Our karma-- cultural, personal and ancestral-- is held within our nervous system and other bodily tissues and imprinted into our bodies’ energetic channels (called nadis in Sanskrit). When unexamined and unhealed, the nadis bind up and create karmic knots (known as granthis in Sanskrit). The knots externally recreate the stories, myths and patterns held within. They are like a computer program etched into our organs and nervous system, dictating the way we interact with ourselves and the world.
In life, we play out the karma that’s held in these knots through our interactions with others. Our knots are constantly sending out cords of information that connect to other people’s cords in the dance of our interwoven karma. The cords are like magnets, and they attract the people and situations that reveal the story or pattern held within. Many people see how they are still playing out the stories and patterns from childhood in their adult relationships. Our attraction to people arises from the interconnection of our karmic cords.
As long as we externalize the process and fail to understand our own part in creating these relationship (karmic) bonds, we will be in an antagonistic relationship with others and ultimately ourselves. It’s easy to see how our problems and our suffering arise from others. And to a certain extent its true, but only at the outermost level. Hidden within every negative interaction we experience at the hands of someone else is our own wounded self, drawing our attention inside. But most of us are not taught how to process these things internally. Our culture teaches us to externalize our suffering and wall off our emotions and trauma. Because we do not process our wounding, we learn how to dissociate or disconnect from it. In the short term, the dissociation allows us to temporarily move through life without having to experience the suffering hidden inside. But in the long term, this walling off process starts forming the karmic knots that bind us down and create our map for interacting with the world.
Our wounds are actually living beings and fragmented parts of our psyche. Our painful emotions are the messages sent by our fragmented psyche asking us to go inside— to heal ourselves and integrate our fragmented parts. When we dissociate or disconnect from trauma, painful emotions or “negative” parts of ourselves, our psyche sends out cords to “negative” people in order to reflect back the part of us that wants to heal. This process can feel like an act of divine punishment, as we recreate the same wounded patterns with different people. Paradoxically, whatever we’ve tried to wall off will come back to get us. The “triggering” process happens when our unhealed trauma manifests an external force to awaken us to its presence. When this happens, we either try to suppress our uncomfortable feelings through dissociation or numbing out, or we try to fight whatever external force appears to be responsible for our pain.
There are many types of therapies that help people address these issues, but the karmic cords are physical in nature and we have to have a physical practice that can pull out and transform the wounded cords implanted in our body. Kundalini Mediumship was developed to facilitate that process.
When we have unprocessed wounds (emotions, trauma and karma) we end up stuffing them down into our belly and walling them off. Many people feel like they can't ever take a deep breath, and that is the side effect of the walling off process. The walling off process helps us dissociate from the unpleasantness that's stored in our belly, creating the illusion of separateness from our darkness. Unfortunately, the walls also dissociate us from our divine self. The darkness and the walls we create to dissociate from it have actual physical manifestations in our body.
Fortunately, there is a whole system of self care called yoga that was developed to help people heal these structures. In fact, the yoga asanas (postures) were developed long ago by sages who were accessing the kundalini energy and wanted to develop a physical system to help transform and heal their karmic wounds. Along with the physical postures, the physical practices of breathwork (pranayama) and bandhas are needed. When bandhas are combined with pranayama, we are able to access the kundalini, which is the force responsible for opening up our channels to transform and clear out our wounds.
The kundalini sages of long ago said that the ultimate goal of a human birth is remembering our true nature— remembering that we are not just an individual human but that we are interconnected with everyone and everything. This is very difficult to remember, because the external world is very good at helping us divide things into “self” and “other”. As long as we see things from the viewpoint of “self” and “other”, we create more and more karma and get bound into more and more karmic knots. But the kundalini energy provides a way out. When we are ready to move past these games, the kundalini starts to awaken, which is really just the seed of remembering our true nature. We start to remember that everything outside is really just a manifestation of an internal process. And if we want to change anything externally, we have to start from inside. But this is not an instantaneous process! We can’t decide to awaken and clear all our karma and then become enlightened. A kundalini awakening is the first stage of a very long process. It’s a long process because the seductions and entanglements in the external world are very tricky and very powerful.
The fundamental premise of Kundalini Mediumship is that being triggered is Spirit’s way of calling attention to our wounds. When we get triggered, we can take the emotions and energy of our trigger and bring it inside to heal and wake up the kundalini. This process involves changing our relationship to our demons. Instead of fighting them, we work with them to access our wounds, because hidden inside our wounds is our divine spirit. This process is at the heart of Kundalini Mediumship-- the recognition that our own internal self has a role in every external process. But it is not easy. It takes a lot of discipline, courage and compassion to make that internal commitment when so many internal processes and external systems are set up to sabotage this process.
There are two main practices of Kundalini Mediumship (internal and external) depending on what type of knots and cords we are working on. The internal knots and cords are accessed through breath/bandha work and healing sessions. Working with the external cords requires tracking. While they are called external, they are really just outward extensions of our internal cords.
Breath and Bandhas
Breath control (known as pranayama in Sanskrit) along with bandha work is the key to accessing the kundalini. Bandhas are yogic techniques that open up the abdomen.
Mula bandha – contraction of the muscle group between the genitals and anus (the perineum). This is a "pulling up" movement.
Uddiyana bandha – contraction in the abdominal cavity. This is a "pulling in" movement.
Jalandhara bandha – a “pulling in” of the spot just above the sternum
When the kundalini starts to move, she may enter the granthi, which may feel like dark pits deep in your stomach. As you continue working with the kundalini, you may also experience the knotted, twisted cords extending out from the granthi to the rest of your body. These roots travel along our nadis (energy channels) and bind them up.
The knots and cords are actually made up of three distinct structures. The outermost level is the wall— the zone of dissociation and numbing out or checking out. We get sent to the wall when the wound (the level just inside the wall) is triggered and unprocessed. If we can access the wound and process what is held there, we may be able to touch into the deepest level. At this level is the intense energy of the kundalini herself, along with gods, goddesses and ancestors. To learn about these structures and processes, Kundalini Mediumship uses the art of tracking
This is not an overnight process, and each person’s process is based on their samskaras (karmically inherited patterns of thought and behavior). Everyone has varying degrees of a desire to work with this process along with a fear or resistance it. To proceed, we need to understand our own resistance, and how that resistance is connected to a feeling of safety and survival.
Tracking
Tracking is the process of being triggered, then using the emotions of the triggering to access our internal landscape. This is a very tricky process, and to do it successfully we’ll need to understand the terrain.
When we get triggered, our wound is activated. The wound is the part of ourselves that contains an emotion, memory or trauma so painful, so uncomfortable, so deep that it feels like it cannot be processed. Unfortunately, most people are unable to feel what is really happening inside when they get triggered. The moment when we are able to connect to the wound usually passes incredibly quick because immediately after the wound is triggered, the wall springs into place. The true obstacle to tracking is our wall.
The wall is the structure we create to dissociate from our wound. When we have trouble accessing our feelings, when we resort to substances or other processes to numb out or check out, we are in the realm of the wall. It is a structure we have created in order to not feel the thing inside of us that feels too painful, too big or too intense. Everyone’s wall is a unique, multi-layered structure that is really an example of our own ingenious power of creation. But it is built and maintained on the illusion of separateness. We try to wall off our painful karma or trauma, but we can never truly escape those things. When we get triggered, we usually end up creating more and more walls and then spend much of our energy on wall maintenance. It takes a lot of mental, emotional and spiritual energy attempting to fix and repair a system whose goal is to prevent us from being triggered.
Each person’s wall is unique, but they all share similar characteristics. The sole purpose of the wall is to prevent us from accessing the wound. There are usually many layers. Some common ones are:
Externalization-- identifying the source of a problem or suffering as someone or something else. On one level, this is true. Other people can cause us pain. Other people can hurt us and treat us poorly. But we can use that pain to take us inside and work with our internal wound. If not, we’ll just be caught in the cycle of blaming others for our internal state and then attracting people who hurt us.
Lashing out-- when getting close to the wound, a righteous anger can be triggered. This looks and feels like the wound, and it can have a very deceptive mask. But under this anger is generally a frightened child, the source of the real wound. The angry mask does not like us to see the little child hidden inside.
Retreating-- some people learn to retreat when the wound is triggered. This is a place of cold numbness, self-pity and victimhood.
If we can work through layers of the wall, we may be able to encounter the outer layers of the wound. The outer layer contains some very deep emotions, but it still contains some of the energy of the wall. It will try to keep us from going any further. This place may tell us we are worthless or that we are not allowed to experience love.
When we get to a deeper level of the wound, it feels raw and vulnerable. There may be images or memories that arise. When we are truly here, we will be able to renegotiate the contract.
Contracts are agreements we’ve made with other people or spiritual forces. Like any physical contract, we get something from them but we also give something. In the case of our wall, our contract with it gives us a temporary escape from feeling our wound. In return the wall demands that we renounce our inner awareness along with a piece of our emotional and spiritual connection. The wall doesn’t just wall off our trauma, it walls off the deeper levels of our emotional and spiritual self with it. That’s the trade-off.
But our “wall contract” involves much more than this-- our wall becomes enmeshed with our belief systems and daily motivations. Wall maintenance becomes a daily habit that requires a lot of energy. The wall never truly separates us from our wounds, it just provides the illusion of that separation. And that illusion comes crashing down every time we are triggered. When we are triggered, we feel into the wound for just a moment. And in that moment, we have to rebuild the part of the wall that let the triggering happen. Once we begin to recognize the futility of constantly rebuilding the wall, we can propel forward on the path of emotional and spiritual healing.
In reality, our walls and our wounds are a multi-faceted structure containing infinite pieces of information. The process of uncovering these issues is not linear-- it’s not about revealing each part. It’s about revealing the pattern that the issues show. When we understand how a wall works within us, we can use that information to understand how other walls we’ve created fit that pattern. When we come to understand the patterns of our wounding and the patterns of our walls, the patterns of our divine connection will also reveal themselves. Those divine connections are the true goal of Kundalini Mediumship. We all have a spiritual self, we all have gods and goddesses that are waiting to connect with us. But to connect with them, we have to work through the layers of baggage we’ve built around them.
To track, we have to understand on a fundamental level that there is no disconnect between ourselves and the outside world. Our ability to affect change in the outside world begins with our ability to change ourselves. Most of us struggle with issues that seem to exist outside of ourselves, and when we get triggered we think that something outside of us has to change. Tracking is the art of following external triggers into our own cords and wounds. This doesn't mean we should ignore the outside world, or not try affect the outside world-- instead it means that changing the "outside" world only happens when we change the "inside" world. At the deepest level of truth there is no inside or outside, there is only one flow of matter and energy.
In other societies and at other times we had ceremonies and rituals that helped us work through the wounds we carry. But our culture teaches us compartmentalization and dissociation, shoving difficult things deeper into our psyche and medicating away the discomfort that bubbles up to the surface. Even a lot of modern spiritual practices teach us to "let go" of difficult emotions and painful memories. This just leads to more suppression, because what we are "letting go" of is only the top level of our wound's expression. The parts that we suppress then become the structure of the "wrong" or "bad" parts of ourselves. Those "bad" parts of ourselves form what I call the "wound" and the tools of suppression make up what I call the "wall".
Together, the wound and the wall make up the knotted cords that exist in our bodies.
The function of the wall is to keep us away from our wound, by any and all means possible. However, the goal of our wound is to constantly recreate itself and reveal itself through external (and internal) situations. When we don't process our wound and instead wall it off, the wound sends out cords to the external world, externally recreating the karmic information held inside. As this process occurs, our wall responds by externalization and dissociation. Our wall tells us our problems are external, even as our wound has a fundamental part in those external creations. In the yogic tradition, this is what is called "getting caught in maya"-- maya being the fascinating and sticky entanglements that appear to exist outside of us.
This is why we recreate the same situations over and over again, and also why we become embittered by the world. If we grew up with alcoholic parents, we gravitate towards alcoholics later in life. A part of it is that we create the relationships that we know, but the deeper part is that the alcoholic is mirroring back our wound to us-- for most children of alcoholics that wound tells us that fixing our alcoholic parent is our responsibility. And when we fail in that job (as anyone who has tried to fix an alcoholic will attest!) we stay stuck in our cycle. To break that cycle, we have to feel even more deeply into our wound. We have to journey into the scattered and fragmented parts of ourselves.
The wound that tells us to fix an alcoholic pattern is actually a part of our wall-- underneath that wall is a scared child, who responds to the fear and uncertainty of their situation by creating a contract with their wall-- if I fix this other person then I'll be OK. The lack of Okayness they feel is actually their own wound, but as long as the wound is externalized and not worked through it can't be healed.
To embark on the journey inward means making a commitment to explore our dark corners, to feel deeply into our suffering. This is not an intellectual process, it is a feeling process. And this is where tracking comes in.
When we truly understand that the external world is an extension of our self, we can use external situations to learn about ourselves.
When this happens our relationship with conflict will change. If you've seen me in the clinic, then you know one of the practices I teach is called "having difficult conversations". Many people hate difficult conversations, but not for the reasons they think.
When I track people in the clinic about difficult conversations, they usually say something like-- I can't talk to my partner Joe because they'll get mad. Through tracking, I help people understand that its not Joe's anger that makes them unable to talk to them, its their reaction to their partner's anger. The first step of tracking is owning your decisions. Remember the job of the wall is to tell us that our problem is outside of us-- and indeed there is some truth in it. Maybe Joe's anger is a problem. But as long as that problem only exists externally, we are doomed to recreate it. Because the part of us that is reacting to Joe's anger-- maybe our fear about anger, maybe our fear about making someone unhappy with us-- our wound-- has manifested Joe in order to bring attention to itself.