity to determine your own destiny.

Dr. Greenwell also shares resources for opening the heart chakra, from devotional practices across traditions, such as the buddhist metta practice, to contemporary YouTube meditations.

Session 9 — The Crown Chakra

If the energy flows up through the crown, you experience the phenomena known in buddhist traditions called satori or kensho and known in yogic traditions as samadhi. 

Even a glimpse of this vast unbounded collective consciousness profoundly changes how you experience yourself and the world around you, but it is very common to reidentify with your old way of thinking – at least partially.

Dr. Greenwell shares descriptions of both the experience of samadhi and the stabilization of the process: an embodied knowing of what we are, often called awakening or actualization.

Session 10 — Satsang: “Who am I?” and How to Disidentify with Your Thoughts

Satsang is a Sanskrit word that means roughly “being together in Truth.”

This satsang was recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many across the globe reckoned with experiences not unlike those that arise during a kundalini awakening — asking themselves “Who am I?” after the loss of their jobs, experiencing an immense sense of loss of control, fear of dying, and loneliness. 

Dr. Greenwell recommends some films about awakening before slipping into a beautiful and deeply peaceful talk about our true nature, non-duality, fear, and fearlessness. She closes by guiding listeners in Loch Kelly’s practice for disidentifying with the content of your thoughts.

Session 11 — Satsang: Portals to Realization

Dr. Greenwell starts this satsang with a 30 minute meditation guiding you to let go of identification with the mind and rest as awareness.

The talk that follows explains the work of Steven Wolinski, student of Nisargadatta, and his detailing of the various “portals” to realization — the awareness that everything is consciousness, light, emptiness, energy, presence, etc. — and how to find the unique portal through which spiritual practice feels natural to you.