Does Kundalini kill romance?

Kundalini is often portrayed as a force that stalks and destroys intimate relationships. The Internet is filled with a wealth of painful and real stories and warnings that Kundalini is a romance killer — an incredibly difficult challenge that makes a successful intimate relationship on the awakening path impossible.

In this article, I would like to bring some balance to the issue and take some of the heat off beloved Kundalini. And to reassure you that love can blossom, be sustained and be joyously discovered while undergoing the fiery heat of spiritual transformation.

For those who are uncertain and doubtful and I know you are out there – romance, deep love and intimate sexual relationships can survive and flourish throughout the awakening journey. I know because I have been inspired by it.

I am blessed to know and to have worked with many people who have successfully managed significant intimate relationships and friendships all the way through an awakening crises, a huge Kundalini blowout and long-term integration processes. In fact, their relationships have benefitted richly from the awakening of one or both people. These relationships have often been a precious, safe cocoon that sustained and nourished deep inner transformation. They have found ways to include and resolve complex relationship dilemmas including pain driven by the unrelenting inner transformation.

Furthermore, other couples have marriages and relationships that remain blessedly and sometimes mysteriously untouched by the pressure of awakening.

And for the single folk reading this, it has been a delight to know so many men and women who have found deep, abiding and spacious love while surfing the wild Kundalini waves.

And yet many relationships, marriages and friendships come to a point of significant change, painful endings and eventual completion though out the process of awakening and Kundalini. Relationships can literally crash into hidden roadblocks once Kundalini erupts and there can be no way to continue them.

Yet how much of such relationship completion is a part of the natural process of life and the relationship process itself and would have happened anyway? And how much is stimulated by the pressures of Kundalini? It is impossible to say.

While Kundalini herself does not destroy relationships, she can certainly pose some powerful challenges to intimacy on the road to awakening. She has a tendency to amplify and shine light on relationship problems and compatibility issues.

Here are six relationship challenges Kundalini can lead you to face.

1. The call to integrity

Kundalini and awakening call us to authenticity. One of the roles Kundalini plays is to call us back to our centre and to constantly and sometimes ruthlessly stand in our individual truth. Often somewhere in our lives or in our relationships, or both, we are off centre and when Kundalini ignites us she begins to sort us out, showing us the way back to deep integrity. She is often fierce with this process.

This can be challenging for any relationships, especially intimate ones that you have outgrown. Or relationships where you have made significant compromises to be in or you know at some level you are out of integrity to be in but share a great love, a wonderful connection or a long-term shared history. It can be confronting when you have important commitments with your partner, such as children, a business, or a powerful relationship dreaming, which keep you together.

Kundalini can put such relationship compromises, incompatibilities, and conflicts under microscopic scrutiny and intense pressure.

2. You become an introvert or a hermit or your interests change

It is not uncommon to become withdrawn, introverted or a hermit throughout Kundalini. Your physical senses withdraw from the outer world, and your primary process focuses on the demanding internal transformation that is taking place within you. You become extremely sensitive to other people and the world around you. Caring for yourself during Kundalini takes a lot of time, research and energy.

To top it all off your interest in socializing, drinking alcohol, going out and doing the precious shared activities that were an important part of an intimate relationship or membership of social group can become unappealing, unattractive or even repulsive.

This can be a very confronting change for a couple. Shared activities and interests are often the glue that keeps a relationship happy, rich and dynamic.

Such inner changes can lead to people leave social groups and mainstream communities. One of the biggest complaints I hear from people going through awakening is of their pain and loneliness from losing such beloved connections.

3. Your Shakti brings up your partner’s stuff

As your awakening process deepens and integrates you begin to transmit Shakti (Kundalini energy) to those around you. Your Shakti can sometimes bring up other people’s hidden emotional and psychological pain. If the person has the resources and skills to meet this process they can find being around you helpful and inspiring. If not, being around your Shakti can become too painful and ultimately too difficult to endure.

4. Kundalini is an accelerated growth process

Awakening can sometimes feel like taking a high-speed Ferrari ride on the road to personal change. Can your relationships, both intimate partnerships and friendships, provide enough space for you to grow, change and unfold your awakening without the relationship being permanently stressed or terminally threatened?

5. Your awakening and Kundalini can become your primary relationship and love affair

It is common for your awakening process to become your primary love affair and a beautiful one at that. Kundalini becomes your beloved, and the divine your sacred lover. The pull to the divine romance can leave little room for an intimate relationship, or little interest in being in a partnership.

The divine relationship can be deeply fulfilling.

6. Your sexual energy can withdraw

Kundalini is generally famous in the west as sexual energy. Yet many people can find that their sexual energy is sublimated to the awakening process or becomes dormant. It is not uncommon for sexual desire to lessen or disappear for parts of the Kundalini process, and then to joyously awaken again at a later point. Others can feel a deep call to celibacy as their intimacy with the divine blossoms and expands.

The loss or change in interest in sexual intimacy can be confronting and sometimes a deal-breaker in intimate relationships, and can thus require sensitive negotiation and understanding.

Kundalini is not a reason to avoid intimate relationships. Nor is a time to hang a sign on the back of your car saying Kundalini on board and check out of the dating scene. It is a time to stay close to your intuition, to your deepest dreaming and yearnings for both for the call to awakening and the call to intimate relationship and follow intimately what is right for you.

And it is important to remember relationship endings are sacred too. That which has completed can be honoured and released, and can simultaneously make space for both your awakening to deepen and new and beautiful people to come into your life.

I love sharing this journey with you, please share your comments below. It is a delight to hear from you!

Writing this article stimulated some wonderful and fun conversations with many people and in particular I would like to thank Lisa Meuser. And thank you to those curious Kundalini folks who submitted questions to me via email, which stimulated this article. I love your passionate enquiry. And thank you to the wonderful person who read this article and wrote to me Kundalini is fierce. That she is.

Please note I have sought to bring in a diversity of relationship images into this post. I am tired of the traditional heterosexual white folks that dominate the representation of  relationships in our western culture. I have to say sadly it is not easy to find great images of diverse forms of relationships. If you  know of sources please email me.

All Images Via Favim