I Don’t Do Kundalini Yoga for the Reason You Think

Maybe this will surprise you, but I don't do Kundalini Yoga for spiritual reasons. And paradoxically, Kundalini Yoga wasn't what awakened my energy, or what I would call my “spirituality”.

I do Kundalini Yoga simply because I enjoy playing with it.
I enjoy testing the limits of my breath, my body and the boundaries of my mind.
I like discovering what happens when I push a little further, stay a little longer, breathe a little deeper. But I have never had some huge transformative energetic moment while practising yoga.

No explosion of energy.
No mystical revelation.
No dramatic awakening.
Mostly, I feel good afterwards.
My nervous system is more relaxed.
My body feels different.
And maybe this is what awakening energy can look like too.

Quietly.
Harmoniously.
Without a big BOOM.
Maybe awakening doesn't always have to be spectacular.

And honestly, I don't know where the truth is. There are as many ways of experiencing awakening as there are people experiencing it. And no, I don't practise it to awaken my sexual energy either. Maybe at this point you are thinking:

So what the fuck does she actually know about this energy?

Fair question. Especially since I have been exploring it in myself and with other people for around fifteen years.
Maybe I am simply deeply suspicious of the way things are supposed to be.
My brain is full of programs telling me how things are supposed to look.
How I am supposed to behave.
How a woman is supposed to be.
How spirituality is supposed to feel.
How healing is supposed to look.
How energy is supposed to move.
And the older I get, the more I realise how much of this is complete bullshit.
Things people told me because it was convenient for them.

Because it made me easier to control.
Easier to categorise.
Easier to integrate into the system.
And I have a feeling Kundalini energy may have suffered from the same thing.

What if the system itself has been turned upside down?

There is a perspective I have encountered in older witchcraft traditions that challenges the way Kundalini is commonly represented today.
Instead of imagining the two serpents meeting in the third eye, they are represented as two snakes crossing from the pelvis.
And there is something interesting about that image.
The pelvis is where new life can emerge.

The place of creation.
Sexuality.
Birth.
Life force.
And this makes me question the way we have been taught to understand Kundalini.
Because perhaps we have become far too obsessed with moving energy upwards.

Towards the head.
Towards transcendence.
Towards consciousness.
Towards becoming something other than what we already are.
And perhaps there is another direction.

Downwards.
Into the body.
Into sexuality.
Into creation.
Into life.

I don't claim to have the final answer here. I am suspicious of anyone who does.

But I find the question much more interesting than the certainty. Because maybe this is the paradox. We live in a society that often feels completely upside down.
And perhaps we have also created spiritual systems that teach us to escape the very body and life we are here to experience.

So where does my Kundalini actually wake up?

Not on my yoga mat. At least, not in the way I expected.

My energy wakes up in real life.

In intense moments.
In conflict.
In pain.
In human interaction.
During sex.
During emotional release.
In moments when something inside me is moving so strongly that I cannot simply sit there and breathe peacefully through it.

And maybe that is where I started to understand something.
Kundalini, for me, is not necessarily a peaceful state.

It is aliveness.
It is intensity.
It is movement.
It is what happens when I allow life to move through me instead of trying to keep myself perfectly regulated and spiritually appropriate.

So if you practise yoga and don't feel anything extraordinary happening, don't worry.

Maybe there is nothing wrong with you.
Maybe your body is simply doing what bodies do.
Maybe awakening does not need to announce itself with fireworks.

For me, the real shift was somewhere else.
It wasn't that suddenly I had my life together.
It wasn't that I became permanently peaceful.
It wasn't that I reached some beautiful Buddhist state of perfect Zen.
Quite the opposite.

I started allowing myself to lose control.

To feel.
To be seen.
To be judged.
To be misunderstood.
To meet the parts of myself I didn't particularly like.

The controlling one.
The manipulative one.
The arrogant one.
The messy one.
The contradictory one.
The one I would rather hide.

Judging these inner demons is easy.
Learning to love them is a completely different game.
For me, Kundalini became stronger when I became more emotionally stable in relation to what was happening around me.
Not because I stopped feeling. Because I stopped making other people's reactions responsible for who I was allowed to be.
I started allowing myself not to have everything figured out.

Not to have an answer.
Not to know.
And even to be happy about not knowing.
I started allowing myself not to have a goal.
Not to have a grand purpose.
Not to know where I am going.
Because what more can I really do with my life than live it according to myself?
Everything else is a by-product of what I allow myself to experience.
And then there is the question of what comes afterwards.

Do I feel guilty about my choices? Do I make myself smaller because someone else doesn't understand me?
Or do I feel the strength inside my own decisions?

Maybe Kundalini doesn't bring peace.
Maybe it brings aliveness.
Freedom.
Creativity.
Playfulness.
A strange kind of wholeness.

The meeting of two forces becoming one.
Shakti doesn't need another version of herself called Shiva.
She has Kali.
The wild one.
The one who destroys what no longer serves life.
The one who doesn't need to be pleasant to be powerful.
And maybe Kundalini wakes up when I allow myself to become free from other people's perspectives of me.
When I accept that I will be misunderstood.
That people will project their stories onto me.
That they will judge me.
And that I don't have to make any of that my responsibility.

For me, Kundalini became real when I could feel my feminine power in my own skin.

Not as an idea.
Not as a spiritual identity.
Not as something I was supposed to achieve.
But as something I could actually live.
Maybe this is my paradox. I don't practise Kundalini Yoga to escape life.
I practise because I like playing with the body, the breath and the mind.

And somewhere along the way, I realised that the real awakening was happening outside the yoga mat.

In the mess.
In intimacy.
In conflict.
In pain.
In creativity.
In sexuality.
In emotional intensity.
In being seen.
In being misunderstood.
In not knowing.
In allowing myself to be fully alive.

Maybe Kundalini isn't asking me to become more spiritual.
Maybe it is asking me to become more alive.