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This post is part 1 of a 2 part series on what I’ve learned and experienced with the energy body. My hope is by sharing my experience, it provides comfort and help to others as they try to make sense of what they are going through.
Becoming aware of the subtle energy body has been one of the most confusing and fascinating experiences of my life. This liminal period of transformation, bewilderment and novel experiences feels kind of like going through energetic puberty.
I first had heard of people referring to “energy” and the “energy body” in my 20’s, but never really thought much about it. I was a dedicated bio-hacker and like most of our society, relied on empirical research to figure out how to get the most performance out of my body. I mostly considered things in the realm of energy work as woo-woo B.S.
Then my whole paradigm kind of blew up after my 2nd Ayahuasca experience where I had an intense kundalini awakening. Most people in the U.S. have never heard of kundalini energy or a kundalini awakening. I hadn’t before and neither had any western Dr. I talked to when I was trying to figure out why my body was shaking like a Mexican jumping bean.
The easiest way I can describe my experience with Kundalini is that it feels like there are these powerful surges of energy that feel like they have a mind of their own moving through your body. In my case, it doesn’t hurt, but also often doesn’t feel pleasurable either. It kind of just feels like a powerful life force that’s trying to go somewhere which moves without conscious thought.
Originally, I thought this was just a phenomenon that was happening because I had just drank ayahuasca. During my first retreat, I had some mild shaking and that Shaman, who was really more a therapist playing Shaman, told me that I was just purging 🙄.
But then a few weeks after my second retreat, the energy and accompanying involuntary body movements returned during my meditation. I came to learn that these movements are called kriyas and from that point on they did not stop. I started to get them 5-10 times a day, mostly when I had a quiet mind.
These unfamiliar sensations inside of me made me extremely uncomfortable. So I went to see a bunch of specialists for epilepsy, Parkinsons disease, and neurology culminating in a 36 hour brain scan. Despite all this, no one had answers for me besides telling me I was probably stressed.
I guess you could say that trying to figure out what the hell was happening to me was how I got into spirituality and the expansion of consciousness.
First Subtle Energy In Here, Then From Out There
Looking back, this experience was the first time I had ever really felt sensations inside of my body. Prior to this, I guess I had never really thought about my body besides how fast I could run and how my abs would look in my annual shirtless instagram post. The only time I ever thought about my organs or insides was when there was severe pain which was incredibly rare. To put it bluntly, I was numb from the head down, but just didn’t know it.
But now that I was feeling so much, it was almost as if I couldn’t stop thinking about what was going on inside. I’d notice constant sensations, movements, and twitches in my abdomen, chest, legs, and shoulders. There were also these massive surges of energy that would come up throughout the day and often wake me up in the middle of the night.
Because I had never felt any of this before and no medical professional had answers, these new feelings were incredibly anxiety inducing.
What was happening to me? Am I going to die? Did I screw myself up!?
I didn’t have anyone in my life that had gone through this which amplified the anxiety because in addition to the fears about my body, there was also the budding concern about whether I was going crazy.
Another interesting phenomena that began to emerge was the intensity to which I could feel emotions. I went from crying a few times a year at the end of watching my favorite inspirational sports movie Rudy, to crying a few times a week often out of nowhere.
Sometimes these emotions were my own and other times it’d seem like they were coming from someone else.
I remember being in a work meeting where part of the staff was told that they were going to be let go. As the news was being communicated, I started to find it hard to breathe to the point where I had to excuse myself from the meeting.
I wasn’t being let go. In fact, I knew about this weeks ago and was sitting there just waiting for the bomb to drop. So why the hell was I not able to breathe?
I’d later come to understand that when you begin to open your energetic channels, you start to get access to information from the collective field beyond yourself which includes other people’s emotions, insights, and ideas. In this instance, I was feeling a coworker's raging anxiety and didn’t even know it.
I also felt a lot of pleasurable sensations instigated from things outside myself. For example, in the presence of my teacher I would consistently feel a profound peace and bliss. As I consumed great texts from spiritual masters, my mind would go completely blank and the body would melt into ecstasy. The fact that an inanimate book could do this to me was pretty marvelous.
As energy beings, there is a notion of entrainment or co-regulation that causes the energy between two things to harmonize usually with the more dominant energy. This is why people often cry in the presence of many Gurus - they get brought into the high being’s field of bliss. I guessed this is what was happening to me.