Kundalini: Barry’s Journey

Barry McGuinness, July 2025

My experiences on Enlightenment Intensives have led to a lifelong dedication to truth. For some, this kind of devotion and inner inquiry can open the door to spontaneous releases of the powerful force known as kundalini energy. This has happened to me on several occasions over the past few decades. What follows was originally written in response to a question on Quora: How does it feel to have a kundalini awakening?

‘Empowerment’ by Alex Grey

I’ve had several kundalini experiences. I could easily fill a book with all the details, so what follows is a very condensed summary.

My first encounter with kundalini was back in the mid-1990s, as I began to practice meditation more intuitively. At the time, I was suffering from excruciating back pain and a fair bit of anxiety.

One evening, fed up with the back pain, I decided to rest by lying flat on the floor. Almost immediately, I experienced a spontaneous eruption of electrical energy up the spine into my brain. It felt unpleasant and scary at the time, like I was being hit with a stun gun. There was also a very loud noise in my head.

But then there was something else emerging from the base of my spine. This thing felt warm and smooth - and ‘alive’. It wriggled up from my coccyx to my mid-spine, but then it abruptly turned 90 degrees, went straight through my heart, and popped out of my chest. And that was that.

When I looked in the mirror the next day, I had a red wavy mark up my spine, like a snake trail.

With hindsight, this strange episode seemed to have healed me of the anxious palpitations I had been experiencing at that time.

A year or so later, I had another upsurge during a psychotherapy session. It began as what felt like bee stings in my left leg, which then spread across my entire body and up to the crown. As I let it happen, it changed from unpleasant to pleasant—a sensation something like champagne under the skin. It left me feeling touched by the divine in a way that I couldn’t quite fathom.

I learned that allowing it all to happen is the best way to deal with a spontaneous surge. It knows what it’s doing better than I do.

In 2009 I developed chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as M.E. It put me out of action for several years. At the start of 2014, having set a new year’s resolution to recover from CFS/ME, I began a period of deeper meditation, physical self-improvement, and surrendering to life.

This brought on all kinds of strange phenomena for a few months, but it culminated one night in a lucid dream. During this dream I was met by a group of wise beings, one of whom pressed a thumb into my forehead – a shaktipat initiation. This immediately triggered a full-on kundalini awakening as I lay in bed. I was suddenly consumed by cosmic love-light-ecstasy that emerged from my spine and gradually illuminated all of my cells, organs, and tissues. It was exquisitely blissful.

Within days I was transformed, both physically and psychologically. I had completely overcome the chronic fatigue that had plagued me every day for the previous five or six years. My wrinkles disappeared. Even my hair felt great. I was 53 at this time but I had the boundless energy of a child running along a sunny beach for the sheer joy of it.

I went from introvert to extrovert overnight. My normal personality and my ego-self disappeared from the picture altogether. In any given situation, I always seemed to know what to do or say. Whenever I focused my attention on something, I received a stream of insights, ideas, and happy thoughts. I could tune into divine love and this would reduce me to tears. I loved every moment of life.

I experienced my ‘self’ as an expansive sphere of pristine awareness, much bigger than my body. And this was not just some ‘altered state of consciousness.’ This was actually my true self, my true nature. My ‘normal’ sense of being a small, thinking mind sitting inside a skull is clearly just a side-effect of habitual thinking. Relax the thought process, and this great still, silent awareness was right there in the background, and always is.

My illumined consciousness was fed by a constant flow of scintillating energy from within my body. The whole energy flow was in the shape of a torus, streaming up my body’s central axis from bottom to top, pouring out of my crown, and then flowing downward to my extremities, surrounding my whole body with a warm, protective aura. Internally, the energy also moved systematically of its own accord around my body, apparently revitalising and healing different organs one at a time.

I soon noticed that whenever I was busy, the energy would concentrate into a ‘golf ball’ in my belly. Then, whenever I relaxed, the ball exploded and the energy would flare up all around my entire body, inside and out. I felt like a human torch. It felt so blissful that it was orgasmic. It kept me awake for many nights, writhing in divine, erotic bliss.

I sensed kundalini itself as a warm, alive, loving, and feminine presence within the core of my abdomen, almost as though I were pregnant. I was able to dialogue with her internally.

At first, I had thought this peak experience might only last a few hours, may day at most, but after a week of it I felt unbelievably blessed. After a month, I felt I must be the luckiest man alive.

And then it stopped exactly 60 days after it had begun, and just as suddenly.

Then I went through the dark night of the soul that so many have written about: depression, despair, emptiness. But a couple of years later, the energy started building up again.

I was prompted to do some research to understand what had happened. I also joined a few online discussion groups (it was quite a surprise to realise that thousands of people around the world are going through similar experiences.)

It helps to know the difference between actual kundalini awakening itself and kundalini-related phenomena. Most people will talk about the latter—the shakes, the tingles, the dreams of snakes, the electricity up the spine, the kriyas (spontaneous postures and spasms), the emotional turmoil, the lifestyle changes, the psychological disorientation… all the chaotic things that sound like a psychiatric disorder (“kundalini syndrome”) but are in fact the prequel to full-on awakening. This is known as pranotthana (energy rising). It’s just your mind-body-spirit as a whole gradually releasing old blocks so as to pull itself into better alignment and thus allow the fullness of a kundalini flow to come through.

The full awakening of kundalini is of a different order of experience altogether. If pranotthana can be likened to members of an orchestra tuning their various instruments, creating a bit of a cacophony, kundalini awakening is like when the whole orchestra suddenly begins playing the most beautiful, inspiring, and perfectly-formed symphony. Body, mind, and spirit come together as one, and shine like a bright star. The most benevolent force in the universe is creating the most wondrous experience one can have while still in physical form.

The whole awakening process seems to go through a repeating cycle. When the energy is first activated, you may go through difficult purification and realignment processes, and then eventually you experience full-on awakening. But your body and mind can only sustain the full flow for a limited period as they are not yet fully refined and adjusted. So then, after a massive surge, the flow subsides and you slip back into the ordinary body-mind to begin the next stage of purification. But you just keep persisting and surrendering, intuitively following the wisdom of the body, trusting that it is all for the best.

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Next, you might like to read the simple tips drawn from my own kundalini experiences—notes I wrote down and used extensively to help me navigate the process. You can read those here → KUNDALINI: LESSONS IN SURRENDER