Seeking to understand how to move forward

Hi community,

I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to answer this questionnaire, since I believe some of the issues I am having or have had are partly due to running my own experimentations with spiritual practices.

I’ll keep it brief and straight to the point.

Q1. What are your symptoms and how long have you had them? Are your symptoms primarily physical, psychological, or both?

  • Psychological symptoms: Anxiety, racing and intrusive thoughts, mood swings, irritability.
  • Physica symptoms: Automatic kriyas/asanas, headaches, rapid and shallow breathing, tingles and related sensations in legs and arms.

Q2. Are your symptoms ongoing, or intermittent? If intermittent, when are they most likely to occur – during what kind of activity and/or time of the day?

  • Ongoing for the most part.

Is your sleep affected?

  • I’m not sure.

Q3. Do you consider your situation with kundalini to be the result of spiritual practices, or do you regard it to be spontaneous?

  • Result of spiritual practices.

Q4. What sort of spiritual practices have you been engaged in, if any? How long? How often?

  • In the past: Constant breath awareness, chakras scans, continuous inner energetic body centering, continuous pineal gland attention centering.
  • More recently: Spinal Breathing, Samyama and Deep Meditation (no more than recommended durations), as well as ongoing breath awareness through the day.

Are you aware that excessive spiritual practice can aggravate kundalini, often with a delayed reaction?

  • Yes.

Q5. Do you consider yourself to be “sensitive” to spiritual practices?

  • Possibly, but not necessarily.

If so, with what practices, and what sort of measures have you taken to accommodate your sensitivity?

  • I’m not sure which practices I could be sensitive to. The only measures I’ve taken are to scale back for a few days, as well as frequent practice routine and baseline practice modifications.

Q6. Do you think drugs have contributed to your kundalini situation?

  • Most certainly. I’ve been smoking cigarettes to cope with the anxiety, and have been prescribed Xanax on several occasions, but I never even took it.

Q7. Have you experienced traumatic events in your life that may have a bearing on your current symptoms?

  • Yes.

Q8. Is your sexual lifestyle affecting your symptoms?

  • I’m not sure.

Are you aware that obsessively limiting sexual release can increase kundalini energy and symptoms?

  • Yes.

Q9. What is your general diet? Are you aware that a lighter diet can stimulate kundalini?

  • Not that healthy, but not the unhealthiest either.

Q10. Do you engage in moderate exercise regularly, like walking, yard work, etc?

  • Not really. I mostly sit in front of a computer when I’m at work (full-time office job) and watch a lot of TV and play video games when I’m at home.

Are you aware that regular exercise can help stabilize (“ground”) kundalini symptoms?

  • Yes.

Q11. Are you a highly devotional person?

  • I’d say so.

Are you aware that excessive devotional activity, satsang or spiritual study can aggravate an active kundalini?

  • Yes.

Q12. Are you engaged in ordinary daily activities like a job, school, family, parenting, social activity, service to others?

  • Full-time office job, with very little social interactions.

Are you aware that such activities, undertaken without spiritual intention or expectations, can help ground excessive kundalini energies?

  • I was not.

Q13. Have you been examined and treated by a medical doctor or mental health professional for your symptoms in the past? If so, what was the result?

  • Yes. In most cases, it was to get time off work because the symptoms were interfering too much with my ability to get work done.

Q14. Are there other factors and/or measures you are taking in relation to your situation that are not covered above?

  • I don’t think so.

Q15. Optional: What is your approximate age (teen, 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.)? What is your gender? We ask because the manifestation of kundalini symptoms can be affected by these factors.

  • 28, male.
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PS (can’t find the button to edit the original post):

Other physical symptoms: occasional general weakness and numbness, and intermittent energy movements of varying intensity.

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Hi qspadone,

At the bottom of each post are three little dots. If you click on them it will show you more options including a pencil icon. The pencil icon is for editing your post.

I practiced AYP daily for 5 years, didn’t achieve any sort of pleasant experiences that others describe, just increased inner silence (and at the beginning, when I wasn’t practicing correctly, some strong side effects - which is how I knew it worked and why I stuck with it). In the past year, I felt stagnant so I increased my practice to two cycles in the morning, one in the evening.

I became increasingly sensitive and irritable and it took me quite a while to connect the dots because lots of other things were going on in my life. I decided to decrease AYP to only twice a day 15min and do Theravada samatha instead, focusing on the breath for 45min after each short AYP cycle. I think things improved. But they really improved after I stopped with AYP altogether and did only samatha. Even when I was feeling down a lot, samatha uplifted me significantly. I also managed to speak with a very experienced Theravada teacher who told me that “I can’t get there just by discipline, it has to feel good”, so I started focusing more on that: fixing my routine, cleaning up my life, rather shorten my practice and go sleep earlier, eat well, think more about my conduct and thoughts in daily life (Sīla, yamas/niyamas) (also because during samatha I can clearly see the impact of my thoughts and conduct, and somehow much clearer than during my AYP practice). It’s still in the process, I more or less just began

It sounds to me like you could benefit from something similar: focusing more on feeling well, noticing what makes you feel worse and changing that, reducing your practice to a minimum for a while if it helps you to tease out what’s going on, skip your evening practice and listen to music instead, change your routine, go for a walk somewhere nice, see how it makes you feel

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