Episode 80 – Bonnie Greenwell Ph.D – The Kundalini Guide

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what’s up folks in Cathedral Kitana here with the human experience and we’re diving back into the more esoteric side of things in this episode as we speak to dr. Bonnie green well dr. von Greim ah has been in this industry for over three decades she has studied some of the physiological and psychological effects of what happens during a Kundalini awakening so the credentials run deep on this one she’s written at least three books on the subject which I highly

recommend otherwise folks if you enjoy our content get to the human expediate help us cover server costs find us on Facebook Twitter YouTube all at the human XP thank you guys so much for listening the human experiences in session my guest today is dr. Bonnie Greene well Bonnie welcome to human experience Thank You Xavier this is a nice opportunity I appreciate it so Bonnie let’s let’s get in you’ve written a few books on Kundalini and the awaking

process of Kundalini but how did you get to the point of writing about this many years ago I was very serious meditator and when I went to graduate school at the Institute of transpersonal psychology I began to do energy work and during that time I had an activation of Kundalini energy and I had to write a doctoral dissertation at that time so I decided to explore what the Kundalini experience was like and how to make it a positive experience

because what I found is for me the awakening was extremely wonderful it was just a great experience and I kept running into people who said that they were having a lot of difficulties with it so the whole point of my research and later many years of my work has been to understand what’s the difference and what can people do to make it a more graceful grace-filled I guess I could say experience yeah that’s that’s really intriguing I’ve heard the same that it

can be kind of a harrowing experience I mean how where do you see this spectrum of do you see most people having a difficult time during this sort of awaking process or is it more gentle for most people well I think because of my books and my research my websites a lot of the people who call me are those who are having difficulties but there are probably many who do not have such difficulties it depends a lot on the context in which the energy awakens and

whether you have a support system of some sort where you understand what’s happening to you at the time which for me that was really important I I was in a graduate school of transpersonal II oriented people and I was going to programs at Esalen with Stan Grof and others so I had a lot of people who understood what the process was right that’s really intriguing I find the whole thing really really intriguing um I mean what is something that would

cause a Kundalini awakening I mean is there a certain point in someone’s life I mean maybe a traumatic experience or a realization through meditation is there commonality but you’ve noticed between people who have Oakland maleeni awakening yes there’s many different ways that it activates but primarily and classically it has wakened either because of a very sincere and intense meditation process often for many years or through a practice of yoga or chew

gum or something that’s undergone in a very discipline and deep way with somebody who sincerely is seeking truth or seeking a relationship with God or seeking enlightenment for those have been the classic ways you would see it there’s specific practices in Kundalini Yoga and in most yogic systems for people once they’re ready breathing practices and other kinds of concentration practices designed to activate the energy so that would be the

primary classical way but you also find many people have an awakening through a near-death experience or when they’re in a period of great trauma whether they’re going through some kind of grief or maybe some kind of a violent event I’d one woman who awakened after being mugged but she had also long period of yoga practice before them sometimes it awakens through an encounter with somebody else who has awakened energy and sometimes it just happens

spontaneously and there’s no real logic you can find in it but usually there’s some kind of an initiating event that that made it it’s just Kundalini is only the life force it’s your own life force and you could say that when it awakens which is normally considered to happen at the base of the spine although in some systems it happens by an activation in the center of the body or in the heart but when it activates you notice a

difference there’s that before and after this is a very specific event you can you can trace the initiation of Kundalini – and then there’s many years of experiences that often follow it yeah it’s fascinating so I mean Kundalini is a thousand two thousand years old kind of tradition I mean do you than India have been kind of talking about Kundalini but now we’re seeing this sort of proliferate what’s going on here in Western society why do you think that

there’s this crossover happening for Mesa West when I think back in the 30s 40s and then again in the 60s there was a great influx of yogic teachers and piete teachers from the buddhist traditions coming to the west so a lot of people in those days where you could say the culture was kind of seeded with the kind of spiritual practices that would make this more likely to happen and then in the 60s it happened quite a bit with people who were using LSD there

was a whole movement of people who are very intensely trying to shift their consciousness and so that generation had a one influx you could say of the energy activating or consciousness shifts that may precede an activation of energy so today though what’s really been different since the computer age is people can find ways to dedicate themselves to spiritual awakening all over the internet they can find practices that are very energizing they

can find meditation practices meditation is almost mainstream now and if the person’s kind of ripe not everybody who meditates is going to have this kind of awakening it’s probably a fairly small percentage but if there’s other ways in their life that their consciousness is prepared or ready for this to happen it’s very possible for it to activate through a meditation practice and millions of people are doing that today also millions are doing yoga so there’s

there’s been a real shift in society and the openness to those kind of experiences yeah I agree completely you know in the in the early 90s 1991-92 I had a Kundalini Awakening and it was probably the most scary event that I’ve ever experienced one of the most scary events I’ve ever experienced and I think through the years that that followed it was even more harrowing because I had no idea what’s going on there was no sense of kind of getting online and even even

getting online and typing it in no one was talking about Kundalini back then so and yeah things have changed a lot things are a lot different what do you think this means for I mean people like you who specialize in cleaning what what are your patients that come to you like what what is something that you would tell a person that comes to you and says hey dr. Bonnie I just my Kundalini awakened you know I feel like this is happening

to me will you what do you say that person well as I start to work with somebody I haven’t fill out a questionnaire that gives me a lot of background information because whatever you’ve brought into the process has a huge impact on what you’re experiencing and what might be helpful in making it a more smooth experience so I do that I also ask their history a little bit because I want to know what triggered it how did it begin for them and that will

give me a little insight on what’s needed for example if they’re already in a spiritual community of some sort they’ll have a good context you’ll know what’s happening if they were in an accident and they never had ever heard of anything spiritual they may need to get it set into a context in which they understand that there is an experience called spiritual awakening and for thousands of years it’s been written about primarily in the east and that

Kundalini is a natural part of that process it’s it’s the part that allows your whole energy field to awaken and support your spiritual intention and that it’s been written about in classical literature but it’s just not understood in Western medicine so doctors and therapists have never really gotten a framework or a paradigm for interpreting in but they’re that it’s very well-known in the East and that it’s all about their transformation and

their body becoming available to higher states of consciousness and to the integration or the living from those new perceptions do you think that this is happening to more people now than before it’s very possible some people think that I believe that Eckhart always talked about this being a not so much Kundalini of consciousness being much more and today but I think we also have to realize that there’s a larger population and there’s a lot more inner

communication than there used to being so it may have been possible that certain cultures or certain groups of people did have these kinds of significant awakenings but it just wasn’t wide widely known yeah you know it seems like when there is a convenient like the the charge in your body is completely different and you’re you’re just sensitive to more and your your chakras are more open you’re just more sensitive to everything would you agree

with this yes that’s one of the biggest concerns people have especially if they were a little bit sensitive types of people anyway and it can become extremely uncomfortable because they can feel they can just feel things in other people’s energies they they’re much more receptive they can’t handle going into big-box stores and places where there’s tension and toxic relationships in fact the energy actually the awakening requires us to really be honest with

ourselves and should make changes in our life is some of the things we’re doing are not compatible for us that in a way the high sensitivity sort of telling you you really need to either change or get out of this particular relationship or this job it’s not you’re not in tune with it it’s not right for you and you have to learn to listen to your body and do what the energy seems to be wanting you to do if you want to be comfortable

and the people a lot of people who get into great difficulty are doing things in their life that are very very stressful and that are just not in tune with their deeper authentic desires and truth and they have to make changes or they’re going to continue to feel bad to feel even sick sometimes do you believe in reincarnation Bonnie I think it’s there’s a high likelihood of it I’ve had many past life regressions myself and done that with other people

and many times people in a Kundalini process will have a spontaneous past life memory or deja boo’ experience and they feel very real feels like it really was me but it’s also very possible that we’re just connecting into the collective lives and experiencing another another life or another you might say another dream of life that’s a belief system you know it’s something you can’t know positively you just can know what it feels like it feels true

but you can’t nobody can actually prove that it is true so hypothetically do you think that the Kundalini process could be a sort of cleansing so that you can kind of escape to your incarnation cycle or I think that it’s an opening and the clearing in a way it makes you face much more of your incarnation ‘el cycle it’s not a way of leaping past it everything that you need to see comes up if you have unfinished psychological issues

that you’ve never addressed they’re very likely to come up some of the shaking and jerking and letting the body release that is some of the energetic holding of tension from your past from your conditioning but often you also get something will happen in your life that really throws your old conditioning in your face and you have much more freedom to choose to see through that and stop identifying with it so it’s a you could say almost a spontaneous psychological

process so what is something that you would say to someone maybe listening to this program that is experiencing a convenient Awakening is something that you would you either know that’s happening to you is it not something that you guess about a lot of times people will have an experience that would be you could say prior to Kundalini in yoga they call it prana Tata we all have pranic energies in our bodies and that’s how Qigong works

you’re learning to tune into that that’s what but Reiki is doing you’re learning to use and let this energy flow through your body if you’re having some energy stirrings let’s say you’re a meditator and energy stirs at the base of the spine or there’s bitching or vibration or maybe sometimes little rushes of energy then you’re possibly in a process where Kundalini may activate if you’re experiencing if you’ve experienced a very intense rush of energy and your

body shaking uncontrollably or it’s that doesn’t seem to be like a seizure it’s not like a seizure disorder it’s much more like a rolling energy it can be very scary but it’s actually a good sign that your subtle body is cooperating with your spiritual intention or if you didn’t ever have a spiritual intention it’s an invitation to a type of transformation and grace that you may not have expected was available to you what will happen is that this process

just naturally unfolds itself if you don’t hold yourself in resistance to it it’s the anger fear and resistance that makes it more uncomfortable but you do have to give it its time sometimes you really need to if you’re using drugs a lot of people today are having activations after using ayahuasca or various other kinds of substances substances that are that create spiritual little openings you may need to stop doing that if you’re

uncomfortable if you’re feeling rotten if things are unpredictable you can’t ground yourself you may need to look at the stressors in your life and what you need to change sometimes people have this awakening who have done a lot of work with Hospice they’ve been sitting with people who make these transitions and they go into these very profound states of awareness with them and that can be an activation so there’s many different ways this might happen for you

and you’re just to get into right relationship with it seeing it as your own deeper self wanting your consciousness to wake up to itself that’s what wakes up is consciousness consciousness awareness is trying to wake up out of you in such a way that it helps you to have a different perspective of life and of yourself and of the world and of your connection with everything in it it’s a very wonderful opportunity and you may not wish it was happening to you

right now it might be inconvenient you know I usually tell people it’s just that your number is up it’s time you’re going to go through this you can’t just make it go away once it’s moved to a certain level in your body where you’re feeling it maybe through your throat or up into the head but it has a process and it can be made more gentle more smooth in a sense that you are welcoming it using it to deepen your meditation or to discover meditation and start to take

very good care of your body not using substances that are toxic not hanging out with people that are toxic if your work is making you very unhappy you may need to really look at what can you do what is your body really want to do that would feel much more harmonious for you you might also need to be out in nature more to find a space that you can sit in if you’re in a city you might need to create a place in your yard or your home

where you feel very peaceful you need to ground work with your hands do things that make you feel stable and connected to the earth in some way my books are very helpful guides to the Kundalini guide and the awakening guide many people write me and say they’ve been a great help and I also have websites with a lot of information Kundalini guide calm and awakening guide calm yeah so those are places to begin yeah we can plug those

you know as as I get older Bonnie I’m more resolved towards living a peaceful and living less dangerous you know and Kundalini strikes me as highly dangerous kind of thing if you’ve treated the wrong way and I think it’s possible for someone who’s experiencing in Kundalini awakening to be misdiagnosed as schizophrenic or having some sort of mental health condition have you seen that before there’s a certain percentage of people that that has happened to it’s

most likely to happen under several circumstances one is that you have this awakening because of a response to a substance you were using like LSD or ayahuasca and you’re having a lot of flashback visualization experiences visions and things like that and somebody around you doesn’t understand what it is and they get alarmed and you get in the hospital for a while it’s also likely to happen if you go with if you get manic and you

don’t sleep or you and you go for a couple almost everybody if they go for two nights without sleeping we’ll start looking psychotic the brain needs rest regularly but sometimes the energy so high you’re just kind of out of control for a while and you need somebody that can kind of take care of you for a couple of days and if you don’t have that you end up wandering the streets you can end up in a hospital for a while most medical professionals do not

understand Kundalini and if you’re having visions or you’re hearing voices they’re likely to interpret it as a psychotic experiences but but I found that most of the people in this process who say hear a voice it’s usually very soothing and very occasional so it might be you’re very upset you wake up in the middle of the night and you hear a voice say peace be with you or we’re taking it easy on you or it’s all going to be okay

if you’re hearing voices that are very chaotic that are telling you to do negative things that the television is talking to you you’re more likely to be in a psychotic process it may be that if it was triggered by drugs or related to Kundalini it’ll pass quickly but usually with Kundalini a vision a vision might be very occasional and also very powerful just a transformative experience of seeing what’s possible and I have to say

most people don’t have visions and voices but maybe 20% might once in a while so it’s really a misunderstanding that gets them labeled the other type of person that can get really into a lot of trouble is the overachiever the one who is doing a tremendous number of practices they’re very intensely perhaps doing shamanic work which actually trains you to travel to other dimensions and can be very chaotic if you’re not really geared up to do that kind of

thing and they may be doing breathing practices four or five hours a day they’re pushing themselves and they’re pushing their consciousness in their mind and their nervous system and they can have a collapse within that process so it’s much better to try if you’re a spiritual seeker and your longings for enlightenment is to try to have a more balanced and harmonious approach to it so that you maybe take good care of your body you do a gentle meditation practice

regularly maybe a little bit of yoga but you’re tuning in all the time to bringing yourself back to earth calming yourself down but I don’t think of it as dangerous I think of it as transformative and if it’s happened to you inevitable and fear is one of the most difficult aspects of it fear makes it much much worse the mother who was a yogi that was a partner of Ora bindles said once that the heartfelt release of fear is the most important step on the spiritual

path very interesting how long do you notice that these symptoms last after a person has a Kundalini experience or an awakening if the energy has fully awakened it never fully goes away it gets much more it’s for the rest of your life you have it well yes and no I’ll just talk about my own experience which began more than thirty years ago sure it’s more intense the first year or two there’s a lot more where your body wants to release energy I always recommend

people lay down on their bed and just let the energy go for a little while usually lasts about 10 minutes and then it stops and then you feel relaxed if you’re trying to contract and hold it back it can become much more uncomfortable so that stage of having a lot of energy releases usually gets a little bit easier after a couple of years and especially if you’re not adding a lot of stressors other stressors in your life if you have a

pretty balanced life then for me what happened and I when my energy awoke I was in graduate school I wrote a dissertation I had three teenage kids and I was working part-time as a therapist so you know there was a lot of other things going on in my life so you can do that but you just have to be doing things that feel compatible and right for you then what happened over the years it got more like a little interior vibration that felt good I’ve

had a lot of bliss with this experience and when you tune into it you and you get used to it you just tune into it and relax it can be extremely blissful then some years later seven or eight years maybe I met Audrey Shanti who is a non dual teacher and when I began sitting with him the mood the whole energy process went to a different level where I had a very deep awakening of consciousness or her self whatever we would like to call that and at that time

the energy settled down almost completely so so it changed how I looked at life and myself and everything else and during that change the energy just kind of faded away but if I do massage or I have bodywork or if I just want to invite it I can lay down and it will start moving again but it’s almost always blissful but I’m in my 70s now so I don’t know to what extent those just getting older too might mellow out the process and I’ve had a very stable life

you know I so somebody who has had a lot of trauma things going on they’ve had to clear out old abuse issues and then maybe they’ve gone through a divorce or their child has died or they they’ve lost their home and they’ve you know they’ve done a lot of struggling they might have a lot more releasing going on because it is trying to release any kind of stress or any kind of attachment or belief that keeps you from feeling completely free and open yeah there’s a

guest of the show Robert Bruce and he talks a lot about out-of-body experiences not sure if you’ve heard of him but he he also does some work on Kundalini and one of one of the things he said was that without a guru type person your life that could aleni is an extremely dangerous thing to try to awaken do you agree with that statement I don’t encourage people to try to awaken Kundalini on their own it depends on the quality of the guru whether he’s

useful or not I’ve had many people from different spiritual systems contact me who had awakenings in that system and their teacher didn’t provide any help at all but was actually kind of critical like they shouldn’t be having all that energy or well they’re not developed enough to have activated Kundalini or Kundalini is always positive and you’re having psychological issues so you have a problem so you don’t always get what you need in a typical yogic or Buddhist

or certainly a Christian system I’ve had nuns call me who felt like this is the devil making them have all this energy because it feels so sexual at times so you know it’s not a absolute it would be nice if there were some really good gurus out there who could really support a person appropriately through the whole system but there aren’t very many I always tell people who call me and say well I want to learn how to open it I say the best thing to

do is develop a very basic and sincere meditation practice start with that don’t start with trying to raise energy and because your attitude and your devotion and your sense of wanting with all your heart to be connected to the greater aspect of life the knowing of God somebody might say or the knowing of your source or the knowing of unitive a oneness that is going to be the biggest support you’ll have in the process and if you can start with that start with

waking up at some level then when the kundalini happens it’s not something that you resist and you get into a lot of trouble with yeah I think you mentioned you touched on my next question which is in regards to the sexual nature of the process and why is it because it’s opening in that in the seat of your spine and it’s touching that chakra is that why it the root chakra is it and the sacral chakra is that why it’s so such a sexual

experience Kundalini is life force and it’s housed just below the sexual organs and it’s actually responsible for procreation so that’s where it’s home is you could say and when it moves and starts moving in that area of the body if it gets stuck there you can have a great intense sexual drive maybe even if you never did before and it can feel like you’re going crazy like it’s just way too much because it’s like it went from 110 to 220 and if it’s stuck in

those lower two chakras it’s really difficult and it’s not moving through the optimal channels so that would be one of the so-called dangers of Kundalini is getting one a few people have this problem when they’re learning tantric sex they get it opened and most people who teach Tantra sex sexually they’re doing it to so-called improve your sex life but they don’t understand the spiritual and the clearing process aspect of it so

sometimes a person will get the Kundalini moving higher through the body through the tantric sex and all of a sudden the whole thing opens up and they’re having all kinds of phenomena that they never expected like involuntary jerking and visions and heat and other other things that are related to this opening that can happen because the energy has been housed in that area that’s why it’s so much more vulnerable to intensifying your sexual drive other

times though it will move after it moves up into the 2nd 3rd 4th chakras the sex drive goes away completely and that can be just as alarming for some people it’s it’s sort of like sometimes their appetite will go away for a while so it can cause all kinds of different reactivity in the body and there’s no predicting of what it will do for you I mean it’s not the same from one person to the next do you feel like people can have partial awakenings is there is

there a degree of kind of this experience most awakenings are partial there most people will have an awakening initially that perhaps opens up the goes up into the belly or goes up and once it goes up into the heart it’s considered a little more stable so once it moves into the heart you might experience expansive unconditional love at times you might experience a need to really face some of your own barriers and blocks you might

have discomfort in the heart then it can move into the throat most people seem to have blockages in the throat I say it’s particularly women because they’re taught not to express everything they think all of us are taught that in school we’re taught to be quiet and there’s a lot of blockages or contractions in the neck area so a lot of times the energy ends up staying in that area for a long time until you’ve either learned some practices for moving

it or you deal with whatever the trauma is that’s related to the withholding you learn to express yourself yeah Wow makes a lot of sense Bonnie um I really appreciate your time why don’t you give us those those websites again what are your books called please the websites our Kundalini guide calm and awakening guide calm the books are the same the Kundalini guide the awakening guide they’re on Amazon and I’m just signing a contract for a new book won’t be out

though until 2018 with new Harbhajan that should be an overview of everything that I’ve learned over the last 30 years awesome that’s really amazing we will definitely put that link up on the website so that people can access it Bonnie thank you so much for your time with very informative conversation thanks so much it’s great to be here and thanks for inviting me this is the human experience we will see you guys next week thank you so much for listening