Exploring the Symptoms
The unconscious nervous system is the autonomic nervous system...which
yogis do have some control over. Many of the kundalini symptoms arise from
the brainstem, which consists of the medulla, pons, cerebellum and midbrain...
that is the majority of kundalini symptoms originate from areas of the brain that
are beyond our normal control. Hence many of the symptoms and feelings arise
directly from physiological events triggered by specific neural circuits and changes
in neurochemistry. Over the period of peak awakening sex hormones and other
pituitary hormones are raging; the heart is radically expanded and engorged with
blood, and the digestive system venting due to parasympathetic hypertonality;
skeletal muscles are ready for action and hypervigilance is up due to the fight-
or-flight activation of the sympathetic nervous system. Thus during a kundalini
awakening there is a simultaneous hyperactivity of the 4F-Responses: fuck/freeze/
fight-or-flight. It is not all tongue in cheek when I say that this 4F response
theory is intimately related to kundalini symptoms and health consequences.
“In response to threat, the organism can fight, flee or freeze. These responses exist as
parts of a unified defense system. When fight and flight responses are thwarted, the
organism instinctively constricts as it moves toward its last option, the freeze response.
As it constricts, the energy that would have been discharged by executing the fight-or-
flight strategies is amplified and bound up in the nervous system...If the organism is
able to discharge the energy by fleeing or defending itself and thus resolve the threat,
trauma will not occur...In humans, trauma occurs as a result of the initiation of
an instinctual cycle that is not allowed to finish. When the neocortex overrides the
instinctual responses that would initiate the completion of this cycle, we will be
traumatized.” Peter A. Levine, Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma:
The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences
The fact that the freeze response occurs during the hypertonality of both
sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems has profound implications.
I used to think the paralysis that occurs during extreme events was due to
overloading of the sensorymotor cortex with kundalini energy. This may play a
part in it, but now I think the paralysis is due to the brainstem stimulating an
extreme parasympathetic response to meet the extreme sympathetic activity that is
occurring...thus both on and off switches are at full bore. To prevent any further
escalation of this duel between the on and off systems the body turns on a massive
freeze response via the dorsal vagal complex. The dorsal vagus complex (DVC)
is a cluster of connected neurons in the brainstem medulla that slows down the
energy-expending processes. It is the primitive unmyelinated vagus related to the
conservation of metabolic resources.
This freeze response is experienced as paralysis and as far as I know the
paralysis only happens during inner-conjunction events when the energy is
pouring at maximum voltage up the spine itself. Thus the total paralysis instigated
by the parasympathetic dorsal vagus freeze complex only occurs with the radical
simultaneous activation of the on-switch either in a freeze response or an inner-