Mary Mueller Shutan - 26 Mar

Working with Kundalini

As someone who has been working with kundalini for more than forty years now, I can tell you that this book is a must-read for anyone who has experienced kundalini or spiritual awakening. It is clear, pragmatic, and incredibly in-depth. It is very clear that Mary has the lived experience of kundalini to be able to guide others, and I am grateful that her compassionate, no-nonsense wisdom is available for those seeking insight and depth in their own process.

FRANK KRIEGER, PH.D., philosopher and alchemist

This extraordinary book is a no-nonsense guide to the unfurling process of kundalini energy. With straightforward narrative Mary shares her personal experiences with kundalini and its effects on her life while weaving in vastly researched knowledge of the process. Compassionate and thoughtful, this book is an essential guide to kundalini awakening.

KATHY TAJIK, CEO of Tajik Home

A clear, grounded, and balanced guide that provides a bridge between the everyday and the transcendental, offering a structured framework and practical suggestions without reducing the beauty of kundalini to a clinical process. As someone going through kundalini awakening, it spoke to both the parts of me that are discombobulated by this experience and to the part of me that knows, helping me to reorient myself on my path with greater clarity and trust.

CHARLOTTE SAUNDERS, spiritual practitioner

Working with Kundalini is a collection of field notes from a reliable, experienced guide who has shared her forays into the various states of being that denote our spiritual realities. Its a lucid, unpretentious, unvarnished, and thorough account of the phenomenon of kundalini experiences. Mary Shutan is reliable, because its clear that shes done her own rigorous fieldwork on the subject. She brings to the forefront the nuances of states of awakening without trafficking in textbook claims of what this means. If anything, this book is an experiential journey into the most intimate and epic frontiers of consciousness. To read it is to get a direct taste of that.

NIRMALA NATARAJ, editor, writer, and author of Earth and Space and The Planets

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Mercury, Jeanne Gorham, Mary Murphy, and to Sara MB, all of whom have encouraged me to share what I know.

Thank you to my editor, Jane Ellen Combelic, for her clarity and insight.

Thank you to all of the clients, students, and colleagues who have helped shape this work.

Introduction

M any people in our world today are going through some form of spiritual awakening. Some of these may be kundalini awakeningsthe path of uniting our individual consciousness with cosmic intelligence. Such awakenings allow us to meet our full potential, to release past trauma, and to move beyond the conditionings of history and society. As the awakened flow of consciousness uncoils and rises through the midline, we evolve beyond the false self and the illusions of this world into an experience of oneness. This experience of oneness paradoxically leads to the realization of our individual divine potential.

Such awakenings are difficult for even the ready and stable soul, and vapid romanticism or horror stories are often found instead of a realistic view of the difficulties and joys of such an experience. While any pragmatic eye could look towards spiritual communities and see deep flaws, especially the usage of the spiritual path to further self-obsession and unhealthy patterns of relating, we have schismatically divided ourselves from the spiritual realms and any type of direct gnosis. Serious, nuanced consideration of what it means to directly experience spirit in our modern culture has become seriously endangered.

In a world so deeply split off from spirit, any experience beyond what is considered normal human existence becomes pathologized. Individuals who feel a deep call towards spirit or who experience spiritual awakenings find themselves confronted by societys deep fear of any type of direct revelation of the divine.

In our culture of scientific materialism, the idea that body, emotions, mind, and spirit are on a continuum, and that our material world is simply the densest and most noticeable aspect of that continuum, may never be appreciated. We have such complexity and depth as humans, yet we are only seen for a fraction of what we truly are.

We are spirit. We are consciousness. It is by connecting to something greater than ourselves that we realize what we are here to do and who we are meant to be. We are so disconnected today from ourselves, from other humans, from nature, from the divine. This type of disconnection is becoming normalized to the point where we are forgetting that we can be connected.

We are meant to be in a state of interbeing, a state of communion with those around us. And we realize on some level that we used to connect more deeply and authentically to the world around us. Connectivity is essential for our health and well-being, and we deeply feel the emptiness and lack of connection in our modern world.

Spiritual awakening involves looking directly at what is not working in our lives, how we are disconnected, how we may be unclear. On some level, we always know what lies unhealed within us, what is preventing us from being authentic and connected and vital in this world. It is only by looking directly at what disconnects us that we awaken.

The scientific materialist worldview seeks to quiet us, to numb what is uncomfortable or distressing. The idea that spiritual awakening is one of the most difficult things that we can experience, involving both pain and bliss, is something that the weary, modern soul is unwilling to contend with. Most of us are looking for a fast, simple solution to all of our pain. We consider spiritual to mean elevated, to mean some place where we no longer experience anything that may distress us. The end of suffering sounds nice to anyone, myself included. So does being in eternal bliss, or emptiness, or infinite love. So does the end of the inevitable ups-and-downs of our daily human struggle, or not having to contend with a rather messy and deteriorating human form that is deeply fearful of old age and death. From this vantage point, emotions and human experiences are to be anesthetized instead of celebrated, suppressed instead of allowed to flow.

We awaken by looking within, by becoming increasingly conscious and accepting of every aspect of ourselves. It is by deeply feeling our emotions and by accepting all aspects of ourselves as valid that we can awaken. We can access our light only if we truly know and accept our darkness. This path allows us to feel more, not less. It allows us to move beyond blind emotive reacting, beyond basic self-obsession. Thus we begin to see and sense more than ourselves: our family, our community, ancestry, society, the world, the cosmos. Moving beyond the self allows us to truly and deeply feel for others, because we see that what is in the world is also within ourselves.