ch aP t e r 11

T

he months following my unexpected Kundalini awakening
were a hell that can hardly be conveyed. Although the first
few days were the most severe, the intensity and duration of
what followed was beyond anything I could have previously imag-
ined. The closest approximation is a nightmare drug trip that never
ends. I found myself in the depths of true spiritual and psychological
anguish. I felt as if my soul were being slowly, mercilessly tortured in
a downward journey that could only end in something bordering on
madness. The next few months were a test of will that took all of my
strength, and even more than I knew I possessed, to endure.
After coming home abruptly from Texas to spend Christmas with
my dad and brother in the Bay Area, I moved in with my mom and
step-dad at their house in Ukiah, in Northern California, near where
I’d grown up. I enrolled in a math class at the local community col-
lege, which I needed to complete before transferring up to Hum-
boldt State University the next fall; and then got a job working at
the college library. Taking that one class and working fifteen hours
a week at the library was all I could handle amidst the onslaught of
conflicting psychic energies that were constantly engulfing my body,
mind, and soul. I found myself engaged in an ongoing desperate
struggle for survival that seemed, at the time, to have no conceivable
resolution.
Over the first two months after moving in with my mom, almost
every night I lay down on my bed feeling certain that I wouldn’t live
to see morning. The burning at the base of my spine and lower back
was so profoundly, acutely painful, that I was convinced that even if
I were to survive it, I would somehow end up maimed or paralyzed