The Big Snake
This happened about two months ago. I was doing yoga in my master bedroom overlooking Diver’s Cove. I could hear the waves. It was at night, cold and dark. The yoga teacher had had me doing major stomach crunching poses and exercises.
At the end, she put me into Shavasana, the part of yoga where you lay on your back, close your eyes and “commune” with nature or whatever you wanna call it.
The point of Shavasana is to find the inter-connectedness of us all, everyone and everything. We are one and we are forever. Or something like that. I don’t know. I sort of don’t care. I am a numbers person. I started my professional life working for a regional investment bank in Los Angeles and then moved to New York to work for a huge commercial bank. Today, I do the financing for my real estate company. It is all about the numbers. It is empirical.
In any case, there I was lying face-up on the floor with my arms outstretched. My stomach muscles started to cramp and I thought the teacher had crunched me too much. Something surely was wrong. The spasms were too much.
The cramping turned into a thrashing cylinder about five inches in diameter. It was in the middle of my belly, starting above my crotch and moving upward. It was writhing like a living thing. I felt it go toward my chest and I thought maybe it was a heart attack or a stroke. I wanted to stop it, roll over and get that pipe out of my body.
Instead, the flesh of my neck and my face started writhing, too. The big pipe was moving upward.
Then I knew it was not a big pipe.
It was a big snake. It too was about five inches in diameter. I think it was black. I think it was male. I knew it was not stopping. I knew the snake wanted something.
It wanted out.
Suddenly and somehow the top of my head no longer existed and the big snake was sliding out through my cranium. It was in a hurry. It was rushing, pushing as fast as it could go. It still started at my crotch, rose upward through my stomach along my spine, through my chest, my throat, and then out my skull. My brain up there was totally open and exposed.
The big snake was so monstrously long not all of him could get out. He accelerated instead. He no longer was just rushing. He was frantic. The snake had to get out and I had to let him. I had to stay open.
After it seemed hours, the snake was slowing down, decelerating and I could shut it down, roll over, finish it. But I did not. More of him needed out. After a time, though, he petered out and I did roll over and struggled into sitting. I was asking myself what just happened? The yoga teacher was looking at me strangely and I told her.
She said, “You just experienced Kondalini.” She said it was extremely rare. She said it was associated with a spiritual breakthrough, but also dangerous. Was I okay?
Wikipedia says, “Kundalini is usually described as lying coiled at the base of the spine, represented as either a goddess or sleeping serpent, whose energy is waiting to be awakened. It has been called an unconscious, instinctive or libidinal force, or mother energy or intelligence of complete maturation. It involves the Kundalini [the big snake] physically moving up the central channel [your spine] to reach within the Saharara Chakra at the top of the head.”
I talked to several friends who had practiced yoga for decades. They all know about Kundalini and they all seemed jealous. None had ever experienced it and they all wanted it. They said it was the ultimate point of yoga: to achieve oneness with the “universal cosmic power.”
It also is closely associated with psychotic breakdowns and often linked with migraines, irregular heartbeat, deep depression, antisocial tendencies and disrupted sleep patterns.
Some psychologists think it is perilous, and in the yoga literature one is cautioned against attempting it without the guidance of a yogi master.
As for me, I think of it as The Big Snake. He wanted to get out. He had to get out. It was not particularly associated with me; I just happened to be in the neighborhood when he awakened and began writhing. I was a convenient vessel for the Big Snake to get from one place to the next. That is it.
I go to my secret cove in Laguna and stare out.
Michael Ray grew up in Corona del Mar and lives in Laguna Beach. He is a real estate entrepreneur involved in many non-profits.
