Second chances

I have to admit, in May 2009 I was not looking forward to having Alex, our middle son back living at home. He had graduated from university in the United States and decided to return to the country where we live to seek employment and to gain eventual citizenship. Ian and I were feeling quite closed in. Chris had just emerged from the psych hospital after a three month stay. We wondered how we would cope.

We are typical North American parents in our mentality. We expected our children to do what we did, which is to be independent –  fast.  Independence means to most North Americans, living away from home. That hadn’t worked out exactly as we planned with Chris, and here was Alex arriving on the doorstep.

Alex and I have always had a volatile relationship. He’s the type of kid who immediately introduces an electric charge into the room.  I could feel the jangle. Outsiders would term him engaging and lively, which he is. It’s the everyday that wears you down. Every family seems to have one like our Alex.  We argue a lot. He doesn’t back down, neither do I. We got under each other’s skin because there must be truth to the saying that the person most like you is the one with whom you have the most disagreements.

Things turned out differently than I imagined. We’re delighted that Alex is at home. He got a job; he’s been a great brother to Chris and good company at the end of the day. I decided before Alex came home that I was no longer going to go head to head with him. It was time to repair the damage from our long years of discord. The less I rise to the occasion, the less I quibble about this or that, the less he grumbles and the closer we are becoming. I’m consciously trying to help him with his own hot temper and we have the luxury of being able to have the occasional quiet chat where I try to introduce some healing words.

In the language of energy healing, our family is becoming in synch because our vibrations are aligning. Our children are no longer children and yet it has taken us this long to live together in harmony. We may not be that different from other families in this regard. Yet, here we are, after 28 years of marriage, three children, and we are just getting to this point.

A Kundalini explanation

A Kundalini emergency can mimic schizophrenia and other health issues. While Eastern mystics and yogis and many Western holistic practitioners believe in it, mainstream Western medicine does not. Whether you call it an aroused Kundalini or an energy imbalance or a spiritual emergency, it doesn’t really matter, because it’s a health emergency.

Western medicine was not able to provide an answer as to why Chris experienced intense piercing pain over his eyebrow as our plane landed. He screamed in pain, and then it was gone just as quickly as it came, except for the lingering headaches over the next few days. The nurse at the airport had no explanation. I took him to our family doctor, who offered no explanation and didn’t recommend any tests. Chris continue to feel sensitive (inward inversion of pressure) in that area for the next six months. He then began experiencing the first of many symptoms which medicine labels the “prodromal signs. When I brought the head pain to the attention of the doctors after Chris was hospitalized, they simply shrugged their shoulders. They had never heard of intense head pain as a symptom of schizophrenia.

Western medicine had no explanation, but Kundalini arousal offers one. A friend alerted me to this* article on the symptoms of Kundalini. One of the many possible symptoms is headaches or pressures in the skull.

The Kundalini-Network in Denmark has a site that documents seventy-six cases of Kundalini arousal.

Else Johansen writes:

– Kundalini arousal especially occurs as an unintentional side effect of yoga, meditation, healing or body-and psychotherapy. Some of the other releasing factors can be: Births, unrequited love, celibacy, intense studies, physical traumas, deep sorrow, high fever and drug intake. But Kundalini arousal can also occur suddenly without apparent course.


– When the process of Kundalini had lasted in me for about ten years, I was too tired out to be able to earn a living on my own. I went to a doctor and said: “It is completely crazy, my Kundalini has been aroused. What shall I do?” And then I told him about my state.
 – “You are deeply psychotic”, he said. “I will send you to a good psychiatrist. The energy you are talking about does not exist. You have serious misconceptions”.


– I got sick pay and later disability pension, diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, without first having been taken in for a mental examination. No doctor that I spoke to concerning my pension believed my talk about Kundalini.


– But in the yoga literature I got a reasonable explanation of what had happened to me. Yes, I understood that the secret purpose of yoga and meditation actually is to release the kundalini force. When Kundalini reaches the brain, it is said to be stimulating the brain cells that are normally not used, so that a higher state of consciousness is reached.


Else Johansen continues and says that the doctors’ ignorance of Kundalini has led to diagnoses like hypochondria, escapism, inflammation of the brain, and calcification of the brain.


– In a radio program, in which I participated, a psychiatrist said that Kundalini is just an idea, imported from the East through yoga. People hear or read about it, and therefore they think they have Kundalini arousal.


– But that reasoning does not hold, Else Johansen continues. I have met 250 (1996) people who have had a well-defined kundalini process, and about half of them did not know about Kundalini beforehand. It was a shock to them when the process started. They have been helped a lot, knowing what actually happened to them, because in any case it is an advantage to know what is going on. That they later found an explanation to the odd thing that happened to them, has helped them enormously, because it is in any case an advantage to know what is going on.”

The addition of, or withdrawal from, drugs (legal or illegal,) exacerbates the physical and mental symptoms.

An earlier post of mine discussed correcting energy imbalances by shifting the assemblage point.

In Castaneda’s The Fire from Within, Don Juan repeatedly warns about the health dangers that come from an assemblage point that has been knocked off center. Both legal and illicit drug use can knock an assemblage point off center. Don Juan uses peyote and other medicinal plants to induce a hallucinatory state in Castaneda. To bring him back to a balanced state afterwards, Jon Whale observes that Don Juan surreptitiously gave the author a quick sharp blow to the shoulder blade, popularly referred to as the shaman’s blow.

Dr. Whale has observed that psychiatric drugs do a poor job of moving the assemblage point back into position. According to him, psychiatric drugs do not take into account the complexities of the endocrine system and leave the patient in a chronic depressed state rather than correcting the situation.

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*Mudrashram Institute of Spiritual Studies webpage