Is Kundalini Dangerous?

The short answer is that it can be. It depends on what you define as dangerous & how you go about awakening your kundalini energy. It’s possible to safely awaken your kundalini and mitigate some of the risks associated with the process.

You can begin your kundalini awakening journey with activations & yoga. You can move at your own pace and even get guidance from a mentor if you feel you need it. Working with a mentor is helpful if you want to deepen your practice, progress more quickly, and have support along the way. Creating your own practice independently can be a good way to start exploring different practices & modalities, it’s a viable option for people who are already highly skilled in another spiritual practice, and for people who have worked with a mentor already and desire to develop their own style.

Risks of Practicing Kundalini

Let’s first look more closely at what kundalini energy is. It’s an energy that already exists within us but that is dormant for most of us, waiting at the base of our spines to be awakened & set free. When we do kundalini activations, we’re opening our minds & bodies to allow this energy to flow freely throughout us. Activations are a passive process where all you do is lie there, listening to music, and receive. Kundalini yoga is an active process, that also helps to awaken your kundalini by strengthening you mentally & physically. These two practices can be paired together to create a holistic approach to awakening kundalini that is well-grounded & free-flowing.

The initial stages of kundalini awakening can be intense physically & emotionally both during activations and after. During an activation, there is a risk of physical injury because of spontaneous body movement which can lead to muscle strain or flailing and hitting an object near by. Injuries are rare during kundalini activations, but we do have to be aware of the possibility - when we’re aware of it, it’s even less likely to happen.

Awakening kundalini can also emotionally taxing because we’re going into the subconscious & releasing repressed feelings & experiences that need to rise to the surface to be addressed so that we can move beyond them. This can look like an emotional flood of crying, laughing, screaming & otherwise releasing both during a session and after. Emotional releases are common, but you’ll only experience what you’re ready to handle mentally & physically in the moment. This is also where the support of a mentor can be valuable to help you work though some of the difficult emotions that come up and receive reassurance that what you’re experiencing is a normal & healthy part of your healing process.

You may feel physically tired & drained after a session or you may feel the complete opposite. You may feel energized and ready to take on the world! Kundalini is unpredictable in this way, but the emotions & physical responses you feel begin to normalize as you strengthen your capacity to hold more & more.

Navigating A Kundalini Awakening

It can feel like it’s getting worse before it gets better, but it does get better - it gets A LOT better. Kundalini can be destructive in the beginning stages, and this is perhaps why people say it’s dangerous. What it’s really doing, though, is aligning us with the true nature of who we are & the life we are meant to live. Depending on how far away from this we are, we may have more layers built up to shed away. This process requires us to meet & heal parts of ourselves that we may not have seen for a while or even don’t realize exist.

Confronting Emotions & Feeling It All

In the beginning, everything gets released from within. We begin to question our lives, our existence, ourselves. We may find that pieces of our lives seem to be falling apart only later to find that they come back together in an even better way. We feel it all here, and we’re not really sure what any of it means. But we feel it, and we free ourselves to make our own decisions about what it means and who we are.

This is another “risk” of kundalini because each person needs to decide for themselves how prepared they are to open themselves up to feeling all these emotions. If in doubt, find a mentor to guide you through the process so that you know you are supported.

Epiphanies About the Self & Place in the World

We still don’t understand it all, but everything begins to make sense in a way that never did before. The realizations that come now are life-altering because we’re waking up from the daze we’ve been living in to notice that life is more beautiful than we ever imagined it could be. Who we are becomes more & more clear as we leave behind who we’re not like a snake shedding its skin as it grows a new layer and expands beyond it.

This is where we begin to develop enhanced awareness about ourselves and the world around us that other people may not understand. This is your weirdo stage because it’s weird to be authentic and express yourself independently of societal influences. This is where you find YOU.

The balance stage

We realize we know a lot, but we also realize there’s even more that we don’t know, and we find peace with that. We decide for ourselves who we are and how we interact with the world around us. We find a way to balance and exist and be happy with who we are and what we have in this lifetime.

Kundalini is intense, and it can feel like we’re off balance when we’re experiencing emotions so intensely on all ends: excitement, grief, bliss, sadness, and even bodily temperature changes like warmth and cold. Before we can balance, we have to know the extremes. Then even when we do balance, our energy is still motion. We still hold all these intense emotions, but the experience of them is different because we’ve strengthened our capacity to be with them. We’ve learned to find balance within the chaos of life.

Know Yourself & Your Path

If you’re ready for kundalini energy, you’ll know. You’ll feel a nudge, and you might not even know when it happens or what it is, but you’ll feel it, and it’ll guide you. Use your own discernment based on research and what you know to gradually find your way and commit to yourself before anyone else. Your path begins here, with you knowing you & accepting you for all that you are. It’s not linear, and it won’t make sense to everyone, but that is the way.

Book recommendations are books I’ve read that I felt drawn to share with you as I created this blog post. These are affiliate links from Amazon. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases❤