Having a profound spiritual experience can feel like a bright light has suddenly illuminated your life.

Imagine your life as a large room that’s always been dark, and suddenly a brilliant light comes on and you can see everything so clearly, things you didn’t even know were there. 

You see a chest of jewels, sparkling light reflecting from perfectly cut facets, and colors you’ve never known before. You see picture books filled with images and stories from past lives. You see a window you never knew was there, and you open it and feel the exquisite freshness of the night air. You see and feel so many things, and it’s like your small known world has suddenly expanded a hunded fold. 

But…it’s still just your room. 

And for some time, what completely occupies your attention is everything that’s new to you, everything you haven’t known or experienced before. It feels like The Everything, like life is totally new and different. Like you are totally new and different. 

But it’s still your room. The same room. And all those “new” things were always there in your room, it was just too dark to see them clearly. And guess what else is in your room? All the old stuff. 

Nothing has been added and nothing has been removed just because the light has come on. The light didn’t automatically remove pre-existing mental health issues, maladaptive coping mechanisms, unresolved destructive emotional patterns and so on. 

The light turned on, and you can suddenly see things clearly, but that doesn’t mean you know what you’re looking at.

The light is on and you can see the shape and texture and movement of things, but you are still guessing at what they are. You’re making assumptions about what they are, what they mean and what significance (if any) they have. 

Just because you can see doesn’t mean you know. Seeing and knowing are not the same, but it’s a common error we make. We get a microscope and we can now see clearly tiny life forms that have always been present yet we never knew were there…but that doesn’t mean we know anything about what we are seeing. 

Instead of realizing this, we start making assumptions about what we are seeing or experiencing. And we believe our assumptions because we’ve mistaken the ability to see (perceptual acuity) with understanding. 

You’ve been framing everything as energetic and spiritual. What if they’re not? 

You use a lot of spiritual language to describe things you are experiencing. You’re assuming that’s the best framework to understand them. What if it’s not? 

What if you’re assuming they are spiritual/energetic/etheric? For ten days, try to avoid framing any of your current or past experiences in this way — are there other ways to interpret and know these experiences? 

For instance, you were in a long term codependent romantic relationship and your recent breakup was traumatic. Can you connect with and describe your feelings without using ideas such as an energetic breakage in your heart? 

You describe having “slips” where you were sloppy with your attention and consequently had to “recover and bring myself back into balance, aligning all my subtle bodies (mental, energetic, etc.) in one direction again and again, and readjusting myself into a state of harmony” — can you remove all the spiritual language and filters and frame this in a different, perhaps even mundane way? 

In other words, is there any other way to describe and understand your troubles — aside from assuming they are all spiritually or energetically based? 

I know such intense experiences can be really disorienting. And one of the hardest things to do at a time like this is to just be practical and ordinary.

Grounding is something you do energetically, sure. But it’s also something you do emotionally and mentally. If you’re just trying to ground energetically without becoming emotionally and mentally grounded, how is that going to work? That’s only one out of three bodies you need to ground. 

Emotional Grounding

Bring your emotions into the center. Give yourself space to acknowledge them, explore them, talk about them and feel them. Not as “energetic wounds” or karmic this and that. These frameworks are just ways to separate yourself from the raw, alive and messy feelings you have. Yes, you have them. So honor that and don’t try to spiritualize or intellectualize them. 

If your feelings are overwhelming, maybe they’re not normal feelings. For instance, when a person has panic attacks they experience all these heightened sensations and what they call feelings, but these are not normal emotions — they are pathological states. 

Learning to distinguish between your true emotions and pathological states is a good start. Emotions, no matter how difficult, need to be recognized and felt — and if they are very intense, you can get support for that. Pathological states are different, and they require professional treatment. 

Mental Grounding

Your life is in chaos and while you may be focused on not being “sloppy” with your attention (more spiritual focus), what you likely need more than that is to start utilizing common sense, practicality, rationality and objectivity. 

You are understandably distraught over not feeling you can trust your intuition, since it has led you to make some bad decisions. I know how confusing and terrifying that feels. But how about leaving off on the intuition and start leaning into some practicality? With your life in such upheaval, was it really the right time to get a kitten in the first place? Cats can live for 20 years — what made you think you were in a position to make a 20 year commitment to be the guardian of another life when you cannot even manage the basics of your own, single life? When you are going through immense changes? Is that really the time? 

That’s just realistic. That’s the grounded mind, stepping in to say hey, let’s think this through. Where was your mind whilst your intuition was taking you for a ride? You say Life gave you a cat, but did it?

You’re the one who went to the shelter and made the decision to adopt a kitten. It’s not like a starving stray kitten walked up to your doorstep asking for a home. You are not a passenger or a passive agent in your life, but you will continue to feel and act as if you are if you persist in over-spiritualizing and using that to keep life at a kind of arm’s distance.

Let’s be clear: Life presents you with options and limitations and you make decisions and choices and take actions. You.

Your problem isn’t that you can’t trust your intuition, it’s that you never should be making these kind of decisions based only on your intuition. Just because you had a spectacular spiritual experience does not mean you are now exempt from having to reason things out when making decisions. 

Part of being able to trust your intuition is knowing the proper place of intuition. You are over-spiritualizing and expecting your intuition to do the heavy lifting in situations where you should be using other tools. But it’s just too easy to make the error of believing these common, mundane tools like emotional intelligence and grounded reasoning and common sense are no longer needed after you’ve experienced bliss and oneness and touched the Source. 

You didn’t use your head. It’s as simple as that. And instead of seeing that this was the error, you go around in mental circles chasing the why and what does it mean and was I given this cat for this reason or that reason? You had bad judgement — it’s very mundane, very common. Also, people make poor decisions around adopting pets all the time. But you are very busy spinning out all kinds of special meanings about it — all whilst ignoring the obvious.

And this is a pattern that repeats in other areas of your life. Your mind is in overdrive spinning out useless spiritual and exotic reasons and explanations and meanings.  

So, what if you decided not to do that, to refrain from doing that? What if you decided to employ your keen observation skills to notice when you are doing that, catching yourself when you are doing that and stopping — for ten days.

NO spiritual meanings and reasons and explanations. No spiritual explanations for your anxiety, depression, obsessive thinking, difficult emotions, decisions and choices, panic attacks, suicidal feelings. No spiritual veneer whatsoever. For ten days. 

Why ten days? Well, I’d like you to make it a regular practice until you are well again, but it may seem overwhelming to make a long term commitment, so just do it diligently for ten days and see how that goes. It seems a manageable span of time to give it your best try. 

Spirituality can be ungrounding. What started out as radical clarity of perception can be the very thing that keeps you from understanding.

Because as I said, being able to suddenly see what was unseen doesn’t automatically come with the ability to understand it.

I can see, but I may not be clearly understanding what I see. Make this statement and see if it shifts your center of gravity a bit.

When you have what you interpret as a Big Deal spiritual experience, you can come to believe that is what you are — and you stop feeling and being connected to your “small” self, as though that bright light of awareness eliminated your ordinary mind, feelings and persona forever. It may seem so for a while, but you eventually adjust to this light and what you find is most likely all these elements of  your human self are still present — only you’ve been neglecting them while you were dazzled by all the bright lights, new perceptions and experiences.

The most awkward and useless thing is to keep pretending these ordinary aspects of being (everyday emotions, persona, desires, thought patterns) are not important, and that Spirit is what matters. Especially since that very penetrating bright light has most likely illuminated lots of old patterns, programs, unresolved emotions, junky habits, fears and mental health issues that you might have been able to keep somewhat under control before.

But now they are noisy and hungry and keep breaking out of their cages! So what are you going to do?

Correctly identifying your problem is the first step to seeking a solution that will actually work.

If your arm is broken, I urge you to go to a doctor first and then do your prayer and energy healing later. If you can’t start your car, you need a mechanic, not an exorcist. 

You had a profound experience, and now you define your life and all other experiences around it. But is this giving you an accurate, useful view of your life? You said your awakening happened in the winter of 2020, yet you later describe your intense struggle as going on for the past five years. So clearly you had issues prior to this spiritual experience.

You were struggling. Then you had a massive spiritual experience that seemed to reprieve some of that struggle. You felt bliss and wholeness and as you say, Big Energy. Then you started having difficulties, didn’t handle it well and the Big Energy left. Now you are struggling worse than before, perhaps worse than ever. 

You have a prior history of anxiety, panic attacks, relationship difficulties and you mentioned a “karmic pattern” of not wanting to be alive anymore. If you remove the overly spiritual language, we can just call that suicidal ideation, because I don’t know if you took action on these feelings or not. You also had some destructive “coping mechanisms” — which resurfaced after your spiritual experience and wreaked havoc on your family and yourself.  

This is not to insinuate that you were somehow just out of control prior to your spiritual experience. You had friends and family and a career you loved. You had a life that worked. I get it. But what I’m saying is that you had some underlying issues and mental health vulnerabilities, and going through this massive spiritual experience may have triggered some of these issues which now plague you. Only you are describing them as having a spiritual nature, and therefore seeking a spiritual remedy. 

You mentioned seeing a therapist and a psychiatrist, and that you are taking some meds that have been helping. Only, you have chosen not to tell the psychiatrist the whole story. This is a very personal choice and I fully understand why you would make it. However, I will point out that your doctor is giving you medication based on a diagnosis…based on incomplete information. 

This is significant and I’d like you to honestly consider the seriousness of your choice. If you are against sharing full information with your current doctor, I wonder if you couldn’t seek a second opinion from another psychiatrist — tell them the whole story and then hear them out. You don’t have to do anything based on their recommendation — that’s up to you — but at least hear what kind of diagnosis they give you and what their recommended treatment would be. 

Doctors cannot be expected to properly treat a patient when they are not given all the pertinent information. You are aware that you need psychiatric help and even accept pharmaceutical treatment, but how can you be sure you’re getting all the help you need, or the best help you can get, if your doctor is only given half the story? 

You found my website and the way I recount my experience feels familiar to you, you recognize your own illumination and subsequent struggles in my writing. You’re already biased toward believing your symptoms are spiritual and not pathological, you already framed it that way. Then you read accounts on spiritual blogs or from spiritual influencers and it seems like a match.  

If there was a website where you could read the first hand accounts of people who are suffering from, say, bipolar mania — who also feel they are having a spiritual awakening, and their subsequent troubles — would you be surprised to find their accounts also match your own experience quite closely? 

Two people very close to me had such experiences, incredible experiences with undeniable Kundalini activations. And within a few months, they started crashing, the inevitable corresponding downswing after such manic highs. The lows were brutal, excruciating and disabling. They were devastated, and so confused, because they had framed their initial experience as true spiritual awakening rather than the effect of a manic episode. That hurts, deeply, uniquely. It feels like you’ve been cast out of Eden.

Am I suggesting you’re bipolar or that the experience you call awakening was a manic episode? No. And I have no qualifications whatsoever to speak to any potential medical condition. But you asked for an outside perspective, and I’m giving it to you.

I’m saying you are biased to look at your situation through a spiritual framework and, may I add…it’s not really helping. You read spiritual blogs and get advice that helps a little, feels familiar and recognizable, but really…if I told anyone, just picked a random person off the street and counseled them to be very mindful of their thoughts and focus…wouldn’t that be generally helpful? 

You have these so called insights or intuitions, but are they? Are they helping you…because if not, what good are they? For instance, how does the insight that you were a cat in a previous life and you were ripped apart by dogs help you?

I mean, in previous lives you were many things and you suffered and died in so many ways — so by that logic everything, every experience could be traumatic. In all animal lives you were killed in some horrible way because animals in nature don’t die peacefully of old age. In previous human lives you suffered all manner of brutality and violence, from men, women, animals, horrible illness and physical afflictions. You died by fire, by the knife, by strangulation. You were a malformed baby and you were exposed to the elements to die. You drowned. So how useful or truly, how meaningful is it to have this past life insight into why you are having panic attacks when you’re around your dad’s dog? 

But you are biased toward believing these insights and uncritically give them significance, when just by the vivid description of your symptoms, a doctor would probably give you a much more meaningful and useful diagnosis and treatment. 

I am suggesting you make space to step outside your bias, outside your framework, and look at your entire experience from different perspectives. It can be from a mental health perspective, or even another one, just regain some objectivity so you can truly investigate what your problem is rather than sticking with your predisposition to believe it’s spiritual and going around in circles. You said it very well…you feel like you’re at a dead end. And I’m suggesting your bias toward this one framework and explanation is that dead end.

It’s not either or. You can have an intense spiritual experience and then have mental health crises. 

One does not necessarily invalidate the other. You can have an authentic spiritual experience and that huge energy can trigger and worsen existing mental health issues, or even trigger latent ones. 

You already have the sense that what you call Big Energy was quite a bit too much for your system to handle safely. Kundalini is notorious for shredding people’s energy fields if it’s too much. 

Kundalini is unkind.

The sweet and naive idea that you are only given what you can handle is nonsense when it comes to Kundalini. So perhaps this situation is a Kundalini activation that was too much for your system, and that triggered a series of mental health crises. 

In this framework, the initial “cause” is indeed spiritual — but what follows is psychiatric, medical. And if you keep trying to find only spiritual solutions, those solutions will be minimally effective. And maybe the psychiatric symptoms will start to recede on their own eventually, as they do in episodic illness, like bipolar disorder. But that’s really not great either, if you never realized you were having a mental health crisis and continue believing it’s spiritual. Because if it returns, you will once again be looking in the wrong places for treatment. 

It’s good and useful and important to get an accurate understanding of what the problem is. It’s essential. 

So, to your initial question: how to keep the gains while mitigating the negative effects? 

If what you experienced was a Kundalini activation, then…you can’t keep the gains. There is an important distinction between Kundalini activation and true awakening. Sometimes they happen together, but sometimes people have awakening without extreme Kundalini, and so many people have Kundalini activation without a lasting spiritual awakening. 

Kundalini is a spiritual experience. It comes and goes. It reorganizes your energy channels. When it doesn’t exceed your capacity, it either departs after doing this reorganizing or it remains, but settled and at a manageable level. 

If it’s more than you can handle, it kind of burns out your system. I imagine it’s a bit like being struck by lightning. 

Kundalini is experienced as a powerful and intelligent force, taking up residence in your body, for a time. If it’s gone, it’s not something you lost. You didn’t fail to be a proper host for this energy.

Kundalini is not your Higher Self. You did not lose your Higher Self upon its departure or anything like that. It’s like an intelligent force of nature that sometimes will activate, move in your system to either reorganize it beneficially or not (if it’s too strong) and then it goes dormant or settles to a manageable level. 

What it left behind, what you call sensitivities and energetic shredding, may be mental health crises triggered by this enormous energy. If this is true, then once you get proper treatment for those, you will be able to truly know how Kundalini has changed you.

For example, experiencing that expanded consciousness and well being, as you described it, has given you a direct experience of what is possible, even though it wasn’t permanent. You know it is there, you know it is within you — it has gone from something you have read about and believe to something you have experienced and known. 

The place where people get stuck with spiritual experiences is misidentifying them as true awakening and then trying to regain them after they have passed. With true awakening, there is no need because the fundamental change is permanent, abiding. Sure, there can be all kinds of dramatic secondary experiences or some kind of dramatic adjustment phase — these things pass, but those are not the essence of awakening. 

In true awakening, there is no concern of holding onto the gains, no fear of losing your awakening and no fear of contamination by other people’s small selves or lack of presence or indeed, your own errors or as you call them, slips. 

So if you’re trying to regain the heightened state, you’re basically looking back longingly on a transitory experience that has come and gone — one that was by its nature impermanent. Stop clinging to it, realize and accept it was a passing phenomenon, take practical measures to clear up any mental health and energetic issues triggered by it, and when you are stable you can reassess what the initial Kundalini activation and that experience gave you.

What remains of that experience? What was the gift or the insight? With all the noise and drama of your mental health issues, how can you possibly see this clearly? You’re in a crisis and need to focus on things in order of importance, and you need the clarity to distinguish what your priorities are right now.

The items you shared on your list of things you desire are attainable, once you address your mental health. It’s nothing to do with spirituality. If you want those things, I urge you to stop looking for spiritual answers and focus earnestly on regaining your mental health. 

As for mitigating the aftermath, I think you can already guess that my first and most emphatic suggestion is to stop seeing it as spiritual — even if the initial cause was. The effects may be medical, and so your best start would be to get a full and accurate diagnosis and treatment plan. 

You can experience mental health issues and have a shredded energy body. These are not mutually exclusive. You can deal with one through an honest relationship with your doctor while simultaneously working to heal up and balance your energy field. 

Go full Muggle. 

Until you get your symptoms in hand, I suggest you become as ordinary as possible. Become as practical, pragmatic and rational as you can. I know you are a deep and intelligent person, this is evident — so for a period of time, lean into that faculty and stop reaching for the spiritual, intuitive, energetic and otherwise exotic. Go back to the basics of human functioning and experience. 

When some “expanded perspective” appears, some intuitive knowing or whatever, acknowledge it gently and dispassionately, giving it no weight or meaning whatsoever, not validating or invalidating it — just as you might do for any random thought. And then gently let it go. In this way, or any other similar way (since you have meditated a long time, so you might have some established way to gently let go of obsessing thoughts) you can prevent yourself from attaching to these ideas and giving them weight and momentum. 

Does this mean you will never work with spirituality or your intuition again? No. This is just for the time of energetic and mental healing and stabilization. However, the practice might have longer reaching benefits and you might continue it in some fashion if it helps you keep your energetic space clearer. It may help you in the future to distinguish between what intuitions are actually useful by getting out of the habit of giving priority and focus to intuitions that happen to pop into your awareness. Just because something comes through that channel doesn’t mean it’s important or even true.

There is no benefit to hosting thoughts and ideas that are not useful and either cause detriment, confusion, drama or at the very least just clutter up your mental and energetic space. There are numerous bits of information that might pop up as intuitions in any given moment. A great deal of it is psychic static. Until you become skilled and intentional at using this tool of intuition, you are basically just passively allowing information debris to filter into your awareness, unable to a) control the flow and b) distinguish what is useful or real.

When you are in a mental health crisis, it’s not a great time to start actively working with this tool of intuition, other than just teaching it be quiet for a while. The tool is really amazing and cool and at some point you can really experiment with it. But it’s not a priority so for now I suggest you dial it way down.

While you’re dialing that channel way down, turn up the channels of your basic human emotional intelligence and on the mental channel,  your rational, practical, reasoning mind. Both of these will be disturbed if you’re within a mental health crisis. Start working with these gently and slowly, inviting back your ordinary emotions and feelings, making space for them and giving yourself space to feel them. 

I’m not talking about the very big feelings of despair around not being able to have a normal life. That is valid too. But I’m talking about how you feel about your breakup, how you feel about your family relationships, how you feel about your friendships.

Those are feelings. How about moods? Moods are not emotions, but it’s important to really get to know them. What kinds of moods do you experience throughout your day? What seems to bring them on? 

See if you are more comfortable and able to get into your feelings or moods. Do you really lean into your mood experiences, find it easy to pay attention to them — but maybe find it harder or less interesting to explore and feel your emotions? Or are they about the same? Be an objective observer, like a scientist who wants to become very familiar with the movement of moods and emotions.

Invite your reasoning, objective mind to interact with you when you make choices or have confusing or dramatic experiences. Make space for this input. Consult it. Listen to the tone and feel of it — how is this part of your mind different from the one that produces thought streams or thought loops? Does it sound different, have a different quality? Getting to know and recognize this mental faculty will help you distinguish this mind stream from other dramatic and irrational thought engines that might pop into your awareness. 

As for your feelings of porousness, it sounds like you’ve had your natural boundary powered down. Start to build it back up again, gently, simply. Imagine a bubble around you that has a very strong and impermeable boundary or membrane. You can see through it, but nothing can pass through it.  

Check in with it throughout the day, at first your attention will help it to reestablish — after it’s stable you won’t need to think about it as much. But for now, and some time to come, check in with it, just as you might check in with your breathing intentionally throughout the day. It’s that easy and simple. Just notice. Start when you first wake in the morning and fall asleep with a gentle awareness of it at night.

Inside this bubble is your space. If you prefer to see it as something other than a clear bubble, that is fine. Make it whatever suits you best. Just make it a boundary that clearly delineates your space from the outside world. 

Learn to keep your energy within this space. I know you feel that you are being bombarded with energy from other people, and this may be true. But it’s not like you are passively sitting there. There is some part of you that reaches out, unknowingly perhaps. Imagine part of you flowing out to meld with the other person or information stream — it’s a bit like that. Or, you can see it as extending an antennae or “feeler” out beyond your own personal space.

Learn to keep yourself within this personal bubble space. This takes practice and is subtle, especially if you are unaware that you are an active participant in this feeling of energy intruding upon you. 

You can pet and love your kitten without synchronizing your breath, just pet the cat. This kind of melding of energy might have been fine for you in the past, but you can’t handle it now, so stop it. It doesn’t mean you can’t be loving to your cat. Do you see what I mean here? 

Start noticing where you actually have control, agency. You can’t control everything, and some things will take time and stability and healing. But start noticing what you can and do have an effect on. You have a tendency to reach out and connect with energy — spaces, people, animals…whatever. This may be an entirely unconscious and reflexive way you interact with your environment. And there is nothing wrong with it at all — except now you are in a very unusual phase where your normal boundary is down.

And I want to point out to everyone reading this: even if you have very little in common with the reader who has come to us today with this difficult situation, this one point is important for just about everyone. To a shocking extent, we remain unconscious of the way our internal system “works” — as long as there isn’t a crisis or some dramatic change. But when we go through a really big shift or change (and it doesn’t have to be spiritual in nature), things stop working normally and we have no clue how to even approach fixing it. 

We don’t know the mechanics of our own systems, we don’t know what’s going on “under the hood” so to speak. And when the engine stops working properly, we sit there stranded on the side of the road. 

It’s a really good idea to start learning how your system works and working with it intentionally before you get caught up in the net of some crisis or huge life change. 

So, back to you, my dear reader. Work with this boundary and establish your personal space. It might take some time, because you’ve been through a lot energetically. There are all kinds of things in life that can temporarily mess up your boundary…very mundane things, in fact. When I got my second covid vaccine shot, I was utterly shocked to find my boundary was disabled for some weeks after. I’ve had major disruptions in my boundary after lightning storms. 

Let’s explore this idea of antennae. Please understand I’m not suggesting you have them — like some kind of cricket. But the framework is a good one to work with. So imagine you have some antennae and they come up out of your head. You can have a couple or many. However you visualize this. See them — are they metal like an old radio, or are they like an insect, or maybe soft like a snail? What do they feel like? Just investigate them for a moment. 

Then retract them back into the center of your head. Right to the very center, where they have their base.  Spend some time noticing what that feels like. You’re in your bubble with your boundary, and now you’ve retracted your antennae and they are secure in the center of your head, returned to their home base, resting, quiet. How does this change the way your body feels? Your breath? Your nervous system? 

Now, when you check on your boundary throughout the day, also intentionally withdraw your antennae back to the center of your head. 

Eventually, if you continue to do this and to notice the way it feels when they are retracted vs out, then you’ll become aware even when you’re not checking in because you’ll know by the feeling itself. Rather than going around unconscious of this activity, you’ll have developed awareness and eventually skill, and then after that, if you continue to work with this awareness, mastery. 

And that will serve you long after this crisis has passed. 

Of course we are limited here to just the bare basics, but I hope you will use these basic ideas to build from as you experiment and discover your own mechanics, your tendencies, your own system.