Jeff Carreira: Today I’m speaking with Dorothy Walters, the author of The Kundalini Poems, and Kundalini Wonder. We’re going to be speaking about mystery schools, the miracle of Kundalini awakening, and the need for deep spiritual work in this time.

Dorothy, thank you so much for joining me today. How did you initially get involved with Kundalini?

Dorothy Walters: I had a very unusual experience. Ordinarily people are told they should practice, learn about Kundalini, and gradually explore it with a teacher, because it’s very tricky and it can do all sorts of weird things. That was not the path that I followed. I was living in Kansas in 1981, and Kundalini was virtually unknown in the United States. I didn’t know anyone who had ever heard of Kundalini.

One day I was in a personal crisis. I also happened to be reading a book that mentioned Kundalini, but it did not tell you how to do it. It didn’t say much about it – It was only two pages. But somehow at that moment in my life, I suddenly felt that I could bring those energies up.

Now, you’re not supposed to be able to do that. You’re supposed to practice for years and live in a cave and eat only grass. I’m kidding, of course!

But I thought I could try. And so I simply concentrated on arousing the energies first in the lower chakras and then bringing them up to my head, because I knew that was where they were supposed to go. Within minutes, energy shot from the base of my spine to the crown. My head opened. The descriptions that are given in classical literature say it’s like a thousand lotus petals opening, and that’s exactly what it felt like. There are pulsations in your brain, and it does feel like a flower opening. And that’s how it started.

I was thrown into complete ecstasy. I didn’t even have a word for that – I didn’t even know how to pronounce the word “chakra”. I didn’t know what a chakra was! They always say, “find a teacher,” but I didn’t know anybody. Where do you find a teacher in Kansas in 1981?

But I did have a teacher, and that teacher was the inner teacher. I thought of it as the inner guru, and it led me from one stage of ecstasy to another all summer long. I was a teacher, and I had the summer mostly off from work. So every morning I just felt this intense ecstasy. And finally, one day I just lay on the floor and stretched out my arms. And I said, “Here I am. God take me.”

So ecstasy was my teacher. But I did not have the word “Kundalini”. I finally found one person who knew what Kundalini was. She had been with Osho at his ashram and knew about it. I described to her what was happening, and she told me I was having ecstasy.

That was 1981. I started keeping a journal, and ultimately wrote a book about the whole experience. Later on I started writing reflections about Kundalini on a blog. Not how to do it, not what the chakras are, but rather my thoughts about Kundalini and how it impacted different aspects of our lives, and of the world and society. And what is contained in this book, Kundalini Wonder, is the compilation of these thoughts and reflections over many, many years.

Jeff Carreira: The book covers Kundalini in relationship to creativity, to past lives, near death experiences, and spiritual life in general. And I wanted to ask you, who is the book for? Why did you write it, and who do you think is going to benefit?

Dorothy Walters: I did not think of an audience. I wrote it for myself, but what I feel about spiritual work is that it’s my job to set the table, and that anyone who is hungry can come and feast. That’s who it’s for. It’s for the right people, and they will find it. I want them to find it, and I pray that the right people will find this book.

Jeff Carreira: One of the themes in the book is the evolutionary leap that humanity is taking, and the responsibility that those of us who have experienced Kundalini have to offer support and guidance at this time of challenging transition.

Dorothy Walters: I very much feel that way. I feel that we are in the transition. It’s not going to happen, it is happening, and we are right in the middle of it right now. I was told internally at the beginning of my Kundalini experience that at first I would not have anyone to guide me or share with on this journey. For 15 years I had almost no one. But I was told that as time went on I would meet more people. And I was told that the number of people undergoing this experience would increase exponentially. And I think that’s where we are now.

I feel blessed to have gone through the whole process when nothing was known. And now it seems like Kundalini is this buzzword, but often that buzzword is pretty superficial and shallow. And people are writing and talking about it, and thinking they’re having experiences. And actually they’re just touching the surface, I think.

Jeff Carreira: That’s another point that comes up many times in your book. Of course on the positive side, it’s great that Kundalini is known now and many people are talking about it. And then there’s also the negative side, which is that it’s often reduced to something that is less than what you recognize it to be.

I struggle with this as well, because there’s two ways in which you support the evolutionary leap. One way is to support people in having profound, authentic spiritual experiences. And the other is to introduce people to the idea and educate them to the place where they can have that kind of experience to begin with.

I operate an online membership that I think of, in my own mind, as a kind of modern-day mystery school operating virtually. I use the term metaphorically, drawing on the ancient Greek mystery schools and the ancient Egyptian traditions.

I think of mystery schools as gatherings of people who used practices to let go of their normal conditioned conceptions of reality, enter into unknown possibilities, and then become illuminated by possibilities beyond the current paradigm so they could bring those possibilities back and live them together.

So in that general sense, I think of the work I’m doing as a mystery school. We use practices like meditation, study, and philosophical inquiry to question the assumptions that condition our perception of reality so that we can begin to experience possibilities beyond them. Before we go any further, I wanted to say that and get your impression of that use of the term “mystery school.”

Dorothy Walters: I love it, and I think it’s much needed at this time.

As we know, the outer world is in chaos. Institutions are crumbling, most notably governmental institutions, and we are all very concerned. Things are literally falling apart. In Yeats’s words, “the center does not hold”; “the falcon cannot hear.”

We are going through a remarkable time, because while the outer world is disintegrating – the chaos in government, the violence all over the world – the inner world is being reconstructed. It is rebuilding. It is being recreated. This is happening everywhere. People are waking up to the truth of the inner realities and the inner truth of who they are, which has very little to do with what is happening in the outer world.

So it is as though we are falling apart and reconstructing at the same time, which is of course a paradox. How can this happen? And yet it is happening. No one can predict what the final outcome will be, but there is a process going on right now of moving into a higher level of consciousness.

People are having experiences. They are waking up. They are developing faculties they never dreamed they could have. Their consciousness is expanding.

Jeff Carreira: Yes, and many people reading this will have had experiences far beyond what they once thought of as normal.

At this point, almost everyone has heard the famous Einstein quote that “no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” We all think we know what it means, but part of what it really implies is that we are never going to think our way through these problems, no matter how hard we try.

You can see that in something like climate change: lots of very smart people have been thinking about it and working on it for a long time, and yet there is still some other ingredient required – an X factor.

So to access a different level of consciousness, it is almost like jumping across a river. The river is a little too wide for you to simply step across. You actually have to leave one consciousness and enter another. That is where I see the metaphor of entering into the unknown: people need to learn to let go of their conception of reality.

In the current paradigm, we overemphasize intelligence and logical thinking and assume that means we have to think harder or better. To me, it really means we have to let go of the way we’re thinking and take the risk of entering into not-knowing, so that we become available for insight and creative revelation that can’t make it through the filters of the current paradigm. And I’m assuming, from reading your book, that you see it the same way.

Dorothy Walters: Absolutely. What you’re talking about, whether it’s the ancient mysteries or current spiritual work, involves a dramatic shift of consciousness. And Kundalini is the ultimate form of that shift, because once you go through an experience like that you can never go back. You enter a state of consciousness you didn’t even dream existed, a different way of relating to the world, of knowing the world.

I think that in the end, when we ask, “What is all this about? Who is God?”, love tends to be the answer. There is a great field of love, and when you go through these dramatic shifts of awareness, you enter into that love stream, that love field. I’ve concluded that we’re never going to think our way to God. We can think our way toward God, perhaps, but we’re not going to think our way all the way there. Our mental systems just aren’t that large. But we can enter into the love field, and we can feel it.

To me, that was the shocking discovery. It wasn’t something you thought or talked about conceptually. It was something you felt in your body. I basically wasn’t aware I had a body, because I was so mental – and you probably were too; that’s what education often does to us. You can’t fully “know” God mentally, but you can feel God, at least to the degree that human beings can bear it.

There’s that old myth about the woman who asked a god to appear in his true form. He did, and she immediately turned to ash. That’s what would happen to us if the full force appeared. But as much as we can handle, we can feel.

Jeff Carreira: Yes, though I’d say it’s not just bits and pieces. Sometimes it feels like overwhelming streams from the great source. And I love what you said, that you can’t think your way to God, but you can think your way toward the door.

Part of the mystery, as I see it, is using the mind to undo its own limitations. Alfred North Whitehead said, “It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.” The obvious things in our current paradigm are the deepest assumptions: that you are a separate person, that the world is separate from you, and so on. If you learn to question them deeply enough, you get to a place where you realize you don’t know. And when you’re truly at that “I don’t know,” you’re at the door. But from the door, you still can’t walk in by yourself.

Dorothy Walters: Right. You have to be available to it, or be dramatically plunged into it when you’re ready. There’s always a wild card – something no one could possibly predict. I think of people with elaborate life plans and I have to laugh, because there is always the possibility that something utterly unexpected will happen and change everything.

That has happened to many of us in different ways, and I believe more and more people are having those kinds of wild-card experiences now.

Jeff Carreira: I think even more people are having them than we realize, but they’ve been conditioned to ignore them. Sometimes I tell people that their effort to force an experience is exactly what blocks them from recognizing the one they’re already having. Often I’m just trying to help people relax.

Dorothy Walters: That’s a good approach. We’re trained to work hard, and we bring that same mentality to spiritual life. But it’s not quite the right kind of effort. It’s more like sitting at God’s door and waiting there patiently, like a beggar at the door, humbly asking to be let in.

People need to understand that they are not going to make this happen. They can allow it to happen. They can let it awaken them. But they are not going to manufacture it any more than they can make the sun shine when it’s cloudy. These are things you allow, but you can prepare.

That’s what I would say to people who ask, “How can I have Kundalini?” I can’t tell you how to make it happen, but I can tell you that you should prepare in case it does. Be humble. Prepare for mystery. The wild card is always going to remain a mystery, but you can be ready to be taken by it.

I don’t know anyone’s karma. I don’t know whether someone will have a Kundalini experience, a non-dual experience, or something else. But I do know that preparation means becoming willing to be taken.

And that was true in my own journey. I never set out to find a teacher in any formal sense. I learned from many people, but I learned most of all to be led through the experience by a consciousness wiser than my own. Ecstasy is not always easy to accept, especially if it suddenly appears and you don’t even have a name for it. You have to be able to say, “This is wonderful. This is divine. This is sacred.”

Jeff Carreira: You speak a great deal in your book about ecstasy and bliss. There’s a beautiful passage where you talk about hearing someone speak about these things, but not feeling the bliss in them, and wondering, “Where is the bliss?” I’m curious what you mean by those words, because I think they’re easily misunderstood.

Dorothy Walters: They are difficult words, but they’re the only ones we have. Bliss and ecstasy are ultimately indescribable, but some of us keep trying.

First of all, it’s a somatic experience. It is bodily. It has a kind of quasi-erotic quality – not in an ordinary sexual sense, but in the sense of being infused with warmth, joy, happiness, love, and sacred aliveness. The best definition I ever heard was from a student who said, “Oh, I get it. It’s like sex, only different.” That’s crude, but in a way it’s true. It’s spiritual energy, like sexual energy, but transfigured.

It has no particular starting place and no particular ending place. It is simply there. It’s like being turned on without wanting anything more, and without any need attached to it. It is complete in itself, and it has a deeply sacred quality.

For me, that is what connection to the divine means. I can’t really connect conceptually. I can think about the divine, but I can’t get very far that way. When this comes, though, I know: Yes, this is it. This is divine union. This is divine presence.

If you read Greek literature and similar traditions, that’s why you find so many stories about union with a god or goddess. Why would people have imagined such things? Because that is what ecstasy feels like. Not literally, of course, but it feels like being joined with something divine.

You don’t need to know more than that. You can feel it. And I believe this is the state more and more people will enter as this transformation unfolds. Near-death experiencers describe states of rapture, beauty, wonder, and unconditional love. Some women have even described childbirth in ecstatic terms. Most of us don’t live in ecstasy day to day, but it can happen.

I think, metaphorically, it’s the state the angels are in: an ecstasy of bliss. And I believe that as humanity develops, there will be circles or bands of ecstasy – communities of people inspiring one another and exchanging blessed energies of love.

Jeff Carreira: Even listening to you describe it, I can feel it. I feel it in my head, very strongly, and then in my toes, and running along my spine.

Dorothy Walters: Yes, and one of the interesting things is that you begin to feel the energies of other people. I had a funny experience once with a plumber who came to the house. He wasn’t someone I would have thought of as spiritually significant at all, just a big, sturdy, ordinary man. We were standing in the kitchen waiting for something, and suddenly I began to feel his energy. It was sweet. Very gentle, very kind.

I thought, “This is odd. He’s not someone I know intimately. He’s just a nice man.” But I’ve had that experience many times. It can happen with strangers in a grocery line or standing beside you at a bus stop. A feeling will come over you, and you realize: that’s a beautiful person.

Jeff Carreira: And I think some people don’t understand why that kind of experience matters. But for me, the head-expansion, the tingling, the ecstatic charge I sometimes feel when teaching, its value isn’t just that it feels good. It does feel good, but that’s not the point. The point is that it opens access to a different consciousness. You begin to see things you don’t see otherwise. New possibilities become available, and new connections get made.

Dorothy Walters: Exactly. It can happen with works of art, too. Rothko is a perfect example. I used to wonder what people were seeing in those paintings – those big bands of color. Then one day I really experienced a Rothko painting, and I thought, “This is intense. This is powerful.” I could feel the energy in it.

And I’ve felt that in sacred places too, especially in Ireland. I don’t often feel that kind of thing in ordinary places in the United States, but in Ireland I visited sacred wells and other sites where I could literally feel energy rising up from the ground through my feet and all the way through my body.

At Tara, before we even entered the site, I felt an extraordinary ecstatic current. And our guide, who was a feminist, said, “They’ll tell you this place belongs to the patriarchal line, but before that, this was the Great Mother’s place. You are standing on her root chakra.” When she said that, the whole place seemed lit up. It was blessed. It felt like unconditional love.

So yes, I think we are all moving in that direction. More and more people will feel these things, and eventually there will be circles or groups of people joined in that kind of consciousness without losing their individuality.

Jeff Carreira: And part of the mystery path, it seems to me, is the dismantling of the current paradigm by using the mind to undercut the assumptions that shape our perception. There’s a real risk in that. It can feel like falling apart, but that’s part of initiation.

Then, on the other side, there is ecstasy and creativity. One of the things you describe beautifully in your book is opening up to a kind of creativity far beyond the ordinary. Even in this new poetry book, Kundalini Wonder, it sounds like the poems came through differently.

Dorothy Walters: They did. I’ve written poetry since I was a child, but this was different. These poems came very quickly, almost as though they were given. It felt gifted. They seemed to come from another place, and for me that place was Kundalini.

That connects with an earlier kind of initiation I had. When I was about sixteen, I met an English teacher at the local college who was a Christian Scientist, and for a while I was drawn to that church. One of their central statements was: “There is no life, truth, intelligence, or substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is all-in-all.” There is something very Eastern in that, and very true.

Through that influence I underwent an initiation of sorts. It had many of the qualities of later spiritual awakening: people seemed beautiful, the world seemed beautiful, and love seemed to be the essence of everything. It didn’t have the same bodily dimension that later Kundalini brought, but it still changed my view of life. I saw that the purpose of life was not to make money or become famous, it was to dedicate oneself to something greater.

And yes, I’m also feeling that energy from you right now. It’s funny. I feel it in my chair.

But even before all this, I already had a sense that I was somehow deconditioned. From an early age I knew I didn’t want to dedicate my life to becoming rich or famous, and I’ve succeeded admirably in not becoming either one. A great many people sleepwalk through life and simply accept the limits set for them by social conditioning. They never wake up to what is possible.

Jeff Carreira: Earlier we talked about how these ideas are becoming more available, but also how they’re often diminished or trivialized. One feature of the current paradigm is the assumption that life is about what we can get from it. And people bring that mentality into spirituality, too. They approach Kundalini or awakening as something they want in order to get an experience, or improve their lives.

I understand that impulse, and I’m not condemning it. But the deeper opportunity is not about what you get. It’s about giving your life to something beyond you, something larger than your personal agenda. You realize you are tiny – really just one small piece of an immense unfolding. But when you awaken into what you’re part of, even that tiny place has significance.

Then mystery initiation becomes the movement from seeing life as something we use for ourselves to seeing ourselves as part of something so vast and glorious that we want to give our lives to it.

Dorothy Walters: Yes, and then you want to help others along the way, especially those who have no one to talk to. Those are the people I’ve always felt called to serve. They say, very simply, “I have no one.” And I feel my task is to say, “You can talk to me.”

One of the things I try to help people understand is that spiritual life is all-consuming. It’s not a hobby. It is, as a friend of mine once said, “the only game in town.” Some people hear that and recoil – they want a tidy, comfortable life. But that’s because they haven’t yet had the experience that makes total devotion make sense.

An ecstatic life is still a difficult life. You still go through hardships. You still have to face your own emotional, psychological, and physical blocks. The process brings your issues up. It brings them right into your face until they are dealt with. Sometimes it even takes you back to your earliest wounds.

But the ecstasy carries you through the pain. Once you’ve had that experience, you have a rope to hold on to. Even in hard times, you know what is possible. It’s as if you’re first carried to the top of the mountain, shown the beauty, and then the next day you wake up at the bottom and have to climb with your hands and knees. But now you know what’s at the top.

And yes, Jeff, I’m still feeling these vibrations from you. It’s very unusual.

Jeff Carreira: That’s helpful for me to hear, because for twenty years I lived in a spiritual community where Kundalini wasn’t central. We knew about it, but it tended to be treated as a distraction, or at least as potentially dangerous. The priority was non-dual awakening and spiritual freedom. Kundalini experiences weren’t considered bad, exactly, but they were seen as something that could throw people into difficult territory.

Then, on a retreat in 2001, I had a powerful experience that I didn’t understand in those terms at the time. I woke up in the middle of the night with pain at the base of my spine and a strange sense that something was wrong. I walked around the room, thinking I might need medical help in the morning. Then I sat back down on the bed, and the instant I did, it was as if a fire hose of white light shot through the top of my head.

It roared. It felt almost external at first, and when I closed my eyes the light was still there, but now on the inside. It lasted maybe twenty seconds. I literally said out loud, “Oh shit.” It was that overwhelming.

Later, when I talked with my teacher about it, he was interested but also reluctant to make too much of it. It happened – let it go. But when you and I spoke years later, you helped me recognize that the experience had become a kind of inner guide. After that, I seemed to navigate more by energetic openings, by feeling which direction had life in it, whether it was art, teaching, a book, or a relationship. I just hadn’t fully understood what was happening.

And I suspect there are many people who have had energetic experiences, though not always dramatic ones, without realizing what they are.

Dorothy Walters: Absolutely. Kundalini makes you much more sensitive. You feel things in the body, and because of that you begin paying attention to subtle realities that would otherwise pass right by.

That’s one reason I think these experiences need to become more accepted in our field of relationship. When I talk about a “virtual mystery school,” I mean a community where people can speak openly about these realities. If I accept that this is real, and you accept that it’s real, and others accept it’s real, then together we create a space where these experiences can be understood and shared.

We all experience them differently, of course, just as people hear music differently. But still, there is a shared field. I feel very blessed to be part of it.

And to be honest, I do feel I was a kind of pioneer. An early model, you might say. Early models are imperfect, but they help make the path easier for those who come after. For many years I told almost no one. Then eventually I realized it was time to speak, because we have to be teachers to one another. This is still relatively new ground.

I once wrote in my journal that I would almost rather run into the street naked than tell anyone about these experiences. They were that private, that sacred. But I came to feel that sharing them was necessary, even though it meant sacrificing some privacy.

There are people who cannot bear to share such things, and I respect that. But when people do allow me to post or share their experiences, I think it helps others enormously. Knowing about Kundalini in the abstract is one thing. Hearing from someone who has actually lived it is quite another.

Jeff Carreira: That reminds me of a man on one of my Montreal retreats. He had been on the path a long time, and during the retreat he suddenly remembered a powerful awakening experience he had had twenty-five years earlier and completely forgotten. As he remembered it, you could feel it come alive in him again.

He had always wondered why he was so committed to spiritual work, and then he realized that experience was still driving him, whether he remembered it or not. That’s one of the beauties of something like Kundalini. It doesn’t depend on our understanding to work. It’s already working in people. But when we become conscious of it, we can begin cooperating with it.

Dorothy Walters: Yes. Sometimes I imagine that somewhere, before this life, there was a call for volunteers. Someone had to come down and introduce this energy, or at least help name it and make space for it. And I imagine I was foolish enough to say, “Oh yes, send me.” I had no idea how difficult it would be, but I do think I did the right thing.

Jeff Carreira: I’ve had a very similar feeling. I’ve even had the sense that there was some sort of soul-group meeting and someone said, “We need someone to go first, to prepare the ground,” and I volunteered before I had any idea what it would cost.

As a teacher now, I often meet people who seem in some ways older or deeper than I am, though they may not yet have the same kind of experience in this lifetime. It makes me think perhaps some of us came earlier precisely to prepare space for others.

Dorothy Walters: Yes, and that early path can be very hard, especially in youth. You know you are different from the other children, but you don’t yet know what that difference means. You only know that life is difficult in a way you can’t explain.

So I’m deeply grateful, truly, for the work you and Amy are doing in publishing writings like mine, and supporting this kind of material. Many publishers aren’t interested in it, but the audience, though small, is precious. Your support has meant a great deal to me.

And it’s also wonderful to see what’s happening with younger people now. They’ve been exposed much earlier to language and ideas that many of us never encountered when we were young.

Years ago, when I was about your age, I remember reading about Kundalini and wondering whether I could feel it. I sat down and concentrated and soon felt something in the root chakra. And my immediate response was, “Oh my Lord, I’m not ready for this.” I stopped at once. But of course, it caught up with me later.

Jeff Carreira: What do you think an experience like that white light does to the chakras? Does it clean them out?

Dorothy Walters: I can’t say with certainty, but I do think it is Kundalini awakening the system rather dramatically – opening it, sensitizing it, and clearing channels. And what often remains afterward is a heightened sensitivity. That, to me, is one of the main aftereffects. In your case, it sounds as if it awakened a greater responsiveness to subtle energy.

As for me, when I write poetry I’m often so focused on the language itself that the energetic experience becomes translated into the work rather than felt separately as bodily ecstasy. I write quickly, in a stream, and the energy goes into the poem.

A lot of what gets called poetry now, frankly, I don’t think is poetry at all. I have a real pet peeve about shallow, fashionable attitudes toward art and poetry, because they miss the sacred transmission entirely. Works of art can carry a transmission of consciousness. And many people simply don’t know that.

I’ve written many poetry books myself, so I suppose I must be a poet, but I also love the sacredness of language and place. There’s an Irish phrase I’ve always loved about “a hill where a poet once walked.” That image says so much to me about the sacredness of poetry.