The Truth About My Spiritual Awakening
The dark side.
Hey friends, welcome to ‘The Inner Journey’. Here, I share learnings and experiences from my own 20+ year, meditation and spiritual journey. I unravel things I have been thinking about and try to explain topics that I believe would benefit you on your own personal inner journey.
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I recently shared my out-of-body experience after meditating relentlessly for 10 days (check it out here if you missed it: My out-of-body experience ). The response I received was incredible, lots of people reached out to say how the experience had inspired them with their own practice. I genuinely thought that most people would brush it off as total nonsense and assume I’d lost my mind (having said that, I'm sure plenty probably did think that!). But what I didn’t talk about was how the experience took me to the very brink of what I could cope with mentally.
I’ve always considered myself mentally strong. With a fairly long list of physical achievements that range from racing Ironman triathlons, running 50 miles across the black mountains, swim marathons, competing for Great Britains age-group team in Triathlon & Duathlon and climbing various big mountains around the world to name a few; I thought I could handle a spiritual awakening easy peasy. Well, it turns out I can, but by the absolute skin of my teeth. Now I’m not naive enough to assume that it was by chance that I could just about cope, I was obviously given just as much as I could cope with - thankfully because I had requested that to be the case in my prayers and communion with God.
On the evening that the experience happened, I was on a huge high. The experience itself was exhilarating. I was teaming with energy and electricity and I came out of it with an excitement and drive for more, not knowing if more was possible or if that was just a one-off experience. It was very different to any experience I had previously had, which was normally a feeling of shear bliss and euphoria.
The first alarm bells started that night, when I couldn’t sleep and my body felt as though it was going invisible. Instead of falling to sleep, I’d drift into this altered state of consciousness where I was totally aware but just existing in a void. When the morning arrived, I felt pretty awful. My mind felt like it had been filled to the absolute brim of what it could contain; a feeling I can never quite articulate with words. It was very different to the feeling of having a busy mind. Throughout the day, I experienced random demonic images would cloud my mind and attempt to steal my sanity. It wasn’t created by my own thinking, they would just randomly appear and it’d take all of my will power to remain calm and somewhat collected. Every time this occurred, I’d repeat the name of Krishna (who is the aspect of God that I personally like to communicate with), within a few minutes the images would go. Alongside this, I was still a hub of energy and electricity, which was souring through my body and out of my hands and feet. My body didn’t feel good either, I felt jittery and almost hungover. Within my chest there was a horrible feeling of heartbreak, very similar to what you may experience after a break-up. In the days leading up to this, I had achieved a level of mental stillness and clarity beyond anything I have experienced before. So much so that I could meditate for 1 full hour without really any mental deviation. However now, my mind felt clouded over, hazy and filled to the max. If my mind was kettle, it felt like someone had their finger continuously on the ON button, even after it had reached boiling point.
This was now day 8 of the 10 day course. The two things I was desperate for was to exercise this energy out of my system, and to tell people what was going on, just to help process it. The issue was that the course was totally silent and we had no access to phones, so my options were either to pull out or to work through this living hell on my own. I was worried I had triggered something that I shouldn’t have. I have been well advised over the years never to actively try to trigger a kundalini awakening due to its potency. Kundalini is a very powerful spiritual energy that sits dormant at the base of the spine. One can trigger this energy through certain meditative exercises to rapidly access higher levels of consciousness , however, if this is triggered when you aren’t ready, it can have catastrophic effects on your mind. Many people have wound up in psychosis because of this and I can now see why.
I was however at some level ease knowing that I hadn’t been practicing any specific techniques to trigger this kundalini release. In fact, I was just simply observing my breath at the time, which is known universally to be a very safe method of meditation. Taking this fact, I could only assume that it had happened because I was ready for it.
At one stage on day 8, when I was at the brink of my mental capacity, I knocked the door of the course managers room. I wanted to ask him if I could call my meditation teacher, it would probably have meant the end of my time on the course. He didn’t answer, so I took it as a Divine sign that all was okay and that what I was experiencing was just part of this catharsis.
After a couple of days everything eventually settled backdown, and my mind returned to the level of clarity I was experiencing throughout the earlier days on the course. If I could share anything from this experience, it is never to chase these experiences. Your best bet is to just develop your relationship with whatever it is you believe in - God, consciousness, the universe etc. Like the blossoming of a flower, it will happen as and when nature takes its course.
Blessings
Ben