It can be quite a shock to have a Kundalini awakening, especially if you were not seeking it out directly.

One minute you are cruising along in your everyday life, when bam! Kundalini wakes up and announces herself to you. And I guarantee you, from that moment on your life is never the same again.

Most people remember some instance of the awakening of Kundalini: a shiver or blast of energy racing up the spine, intense sensations in the base of the spine, a bright light burning in their head, a vision of lights, and sudden vast states of awareness with accompanying intense body states. And these are just a few possibilities.

For me, it was a vision of Kundalini as a lush, maroon serpent, curled three and a half times in perfect pose, and hovering in front of me, while I lounged in my deck chair in my country garden.

She wrestled me abruptly from my engrossed reading of Marion Woodman’s Jungian classic, Leaving My Father’s House. It was a seemingly ordinary, lovely day, yet I knew straight away who she was and what she was up to.

We gazed at each other for a few moments, and then she suddenly plunged downward and slammed up into my spine, sending a blasting stream of luminous Kundalini Shakti up my spine to my brain and altering the course of my life.

People call me understandably, deeply distressed and confused that Kundalini has woken up their life, and is, at the least, annoying them, at her most troublesome making them sick, sleepless, uninterested in the lives they have created (and lives they previously loved and were dedicated to) and somewhat manifesting havoc.

Often, their biggest distress is that they weren’t seeking awakening or Kundalini. And for many this is true; it was an unsought, spontaneous awakening. It can even be a trauma to have such an intensely spiritual event just happen to you, out of the blue.

Yet there are common activities that can wake up Kundalini from her deep slumber at the base of your body. Here are a just few possibilities you may not be aware of:

1. Yoga and meditation. Yes, these two are historically designed to wake you up. While our western culture busily appropriates and reworks traditions from all around the world, and whether you practice a quite traditional style of yoga or yogalates to Madonna dance music, its purpose is to open your body to free flows of Shakti, activate Kundalini and wake you up. So, be aware if you are practicing yoga and meditation for fitness. Kundalini awakening may come your way as an unsought by-product.
2. Reading spiritual books and self-help books. When you read spiritual books by conscious and awakened people, you will receive a transmission of their awareness and consciousness. You will receive Shakti into your system, and Shakti will raise your consciousness, consequently waking you up — this may awaken your Kundalini.
3. Meeting with awakened spiritual teachers. The presence and radiant awareness and grace of an awakened spiritual teacher will transmit to you their Shakti blessing to ignite an awakening. This may eventually unleash Kundalini in you, and thus purify you and generate insight. This is often a sure-fire way to activate your Kundalini — by direct transmission.
4. YouTube. Watching videos and listening to talks, sacred music or chants by awakened teachers will transmit Shakti awakening to you in the same manner as being in their physical presence.
5. Praying to saints and awakened teachers of any tradition. Making offerings to images of awakened masters will also generate a transmission of Shakti and may awaken you.
6. Sacred places. Visiting sacred places, temples, landscapes, holy pilgrimages, churches…all of these may hold enough sacred power that even if you are simply on a casual holiday visit to them, they may jump-start an awakening process.
7. Energetic healing and some types of depth psychotherapy. These practices can unlock energy blocks or take you to deep inner places which can create and appropriate conditions for Kundalini to awaken.
8. Merging with Nature. Nature — a tree or forest, the vast ocean or night sky — is always present, always conscious, and is able to hold you in deep, peaceful, merged states with the beauty of our planet. From there, we may slip more deeply into altered states of peace and oneness, and the bliss of nature may just, ever so gently, wake us up.

We are living in times when the consciousness evolution on this planet is making it easier and easier to awaken and to ignite seemingly random Kundalini processes and crises. Such rapid, mass awakening is a healing balm, perhaps to balance the environmental destruction we are witnessing on our planet.

So I encourage you to honour the power of your spiritual practices and respect them. They bring peace, joy, insight, guidance, healing and freedom, and they may, just maybe, and increasingly likely, wake you up as well.

If you are in a Kundalini process, remember you are blessed, even amidst the difficulties, with grace and increasing levels of consciousness in which you may rest, reside and live from. There are calm moments when you can feel this and soak in the blessing of awakening, even if at times the process is more of a storm.

I send you my love, compassion and care for your awakening.