Surviving Illumination Breaking through Crisis: A Memoir & Teachings from a Kundalini Rising

If your deepest yearning is to be alive, awake and potent, then this book is for you. If you want to transform crisis into a gift, may this inspire you. If you are navigating the perils of a spiritual emergency or an intense spiritual awakening, then the human sober stories here will serve as examples. The invitation to love and acceptance that reside in the kernel of each of our experiences show us that humanity and divinity are no different. If your deepest yearning is to be awake to both light and dark, and integrate the personality with being, then this book is for you. The kundalini process is about waking up what is asleep in each of us. This book is also about using chronic illness and grief as doorways to transformation. This is part memoir, part self-help peppered with reflective questions and simple guided awareness practices after each chapter to wake you up. So put on your seatbelt as this journey traverses mercurial terrain. In the alchemical forging ground rises the phoenix. Welcome aboard! Different people experience kundalini differently depending on different stages of rising as well as what blocks are in the physio-psycho-spiritual system. These could be kriyas, opening of non-ordinary states, glossalia, etc. When the openings are in "wilder" phases because of the unblocking process happening, there are ways to help soothe it and listen to what is the wisdom the kundalini is sharing. Kundalini can be explosive and rapid as a fire razes through a dry forest of beliefs and world views. It can also be smooth like mist. Surrender honed over decades has allowed me to listen to the teachings of the Shakti (Divine Power Consciousness). There were times that my ego personality desperately wanted to control and manage the phenomena that was very disturbing. This grasping created more problems with the kundalini process. Think of BIG energy moving up your spine, and then LITTLE energy (ego) trying to micromanage the direction of big energy. It doesn't work. Part of my development was seeing directly these distinctions as energy patterns, and then translating them into the integration of being and non-being. There is a necessary place for the ego, but I found it wasn't the way we usually think about it.