2. Preparing for kundalini
————————Blog Discovery Journey Kundalini Energy/Pierjasi———————
‘your energy system will need a warming up’
Meditative approach
The exercises in this book are mostly about working with kundalini energy meditatively. Since all the exercises have been worked with in practice, they can give those who want to dive in deeper, the possibility of making contact with the appropriate ‘atmosphere’. Much like reading an exciting book will pull us into the world of the author. This can be very stimulating when working with the exercises yourself.
Methods to activate the kundalini
Moreover, there are many methods to bring the kundalini system in a higher state of activation. Swami Satyananda Saraswati elaborates on the different ways of activating Kundalini in his book ‘kundalini Tantra’. He mentions: the awakening of the kundalini at birth (this happens automatically), awakening by the regular use of mantras (special sounds), awakening by ascetic purification (tapasya), awakening by herbs (this is considered a very risky method), raja-yoga whereby the individual conscious is merged with the super- or higher consciousness, awakening by breathing exercises (pranayama) sometimes causing effects that can become hard to control, kriya-yoga as a form of mild awakening with the help of certain physical yoga exercises, tantric initiation for those who have overcome their sexual needs and passions, shaktipat (this is given as an energy by a guru and can give an immediate experience) and self-surrender (‘letting it happen’). About pranayama is said that this method can bring a great energetic tension to the spine.
Yvonne Kason gives several more methods in her interesting book ‘A farther shore’. She calls these ‘stimuli for transformative energy’. These methods mostly overlap the ones previously mentioned but also add a few, such as:
- Meditative methods whereby the kundalini is stimulated with visualization and focus.
- Being in the presence of a person with a (very) active kundalini system for a longer period of time.
The meditative approach of this book has been used successfully many times by different people without bad side-effects. Applying this approach triggers a process of acceleration of spiritual development that gradually makes way for deeper, inner realization.
The meditative approach of this book
In this books’ method of kundalini development meditative techniques are emphasized and breathing techniques and physical exercises are only marginally mentioned. The advantage of this is that the different phases of kundalini activation are easily recognized and controlled. This way our energy body can gradually grow along with the new energetic possibilities and there will be more space to integrate them. With this approach it can also just be pleasant to let kundalini energy flow.
Those who are going to do the exercises systematically, are advised to occasionally exchange information and healing with others. When flowing the kundalini energy, much ‘old stuff’, both from this life and past lives, can be released, making way for further development. Exchanging with others has another benefit: by giving a healing and exchanging our knowledge and experiences, our inner space seems to open up for new experiences and this way our development can go on. If we don’t exchange healings and experiences and if we don’t use new insights and possibilities, this might cause stagnation of our development and we will feel stagnated as well as a person.
The necessity of a warming-up
Someone who wants to activate their kundalini system, will directly be confronted with one of its characteristics: activating the kundalini system can’t be done out of the blue, because it requires a ‘warming-up’. This warming up can be done in different ways. In kundalini yoga, there are several intense physical exercises. In the dynamic kundalini meditation periods of moving fervidly and dancing are interspersed with periods of resting.
In this book we use meditation as a means to warm-up. Using this introductive meditation has two more great advantages: the energy systems get cleaned and we are tuned in to our inner world.
The following meditation is a variant in which techniques are used that were originally introduced by Lewis Bostwick, founder of the Berkeley Psychic Institute and they are described in :The Psychic Healing Book: written by Amy Wallace and Bill Henkin. They are also mentioned in ‘ “intuitive magic, understanding your psychic nature” by Linda Keen and in “Chakras” by Mary Ellen Flora. In the Netherlands there are several training centers for aura healing and aura reading where these techniques are used.
This type of meditation includes several key features such as grounding, working with a flow of energy and visualization, all of which are essential for success. In the text below, this is elaborated upon.
If all of this is new information for you, reading the following pages and doing the exercises can give you a Crash Course in self-healing! Practice is required for it to work. If you have some experience with aura healing already, it may be a challenge to practice with tips and ideas you are not used to, and this may tickle your curiosity
Grounding
The first key feature of these meditations is called ‘grounding’. In the seventies, when Lewis Bostwick gave courses in healing as a paranormal healer in Berkeley, it was habitual to wash the hands afterwards and discharge the energy that had gotten stuck to the hands of the healer during the healing.
Looking at this stream of water, Lewis got the idea to visualize a cord of energy with which one could directly channelize troublesome energy to the earth. This thought turned out to be golden. A visualized cord from the client, the healee, going down to the earth, turned out to help moving residue energies towards the earth, see figure 2.1.
Figure 2.1: Visualization of grounding cords
An important part of that is that the healer must visualize such a cord for themselves. This so called grounding method turned out to have effects on a practical level as well. Grounding can stabilize the energy of our energy body and the energy field around us. This is important during meditation, healing, and aura reading when strong spiritual energies are flowing through us and we are releasing old stuff. There is more still. Grounding also has effects on the structure of our energy system.
Without grounding, a significant portion of the energy of our aura is stationed much higher above us, even above our heads! When we meditate without any form of grounding, we might be inclined to start ‘floating’ and getting lost in our thought- and fantasy world. This may lead to daydreaming or falling asleep!
An important part of our more subtle energy body is located at the top of our physical body. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if we want to remain aware of our inner world in relation to the outer world, it’s important to be energetically present in our physical body.
During all meditative exercises described in this book, it is important to visualize cords or tubes going from our tailbone area towards the earth. If it works better for you, you could also visualize a root instead of a cord. In order to benefit from this maximally, it’s important to try to ground as deep as possible, namely to the center of the earth. This doesn’t concern the physical earth of course, but the energy body of the earth. When you are flowing kundalini energy another way of making the grounding even stronger, you can visualize that these grounding cords start at our feet and travel down to the center of the earth. In this book I generally use the word grounding cord.
Flowing energy
A second key feature of this first meditation is letting energy flow. At first, most people will associate the word energy with physical energy such as electricity or the energy in our food. In those cases the quantity of energy can be measured with the strength of electric current or weight and type of food. The energies we are concerned with in meditation aren’t physical energies that we can feel with our ordinary senses, but we can still detect it.
These are energies coming from the invisible world. For example, the energy body of the earth continuously radiates an invisible energy, and also , the invisible cosmos flows energy towards us. We call these earth- and cosmic energy. If you have a sensitivity for this field, you may be able to perceive earth energy with the palms of your hand as a somewhat tingling energy. Cosmic energy is also perceivable with your hands if you turn your palms upwards, but it is a finer energy sensation and more difficult to sense.
These energies are not just perceivable with our hands, but we can also feel them in our body. The earth energy through our foot-chakras, which are small round energy centers under our feet, and the cosmic energy via the back of our crown chakra, a great round energy center on top of our head (see figure 2.2).
Figure 2.2: Flowing earth and cosmic energies
We can clean our energy body by letting these energies flow through us. . And what’s more, we can thereby activate our energy body and simultaneously focus our attention to the realm of invisible energies .
Letting these energies flow is a good warming -up for letting the kundalini flow, a more powerful and intense energy that is more intense.
Moreover, it’s a fact that reading about sensing and letting energy flow is something else entirely than actually learning to work with them consciously. It is highly recommendable that you work on this with others, preferably with someone who is already experienced with this type of meditation . If this isn’t the case, someone can easily get stuck in wondering whether you are actually feeling something or that you are only imagining it. In my case, it took me a few weeks of practice, after I had done a training-weekend on ‘sensing auras’ to get a feel for this type of energies.
Visualizations (1):updating
A third key feature of the start meditation is focused working with certain visualizations to clean up your energy system. For example: imagine writing the date of today on several spots in your energy body.(figure 2.3a).
Figure 2.3a: Coming in present time (datum = date)
As crazy as this sounds, this can have a healing effect. In our energy body, numerous thoughts and energies of emotions are present that are outdated, yet they still hang out in our system and keep our energy stuck. Imagine: we are shocked because we almost fell down the stairs. Hours later we can still feel as if we are scared although the present situation doesn’t seem to call for it.
By visualizing writing the date in our body, often the emotional charge of such a memory dissolves. Furthermore, this load can be situated anywhere in our body. There are thousands of examples of this phenomenon. All kinds of emotional states, work-related stress, tension from relationships or traumas, can lead to disturbing energies getting stuck in our energy body. Being released from this, by using this simple technique, can be quite a relief. Especially in times of great change and personal and spiritual growth, it can be very effective to ‘update’ our whole energy system or, in other words: to put our energy system in the ‘now’, the present. The phrase ‘our whole energy system’ refers to our energy body and the energy field about a meter around us, the aura. Later in this book this will be elaborated on.
Visualizations (2): owning the energy
A second technique we often use in this book, is visualizing your own name in your energy system (figure 2.3b).
Figure 2.3b: Owning your energy (naam = name)
Other peoples’ thoughts, wishes and desires directed at you, can sometimes get stuck to you as energies. After an intense conversation with someone, you may notice you are keeping the conversation going on an imaginary level. Visualizing your own name (or mentally letting it resound in your head) on a variety of places in your energy system, can be helpful for dissolving other peoples’ clouds of energy or invisible cords. This purifies the thoughts you have, so that only your own thoughts remain in your mind, and not other peoples’ opinions.
Visualizations (3): blowing up roses
A third cleansing method is mentally ‘blowing up’ a visualized rose during the exhale, much like fireworks explode into tiny pieces of light in the sky (figure 2.4).
Figure 2.4: Blowing a rose
This practice cleanses your energy system. If ‘blowing it up’ feels too crude to you, you can also transform the rose into a cloud of fine golden particles. This too cleanses your energy system. In some mystical traditions, a fire is visualized in which you can burn things. You yourself should choose the image that fits you and works for you. One of the proof readers struggled with blowing up the rose because she had just put great effort into visualizing it. She visualized a little box instead to put clutter in and she then blows it up with ‘dynamite’. This worked excellent for her. Another person just let the rose dissolve in thin air, which was effective as well.
A rose is often used in these and similar meditations as a symbol for our personality. When we visualize a rose, we notice there may be ‘dust’ on it, energetic clutter. By blowing up a rose , and visualizing the rose again and again until the rose appears completely clean, the ‘dust’ is converted to neutral energy. Clairvoyant perception shows that this practice can make a dark looking aura much lighter.
Practicing in steps
In this book a number of other techniques will be discussed. These techniques are often used in aura healing. The next exercise is a start- or cleansing meditation you can use as a ‘warming up’ for activating your kundalini system. After reading a step in the text you can close your eyes for a moment and perform the step described. After this you move on to the next step.
Exercise start- and cleansing meditation
- Begin by making contact with your body. Sit on a chair with your feet flat on the ground. Make sure you are seated comfortably so that you can relax. See of you can feel your feet from the inside out… can you feel where every toe is…?
Exhale deeply and allow the air to smoothly fill your lungs again until they are completely full… - Grounding yourself. Aim your focus on your tailbone area and visualize a cord or tube starting there and going downwards. First it goes through the floor…and then deeper…and deeper…Through all the layers of the earth …all the way to the center of the earth. If you like, you can mentally tie your grounding cord to that center place. This helps to strengthen your grounding. Some people visualize an anchor, others use something else as a means to tie up the grounding cord. See which image works for you.
Now you can experiment with the thickness of the tube and its color. Make the tube, the grounding cord, as thick or as narrow as you like. Then sign the tube with your name and todays’ date…(figure 2.5). While doing this, you may sense a shift in you energy.
Figure 2.5: Brinig your grounding cord in present time and own it (naam = name; datum = date)
- Letting earth energy flow inside us. Focus on your feet and imagine small round openings in the middle of the bottom of your feet, the foot chakras. Just like the diaphragm of a camera lens, you can make the inlet bigger or smaller…when you open your foot chakras this way, you may feel a stream of energy in your feet and legs. This can give a gentle sensation…tingling…warm…. For most people, it is a pleasant sensation, but that may not always be the case. Sometimes something is in the way of this stream, that needs to be resolved. Allow this energy, this earth energy, to flow through your lower body, and theninto your upper body as much as feels pleasant. Usually this earth energy has a soothing effect on the body. Your energy body can take in some of this earth energy , and some of it can be channelized down again through the grounding cord. Give it a try…
- Letting cosmic energy flow inside. Aim your attention towards your crown and imagine that you have two spots on the backside where cosmic energy can flow inwards (figure 2.6).
Figure 2.6: Mixing earth and cosmic energies in your tailbone area
…this can give a very light sensation of flow. Write your name in your crown mentally and feel how the energy there changes lightly… let the cosmic energy flow downwards through the back of your spine through two parallel channels to your tailbone area…If you let a lot of this cosmos energy flow, you may begin to feel very light. If you let a lot of earth energy flow you may feel quite heavy. Try out what combination feels best to you…
- Mixing the two energies in your tailbone area (at the tailbone or root chakra)… Let this mixture flow upwards through parallel channels at the front of your spine…let the stream come out of your head at your crown like two small fountains…
If you aren’t used to working with these energies, it’s best to spend a few weeks on learning to feel that sensation of flowing energy in this meditation. - Now imagine a tiny room in the center of your head…A cozy little room as your own meditation place…this is the area of the sixth or forehead-chakra. It’s also called your minds’ eye or your third eye. Look around in this room, see what it looks like: is it dark, is it light…are there comfortable seats…is there anything hanging on the walls…? Clean up this room by letting colors flow through it, as if you were squirting the colors out of a hose…write todays date on the walls…and your name as well. Say ‘hello’ mentally and look around if there are visitors in your room. If this is the case, request them friendly yet urgently to leave your room. Other peoples’ energy –because that’s what that is-, is only troublesome. Furthermore, the energy you run into may belong to all kinds of people, varying from close kindred people to colleagues or the salesman in a shop you went to! Cleaning up your head in this way can give you great peace: no more, or less, vague background voices in your head. See if all the windows on the front of your little room are clean, and if not, give them a wash…
- Visualize a screen in front of you. .. A movie screen or a computer screen, something that suits you. Ground this screen by visualizing a hollow tube or cord from the underside of that screen to the center of the earth…clean up the screen by ‘washing it’ mentally…’updating’ it…and writing your name on it… This exercise helps to clean up your sixth chakra and to make sure you can see clear images through your minds’ eye. Moreover, it is quite possible that you see nothing at first. Still, you can do this exercise and imagine you are sitting in your little room. That works, too!
- Visualizing and blowing up a rose. Visualize a rose in front of you…when you’re done making your rose, you can begin to look at the colors and see what part is clear, and what part isn’t…
Maybe you only think you see a rose, but that also works in this exercise.
Blow up the rose into a fountain of gold while exhaling…and visualize a new rose…See if there is any difference between the roses…Repeat this a few times if necessary, until the image of the rose is clear…Usually the rose is blown up during an exhale, which is why it’s called ‘blowing up roses’…Experiment with this… - Wrapping up. Let everything you visualized dissolve…so that the energy flows back into your system. Move your attention to your feet, and feel them from the inside out…This can strengthen the sense of being on earth. Now move your attention to your breath, and breathe deeply a couple of times… and you’ll start to notice that your body is beginning to wake up from the meditative state.
In doing these exercises you probably noticed you entered a meditative state. Your attention was focused on your inner world, and you were able to make greater contact with energies flowing in your energy body. Maybe you noticed that your energy system is somewhat cleaner: after such a meditation you may feel clearer inside. You might stop after having given yourself a healing this way. In this book however, we use the cleansing meditation as a warming up for the kundalini system.
If you are not used to these kind of exercises, it’s a good idea to do them regularly, so that you know them by heart after a while. The effects of the exercises will grow stronger that way. Working with others or voice-recording the exercises on a tape can be good way to stimulate yourself. Pay attention to your legs; check that you don’t cross them, and make sure both feet are on the ground. If not, then that’s often a sign that your grounding cord isn’t functioning fully anymore and you have to visualize it anew.
It’s possible that you didn’t ‘see’ anything during this exercise, just like many others. This is not abnormal, many people experience this. What to do about it, differs for everyone. Below, a proof reader describes her solution to this problem.
But I don’t see anything…
I have been involved in intuitive development for the last 15 years, and I still don’t SEE anything! It would be much easier if I could, but it’s not how it works for me. The good news is that I’ve learned to be okay with that. Without worrying about visualizing, I am still very capable to work with energy. How you ask? Well, energy follows intention!
I can imagine being connected to the earth by describing it to myself. This helps me to stay focused. It goes like this: ‘I am now connected to the earth and I know this because I feel like a tree, with its roots grown deep into the earth. I can suck the earth energy up in me through the roots, like a tree gets its nutrition from the ground.’
I use a combination of words that evoke a certain feeling, often a feeling of motion and that I can imagine! This is a way that works for me, maybe your way is very different. It’s been my experience that it doesn’t matter HOW you imagine something. By focusing, something happens and if you practice focusing more often, the resulting feeling grows stronger and more tangible. By linking an intention to your breathing it becomes easier to hold the focus and to FEEL something is happening.
Intermezzo: Visualizing
I can still remember the incredible effort it took me to visualize a rose during my first course in aura healing. At home, I began practicing with it. I began visualizing a rose, but I discovered that I didn’t exactly know what a rose looks like. Is there a green knob under the flower, and what does that look like? How are the green petals connected on the stem? Etcetera.
I decided to buy a bunch of roses and to try visualizing them while looking at them. This was helpful, but not easy. The rose looked much more complex than I had expected. However, by comparing my visualized roses with the real ones, I had a good reference at hand to help me along.
Still, I was curious about how other people saw their roses. Did they see a three-dimensional full color, full screen image, or was their rose more plain, like mine?
I learned that struggling with visualizations was a common reality. Some people didn’t see anything with their inner eyes, but could build some sort of image by simply thinking it. This appeared to be working in meditation practices, too.
In the course of time, I collected a few tips that might be helpful with visualizing.
-Grounding first
Do some grounding- and cleansing meditation first. This helps enormously in a visualization practice. Otherwise it’s easy to start daydreaming or to lose focus on the visualized image.
-Pick a nice object
Choose something you like to visualize, so that it becomes worthwhile to work with. Something interesting or nice. It’s boring to have to visualize something you don’t feel like seeing. Personally I felt that many things were uninteresting and not worth the effort and the energy to visualize. A rose (figure 2.7) I liked enough to spend time on, especially once I had a real-life rose in front of me, looking extraordinary and special.
Figure 2.7: Visualizing a rose
Someone else may prefer visualizing an elephant, the flame of a candle, or a symbol.
-Drawing or copying
When you visualize something, there are different ways to do it: you can mentally draw something, or just put it in front of you in one piece. You could try mentally ‘copying’ an object. This means looking at an object with your physical eyes, then closing your eyes and copying the physical, visual image onto your mental screen. In order not to lose that image, you can outline it. After that you can also physically draw the visualized image on a paper. This helps tremendously. I myself found, after searching for a long time, a box of pastel chalks with which I could reproduce the colors that I perceived on my inner screen. This made it fun for me to draw roses.
-Zooming in and out
A visualization isn’t something static, but something you can zoom in on, just like with a camera. Try this with your object of choice With a rose for instance, you can zoom in on one single flower petal and look at the structure of the veins. It might surprise you how automatically the process of zooming in is, and that you don’t have to visualize the rose all over again! In the same way you can zoom out and look at the surroundings of your test object.
-Sense of movement
You can use your bodily sensations, like the breath, when visualizing. This makes it more ‘real’ and more tangible . You can visualize your grounding cord as a thick ‘antenna’ -like some animals have- with which you go deeper and deeper. With this antenna you can feel how thick and how coarse the layers of the earth are. Once at the center of the earth, you can stick or tie your antenna there. You can mentally use your hands to make sure that the grounding antenna is tightly positioned. After some practice with this, you develop an emotive image which is very pleasant to work with in the exercises from this book.
-Coloring
An object can be mentally colorized, or its’ color can be changed. It’s easy to turn a red rose into a yellow or a blue one. Every color of the rainbow can be visualized. You can just change the color of the flower, but you can also blow the first one up into a cloud of golden confetti and visualize another rose in a different color. This way you are simultaneously cleansing your energy system on different energy levels because every color represents a different energy level.
-Tuning your sixth chakra
When you are visualizing, you are mainly working with your sixth chakra (your third eye or your minds’ eye or however you want to call it). this chakra can be activated further / by imagining you are closing or opening it like a camera lens. Doing this in combination with blowing up a rose is another way of cleansing your sixth chakra properly.
-Sharing experiences
It’s good to exchange experiences with other people. Soon you will notice that you aren’t the only one struggling with visualization. By exchanging experiences, you might be able to give each other nice tips.
The art of visualization is being discussed in several books. A well-known book on the subject is ‘Creative Visualization’ by Shakti Gawain.
—End of intermezzo “Visualizing”——