Removing the Ladder: Kundalini Awakening

Part Two of a two-part series asking what Kundalini is, what Kundalini Awakening means, and whether a new framework is needed for the modern 'Awakening' phenomenon.

The term "kundalini awakening" is a modern compound that no single classical tradition uses in the way we now understand it. This essay takes the two words apart. "Kundalini" entered Western culture through a specific chain — Vivekananda, Woodroffe, and above all Gopi Krishna, whose 1967 autobiography gave the concept its modern shape as a biographical crisis event. A clinical lineage followed — Sannella, the Grofs, Greenwell — each reframing kundalini further from its classical roots toward a crisis-management category. The essay argues that we need to examine what we actually mean when we use this term, and asks whether a new framework — better suited to what is now a global phenomenon — may be needed.

If you have not read part one click here.

In 1921, at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein did something unusual: he dismantled his own book in its final lines. The propositions of the Tractatus, he wrote, are elucidations — and anyone who truly understands them will eventually recognise them as nonsensical, having used them as steps to climb beyond them. The reader, he said, must "throw away the ladder" after climbing up it.

The image has become shorthand for a particular kind of tool: a concept that is genuinely useful for getting somewhere, and misleading if you keep gripping it once you've arrived. Wittgenstein was not the first to see this; the Buddha reached for the same move two and a half millennia earlier, comparing his own teaching to a raft — built for crossing the river, not for carrying on your back afterwards.

I want to make an argument that I will come back to at the end of this essay: the modern term "kundalini awakening" is a ladder — one we will ultimately have to let go of — and much of the confusion, and some of the real challenges, that surrounds it comes from our never stopping to ask what we mean when we use it.

To see why, we have to take the term apart. It's a compound word but the two words have separate histories. They do not begin together, and the compound they form — with its present meaning — belongs intact, as we will see, to no single classical tradition.

The first word: Kundalini

The first essay in this series traced kuṇḍalinī from her earliest documented appearances — roughly 600 to 700 CE — through the traditions that carried her. Two findings from that history matter here. The first is that the word never had a single settled meaning — not even at the beginning. It surfaced simultaneously in opposed branches of early Tantra, embedded in different theological realities, naming something different in each. The second is that in the oldest layer of the record she was not asleep. The earliest text to give her a bodily location places her at the heart, dwelling as a curled sprout — the image of something alive and already growing. Her famous dormancy is a later codification, arriving centuries after the word itself. The structural point deserves to be stated plainly: in the oldest texts so far identified, there is nothing to awaken.

The first essay also surveyed how the great schools answered the question of what kundalini fundamentally is — consciousness recognising itself, another name for the Self, a kinetic force distinct from consciousness, a fire burning within emptiness — and found that they do not agree. For this essay, we need only the origin point: a word that never had a single settled meaning, naming a power that was present, living, seated at the heart — and awake.

The second word: Awakening

If she was never asleep, then "awakening" is not a natural companion to the word kundalini.

Once the awakening doctrine exists, the medieval yoga texts speak of awakening kundalini — a verb, and one among several: she is variously to be awakened, roused, raised, straightened, led into the central channel. Something a prepared practitioner does: deliberately, through method, over years, under supervision. Where the awakening verb appears, the Sanskrit uses causative forms — bodhayet, "one should awaken her." The subject of the sentence is the yogi.

Modern spiritual culture speaks of a kundalini awakening — a noun. A countable event. Something that happens to you, often on a particular day, frequently uninvited. The subject of the sentence has changed places: the person is no longer the one who awakens her, but the one to whom an awakening occurs. Grammatically, the phrase now behaves less like an achievement and more like a diagnosis or an accident.

That shift — from verb to noun, from agent to recipient, from attainment to onset — happened in stages.

The idea of a dormant kundalini is itself an evolution. Somewhere between the earliest layer and the medieval haṭha corpus, the doctrine changed. By the period represented in the texts associated with the Nāth and early haṭha traditions — roughly the eleventh to fourteenth centuries — and certainly by the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā (fifteenth century), the model we now all recognise is fully codified: kundalini lies dormant at the base of the body, blocking the mouth of the central channel, and the yogi's task is to rouse her by force and drive her upward. The Pradīpikā's image, in Pancham Sinh's 1914 translation, is famously violent: struck by the heat of practice like a serpent struck with a stick, she "is awakened" and straightens.

To my knowledge, nobody has yet identified the first Sanskrit text to apply an explicit awakening verb to kundalini by name. But Wallis has drawn attention to what may be a revealing trace of the vocabulary forming. An old Kaula verse — quoted by the Kashmiri master Kṣemarāja around 1025 CE, so more than a thousand years old — describes the descent of the upper power and the compression of the lower, and speaks of immersion (samāveśa), with no awakening word anywhere in it. A later, revised version of that same verse, preserved in the Amaraugha-śāsana of the Goraksha corpus, adds a third element: the awakening — prabodha — of the central power, the madhya-śakti. On this reconstruction, awakening language enters somewhere between the original verse and its revision — in the long, overlapping transition from classical Tantra to the Nāth synthesis, which is also where the dormancy doctrine takes shape. Still not kundalinī by name; still awaiting proper philological work. But the direction of the evidence is consistent: her sleep, and her awakening, were written in late.

Notice, though, what awakening is in this medieval layer — because it is still not the modern thing. It is an attainment sought through method: embedded in preparation, posture, breath-restraint, lock and seal. The verb belongs to the practitioner. Kundalini is awakened; she does not, in these texts, simply awaken.

The tradition's own word for the unsought event. But what of the person to whom something simply happens — power arriving unasked, out of nowhere, into an unprepared life? The classical tradition knew that experience too, and it had its own vocabulary for it. The word was śaktipāta: literally "the descent of power."

Today the word is most commonly encountered in its narrowed modern sense: the transmission a shaktipat guru confers by touch, glance or intention — a deliberate act from teacher to student. But classically, śaktipāta meant something broader. It referred to the descent of divine grace itself, of which the guru was understood to be one vehicle, not the source. The doctrine's fullest classical treatment is Abhinavagupta's, in the thirteenth chapter of his Tantrāloka (condensed in his Tantrasāra), around 1000 CE, where this descent of grace is graded into degrees of intensity — from a descent so fierce the tradition held it could end embodied life altogether, down to the gentlest first stirrings of spiritual longing. And across several Śaiva initiation systems, śaktipāta is what turns a person toward the path at all: the precondition for initiation, the reason anyone seeks a teacher in the first place. It is, in other words, the classical tradition's own name for the unsought event — grace arriving before the person has done anything to earn it. As Wallis points out, the sudden, life-changing psychophysical event that our era calls a spontaneous kundalini awakening is what the classical tradition would have discussed under this name.

I should be precise here, because the two concepts are not the same thing. Classical śaktipāta was defined not by what happened in the body but by what happened to the person's orientation. Its signs were a turning toward the path: a sudden longing for liberation, a desire for a teacher, a reordering of priorities — the kind of shift that made a person seek initiation. Abhinavagupta's grading system distinguishes degrees of intensity by how completely this reorientation takes hold, from the gentlest stirring of spiritual interest up to a descent so total the tradition held it could end embodied life. But heat, trembling, involuntary movement, energy rising through the spine — the symptoms that dominate modern reports — are largely absent from the classical śaktipāta literature. Those physical phenomena map more closely to what the Haṭha texts describe under a different heading: the effects of intensive prāṇāyāma and prāṇa activation, which the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā treats in a separate chapter from the kundalini rousing itself, as a distinct and broader category. They could also be accounted for by autonomic nervous system activation, by trauma release, or by what other traditions name differently — qigong deviation in the Chinese systems, the Sufis' ḥāl, the somatic phenomena that gave the Quakers and Shakers their names.

This matters practically, not just historically. If the modern concept of "kundalini awakening" has quietly merged two things the classical tradition kept apart — a theological category about grace and orientation, and a physiological category about energy and the body — then some of the confusion around the term may come from that merger itself. The first essay's discussion of prāṇotthāna explored this distinction in more detail: the classical texts treat prāṇa activation as a broader, less specific process than kundalini proper, and keeping the two apart may be one of the most practically useful things the older vocabulary still has to offer.

In practical terms, this means the modern compound did not name a previously unnamed experience. It renamed the nearest classical concept it could find — and in the process, filled it with a different set of contents.

Kundalini and the West. The concept crossed into English in a strikingly short window. Through the 1880s, Theosophical writers were glossing kundalini for Western readers, and the historian Julian Strube's research on this transmission — summarised in a recent Harvard essay by the yoga historian Anya Foxen — identifies an 1888 article by Bamandas Basu in The Theosophist ("The Anatomy of the Tantras") as perhaps the first published source to map the chakras onto the body's nerve plexuses: the move that made kundalini legible to the Western physiological imagination.

In 1896, Swami Vivekananda's Raja Yoga gave the English-speaking world its first influential account of kundalini awakening as the mechanism of spiritual realisation. Vivekananda's claim was strong: kundalini's rousing, he wrote, is "the one and only way to attaining Divine Wisdom." But his account was also broader than what followed it. He described multiple pathways to that rousing — devotion, the grace of perfected sages, and the power of philosophical inquiry — not only practice or energy work.

Sir John Woodroffe, a British judge in colonial Calcutta writing as "Arthur Avalon," then published The Serpent Power(1919), and it is this book, more than any other single text, that shaped the Western image of kundalini. Woodroffe's account is drawn primarily from two Bengali Shakta texts — the Ṣaṭ-Cakra-Nirūpaṇa of Pūrṇānanda and the Pādukā-Pañcaka — and it is their model that became the default: six chakras plus the sahasrāra, the dormant serpent at the base, the rising through the central channel to the crown. The result is that one tradition's map — the Shakta synthesis — was presented to the West as the map, and most popular accounts since have inherited it without realising that Kashmir Shaivism, Advaita Vedanta and Vajrayana each describe the process differently.

By the end of the 1910s, the essential elements of the modern concept were in place: the sleeping serpent, the forcible rousing, the nervous system, the promise of realisation. One thing was still missing. Nobody had yet described "a kundalini awakening" as a first-person experience — as a biographical event.

Gopi Krishna

Gopi Krishna was a government clerk from Kashmir, not a renunciate — and that fact is central to why his story reshaped the Western understanding of kundalini. When his autobiography reached English-speaking audiences in 1970–71, it arrived at the peak of the counterculture's interest in altered states of consciousness, and it offered something no previous kundalini text had: a story Western readers could see themselves in. He was not a guru. He had no lineage. He had not renounced the world. He was a man with a job and a family to whom something overwhelming had happened — and he told it as a first-person crisis narrative, the kind of memoir Western readers already knew how to read.

His 1967 autobiography opens with the event itself: "one morning during the Christmas of 1937," aged thirty-four, sitting in meditation and concentrating on the crown of his head, he experienced a stream of energy rising through his spine into his brain. What followed was not liberation but a roughly twelve-year arc marked by periods of severe crisis: weeks at the edge of death in the first months — consumed by internal heat, unable to eat or sleep, in severe digestive distress, in states he himself compared to the edge of insanity — another period of crisis around 1943, and a resolution into what he interpreted as enlightenment only in 1949. The book became the founding text of the modern genre of kundalini-crisis narrative: the first-person account of an overwhelming, unprepared-for awakening arriving as a destabilising life event, followed by a long arc of crisis and integration.

Two things about his case are often missed. His awakening followed seventeen years of unsupervised daily meditation — practice-induced, not spontaneous, a distinction that matters practically. And as the historian Anya Foxen has shown, his original letters seeking help did not use kundalini terminology at all. The framework came later, acquired from the culture around him. His book gave the modern concept its shape: the datable event, the crisis arc, the biological framing, the sense that no lineage is required.

When the Western editions arrived in 1970–71, they were packaged to land. A psychological commentary by the Jungian analyst James Hillman reframed each chapter in therapeutic terms, turning a yogic autobiography into a case study in transformation. An introduction by Stanford's Frederic Spiegelberg gave it academic credibility. The timing was precise: the counterculture was at its peak, psychedelics were opening people to non-ordinary states faster than any tradition could contain, and there was a growing appetite for frameworks that validated inner experience without requiring submission to a guru or a church. Gopi Krishna's book offered exactly that — a story of radical transformation told in biological language, accessible to anyone, embedded in no institution. It gave Western readers permission to take their own experiences seriously while keeping the vocabulary secular. That combination — personal, biological, anti-authoritarian — is why it landed, and why the clinical literature that followed built on its foundations rather than on the classical texts themselves.

What the ladder built next

Gopi Krishna's autobiography moved kundalini from yogic attainment to biological event. He argued it was a literal evolutionary mechanism — testable, urgent, the basis of genius and, in its pathological form, of certain kinds of mental illness. He founded the Kundalini Research Foundation to pursue scientific investigation, not spiritual teaching, and spent his later decades presenting the hypothesis to scientists rather than seekers.

Lee Sannella moved it from biography to clinical syndrome. His 1976 book Kundalini: Psychosis or Transcendence?created the first Western framework for distinguishing kundalini phenomena from psychosis, building on Itzhak Bentov's "physio-kundalini" model of the body's response to meditative states. The title's question became the organising question of the entire clinical literature that followed.

Stanislav and Christina Grof moved it from standalone syndrome to subspecies. Their 1989 anthology systematised "spiritual emergency" as an umbrella category with kundalini as one type among ten. Their Spiritual Emergence Network provided the direct impetus for the V62.89 "Religious or Spiritual Problem" category in the DSM-IV (1994) — the first formal psychiatric acknowledgement that distressing spiritual experiences could be non-pathological.

Bonnie Greenwell and the Kundalini Research Network (co-founded with Yvonne Kason in 1990) moved it from symptom checklist to individual process — explicitly "biospiritual," emphasising variation over template. Greenwell's own later shift toward non-dual teaching through Adyashanti mirrors this essay's argument: she came to see the clinical-kundalini frame itself as a ladder, useful and eventually to be set down.

The net effect is that the modern Western definition of "kundalini awakening" is primarily a crisis-management category — something to be supported through, differentiated from psychosis, and integrated — rather than a claim about the nature of reality. The ontological questions the traditions were answering — what is consciousness, what is liberation, what is a completed human being — have been almost entirely replaced by clinical ones: is this person safe, is this pathology or transformation, what support do they need? That is an enormous gain in one direction and an enormous loss in another.

The question of appropriation

There is an uncomfortable dimension to this history that deserves to be named directly.

Kundalini emerged from Indian traditions — developed, protected and transmitted over centuries by communities for whom it was embedded in cosmology, ethics, devotion and lineage. Much of what now circulates under its name has been extracted from those communities, repackaged, and sold back to the world as part of a global wellness industry worth billions, often taught by people with little connection to the sources and little acknowledgement of them. I don't believe the people in this essay are culpable of this but there is a lot of misinformation about this topic and we need to address the balance.

When a tradition's vocabulary is used without its knowledge systems, its teachers, or its communities being acknowledged — when the aesthetic is kept and the ethics discarded — something is being taken, and perhaps these essays are my way of addressing this for our collective.

What the phrase has become

We can now reassemble the compound and say plainly what "kundalini awakening" means in the modern era. Something like this:

A sudden, usually unsought psychophysical event — heat, energy, involuntary movement, altered perception, sometimes ecstatic, often destabilising — understood simultaneously as a nervous-system episode and a spiritual promotion; arriving with or without practice, preparation or context; narrated in the first person as a biographical rupture; and followed by a long arc of crisis and integration.

Each element of that definition can be traced to an identifiable historical strand, and the strands do not agree with each other. The risen serpent comes from the medieval manuals. The nervous system comes from Basu and Vivekananda. The idea that it can be spontaneous — even though in his case it may not have been — comes from Gopi Krishna. The crisis-and-integration arc was amplified by Hillman's commentary and developed by the clinical and transpersonal lineage that followed. The modern term is a collage — every layer historically real, the assembled whole belonging intact to no single tradition. The earliest sources describe a present, living Goddess with nothing to awaken; the haṭha yogis describe a hard-won attainment at the end of a prepared life; Vivekananda described a universal mechanism of realisation; Gopi Krishna offered a warning and a lifelong plea for scientific research. None of them provides a precedent for what the phrase now most often does: naming an unchosen crisis in an unprepared person, and quietly implying that the crisis is itself the beginning of enlightenment. When a fifteenth-century text describes what awaits the yogi whose kundalini is fully awakened, and a person in crisis reads it and starts the clock on their own realisation, they have been made a promise by a term that has evolved to meet the symptoms and phenomenology of something more modern.

What these first two essays show is that kundalini as a concept has never stood still. Every generation has reshaped it for the people around them — and that is not a failure of the word but part of its life. Gopi Krishna gave it a biography. Sannella gave it a clinical frame. The Grofs gave it institutional recognition. Greenwell gave it room to vary. Each of them helped people who would otherwise have been left without language, without community, without support — and their work deserves gratitude.

Throwing the ladder away

Which brings us back to Wittgenstein, and to the question that actually matters: is the modern term 'Kundalini Awakening' helpful?

After years of sitting with people who use it, my honest answer is that it is exactly as helpful as a ladder — no less, and no more.

As a ladder, it works, and I will not pretend otherwise, because it worked on me. Twenty years ago the word gave my experience a structure and a history; it told me I was not broken, not alone, and not the first. It ends isolation at a stroke: someone shaking and terrified discovers there is a community, a literature, a lineage of people who have encountered something resembling this. For some, that recognition is the difference between seeking support and concluding they are losing their minds. And this is no longer only anecdote: researchers on the Varieties of Contemplative Experience project, studying meditators with adverse "energy-like somatic experiences," found that the simple fact of finding an interpretive framework — with kundalini the most commonly adopted — was itself a powerful remedy.

The difficulty comes when people stop questioning the term and start treating it as a complete explanation. Once that happens, expectations built for supervised classical practice get applied to unprepared modern experiences. Timelines get inherited from a tradition the person has no connection to. Experiences that may need entirely different kinds of support — psychological, medical, relational — get absorbed into a single category because that category was the first one available. And perhaps most importantly, what a person remembers about their own experience begins to reshape itself around the vocabulary — the word comes after the experience, from the culture around us, and then it starts organising what we recall. That is not a flaw in any individual account. It is what shared vocabulary does.

Towards a new framework

Here is what I see when I set the term down: a growing, global phenomenon in which something awakens people to a greater sense of their ordinary selves. These experiences are arriving at scale, in people with no lineage, no teacher, and no preparation, and with symptoms from a diversity of traditions, — and the classical traditions, for all their depth, did not anticipate this. What people describe on the other side is often not the jñāni or the siddha of the texts, but something quieter and perhaps more practically important: greater authenticity, deeper compassion, a stronger capacity to contribute to the people around them. With integration and support, it brings them over time into a more authentic space. Without support, it can be destabilising and extremely challenging — and this is why we need to build better containers in society to help people through this process.

I hold this as a belief to be tested, not a conclusion to be defended — but I suspect the novelty runs deeper than just the conditions. Awakening at population scale, in unselected and uninitiated lives, may not be a failed or diluted version of the classical process but something new, and it may ultimately need its own framing, its own language, and its own forms of support.

Coming back to kundalini

I personally believe there will always be a few people who are called to go further — to awaken not just to a more authentic life but to the nature of reality itself, to dissolve the paradoxes rather than navigate them, to live within the framework the classical scriptures describe. These are the awliyāʾ of Sufism, the tzaddikim of Kabbalah, the mahāsiddhas of Vajrayana, the jīvanmuktas of the yogic traditions. What these traditions share is not a doctrine but a structural insight: what is recognised at the end was never absent at the beginning. The path does not take you somewhere new — it reveals what was always already the case. In this light, you do not awaken to kundalini. In the oldest texts, as this series has shown, she was never asleep.

This is the territory Advaita Vedanta has always pointed toward — a tradition whose central teaching method, adhyāropa-apavāda (deliberate superimposition followed by rescission), is designed to build frameworks the student will eventually let go of. It is why nonduality will always, in the end, ask you to let go of any framework — including its own. Ramana Maharshi, speaking from that standpoint, did not deny kundalini. In the recorded dialogues he accepted the phenomena as genuine experiences, while teaching that kundalini, śakti and the Self are ultimately not different: the same reality named from different angles. But he consistently declined to make the phenomena the point, redirecting attention away from energies, visions and powers — all of which, he taught, arise within the Self — and toward the one to whom they appear. In Advaita's hands, kundalini is real as experience and provisional as truth — legitimate as preparation, and self-cancelling on arrival. The energetic itinerary, the centres, the rising: all of it to be honoured, used, and finally released.

This is the deepest reason why the ladder must eventually be examined. Not because it is false — it is not — but because nonduality, by its nature, cannot leave any framework in place permanently. Every map, however accurate, is still a map. Every word, however sacred, is still a word. The traditions that understood this most clearly built the letting-go into the method itself, so that the student would not mistake the scaffold for the building. For the few who are called to that depth, the classical path remains exactly what it has always been. For the many now navigating something new, a different kind of support may be needed and is emerging.

A note on sources: the philological backbone of this essay — the earliest attestations of kuṇḍalinī, the Kālottara's heart-dwelling sprout, the reading of prasupta-nāgābhā as coiled form rather than sleep, the two versions of the Kaula verse, and the identification of śaktipāta as the classical name for the sudden, unsought event — rests on the work of the Sanskritist Christopher Wallis (Hareesh), in particular his essay "The Real Story on Kundalini" (hareesh.org, 2022). Wallis is candid that the earliest sources still await a full scholarly study. The modern transmission history — Basu, Vivekananda, Woodroffe, and the Gopi Krishna–Aurobindo correspondence — draws on Anya Foxen's essay "Kundalini" (Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, April 2026), itself drawing on Foxen and Sravana Borkataky-Varma's The Serpent's Tale (Columbia University Press, 2025), Julian Strube's Global Tantra (2022), and Marleen Thaler's history of modern kundalini research (2024). The post-Gopi-Krishna clinical lineage draws on Lee Sannella's Kundalini: Psychosis or Transcendence? (1976; revised as The Kundalini Experience, 1987), Itzhak Bentov's Stalking the Wild Pendulum (1977) for the physio-kundalini model, Stanislav and Christina Grof's Spiritual Emergency (Tarcher, 1989), Bonnie Greenwell's Energies of Transformation (1990), and Lukoff, Lu and Turner's account of the DSM-IV proposal ("From Spiritual Emergency to Spiritual Problem," Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 1998; original proposal published in Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 1992). The identification of Woodroffe's primary sources as the Ṣaṭ-Cakra-Nirūpaṇa of Pūrṇānanda and the Pādukā-Pañcaka is standard in the scholarly literature. The finding on interpretive frameworks and adverse energy-like experiences is from Cooper, Lindahl, Palitsky and Britton (Religions, 2021). The argument built on these scholars' work, and any errors in it, are mine.