Kundalini Energy and Zuko Moments
Kundalini energy, or moving into your natural flow as I call it, is a common topic on the internet. You can find videos of people recording themselves as they ‘wake up.’ It’s shown as a sudden experience, something that is intense. It may be very dramatic as they collapse to the floor and writhe around in seeming ecstasy like those old-timey tent revivals where people feel the spirit move them and dance around while the power of some unseen force moves through their bodies. I had the opposite experience with my kundalini, or divine feminine energy, rising. It wasn’t intense per se, but it wasn’t subtle, either, and I didn’t even know what it was when it was happening. It took me a few years, after I had been through a lot more awakenings, to remember those moments and realize what they were. But they were definitely a moment and I’ll describe them here so you can compare notes to your experiences.
It happened in the middle of the night. I woke up from a dream, and I first felt my body being pushed from the side, like a wave nudging me sideways from my right side — always my right, never the left. It was as if I was lying on a beach, parallel to the shore, letting the ocean waves push me as they rolled in, but not forceful. My energy was literally gently nudging me. Then I moved into a weird, mental space and I heard the words of a song that I had been listening to run through my head: “Are you drifting on the astral plane?” It played over and over in my head and it felt like there were beings surrounding me. I wasn’t afraid. I think what I was feeling in the moment was curiosity.
The wave sensation happened many times over a series of nights, keeping me awake, forcing me to pay attention. I tried my hardest to shut it down, thought it was a nefarious energy trying to infiltrate my mind and keep me awake so I went crazy with sleeplessness. It didn’t work; once our divine energy wakes up, it’s hard to go backwards and why would you want to anyway?
After more than a week, in desperation for sleep, I finally sat down with myself and considered the possibility that maybe I was being asked to open up to love.
Once that thought occurred to me, it was an easier decision to say, yes, I accept. I don’t have to be afraid or shut this down, I can accept if it is aligned with love. And you will not believe — or maybe you will — the wave sensation stopped right after that. Full stop. No more. I haven’t experienced it since, though I have had other kundalini moments, often in the dark, when we are in the liminal space of the moon reflecting the light of the sun.
Kundalini energy, or our divine life force energy, is described as feminine and often as a coiled snake that is waiting to uncoil at the base of our spines and rise up into action. Perhaps for some that makes sense, but for many women, the snake image brings up much pain and suffering, being cast out and shamed for being who we are through the story of the Garden of Eden. Snakes are also powerful shapeshifters that can shed their skins and be reborn into something new, but again, shapeshifting is aligned with witches who are still castigated after all these years (though many people are calling attention to the atrocities towards women). So the snake image doesn’t work for many people and if we don’t experience it as an upward thrust from our spines, then we may miss the moment.
Sleepless nights are often aligned with feeling stressed, irritable, uncontrollable, but we can also think of them as awakening moments when our hearts and bodies are aligned. It often comes with night sweats or being overheated as our energies take on new powers that are aligned with the fire within. I call it a ‘Zuko Moment’ after the character in the animated series Avatar, the Last Air Bender, who went through a fever with illness when his belief systems started to change towards love and acceptance after he saved his arch enemy’s flying sky bison. (It’s a whole thing, you have to watch the series to understand the sky bison reference.) The illness and dream state that the character moves through is actually a death of his old way of being, or ‘dying to self.’ When we enact change, old energies leave so new ones can move in. We see this all the time in our life cycle, relationship cycles, and other ways we move through our lifetimes. The fire, or spark, is also aligned with creativity. The creative spark is a well known idiom and takes people on journeys into their unknown through exploration and feeling their bodies. The body is aligned with the divine, but not at all times.
You may not like the term divine energy, but think of it as getting maximum results out of whatever you are doing in the moment.
In times such as these, you are aligned with who you are. It’s all the same thing as we work to understand who we are as individuals, finding our way back to ourselves, or for the very first time. You don’t have to be into the mystical to feel it. You can feel alive in your body, at one, at peace, intensely focused, in free flow. It can happen on the basketball court, in the office working on a spreadsheet, or stepping into a new life that doesn’t involve the daily grind. All of these things speak to a new energy that is rising within us and outside of us, too, as the collective starts to bring in a new awareness about who we are as individuals working together to find a new experience on Earth. We don’t need to climb a mountain to find this experience, we can just go to the mountain top of our desires to find the new and bring it in for ourselves. Once we’ve done that, we can climb back down and share it with everyone else in the valley of our collective consciousness, like on the internet. But be sure it is authentically aligned with who you are as an individual, not copying and pasting someone else’s experience, ideas, or thought process.
I have started my business for this very reason: to enact change on Earth in my own way. I’ve been in a healing mode for a while. My sorrows have seemed endless, but as I work through them, I’m finding more joy and more fulfillment through my creative endeavor that isn’t dictated to me by anyone else. I find myself to be free of the bulge in my heart and throat that was keeping me underwater, unable to breathe or find my self-expression, which often required me to stop something in the form of a relationship, whether with a person or an environment (e.g. work).
It’s not vainglorious to tell people to skip off. You can be subtle about it or quite verbal, but when you are enacting change, sometimes you need to shove, or you’ll be shoved back down.
Your energies are rising whether you’re fully aware of it or not. It’s in our DNA to move through this world and expand in consciousness. If we’re aligned with the divine, we can find an unending source of love and inspiration that’s on a repeat loop to bring in the new. So it takes enacting change through our minds and hearts to burst through the self-conscious behaviors we hold in our bodies and move out into the world with a little more grace and a little more understanding about who we are collectively and individually.