Dorothy Walters Transcript: Kundalini Awakening, Guides, and the Guru Within

Dorothy Walters Interview

Summary

The conversation explores kundalini as an awakening of life force and its effects on the body, mind, and subtle dimensions of experience. It considers why awakening can be ecstatic or disruptive, how emotional upheaval may precede it, and the importance of understanding and support.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is kundalini, and what happens when it awakens?
• Why can a kundalini awakening feel frightening, destabilizing, or overwhelming?
• Can emotional crisis or previous spiritual development prepare someone for kundalini awakening?
• What is the subtle body, and how is it related to auras and out-of-body experiences?

Key takeaways

• Kundalini is a universal life force that becomes conscious when it awakens.
• Awakening can bring profound ecstasy but may also expose physical, emotional, and mental blocks.
• Resistance and lack of understanding can make the process more difficult.
• Emotional crisis may create an opening through which kundalini can emerge.
• The physical body may not encompass the full range of human experience.
• Reliable guidance can reassure people who mistake kundalini symptoms for illness or insanity.

Transcript

Welcome and introduction

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 500 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the Past Interviews menu.

This project is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So, if you appreciate it and would like to contribute something, there’s a PayPal button on every page of batgap.com.

My guest today is Dorothy Walters, PhD. Welcome, Dorothy. Dorothy just had her 91st birthday. Happy birthday.

Dorothy: Thank you.

Rick: I’ll read a little bio here that she sent me. Dorothy spent most of her early professional life as a professor of English literature in various Midwestern universities. She helped to found one of the first women’s studies programs in this country and served as the director of this program for many years.

After an extended residence in San Francisco, she now lives and writes in Colorado, where she has a close relationship with the mountains as well as various streams and canyons. She underwent a major Kundalini awakening in 1981, a phenomenon totally unfamiliar to her, as well as to most of her contemporaries at the time.

Since then, she has devoted her life to researching and writing about this subject, and to witnessing the unfolding of this process within herself, as well as assisting others on a similar path through writing and other means. As someone who made her extensive journey without the direction of any external leader or guru, church, or established order, she’s a strong believer in the guru within, the inner God rather than the external authority figure or institution.

She feels that universal Kundalini awakening is the means for planetary and personal evolution of consciousness, and that evidence of planetary initiation is becoming more and more prevalent.

Her Kundalini awakening and subsequent process of unfolding are described in her memoir, Unmasking the Rose: A Record of a Kundalini Initiation. Her poems, taken from her four previous volumes, are published as Some Kiss We Want: Poems Selected and New.

Her article on Kundalini and the mystic path was included in Kundalini Rising, an anthology from Sounds True Publications. Her poems, which have been included in many anthologies and journals, have been set to music and sung at the Royal Opera House in London, as well as at Harvard University; used as texts for various sermons; read aloud in churches; included in doctoral projects; frequently quoted; and have given inspiration to many.

Recently, a pilgrim to Petra read one of her poems aloud while there. This might as well pop in a question here, Dorothy. I didn’t understand what was meant by a pilgrim to Petra. What’s Petra?

Dorothy: What is Petra?

Rick: Yeah, I hadn’t heard of it.

Dorothy: Well, Petra is a famous ancient historical site. Petra means “a stone.” It’s made entirely out of stone. It’s very ancient. And that sentence says “recently,” but I don’t think anybody could go there now. I think it’s become a war territory. But at the time, pilgrims could go there, and they enjoyed it. It’s a famous historical site.

Rick: Okay, where is it, just out of curiosity?

Dorothy: I think it’s in Syria, if I’m not mistaken.

Rick: Ah, yeah, we wouldn’t want to go there now.

Dorothy: No, not now.

Rick: I should add, finally, from your bio, that you often give counsel and referral free of charge to those undergoing spontaneous Kundalini awakening and/or spiritual transformation. Do you still do that?

Dorothy: Oh, absolutely. And it isn’t just spontaneous. Many people today are having Kundalini awakening, and they themselves are not quite sure what is going on. The first thing that I’m asked most often is to reassure them that they have not gone crazy, because it feels to some like they’ve gone crazy.

Kundalini can really upset your system, and it’s a new self that’s being created. So, people write to me. I had somebody who wrote to me just yesterday, and this dear man has been having Kundalini since he was a child. He’s had no one to talk to, and for some reason, he’s living, I think, in the East somewhere—I don’t know where. He can neither read nor write, and he said he found my site on YouTube.

I’ve done several YouTube presentations with Andrew Harvey, but that answered many of his questions. And he was so glad just to find me. They’re just glad to find somebody who has been through this and can help them manage their process. Yes, I do that regularly.

Rick: Good. I remember early on when I started doing these interviews, I interviewed a woman who started having Kundalini experiences spontaneously, and she had no idea what they were. She started doing research here and there on the Internet, and at first she thought it was some kind of disease, like Kundalini disease. Eventually, she kind of figured it out, but obviously, without the knowledge of what it is, it could be very disconcerting. Something that’s actually kind of beautiful could be frightening.

Dorothy: Oh, very much so, and it can have negative effects as well as positive. Kundalini is a two-edged sword, believe me.

Rick: Do you think the negative effects can be exacerbated if you don’t understand it and you’re kind of fighting it as opposed to going with it?

Dorothy: I would think so. I think what Kundalini wants is a clear path through your system, and it does everything it can to clear your system. And if you’ve got blocks in your system from whatever source, whether they’re physical, mental, emotional, or whatever, that’s going to be a big problem.

Kundalini will work on you until you clear those blocks, and then it’ll go to another block, and it’ll work on that block. But some people have a terrible time. Some people are disabled, they can’t work, they’re emotionally unstable, and they have a terrible time. I don’t know what the difference is. I know that some people have a very difficult time and others do not.

Rick: I suppose perhaps it depends on the blocks, how voluminous they are and how solid they are.

Dorothy: How open you are.

Rick: Another would be how open you are, how rapid the progress of Kundalini is. If it’s just a trickle, maybe it’s not going to be too disruptive, but if it’s a deluge, then it could be very unsettling.

Dorothy: Or it can be very wonderful. Mine came as a deluge, but go ahead.

Rick: Just so that we’re more or less on the same page, give us your explanation and your definition, so that when we use the term, we’ll all understand how we’re using it.

Dorothy: Kundalini is still a great mystery. I don’t know that there is any single definitive definition. It is essentially the life force. It is in everyone. We all have the life force. But generally, that life force stays in the subconscious mind.

It’s with us, but we’re not aware of it any more than we’re aware of our digestive processes or how our heart works. But when awakening occurs, the subconscious is brought into the conscious mind, and we do become aware of it, for better or for worse.

So, you can call it the life force. Some people call it the electro-spiritual flow of energy. Some people call it the beloved within, because it can act like a beloved, and it can act as though it’s making love to you from the deepest recesses of your being.

But it’s still a mystery, and I don’t think we have a full explanation yet. But it’s wonderful when it works right.

Kundalini is a two-edged sword.

Rick: This might sound like a dumb question, but couldn’t we say that all forms of life have a life force? Elephants and dogs and all kinds of animals?

Dorothy: Absolutely. Everything has Kundalini as the life force. And when we have ours, we simply become aware of it.

Rick: So, I wonder if humans are uniquely capable of becoming aware of it.

Dorothy: I don’t know what animals are aware of. They probably just accept it and think, “That’s who I am. That’s what I am and am supposed to be.”

Rick: Some people I’ve interviewed contend that Kundalini can progress over a sequence of lifetimes, that it can actually have awakened in some previous life, and then you die, and then you’re born again, and next thing you know, in this life, it picks up where it left off.

Dorothy: I’ve thought about that a lot, because I haven’t told you about my experience, which was very swift, very subtle, and very unexpected, and I can’t imagine how that happened if it did not come from a previous lifetime.

I think that you bring your subtle body in again, to the point it had developed in a previous life, because I certainly didn’t do anything to bring it on in this life except to wish for it to happen.

Rick: You just alluded to the subtle body, and perhaps we should explain that, because some people don’t understand that we have one or have any idea of what it is.

Dorothy: We all know we have a physical body, but certainly we know now that there’s another body, which I’m calling the subtle body, which is kind of like an energetic body within our physical body.

People talk about seeing auras. What are they looking at? They’re looking at, I think, the subtle body. People talk about feeling bliss and ecstasy. What’s feeling bliss and ecstasy? I think it is the subtle body.

I don’t think that it is separate from the physical body. It impacts the physical body, but basically they’re one and the same. If you can learn to see or feel your own aura, you will understand more about the subtle body. Sometimes you can see or feel your own aura stretching as far as you can stretch your arms.

Rick: We’ve all heard stories of people who are undergoing surgery and observing the operation from the ceiling.

Dorothy: That’s out of body. That would be your subtle body that goes up to the ceiling or beyond the ceiling, or goes up to the roof and sees a red shoe and comes down and tells the surgeon, “I saw a red shoe,” and they go up there and check.

Some people practice that almost regularly. They like to go out of body.

Rick: The principle we’re laying down here is that the gross world, as it’s ordinarily perceived, is not the whole enchilada. There are subtler realms and subtler realities.

Dorothy: Certainly not.

✨ Before the awakening

Rick: You were doing the Ouija board with your partner, and you were showing early interest in mystical things.

Dorothy: That’s correct.

Rick: You were interested in psychic things and various phenomena that we think of as psychic.

Dorothy: I had discovered the Great Mother.

Rick: How did you discover her?

Dorothy: I discovered it when I was visiting Boulder. I happened to pull down a book that talked about and had pictures of the Great Mother. Merlin Stone wrote a wonderful book about that time. It’s called When God Was a Woman.

The Mother was worshipped throughout the Mediterranean world before it came under the sway of the patriarchy. Early tribes were very impressed with the female. The female could do two things that no male could do: she could bear children, and she could bleed and not die. They were very impressed. Then, at some point, they discovered the role of the male in begetting children. That kind of put the Mother in her place.

But it’s still a very powerful image. Many women today, particularly in groups, love the Great Mother. She is actually simply a visual form, I think, of the basic universal cosmic energy. All the goddesses and gods, as they are depicted, are representations of the energy that lies behind them: the ultimate energy, the cosmic energy, the life energy.

Rick: Did you have some kind of esoteric or mystical experience of that, as well as discovering it in a book?

Dorothy: I felt it very strongly in my body. I went around to classes and gave talks on When God Was a Woman. That was a whole lot of fun in Kansas, and those women just loved it.

It led on to other areas of investigation: the divine feminine, the divine masculine, God is both feminine and masculine, all this.

Rick: That’s certainly the way the Hindu or the Vedic culture depicts it.

Dorothy: Absolutely. Shiva is a representation of the masculine aspect, and Shakti is his feminine half. A lot of depictions show him literally split in two, with the feminine on one side and the masculine on the other.

Rick: In your book, you mentioned that you had been through a series of heartbreaks due to broken relationships ending. I was thinking, “She’s getting softened up here in preparation for this Kundalini awakening.”

Crisis and trauma as openings for Kundalini

Dorothy: Often there is some kind of crisis or trauma before Kundalini awakens. To quote that rascal guru once known as Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, it’s like an opening is prepared. Once that opening is prepared, Kundalini can rush in. I think that’s what happened to me.

Your energies, when you’re in emotional crisis, are all shaken up. They’re not solid; they’re not fixed. They’re all kind of jabberwocky. Things can happen to you that might not happen otherwise.

If we regard the universe as having a sort of ultimately benign purpose and as being an evolutionary machine that has our ultimate enlightenment in mind, then we can’t regard the difficulties that befall people as being capricious or cruel. They must somehow fit into the whole cosmic purpose that helps us grow over the long term.

Rick: If we regard the universe as having a sort of ultimately benign purpose and as being an evolutionary machine that has our ultimate enlightenment in mind, then we can’t regard the difficulties that befall people as being capricious or cruel. They must somehow fit into the whole cosmic purpose that helps us grow over the long term.

Dorothy: I don’t think any of us has the whole picture. We all get a glimpse or a portion or something, and Kundalini is a wonderful window into possibility.

✨ The first awakening

Rick: Let’s get to what you experienced when your Kundalini first awoke. Take us into that and describe it in as much detail as you can.

Dorothy: The year was 1981. I was a teacher at a university in Wichita, Kansas. I had basically no knowledge of Eastern thought. I had taken a PhD in literature, and that meant Western literature. I had a wonderful education. I was exposed to Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, the great Greek plays, and the great dramas. All of that gave me a fine foundation in Western wisdom.

But I didn’t know one thing about Eastern philosophy or practice. I’d never meditated. I didn’t know anybody who did. I had hardly heard of yoga. In 1981, you did not find a Kundalini yoga studio on every corner, or even a yoga studio in Wichita, Kansas. There was no place even to get a massage. I was a beginner in every sense of the word.

I happened to be reading a book when I was feeling quite devastated. I thought I had been destroyed by a breakup. The book wasn’t about Kundalini, but it had two pages on Kundalini. It was written by a Western writer, William Irwin Thompson, and that made it seem more comfortable to me.

He mentioned the myth that there is a serpent at the bottom of the spine, and the serpent rises up through the chakras. It finally rises up to your head, and after many years of practice and austerities, under the guidance of a guru, you might reach what they called enlightenment.

I thought, “Gosh, I wonder if I could do that.” I knew that it talked about how you could have your ball of energy in your lower abdomen. So I thought, “I’m going to see if I can feel a warm ball of energy there,” and I did.

Then I started breathing. I called it yogic breathing. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. It was just deep breathing and concentration: “Get it up, get it up, get it up.”

The first thing I knew, that energy shot into my head. The rest of that myth is that the head will open, the crown will open like a thousand lotus petals unfolding, and that is exactly what it felt like. I thought, “No wonder they use this metaphor.”

I realized later that there are pulsations within the head, and those pulsations feel like a flower that’s opening. So there I was with ecstasy in my head. I didn’t even have a name for it. I knew generally what it was about because I had read that much about Kundalini, and it was wonderful.

Then I began to feel as if the beautiful energies of the whole universe were flowing into my head from without. It was fabulous.

After a while, it occurred to me, “I don’t know what I’m doing. Is this good? Is this bad? What’s happening?” When I didn’t think about what was happening, it would continue. When I remembered that I was sitting in my living room in Wichita, Kansas, having this ecstatic experience, and thought about what was happening, it would all go away.

Then I decided, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’d better try to get this down.” I did everything I could to bring it down, and it went down.

I was on my own, and I had been in a state for which I had no name.

I did not know where to find a teacher, and there weren’t any teachers. I didn’t know where a guru was. There was no Internet, and there were hardly any books.

Rick: Like in the Yellow Pages under “Kundalini,” right?

Dorothy: Exactly. No, it’s not in the Yellow Pages. In the 1990s, when the Internet first started, I asked a friend who was very avant-garde in terms of technology to put in the word Kundalini. We found four references. If you put that word in now, you’ll be overwhelmed by thousands of references.

I did keep a journal because that ecstasy was not just a one-time thing. It came again the next day and the next day, and it went on. From May all through the summer of 1981, I experienced intense ecstasy day after day after day.

I didn’t know anything about meditation, but I had been impressed by illustrations of Shiva dancing and St. Teresa of Avila, who was known for having ecstasy in her spiritual awakening. I went into ecstasy. I found one friend who had been with the fellow later known as Osho. She said, “You have been in ecstasy.” I said, “Oh, really? Is that what it was?” Now I had a word for it.

Shiva, Krishna, and the experience of bliss

Dorothy: The summer was beautiful, and I was meditating on Shiva. Shiva is very powerful.

Rick: How would you meditate on Shiva? Just visualize?

Dorothy: Just visualize internally. When I did, these ecstatic energies became almost unbearable. Our system is not used to carrying this level of energy. I thought, “I don’t know if I can take this.”

It was like trying to have sex with God every morning before breakfast. I don’t think I’m up for this. So I asked for somebody or something to send me something not quite as intense. With Shiva, I had lain on the floor, stretched out my arms, and said, “Here I am, God. Please take me.”

I asked for something milder, and it came in the form of Krishna. Krishna is the gentler God, and Krishna is very effeminate in his aspect. He plays the flute, and the myth is that he makes love to the gopis, the milkmaids, many at one time. I can see why, mentally, each one would feel that Krishna was making love with him.

Rick: You were maxed out in terms of intensity meditating on Shiva, so you switched to Krishna. Did you notice a distinct shift in the quality and intensity?

Ego dissolution and the cosmic flow of energy

The intensity, for sure. If I can back up just a little bit, when I had this first awakening, I also had an awareness that came to me. In the throes of that, I realized that I really didn’t exist—that I was a fiction that I had made up for myself. What did exist was this infinite, indescribable flow of energy, the vast energy of the cosmos.

Dorothy: The intensity, for sure. If I can back up just a little bit, when I had this first awakening, I also had an awareness that came to me. In the throes of that, I realized that I really didn’t exist—that I was a fiction that I had made up for myself. What did exist was this infinite, indescribable flow of energy, the vast energy of the cosmos.

I was part of it, but only in the way that a cell is part of your own body. That cell is you, but in another way, you’re a lot more than that one cell. Or a raindrop falls into the ocean. It’s now part of the ocean, but the ocean is infinitely more vast.

Some people connect that with enlightenment. I don’t know if it is or isn’t. Some people get that far, and they get very upset. They don’t want to be told that they don’t exist. But I got that awareness, and I think that is true, although I also believe there is a subtle body that continues from life to life.

Otherwise, our persona in this life is a fiction. We have to have it. We have to have something to operate in.

Rick: I interviewed a woman named Tree who told me that when she underwent her awakening, she got into this state of “I don’t exist,” and she didn’t even recognize her husband. Eventually she came around, and now things are much more integrated.

Dorothy: I called it walking in the two worlds. You have to learn to walk in two worlds. One is the ordinary, familiar world. You have to have a job, friends, and be able to recognize your husband or whoever. But there’s another world that can be a very private world, where you have these mystical, fabulous experiences.

One of the problems I had was that I didn’t have a guru or teacher, and I didn’t have anybody really to talk to. I had to be in almost total isolation, going through these extreme awakening and ecstatic experiences. That’s very important—to have a spiritual buddy. If you can possibly find someone you can share your experiences with, please do, because that’s important.

I didn’t have anybody, so I wrote a journal. Ultimately, that journal became the basis for this spiritual autobiography.

Rick: It’s nice that your experiences were largely ecstatic, because they could have been much more unpleasant.

Dorothy: I’ll get to the next segment.

During this early awakening, I was obviously in a very altered state of consciousness. I had inner guidance, and I did some things which I later recognized were a kind of initiation process.

Rick: In your book, you call it “a prolonged initiation directed by unseen guides.”

Dorothy: Thompson’s book mentioned Tibetan Buddhist initiation, and he talked about how the aspirant would hold a vajra and a bell. The vajra is like a wand with a ball at either end.

Where was I going to get a vajra? I looked around, and in my house I found one. It wasn’t an authentic Tibetan vajra. It was made of glass, but it did have the bulb at either end. Then I found a little bell my mother had collected. I held the bell in one hand and my vajra in the other.

I experienced the opening of the crown. In the authentic ceremony, the student sometimes receives a crown, but I didn’t have one. Afterward I asked, “Did my crown open?” The answer came in an image of a crown.

One part is the vase ceremony, where water is poured on the student. I didn’t pour water on my head, but showers became very important. Water became very important to me. Later, when I read about the first-level Buddhist initiation, I realized I had pretty well followed all of it intuitively.

Rick: You mentioned a cognition of Padmasambhava. Was that one of the criteria of an initiation?

Dorothy: I think so. During that period, I looked at myself in a full-length mirror, and I saw the light around the body, and I saw my lips move. It said, “Bodhidharma, full of light.” I had no idea what a Bodhidharma was.

I looked it up and discovered that Bodhidharma was a great spiritual master who took Buddhism to China. I knew I wasn’t an incarnation of Bodhidharma. But I translated the term as “truth speaker.” I think I did become a truth speaker, because later I became a writer and said things that most people had not thought of at that time. I tried to talk about inner truth rather than accepting received truth from elsewhere.

Rick: Do you have any idea who or what these unseen guides were?

Dorothy: I sensed there were guides around. I did not see them. I think we all have guides. I do not name mine, but I sense being in touch with guides from time to time.

I think that they set this whole thing up for me. It was a confluence of many parts, many impacts, and it all happened at the same time, at the right time. It was almost like, “Okay, we’ve got her. Let’s take her now before she knows what’s happening.” They took me quickly, and after that, my life was never the same.

Rick: I get the feeling that there is a whole level of guidance that oversees the earth, and that guides keep an eye on who’s ripe and who’s a potential collaborator.

Dorothy: Who’s ready. And the moment is ripe. I was 53 years old. I wasn’t like a kid who just went to an ashram and had a bliss experience. I had a good foundation for my work, reading, and so forth.

✨ A planetary awakening

Rick: There does seem to be some sort of epidemic happening on the planet.

Dorothy: Jung said that Kundalini would not be known in the West for another generation. One day it occurred to me: we’ve passed that generation. We’re here. We’re doing it. This is it.

I think Kundalini is the main aspect behind this whole process that we’re all in. The species is evolving. It’s happening now, and a lot of people think that now. They call it different things, but it’s happening.

Andrew Harvey was the first person who listened to my story, sympathized with it, and encouraged me. I had tried to tell people who should have known better what was going on with me. One energy teacher told me, “If you’re lucky, you’ll get over this.” Who wants to get over ecstasy?

Later, I told a teacher in San Francisco, a very well-known and authentic teacher of qigong, what was happening to me. She said there was nothing in the literature like what I described. That was a long time ago. I think there’s a lot more awareness now and a lot more going on.

Rick: When I first learned to meditate in 1968, and then started having Kundalini experiences two years later, it was not public knowledge. I’ve met a gazillion people having Kundalini awakenings and symptoms.

Dorothy: It’s all over now. Epidemic. But that’s good. I think you and I were early models. We were pilgrims, breaking ground for people who were going to come later. It was harder and tougher.

Rick: Maybe back in the Buddha’s day there was a very thick membrane that had to be penetrated to break through to awakening, and it took a Superman to break through it. These days, so many holes have been punched in that membrane that it’s getting more porous.

Dorothy: That’s a good way to put it, and there’s so much more help now. Boulder is a hot spot. You run into people all over having wonderful experiences.

Rick: Tom Davis asks about having a profound Kundalini experience decades ago, with cosmic consciousness, God consciousness, and unity consciousness, followed by forty years of practice but a sense of remaining confined by the waking state. He asks what to do.

Dorothy: We should give time to it. If he doesn’t give any time to it, it’s not going to happen. By time, I mean a practice, whatever his practice is. Community is good, reading is good, poetry is good, music is good. You don’t just stay there because you think you want to be there. You have to attend to it, practice it, and give it a chance.

If there’s any comfort, I have read that many people, when they’re dying, have the Kundalini release, and then they go into what near-death people call unconditional love. To me, that is the full Kundalini.

I don’t wish to go into a state of vastness. I wish to go into a state of ecstasy, because for me, that’s the closest I’m ever going to get to God in this lifetime.

Rick: A lot of progress can take place without your noticing it. If you’ve been doing spiritual practice for forty years, don’t think that you’re just stuck. You can be in a higher state of consciousness and be so accustomed to it that it doesn’t seem extraordinary.

Dorothy: Everybody is different. There is no common path and no common experience. Some people do all the practices, meditation, chanting, and diets for years, and never feel the bliss. Why do some feel it instantly while others never do? I don’t know.

Rick: We all have different nervous systems. According to your constitution, an enlightenment experience can be predominantly bliss, vastness, emptiness, or something else.

Dorothy: I feel very lucky that I got the bliss. I love the bliss. To me, it’s like reaching a sense of union with the divine. It’s a visitation of the divine, which comes into you and your body, and you experience a glimpse, a taste of it.

Rick: Have you heard the objection that transitory experiences aren’t to be taken too seriously because they come and go?

Dorothy: I think it’s sour grapes. Ecstasy is marvelous, whether it comes daily, once in a while, or comes and goes. When it comes, it affirms your connection with the divine reality.

I still have visitations of ecstasy. I had one just the other day. I felt energy running in my hands, put my hands around my head, and felt exquisite energy come into my head.

Now I work with my hands to expand the aura. I think I’m literally caressing the edges of my own aura. Your arms go out farther and farther, and the ecstasy continues. I feel very blessed to have that experience.

Be satisfied with the level of attainment. Be open to progress in attainment. Remember that the path, the way, is the goal.

Rick: You wrote down those three precepts. The first is, “Be satisfied with the level of attainment.”

Dorothy: Start where you are.

Rick: The next is, “Be open to progress in attainment.”

Dorothy: We have to be open. You’re not going to get very far if you close down. Let the process naturally unfold.

Rick: You don’t like the word enlightenment because it has a static, superlative connotation, and as far as you can tell, there’s always further progress possible.

Dorothy: I think it never stops. It’s amazing. In terms of the energetic quality, whoever “they” are keep thinking up different things that you can experience in a different way, and it’s fascinating.

I met somebody I knew on the Internet but had never met. He said that sometimes he got little tingles around his head. Pretty soon I began feeling tingles around my head, and then vibrations in my body. I felt as though I were sitting in a vibrating chair. I think I picked it up from him. That was new for me.

I’m an empath. Whatever that person feels in their energy field, I tend to absorb it and reflect it back. Sometimes I don’t want to feel their energy field, particularly with strangers in the grocery store.

Rick: The third point was, “Remember that the path, the way, is the goal.”

We’re all in process. I don’t think we want to set some goal. I don’t know anybody I would call really enlightened. We’re all climbing the mountain at different points along the way. The goal is to keep climbing, progressing, and opening. Let it take you where it will take you.

Dorothy: We’re all in process. I don’t think we want to set some goal. I don’t know anybody I would call really enlightened. We’re all climbing the mountain at different points along the way. The goal is to keep climbing, progressing, and opening. Let it take you where it will take you.

Rick: How do you believe challenges and painful moments act as potential catalysts for Kundalini awakening?

Dorothy: Trauma, challenge, chaos—those things shake you up, and your nervous system becomes chaotic. In that sense, it can prepare you for Kundalini, or, as Osho said, when there is a blank space, Kundalini can come in.

I don’t know the final answer about the purpose of pain and suffering. Part of the reason we’re here, in my philosophy, is to learn how tough it is to be human. We’re thrown down here in a chaotic world, subject to conflicting forces, and we learn lessons.

If you get in a relationship and forget to preserve your integrity, give away your power, and give everything you’ve got to another person, that’s not good. Eventually you learn that you mustn’t do that.

I don’t necessarily believe that we all have to suffer horribly in order to have these awarenesses come to us.

Rick: Some people may have very solid blocks, and there has to be a lot of dynamite used to blast through them. For others, the path may be clear.

Dorothy: These are great mysteries. I don’t expect anybody to believe anything I say just because even Buddha said not to believe something simply because he said it, but to test it as though it were a coin whose authenticity you wanted to establish.

I wouldn’t believe any of this if it hadn’t happened to me. I don’t expect anybody else to believe it just because I’ve come to these conclusions.

Rick: I once heard Eckhart Tolle say that he believed nothing in particular.

Dorothy: That’s a wonderful answer, because we live in mystery. I think we live in the heart of mystery.

Rick: A friend of mine went through stage-four throat cancer and described the treatment as the most difficult six months of his life. He later felt that God had put him through it to help him work off a large amount of karma and express what God wanted him to express.

Dorothy: I do not accept the theory that people suffer because they’ve done bad things in a previous life. I don’t like that at all. I don’t want to blame the victim.

Rick: Whether or not it’s someone’s karma to go through suffering, it’s our karma to try to alleviate their suffering.

Dorothy: I certainly agree with that.

Rick: If bliss, Kundalini, and spiritual awakening are all one and the same, what does that mean for moments when you’re not feeling bliss, or when you’re feeling pain in your body or mind?

Having a big-time Kundalini awakening doesn’t free you from human pain and suffering. Your body is still a human body, and things can happen that are not good. But on the whole, it’s better to live a life where you have glimpses of this than no glimpses. You’re still a spiritual person. You’re still in a human body, and as you get older, you’ll have more aches and pains.

Dorothy: Having a big-time Kundalini awakening doesn’t free you from human pain and suffering. Your body is still a human body, and things can happen that are not good. But on the whole, it’s better to live a life where you have glimpses of this than no glimpses. You’re still a spiritual person. You’re still in a human body, and as you get older, you’ll have more aches and pains.

Rick: Do you feel that your inner spiritual awakening buffers those aches and pains?

Dorothy: I think that’s exactly right. I also suspect that going through Kundalini for years probably gives you a stronger and healthier body than you would have had otherwise. You can’t compare the body you have now with the one you might have had without Kundalini, but it seems to me that you are stronger.

Rick: You mentioned that you were smoking and eating meat at the time of your awakening. Do you feel that Kundalini guides you in a practical way to make better decisions with your body?

Dorothy: Some decisions are simply made for you. I smoked at one point, but that just fell away. I no longer wanted to eat meat, and for the most part I don’t eat meat, except fish. These things happened naturally. I didn’t have to struggle with anything.

Rick: As awakening progresses, you don’t have to drop bad habits; they drop you.

Dorothy: Exactly. That’s well said.

🛤️ Finding your own path

Rick: You went through a TM phase and had headaches and saw auras. As a TM teacher, I know that if someone tries to think the mantra too clearly, they can get a headache. Perhaps you were trying to make it more concrete than it naturally could have been.

Dorothy: I don’t know. I have all respect for TM, and I know it’s done wonders for many people. But I was on a path of energetic awakening. The teacher gave me a mantra, and suddenly my focus was switched from Shiva or Krishna and those marvelous energies to this word. It was like putting a lid on a boiling pot.

For me, it was terrible. I was getting acute migraine headaches, and I’d never had migraines. My doctor announced that I had a brain tumor, but an MRI showed there wasn’t one. I went back to my former practice, but you can’t step in the same river twice. Things had changed, and I had to start all over.

I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t gotten off course with TM. At first I’d had all this vibrant, natural energy. I never got back to that level. For me, it was a disaster, but it wasn’t for everyone.

Rick: God is not a one-trick pony. You changed horses in the middle of a stream.

Dorothy: I fell off and almost drowned—for me.

Rick: Different strokes for different folks.

Dorothy: We are each unique. You have to find your own path.

🎵 Beauty, poetry, and the beloved within

Rick: Very often in your account, you talked about how beautiful everything became.

Dorothy: There was a luster, a beautiful illumination from within, and also a sense of oneness. If I looked at you and then looked in the mirror, your face was the one I would see. I felt oneness with others and with everything.

I had that deep experience of oneness, what I call the beauty beneath the beauty. The world was beautiful. I’ve read that’s the way saints are: everything is beautiful to them.

Rick: Why do you think it isn’t happening now?

Dorothy: I was in a different state of consciousness. Some gifts are given to us, and I think I got switched off into writing poetry.

Andrew Harvey encouraged me to write a book of poetry. I did, and I wrote Marrow of Flame. I also started writing a blog and Facebook page and other books. I have published several books and was preparing a new one called Kundalini Splendor: The God/Goddess Inside Your Body.

For me, this unfolding has been as though there were a god/goddess within the body. I call it the beloved within. I had my own process that I continued to work on and let unfold. Maybe I wasn’t intended to be in that state forever.

Rick: Maybe you derived everything you were meant to derive from that experience, and then it was time to move to a new phase.

Dorothy: I love people’s stories. One friend said, “We must be teachers to one another.” I think the way we learn is by hearing each other’s stories.

I’m skeptical. If I find a so-called enlightened being, I read what they write with a skeptical eye. I’m not going to believe it just because they say it.

Rick: I give people the benefit of the doubt, but I also take them with a grain of salt. I’m open to all possibilities, including channeling.

Dorothy: I can channel, Rick.

Rick: Go ahead and channel.

Dorothy: I asked what was going to happen to us in the future, and the answer was, “Hard times ahead, hard times ahead. Stay together, stay together. You can weather hard times ahead.”

Another time I asked where we should go for safety. The answer was, “Go to the island, the island that is Ireland.” I’m not going to move to Ireland just because she said that, but that’s all my channeling. Ireland has a special place in my heart because I was born on St. Patrick’s Day.

Dorothy: After school started, I had to go back to teaching, and it was hard to focus my mind. I started having symptoms, including pain and pressure in the eyes. My mother became ill, my father was 91 and trying to care for her, and I had the stress of teaching and family responsibilities.

Kundalini will bring up unresolved psychological or emotional issues, and they’ll be right in your face. I had leftover childhood issues. I was lonely and depressed as a child, so I read books constantly as an escape. I had to relive those early feelings, understand why they caused pain, and get to the bottom of them.

You have to deal with your issues, whatever they are. They will be right where you cannot ignore them, because Kundalini makes you much more sensitive to everything, including what’s going on in your own body.

Rick: If the individual is confronted with things that need to be resolved, do you think that’s happening collectively or societally too?

Dorothy: We’re certainly getting to see our shadow. Our shadow is prominent and obvious, and we have to deal with it or go under.

We’ve always thought of sweet America, but we’re being forced to look at what has really been going on in our history and how we’ve ignored it. We have to come to terms with it and wake up to what is really going on. Life in America for certain minority groups wasn’t as happy as it was for others.

Rick: Do you have any sense of how things are going to go over the next ten or twenty years?

Dorothy: I think it’s a nip-and-tuck race. It could tip either way. I believe there is worldwide awakening, and that we’re headed into the next stage of human consciousness and development. At the same time, all this negative stuff is coming. Who knows which is going to win out? There are no guarantees.

Some people get discouraged and give up, but I think there is hope. Don’t let the news pull you into total depression. Rumi has a poem that puts it starkly:

We must dance in our own blood.

We must not give up hope, joy, play, or happiness. My motto is, “Consider your friends as life jackets.” They are your hope and will help you get through.

🎵 Poetry and mystical experience

Rick: Why do you think mystics so often speak in verse or poetry rather than prose?

Dorothy: I’ve been a word person all my life. I joined my first poetry group in the first grade. I’ve written poetry all my life.

Poetry is an art, and you have to practice it for years. I published Some Kiss We Want, a title taken from a line by Rumi: “There is some kiss we want, the touch of spirit on our bodies.” Poetry can take us close to that, as music and art can. When we are doing what Yeats called making our soul, those are ways we make our soul.

Someone recently told me that listening to a reading by me and Andrew Harvey gave him answers to questions he had had all his life. That’s why we do it: to help others who are trying to see the light move and become light.

Rick: Andrew Harvey praises your poetry highly and regards you as one of the greatest mystical poets of our generation.

Dorothy: My test is, do you like Rumi? If you love Rumi, you may like my poetry. I’m writing about the transpersonal level, the spiritual level in the fullest sense.

Fred LaMotte is a great poet of our time. He has a wonderful Facebook page where you can read his poetry.

⛰️ Evolution through crisis

Rick: You quoted Ilya Prigogine saying that evolution occurs at times of acute stress and crisis. Hard times don’t only mean that things will get bad; they also mean that there is great evolutionary progress potentially to be made.

Dorothy: I think we are moving into a time of great evolutionary progress. There were alchemists and saints who talked about perfecting the human and turning the human into the divine human. I think this is the time.

It’s tough. You don’t jump from point A to point B; you go through all the stages in between. But we’re doing it. It’s not going to happen; it is happening.

We’re being reborn.

Evolution is difficult. Birth is difficult. We’re being reborn. I really believe it. I’m committed to it.

A gentler unfolding

Rick: After forty years, do you feel that you’ve come to rest or completion?

Dorothy: Things are not turbulent, but there’s never a completion. Never a completion.

I don’t have the intense bliss-outs I had early on, and I don’t want it to be that intense. At first it was like having a big brass-band parade through your living room. Now it’s like hearing a flute play in the distance. It’s beautiful, soft, and lovely, and I’m glad it’s soft now.

My nervous system and subtle body have become much more sensitive. I can’t do yoga on the floor anymore, but I still consider myself a yogi. Sometimes all I need to do is make little movements with my hands or move my eyes. I can literally feel the edges of my aura.

The bliss can start anywhere. I don’t do the up-the-spine kind of yoga. I just like to go right to it, to be in the bliss.

Rick: It sounds like it’s already up the spine for you.

Dorothy: I don’t usually feel it in the spine. I feel it in my elbows, everywhere. There’s a wonderful quote from an ancient text:

Its practice demands complete mastery of the physical and mental body, rendering the body and mind capable of withstanding prolonged ecstatic states of union with the infinite. Samadhi, or the enlightened state, is not just a mental experience. It is a psychokinetic or whole-body-mind event involving every fiber, cell, and tissue.

The final goal of yoga is to turn the physical into light. I think that’s us. That’s Kundalini. The point is to turn the physical into light.

Rick: If enlightenment is as radically different from the ordinary waking state as it’s said to be, then there should be a radically different physiology supporting it.

Dorothy: It changes everything in your body, as well as your consciousness and awareness.

Rick: Be careful what you do to your body or put into it. Your body is like an instrument through which you live your life.

Dorothy: It’s sad that many young people aren’t taking care of their bodies. I’m surprised by how many young people are having Kundalini awakenings so young.

You have to be careful not to overdo qigong, tai chi, or meditation. You can overstimulate your nervous system. You don’t want to stimulate it more than it’s prepared to take.

✨ Poems of transition and awakening

Dorothy: I’d like to read a couple of poems. This one is called “The Transition,” and it is fitting to our conversation:

Even as the world around crumbles, the gates of heaven are opening. Angels, good and bad, are flowing down, mingling among the crowds. Their children are appearing among us with strange talents we do not understand. Something is carrying us into another universe where colors deepen and frequencies rise. The old gods are awakening, the times when the oracles spoke. Some of us are hearing unknown music of the sublime. Others are seeing before them images of holy ones, visions of the real. No one can explain what is happening. We are now captives of rapture, of seeing beyond the veils. We must surrender to vastness, to love. We must become more than we are.

This next poem is called “Preparing to Greet the Goddess.”

Do not think of her unless you are prepared to be driven to your limits, to rush forth from yourself like a ritual bowl overflowing with sacramental wine. Do not summon her image unless you’re ready to be blinded, to stand in the flash of a center exploding, yourself shattering into the landscape, wavering bits of bark and water, mirrors, your bracelets, your childhood adorations. From now on, you are nothing, a ghost sighing at the window, a voice singing underwater.

That was a precursor of my awakening experience, and that is what it felt like.

I also have a book called The Kundalini Poems. It’s the culmination of all the poems I’ve ever written. I think these were more channeled than crafted, but they’re crafted. Kundalini is behind all creative processes. It’s a great source of our creativity and of the creative force of the universe.

Here’s one called “Sanskrit Chanted by a Swami.” Sanskrit is a powerful, sacred language, and it can awaken the energies just by listening to it.

They wear their beards and turbans, darkened skins. My face is naked. My head unbound. They speak in strong, deep voices. This language is theirs. I listen intently, understand nothing, yet Shiva Shakti are at play in my body. Pulsations of delight. I am one with whatever this is.

Here’s one called “Our Beginning.”

It is never easy, this moving ahead, this coming to the place where you and the other are one. You have come here in the way that you are. You will leave much the same, not wearing wigs and false robes, nor assuming the guise of all your past accomplishments, but rather in the primal innocence of what has always been you, the hallmark of your special being. Even as now the wind speaks its secrets, howling down the mountain passes, the rain making its way into our hearts as we strain to grasp what is being said, to hear the message hidden in the tight bud unfolding, the cloud passing overhead into the violet sun, all fading in silence, and somewhere a whisper: “This is your beloved arriving to embrace you in a final recognition. Be silent and attend.”

This one is called “Sudden Turns,” beginning with a quote from Mary Oliver:

“I want to live my life all over again, to begin again, to be utterly wild.” Do you want to live your life over again, to let that wild thing inside you have its way this time? To not hold back when the invitation came on the silver platter, the one that would have changed your life forever? Do you wish you had stood up and said your truth in a louder voice, even when the others didn’t want to hear what you were saying? Do you wish you had told them how wrong they were, how they didn’t understand? Do you wish you had picked up and moved to the mountains, even if the snow blocked the door in winter and the streams froze over, and gone swimming naked in the pond that summer with the stranger who stopped by, or hitchhiked through Greece with a backpack and a smile? Would you give up all the things you did in exchange for what you refused? Consider all those treasures in your memory box, the times when you were, in fact, quietly, suddenly wild, took the unexpected turns in the path which brought you here, the place you are now, this life you love, and would not trade.

Closing

Dorothy: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: Thank you, Dorothy. It’s such a treat for me to do these interviews every week and get to know a person each time. It’s really been a treat to get to know you.

Dorothy: Thank you. Everybody said, “Have fun with Rick,” and I did.

Rick: It’s been delightful.

Dorothy: Thank you for having this. It’s a wonderful thing that you’re doing, because otherwise, how would we find each other—all of us here having these strange experiences, and our nervous systems being changed whether we like it or not?

Rick: I’ve always liked to connect people in my life. I’m kind of a spiritual yenta these days.

Dorothy: Wonderful. I hate to leave now that we’ve got started.

Rick: You’ve really gone the distance. You’ve done a full two hours, and your voice held up.

I’ll be creating a page for you on batgap.com with links to your books, your bio, your website, and everything else.

Dorothy: How do people get the replay?

Rick: It will be up on the Internet in a permanent way, and I’ll send an email to the subscriber list. People can subscribe on YouTube as well. We’ll do post-production work on the video before posting it.

Dorothy: Will you include the YouTube presentations I did with Andrew Harvey?

Rick: I’ll include a link.

Dorothy: I’m happy to hear from people. My email is DorothyWalters72@gmail.com. I also have a Facebook page where I often put new poems, and the blog.

Rick: I’ll link to those as well. Thanks, Dorothy, and thanks to those who have been listening or watching. We’ll see you for the next one.

Dorothy: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Rick.