Kundalini and the Art of Being ... Just a few weeks earlier I had been leading a normal, fairly stable life.
Now I was sleeping in a tent—and that tent pretty much encom-
passed all of my immediate belongings and responsibilities. The feel-
ings that this sudden change brought up in me were simultaneously
of freedom, personal power and excitement, and that age-old fear of
that which we always instinctively wish to avoid—the unknown.
If it had been completely up to my mind where I would be in that
moment, I would have reasoned that the last position I wanted to
be come late October was sleeping outdoors and hitchhiking across
the country, homeless and unemployed, with no concrete plan for
where I would spend the winter. If reason and common sense was
what mattered most at the time, I could have kept my job, found
another place in Eugene, and perhaps sold my truck to cut back on
expenses. But at least I would have been somewhere warm and dry
for the winter, where I had friends and things were familiar and I had
some measure of security. I could have saved money over the winter
and then left on my experimental adventure the following spring,
leaving plenty of time to find another place to call home before the
next winter.
Of course, this isn’t what I did, for a number of reasons. Some
were practical and some were intuitive—my gut was telling me that
this was the thing to do. Although the mind generally prefers to plan
the future out beforehand in order to avoid unpleasant circumstanc-
es, deep down I must have known that I needed this experience—a
symbolic leaping into the darkness—to crack me wide open. There
was no other way to do it. I couldn’t know in advance what was go-
ing to happen, because what I needed to contact within myself was
totally unknown territory. I was about to venture into a deep, dark
and terrifying part of my own consciousness. And I needed to trust
those gut feelings—rather than my mind—to let it happen and some-
how guide me through it.
Of course, I didn’t realize all this at the time, having no prior
knowledge of Kundalini energy, let alone that it was on the verge
of awakening within me. And yet, Kundalini awakening is what