Becoming a Buddha

Hamish, 40, Male, London

I was watching some confronting videos on the topic of non-duality and around that same time I began practising yoga in a hot sauna and began crying from time to time. Something in my body was changing. During a psychedelic trip, several huge knots in my neck and back broke apart and I fell off my bed, dangled like a puppet and experienced some bliss. After that, that same night, I was dancing to Pink Floyd, throwing shapes and moving in a very energetic way. This was happening in such a way that I didn't feel I was moving any longer, rather something (and something very powerful in fact) was involved instead.

A week later, at a theatre show, my shoulder began rotating by itself. In the months that have followed, my whole body has been healing and reconstructing itself and this has even included self-dentistry (my finger goes into my mouth to re-align my wisdom teeth...), full on spontaneous yoga happens also now, whenever I allow it, as well as spontaneous walks around town. Most perplexing is that the kriyas (spontaneous movements caused by moving energy) move my palms to my forehead and there, as well as on my crown, they have been engraving a Buddha-like mark as depicted on ancient paintings and engravings. It scabs over, heals, and the process is repeated. This of course has been very daunting and confusing but also empowering. I don't know if my hands will continue to make these red marks on my head forever (they run along the meridian lines), or whether it is a symptom of the kundalini, and something that can happen when there is a lot of energy in the system. It may be kundalini's way of aggressively trying to open up my third eye and crown chakras. 

I experienced a night of despair that was short-lived when a big shift in energy from “seeking” to “being” took place, but other than that, despite the odd messiah complex here and there, so far this journey has been beautiful, magical, enlightening, empowering, interesting, and beyond anything I could have imagined.

That is the story so far, but it should be said that I am only 1.5 years into this process and it is sobering to hear the challenges and nightmares that others are going through. I suspect I may also have some dark times ahead. Who knows? It seems that often the first year or two of Kundalini can be quite magical and around four or five years into the process the demons can suddenly surface!

I have never felt ashamed about what was happening to me nor have I felt ridiculed, though I did feel a lot of concern from my friendship group who simply thought that I had messed myself up by taking too many psychedelics and that I needed help. This concern is of course coming from a good place and it's understandable.

There was a phase in the process early on which I have termed “the twilight zone”. This started when I had to leave work because I kept falling into a more expansive state of awareness which was interrupting my chores and routine. I took time off work and spent the next few weeks or months (hard to remember now) mainly going through dramatic kriyas on my yoga mat. I would wake up in the night, shift to my yoga mat on the floor, go through movements, and then go back to bed. It was during this phase that my hands started scratching my forehead and scalp. You can imagine my surprise when I looked in the mirror to find out what my hands had been doing and was confronted by a large red mark on my forehead in the shape of a “U”. My reaction was in fact quite comical. The energy I was feeling at the time was something akin to the Norse god Loki and so I said with a cheeky grin. “I'm back baby!”

So far, “the twilight zone” has been the trickiest part of my awakening. The reason is that it seemed like my logical mind was having to take a step back, and my intuition had taken over. Whilst before I was guided by sensible, practical, and logical decisions, I was now guided by numbers, snippets of songs, spoken words in my head, and things I would read and see on the internet. There was a great deal of confusion as to when I was actually being guided by a higher intelligence or just making things up. It wasn't easy to tell the difference. This big change in gears was a little akin to madness, or a heavy psychedelic trip (albeit without visual changes) and I confess that there was a period of about three days where I wondered if I shouldn't check myself into a psychiatric ward, knock on the door while bearing this mark on my head and declare, “I think I may have lost the plot”.

Thankfully, my trust in the process was so strong that eventually “the twilight zone” stabilized. My guess is that I am still very much in it but it has become my everyday reality.

What is happening now is a loss of the desire to eat so much, an increase of energy, a natural falling away of drinking habits, a constant seeing of the number 33 which I believe relates to the number of vertebrae in the spine, and non-stop spontaneous yoga.

My belief is that every challenge and difficulty on the journey is there for a reason and they all give way to a deeper sense of peace and expansion at which point we are ready for the next challenge. Eventually this process should become seamless and more enjoyable. I kind of see my role in this as a comedian and I enjoy defusing some of the tension that surrounds awakening. It can all get very serious sometimes so I enjoy cracking jokes about it, seeing the fun side of kundalini, and having complete faith in the process.