The Commodification of Spirituality: Kundalini Awakening vs. 'Being Woke'
We must stop commodifying the sacred. Spirituality isn’t a job, it’s an expression or language of the spirit, our energetic state-of-being, and the law of existence by which all creation is animated. We can however, look to how we can reciprocate support for one another in an equal exchange of energy, for services rendered vs profiting off of the universal laws which should be inherently available to all. Barriers to entry should not exist! We awaken at our own time, emit our own frequency and exist at our own vibration according to our state of being, our belief systems, pain bodies and environments.
Now, let's get something clear, being "woke" is a thing of beauty, especially when approached and shared ethically, compassionately and inclusively, paying special attention to consider the most marginalized and oppressed, while acknowledging the work and ancestral wisdom of those that came before us. When it comes to speaking to real life experiences of Spiritual Awakening, we aren’t meant to be out here doing endless research, or piggy-backing off of the cliff-notes of others, in attempt to "fake it til we make it". We need to speak from experience, sacred sciences and keep in mind that no two experiences are identical, so generalizations may not be enough to comprehend or decipher from a glance. Awakening speaks to the wisdoms received from spirit through our open channels in the chakra systems which allow for a very powerful energetic series of events to occur. We must remember, damn well, that we didn’t invent the wheel of kundalini energy, nor do we deserve to reap monetary rewards for simply regurgitating here-say. Most everyone has this energy stored, sitting at the base of their spine, and the awakening that happens may be a result of or reaction to the rising of such energy up the spinal column.
All spirit, is seemingly on the trajectory to full awakened enlightenment, over time. We all came here to experience uniquely individual experiences and lessons, with no two lifetimes looking completely identical to another. So it is important to keep in mind that one being's goodness is better than another, nor one being's karmas or downfalls lead to less of a growing experience than a "good deed". All life experience is a lesson, and no time is ever wasted. We simply have difference challenges and purposes along our individual paths. Awakening is not a goal, rather a leveling up of cycles along the soul's generational path. We all must play our parts, and do what we can to work toward finding our purpose and expressing our passions,while incarnated in our physical form.
Kundalini Rising + Pineal Awakening
Spiritual Awakening or Kundalini Rising, is an actual physical happening, that can feel physically hot, euphoric and at times unbearably painful. It is a slow burning action of awakening that speeds up in a fit of traumatic occurrences, climaxing up the spinal column (commonly referred to as the 33 vertebrae of Christ Consciousness, kind of like the staircase of divine knowledge) as the life force energy that exists in our spinal fluid and reproductive organs. This fluid ascends up toward the cerebellum, triggering the spark in our pineal gland (third eye), upward through the synapses of the brain, which inform the mind and unlock the key to the crown (located above what we call the ‘soft spot’ on an infant skull). These series of events allow our portal (crown chakra) to open and trickle in through our channels of remembrance, flowing in divine revelation (understanding), and flooding us into intuitive overdrive, like a lighthouse taking in the light of the sun and shining it out though our being for all to see.
Enlightenment Cannot Be Attained in One Lifetime
These folx are tasked to serve a higher purpose for the collective of humanity, stepping into the role of helper or a catalyst for those they touch, as a beacon of light, tasked with the arduous role of doing their inner healing so that may more actively shine their loving light for those around them to see more clearly through the dark choppy waters that surround and engulf us all. This act is rarely a self-serving claim to fame, it’s a deep surrendering and allowing so that we may be able to have a spiritual conversation with God-Source through a state of surrender akin to meditation, trance or like we see in the movie the matrix: having an awareness that there is no spoon, there is only source energy. Instead of trying to bend the spoon with our mind, rather there is no spoon, only the thought form. We create the thought form, we are the spoon, allow it to bend by allowing the self to bend. Awakening is a verb, and many awakening beings go into states of hermitage, with a deep crawling desire to escape from society and hide in solitude, away for the density of the collective pain body. We can feel it all at once, the barriers between the “I am” self and the oneness of all, reveals the “Am”, allowing for intense feeling and absorption of other’s pain. In Daoist philosophy, this universal law is described as “allowing the natural”, where trying to control the natural goes against the flow of nature (akin to a sin), which accumulates karma.
Major Keys The key to unlocking the lower and upper chakras is through healing the heart chakra, which acts as a filter. Unharnessed, an open-heart channel can become overactive. You may here folx refer to this as "being an empath", though, this highly sensitive receptivity is more specifically known as Sympathy (feeling all the feels of emotionality), whereas with informed boundaries, we can learn to harness the ebb and flow of emotionality as a practice, by simply observing the lessons without accumulating the density of others, which is more along the lines of true empathy: (a process of acknowledging the feeling and learning from it, which eventually evolves into a reverence for all life)
One key lesson is the principle of Ahimsa, meaning to “do no harm”, neither taking or inflicting from others. We can see these nuggets of ancient wisdom, practiced in schools of thought such as Jainism, Daoism and Hinduism, to name a few, and are mirrored n states of altered consciousness, revealing the universal truth of ‘oneness’. Particularly, transcribed by the spirit teachers of “los niños” that inform the mycelial network of entheogenic fungi.
These truths are branches off of source consciousness, reminding us that to harm another is to harm one’s self, we are connected, we are mirrors, we are one, the external self is but a construct of the Maya, the Matrix, the video-game-of-life. Awakening is the practice of leveling up before game-over.
Dark Night of The Soul
The traumatic process of awakening ain’t as cute, ordinary or commonplace as folx may make it sound. The denser the state of the world becomes, the more instances of radiating awareness is unlocked and able to be spread to the collective of humanity. There is a lead up to the climax of waking up, and requires years of cycles of ego and arrogance to rise and fall, entering into downward spiraled phases known as the ‘dark night of the soul’ and ‘ego death’. These states get deeper and deeper, until the being gives up and gets eaten up by insurmountable fear, or allows, observes and surrenders to forces greater than the “I am” self, and “why me” that feeds the ego, by facing the mirror and extracting the lessons. Not everyone goes through an awakening, and for those that do/are, there are layers of crap to sift through that will span the entirety of our lifetimes. One outcome is not stronger than the other. Even if we choose to end a life, we cycle back through again, giving it another go.
"Stay Woke", But Keep My Mouth Shut?
When my being was going through this difficult experience, I didn’t have a word to put to what was happening. My family and friend group was worried for me; I say “for me” instead of “about me” because some were concerned about how I sounded to the outside world, and feared I could be placed in an psychiatric ward or institution. Others, simply cried, or asked that I curb my language, as my sudden sense of foresight and unexplained sudden knowing of vast spiritual concepts, and my new found and seemingly "creepy" intuitive abilities was rubbing others the wrong way. Personally, I didn't have a support system that knew of our could validate what I was experiencing. I no longer knew how to exist in social settings, and began to retreat into isolation, which was paired with the intense grief of divorce and betrayal (a loss of my best friend and confidant), which led to suicidal waves of impulsive thought, and a thirst for knowledge, a disinterest in being indoors, and an internet search for others who may be able to relate to what I was experiencing.
Prior to social interactions, I began to use Ayurveda, movement meditation and Cannabis to help ease the tension and mellow my moods and behavior, in an effort to ease the concern of others, soothe my impulses, and potentially blend in. Surprisingly, this helped me tap into to other areas of myself, mastering other worlds of consciousness and heightening my downloads on claircognizant information, and articulate the hell out of what was occurring. While I felt silenced, or was asserting myself rather than my wounds) because seemingly overnight (though it was a slow progression of the unfolding of my channels that was allowing that which was suppressed to exist freely). I heard things like “we’re all waiting for you to snap”
Folx tend to confuse the trendy notion of “being woke” with kundalini awakening, and the 2 could not be further from one another. One is an unlearning and relearning through education and informed experience, whereas the other is like a smoldering fire, sparked by trauma and meeting it’s full crescendo, as we suppress so much hardship and grand events in our life, which then bust through our walls of consciousness and ascend up the cerebral spinal column, in a fit of slithering painful rebirth, with very physical, psychological symptoms (often diagnosed as "psychosis"of the mind).
In hindsight, awakening is more like a smoldering when living in an unconscious state, rather than a slow burn. We are having advanced thought forms far before we explode into awakening. If you are experiencing any of these feelings, please feel free to reach out to me here or on Instagram. You don't have to go through this alone*
*Some searchable terms that may help shed more light on the subject are:
Tree of Life • Pineal Awakening • Sacred Serpent • DNA double-helix • RX symbol of medicine • Opening The Chakras • Kundalini Awakening • Spiritual Awakening • Kundalini Rising • Third Eye Awakening • Open Crown Chakra • • Awakening Psychosis • Annunaki • Cosmic Consciousness
Universal Truths
Some may wish to paint a picture that Zen-meditation, enlightenment and awakening are a one-size fits gateway to greatness, all gained through routine work and the desire to be woke, a guru, a voice of reason to the masses. Sounds an awful lot like organized religion, government and institution of control that are prison, schooling, caste and creed all based in systemic oppression, and most commonly seen in false constructs like white supremacy and the patriarchy (...Oooh child, you getting me hot!)
These tactics are not new, they are thought form constructs, a manipulation of the ego self. Growing in the shadows, feeding off of fear and the energy of others. Every time we perpetuate false narratives or use coconut telephone to pass the baton of a theory without having actually lived an experience, we feed the ego. We see this in the churches and temples that seek to inform while cutting off the person from their intuition, their connection to the most-high, commodifying our way into our own heaven (don’t get me started on that messy though form), spreading the lie that we are separate from the divine and have to seek outside of ourselves to achieve salvation, success and reverence.
The inner standing of Truth, is called a remembrance, and may seemingly come from nowhere. It is a download (an over-standing) of information that is received from our higher self, whispering in through our crown of knowledge, then, conceptualized in the mind's eye (3rd eye chakra), becoming a thought form in the psyche, and eventually filtered through the throat in an effort to become materialized into being. A principle law of energy is that it moves on spoken and written word, which we can see actualized in practices of Manifestation and Akashic Record journeying.
This is how we are informed the truth, by the divine. These truths cannot be unraveled or dismantled, they simple are universal laws, states of being that exist in all of creation. These truths are present in the life of mosquito, mushroom, mountain, and algae to pinecones, waters, sky and firelight. They are the pillars to the architecture of earthly existence on this plane are founded upon. When these constructs fade, so too does our physical form, releasing us back to the essence of oneness that is nirvana, ultimate freedom from form, existing within the spectrum of light that is God. All experiential thought forms, exist in the Akashic library, making up the almighty collective consciousness, an encyclopedia of existence, which we can tap into as we crack wide open into awakening.
The Three Pachas Let's get one thing clear: Awakening ain’t cute, and it has nothing to do with our personality. You’ll know an awakening being because they aren’t here for clout or to be your diva-like guru, they are here because they made a contract, experiencing lifetimes of trauma, facing the terrifying depths of the shadow, venturing through where the Indigenous Peoples of Peru refer to as the Ukhupacha, or Lower-world. Left unchecked and untended to, the shadow overwhelmingly bleeds out to the Middle-world, referred to as the Kaypacha, manifesting as hurting the ones we love, outbursts of violence and anger, undesirable outcomes, friction, depression and so on. As time goes on, the darkness can exploded to the Upper-world, or Hanaqpacha, living in a state of unawareness, ignorance not being bliss, rather a relinquishing of power in return for a false sense of control. These three levels of consciousness are called The 3 Pachas.
These ancient concepts are not of the new age... we simply think we are hearing of them for the first time, much like the colonizer believing they “discovered” land that was already inhabited for centuries… Mmm...kay? Awakening can be thought of like the unlearning of the erasure process, and allowing of the relearning through divine guidance outside of our control. Animate the body where you are guided from your higher self, rather than our physical peers that exist unawakened in the 3D. Or to put it more bluntly, relegating our existence to being “young, dumb and full of cum”.
Ego-Death or Psychosis?
Kundalini Awakening can feel like a frustrating, dangerous, even suicidal existence, especially in the beginning. Yes, synchronicities are always happening, as messages from the divine. Whether we chose to look deeper into meaning is on us. It is not merely being interested in trending topics and doing research and then deciding we are gurus, sharing what we read for a dollar amount. It bears a tremendous weight on the soul, that if not released, shared and lifted, can leave the soul feeling like it is experiencing an agonizing death. This ego-death can feel like we are going mad, like the world has its knife to our necks, and no one is stopping to help.
Our pain bodies can no longer take the shadow that is engulfing the very density of the air we breathe, causing the being to either sink deeper until we run (in flight mode) and feed the fear, at time ending our life cycles, or we enter fight mode and face our fears through observation and asking the questions we were too afraid to verbalize in the past. Essentially, we are tasked to do inner child work to face our own demons, in order to free the self from the endless cycle of rebirths, by awakening the sleeping mind. We are tasked to lessen our karmic footprint, by feeling it all and making conscious choices in an effort to live intentionally and in our purpose.
Our shadows are parasitic and grow to be "demons" of our own making, but they aren't the enemy per se, they are instinctual ways of shutting down in order to protect the body from life's painful existence, overrun with trauma, violence, hate, betrayal, deceit, harm, cruelty, judgement, shame and the like. They are all the false thought-forms that were forced upon us and as a reaction, we chose to believe out of loyalty and in order to get our basic needs met by our parental guardians and authority figures. True awakening starts is a process, and continues to strengthen as a practice of allowing, of surrendering to the guidance of the divine, rather than the illusion of life also known as the Maya.
To Sin, Is To Act Without Knowing
Awakening beings are never fully awakened, until well after death. What would be the point to knowing it all without putting practice to living, gaining knowledge through cycles of lived experience?. There is such thing as advanced souls, who keep the momentum going from lifetime to lifetime, not just accumulating knowledge, akin to muscle memory, but by doing the work to lead with love in the depths of the shadows, embracing all aspects of the self, and rescuing the inner child lurking in the dungeon that forgot it was royalty.
This may stem from the human need to understand and control that which we do not know or understand. To be without knowing is to simply to forcibly act without being informed, to act in contradiction to natural law, forcing the outcome of life rather than allowing ourselves to be guided. That which translates literally into the word “sin” (to be without)— To be without factual knowledge (universal law), we allow ourselves to be misinformed, so we hold on to man-made theories out of fear of the unknown, which is rooted in scarcity. Which is how we become so unconscious and ignorant in the first place.
Sacred Spiral of Ascension
Consider yourself informed… enlightenment cannot be achieved in one lifetime. Journeys to ascension happen over lifetimes, like a corkscrew. We incarnate in each parallel life form to focus and learn a different lesson, and Disney happy endings are not the moral of this story. We accumulate remembrance toward a state of enlightenment or nirvana (the freest form of being, which is actually out of body and back to our spirit form), so in essence we are all moving toward enlightenment as we approach death, though this does mean we are all awake.
We are actually growing, evolving and informing source consciousness through a series of experiences, which are not linear (as time is not linear), rather more of a spiral staircase, where we ebb and flow from light to shadow in an upward corkscrew motion. We don’t even know it is happening because to us, we sense time as a plateau, even though with each passing moment, we are growing and aging inward and outward, rather than forward or backward. It is our being that is upward and informs that downward that are the natural laws of growth. As the trees, as above, so below. We are chips off the old block of source, who decided to incarnate in many parallel forms, to serve as mirrors, so that we may see and understand the self, within the laws creation, in order to perceive all possibilities throughout existence. Words + Photography by Natasha Jain © 2021 @asha_art.n.soul + features graphic from @magicalrecipesonline