Through the years, in being witness to my personal healing journey and those of others, I’ve consistently observed individuals engaging in rigorous spiritual practice and inner work without a strong sense of their internal boundary and container.
Years ago, when I took my first Kundalini Yoga class, I was introduced to powerful breathwork practices that were supposed to support the dislodging of stuck energy in the nervous system and awaken the channels of kundalini energy up the spine. As we engaged in the breathwork practices, I felt a sense of expansiveness and ecstasy. My whole body began to tingle and vibrate. I was having a peak experience.
What I didn’t realize was that this peak experience would last for far longer beyond the class. I went home that evening and had to lay on the ground outside for 3 hours because I had so much energy running through my system. My arms began to freeze and tense up, jaw tightening, and hands morphing into a claw-like grip. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was experiencing tetany; a physiological involuntary muscular response that can arise when engaging in rapid and rhythmic breathing practices.
Some would call this a powerful kundalini awakening, and in a way it was. I was activating subtle energies in my body that I had never experienced before. Simultaneously, my nervous system and energy body were so overloaded that I couldn’t healthfully integrate and maintain the state that I attained in the peak experience. It ended up feeling more like a healing crisis rather than a purely healing experience.
It is imperative that we already have an established container, a sense of anchored embodiment and groundedness before we start engaging with higher dimensional frequencies and energies.
In today’s time, we are lucky to have access to a variety of spiritual practices, teachings, and exercises that can support us in activating our awareness of the subtle energetic realms. We become empowered to utilize these distilled ancient teachings to transform ourselves and augment our own healing processes.
We can learn how to clear our energetic field, cellularly reprogram our nervous system and energy bodies, and alchemize deeply embedded programming, traumas, and beliefs from this lifetime and other lifetimes we may have had. We have so many incredible resources at our disposal.
I am reminded of the quote, “with great power comes great responsibility.” In an age where the literal knowledge of the universe is at our fingertips, discernment is key.
As practitioners, healers and light leaders, it is our sacred responsibility to provide a safe environment for those that are entrusting us to be their guide on their journey towards greater wholeness.
When we create a safe, sacred space, we are providing a container so our clients can memorize what groundedness feels like in their own bodies so they can begin to develop a refined awareness, embodied understanding, and connection to their own baseline and inner guidance system.
As we are being entrusted with providing and modeling what the ground looks like and what a healthy baseline feels like, it is imperative that we attune to what our client’s actual pace is and not overload them with practices and perspective shifts in awareness that they don’t have the capacity to integrate.
It is also crucial that we have a deep sense and understanding of what our own internal baseline feels like and have refined our capacity to self-regulate so that we can reliably stay anchored within our own sense of ground and embodied wisdom.
Similarly, as students on the path of life who are engaged in our own healing journeys, it is our responsibility to use the power of our awareness to discern if we are moving at a pace in our healing work that doesn’t feel sustainable and if we are being asked to do things before we truly feel ready.
