Experiencing spiritual awakening through a resilient nervous system
In 2007 I spent several months in India, during which I experienced a profound spiritual awakening. At the end of my trip, I participated in a Long Life Ceremony for the fourteenth Dalai Lama at his monastery in Dharamsala, India, which gifted me an experience I will never forget.
I’ve since learned that my awakening experience has a name: shaktipat. In the tradition of kundalini yoga and tantric yoga, shaktipat is an energetic transmission passed from teacher (guru) to student which spurs a profound shift in consciousness and dismantles the separation between the individual and the Divine.
Sounds pretty incredible, doesn’t it? At the time though, I hadn’t heard of shaktipat, had no idea what had happened, or that what had happened was actually a ‘thing’.
Although words couldn’t capture my experience, I described what happened to a few meditators and teachers. They seemed to understand and were quite amazed that I hadn’t blown my neural circuitry, as often occurs in a kundalini awakening.
In 1994, I left Australia to travel for an extended holiday. What was intended to be a six- or nine-week vacation ended up with me living overseas for fourteen years.
In 2000, I found myself working in London, and in 2006 I negotiated a redundancy payment from my job which was enough money to travel for another two years. I looked to my dreams for guidance, and after dreaming about an angel called Aurora, my first port of arrival was Aurora airport in Guatemala. I travelled in central and south America for seven months, and in October 2006 I arrived in Delhi for a friend’s wedding.
After the wedding, I was inexorably drawn to Varanasi, and from there, to Sarnath, for a three-day teaching that was being given by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Sarnath is a small town on the edge of Bodhgaya, the place where the Buddha achieved enlightenment while sitting underneath a bodhi tree.
Attending any event where His Holiness is scheduled to appear requires registering in advance – at least 24 hours prior. Trying to find the registration office is known to difficult, sometimes impossible, due to their temporary nature. This was one of those impossible times. Rickshaw drivers were practising Hindus, not Buddhists, and the Dalai Lama wasn’t a known figure to them; so, when you ask for directions, you’re likely to be given conflicting information. In Sarnath, my rickshaw driver dropped me at the centre of town, a long way from the registration office. Upon turning a corner, I encountered a crowd of Tibetans waiting patiently for the Dalai Lama to appear after blessing a new temple. I joined them – not knowing if it would help me register for the teaching, but trusting that my intuition had guided me in my travels thus far…
After several hours, the Dalai Lama did indeed appear, and I snapped this photo of him as he was about to get into his car. Behind him is his trusted Tibetan translator, and behind him, his Indian bodyguard. This photo sits behind me where I work – it gives me a felt sense of a trio of masculine support at my back.
The next day I arrived at the venue for the teaching. It was a stifling hot day. Saffron-robed monks sat in careful rows underneath billowing canvas marquees in front of translators who translated the words of the Dalai Lama into an array of Indian, Asian and European languages. Students from all over the world followed the teaching by tuning into a specific channel on a portable transistor radio.
After lunch, the morning breeze faded, and although we were shaded underneath the canvas sheets, the air was still and close. With our bellies full of Tibetan dumplings, most people were in gentle repose – most had their eyes closed, and when I looked around, I saw that even those sitting upright were nodding off to sleep. After eating starchy carbohydrates on such a hot day, I would usually be doing the same. But when the Dalai Lama resumed speaking, it was surprisingly easy for me to sit upright without any support for my back. Even though I didn’t understand what he was saying, when I heard him speak in his native Tibetan without the English translation, it felt like a direct transmission. The English translation felt like an impediment to the ‘real’ meaning. (I later discovered there was a new English translator that day, and he was having difficulty conveying complex concepts from Tibetan into English).
As I let the Dalai Lama's voice wash over me, surrounded by snoozing students, my body was called to attention suddenly, and I sat bolt upright. My spine was being activated in a way I thought was impossible, given the weakness in my back. I felt strangely alert and fully present. It felt as if my skull was mounted on a rusty hinge, and my scalp was being opened front to back as if I were a cartoon character. Creeeaak! I had a distinct sense of my skull opening slowly like a tin can.
I slipped into an alert but altered state of consciousness where I had a vision of a sponge being dipped in a diluted solution of bleach which was then wiped across my exposed brain tissue. The bleach solution woke all the parts of my sleeping consciousness, and for just a moment, I felt what it was like to 'know' at every level of my Being and beyond. I could perceive all knowing beyond my mind, and I could embody full cellular and cosmic 'knowing' - for about 40 seconds.
For many, this kind of experience would completely overwhelm their nervous system. At this point in time, I hadn’t done specific nervous system training work, which is partly why my teachers were so surprised at my ability to contain the energy of a kundalini awakening. But I knew I had it within me to surrender to the guidance being offered in this experience; to lean upon the ‘break apart to break through’ life experiences and my past life karma, and submit to my path. Knowing yourself at the level of the nervous system and training the nervous system means that you know yourself deeply on a visceral level, which contributes to the self-knowledge necessary for spiritual awakening.
That feeling of full-bodied cosmic and cellular knowing still lives in my body and is alive, present and visceral. It is what conceived the shamanic elements of my programs and is often felt by others when I teach a class on the nervous system.
That’s one of the reasons that nervous system work – when done in the way I do it – is so powerful, and beyond physical 3D reality.
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