I recently completed a four-month-long Kundalini Yoga teacher training. It softened the perfectionist in me, reminding me not to push myself and to pause for integration when my body speaks, even when I am the only one who needs that. It was a reminder that I am my own best guide and protector.
We love efficiency and a smooth ride, and curse what we see as setbacks, especially as it relates to the physical body. But what if you instead orient to the opportunities inside each setback? Often, with time, we can see the growth that is the byproduct of the challenge.
If we fail to hear or respond to messages whispered quietly, they often escalate into shouts that land in our physical bodies or lives in increasingly drastic ways, making them impossible to avoid.
Kundalini yoga is an energetic practice that can activate and clear density (aka traumatic material that is not fully processed, conscious, or felt) and karma.
It’s liberating stuck energy that no longer serves you. Many people have gentle and uplifting experiences with Kundalini Yoga. Others can have energetic releases that take the form of digestive distress or physical pain through Kundalini Yoga.
At times, during our multi-hour-long morning practice, I had whole body orgasmic sensations while chanting, Sa Ta Na Ma, each time my thumb pressed a different fingertip. But when significant openings occurred and a substantial amount of energy was generated, subconscious and ancestral trauma were also stirred up to be released. This was certainly more clarifying than pleasurable.
At its most intense, it felt like I couldn’t burp, was being choked out, and someone was standing on my chest. Dislodged energy couldn’t find its way up or down. When the body experiences a shock and freeze response, the diaphragm and the flow of breath become stuck, as if the breath is dammed up.
Chinese medicine including Kundalini Yoga refers to this as a chi upsurge, characterized by an excessive increase in chi that disperses to the head and upper extremities, unable to return to the ground, which is essentially the experience of shock. It is groundless and breathless. A chi surge may seem to come out of nowhere, but energy follows a habitual trajectory, unless trained otherwise.
If your system tends to have more upward momentum than access to ground, energy will rise instead of going down. This is an oversimplification because there are many variables, such as diet, digestion, anxiety, and other factors, that contribute as well. While we often look at one source and think that it is the cause, it’s essential to remember that we are a whole system. Many things contribute and interact over time to make our system susceptible to certain physical experiences.
Bodies communicate through heavy-handed metaphors. Body memories and flashbacks that arose for me after chanting for two and a half hours were “unnerving.” So it is no surprise that Western medicine diagnosed trigeminal neuropathy and neuropathy from my eye to my calf, along with tendonitis.
There are extensive studies, such as the ACE score, correlating long-term physical effects with Adverse Childhood Experiences that are traumatic. Unexpressed or interrupted emotions often manifest physically. The physical experience of processing trauma is integrating feelings that have not been felt.
Emotions and experiences that want to be seen, felt, and completed present themself when you are resourced enough to manage them. We do not always need to know the whole story to feel and understand the emotions held in the tissue. For some, there are flashes of images inside a river of heat or coldness, terror or tears.
The body off-gases stored, unprocessed experiences because they were too threatening and confusing to make sense of in the past. Sometimes these experiences are preverbal, other times they don’t even belong to us. We may have marinated in a parents unprocessed trauma, a womb that holds the memory of her own assault and abandonment.
Trauma is an appropriate emotional response to an overwhelming situation without enough external or internal resources to process the feelings. In my case, chanting dislodged those energetic barnacles, causing the emotions of terror and grief, and physical sensations of pressure and suffocation, and the thoughts “I want to get out of my skin, I think I am going to die, I am alone”, to all occur in the present time. But a resourced part of me, despite persistent physical symptoms, trusted this, too shall pass. I’d gathered the tools and awareness to move through this and see it for what it was.
With decades of experience in healing somatically, through bodywork, meditation, qi gong yoga, somatic practices, and psychotherapy, I developed a strong enough observer to move through these experiences and not have my life disrupted. Navigating my own spiral of healing has helped me understand sensation for what it is. Processing and integrating stockpiled energetic charges (unfelt emotions) in my system is like being in turbulence on a flight. Although it is scary or startling, I don’t actually fear that the plane is crashing. I believe in our ability to regenerate and reclaim our bodies and our lives after trauma.
I believe some of us are unconscious drawn to moving our bodies as a way to integrate subconscious trauma. We are brilliant beings. We can also go into aware and be prepared, knowing that traumatic experiences, feelings and beliefs may arise during physical practices geared towards emotional and spiritual awakening you can be prepared. You can then choose to engage with them as an opportunity for healing yourself and your ancestors. It’s up to you to be a good guide for yourself, which then allows you to eventually be a good guide for others.
