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Rick Archer: 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 have 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 COMM bat gap 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 is 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 Walters: Thank you.
Rick Archer: And 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 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 guide 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 men more unmasking the rows and holding it up here. A record of a Kundalini initiation, or poems taken from her four previous volumes are published. As some kiss we want poems selected and new, or article on Kundalini and the mystic path was included in Kundalini rising, an anthology from sounds true publications, or 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 Harvard University. Use this texts for various sermons and read aloud in churches, included in doctoral projects, been frequently quoted, and I’ve given inspiration to many. Recently a pilgrim to Petra read one of her poems aloud while they’re so this is my little pop in a question here, Dorothy, I don’t I didn’t understand what was meant by a pilgrim a pilgrim to Petra, what’s Petra?
Dorothy Walters: What is Petra? Yeah, I hadn’t heard of it. Wow. Petra is a famous antique historical site. It’s made Petro means a stone. It’s made entirely out of stone is very ancient. And it’s 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 it’s a famous historical site. Okay.
Rick Archer: Where is it? Just out of curiosity. I
Dorothy Walters: think it’s in Syria, if I’m not mistaken.
Rick Archer: Yeah. He wouldn’t want to go there now. No. Now, yeah. 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 Walters: Oh, absolutely. And it isn’t just spontaneous. People. 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 At 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, their man has been having Kundalini since he was a child. He said, no one to talk to. And for some reason he’s living, I think, in the East somewhere, I don’t know where he is. He can either read or write. And he said, he found my site on YouTube. I’ve done several YouTube presentations with Andrew Herbie. But that answered many of his questions. And he was so glad just to find me there just glad to find somebody who has been through this and can help them manage their process. Yes, I do that regularly. Good.
Rick Archer: Yeah, 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. And she started doing research here and there on the internet that at first she thought it was some kind of disease like Kundalini disease, you know, she didn’t know what 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 Walters: Oh, very much so. And it can have negative effects, as well as positive. That’s, that’s true. Yeah. Kundalini is a two edged sword, believe me.
Rick Archer: Do you think that negative effects can be exacerbated if you don’t understand it? And you’re kind of fighting it as opposed to?
Dorothy Walters: I will? Yeah, I would think so I think what Kundalini wants is a clear path through your system, and it does everything it can declare your system. And if you’ve got marks in your system, from whatever, source, whether they’re physical, mental, emotional, whatever, that’s going to be a big problem. And cooneelee will work on you until you clear those blocks. And then it’ll go to another block. Work on that block. But some people have a terrible time. Some people are disabled, they can’t work. They’re emotionally unstable. They have a terrible time. I don’t know what the difference is. I know that some people have a different very difficult time, and others do not. Yeah.
Rick Archer: I suppose perhaps it depends on what we can speculate as to the variables. But one would be like you just said the blocks. I mean, how how voluminous they are, and how solid how solid they are? Oh, you are? Yeah. Another would be how open you are? How rapid the progress of Kundalini is. I mean, if it’s just a trickle, maybe it’s not going to be too disruptive. But if it’s, if it’s a, what would be a deluge or something, then it could be very unsettling. Or it can
Dorothy Walters: be very wonderful. Yeah, my name is Adele. Ah, but go ahead.
Rick Archer: Okay. I just want to Well, I suppose we, just for this, I mean, undoubtedly, almost these days, just about everybody who’s listening to this thing has probably heard of Kundalini and could actually give us some sort of an explanation of what it is. But 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 be, you know, understanding how we’re using it,
Dorothy Walters: more or less, because 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 is with us, but we’re not aware of it. Any more than we’re aware of our digestive processes are our heart works, or anything like that. 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 elect. flow of energy. Some people call it the beloved within because it does can act like a beloved, and it can act as though it’s making love to you from your deepest recesses of your being. So but it’s still, I think, a mystery. And I don’t think we have a full explanation yet. But it’s wonderful when it works, right? Yeah. When it’s like, it’s like a beautiful antique car when everything is working just fine is great, but things can get out of kilter.
Rick Archer: It could also be like a race car and its power. This might sound like a dumb question, but I I think you know, wouldn’t we? Couldn’t we say that all forms of life have a life force elephants and dogs and all
Dorothy Walters: kinds of salutely? Absolutely. And that is certainly a belief that everything has, has Kundalini. Yeah. As the life force. Hmm. And and when we have ours, we just simply become aware of it.
Rick Archer: So I wonder if humans are uniquely capable of becoming aware of
Dorothy Walters: it? Well, I don’t know what animals are aware of, they probably just accept it. Yeah, I think that’s who I am. That’s what I am supposed to be. I don’t know. Some people I’ve
Rick Archer: interviewed contend Kundalini can progress over a sequence of lifetimes that you could actually have awakened in some previous life. And then you die, and then you’re born again. And then next thing you know, in this life, it sort of picks up where it left off and continues to progress.
Dorothy Walters: Well, I’ve thought about that a lot. Because I haven’t told you about my experience, which was very swift, very sad, and very unexpected. And I can’t imagine how that happened. If it did not come from a previous lifetime, I think myself that you bring your subtle body in. Again, as as, as were add to the point it has developed in a previous slide. Because I certainly didn’t do anything. I’ll tell you about my experience later. But I didn’t do anything to bring it on in this life, except for the wish for it to happen.
Rick Archer: Yeah. What you were doing some little things, we’ll get to those in a minute, too. But 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. And therefore the whole notion of reincarnation is puzzling to them, because they don’t understand how anything that they don’t conceive of there being something which could sort of transition from one gross body to the next.
Dorothy Walters: And you want me to explain this? Yeah, as best you can, you know, let me put it this way. 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. Now, people talk about seeing auras. What are they looking at? They’re looking at the I think the subtle body. People talk about feeling. Bliss, ecstasy, what’s feeling bliss and ecstasy, I think it is the subtle body. I don’t think that’s it impacts it impacts the physical body. But basically, they’re one in the same. If you can learn to feel your to see or feel your own aura, you will understand more about the subtle body. And sometimes you can see or feel your own aura stretching as far as you can stretch your arms.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And I know you’ve had a lot of experiences of seeing auras. Maybe we’ll talk about those two, we’re racking up a list of things here that we need to talk about. Yeah, I mean, we’ve all heard these stories of people who are undergoing surgery or something, and they’re observing the the operation from the ceiling, or something.
Dorothy Walters: Yeah, that’s out of body that’s out of body. And certainly that would be your subtle body that goes up to the ceiling or beyond the ceiling or goes up to the roof and sees the red shoe and comes down and tells the surgeon I saw a red shoe. And they go up there check by the way. So people and some people practice that almost regularly. They like to go out of body.
Rick Archer: Yeah, some people ask your project intentionally. Yeah. But anyway, the principle we’re laying down here is that the gross world as it’s ordinarily perceived, is not the whole enchilada. And right that there are subtler realms and subtler realities and so on. Yeah. Good. It’s good to remind. I know, it’s good to be clear on that understanding, I think otherwise, a lot of things don’t make sense.
Right.
Rick Archer: Okay, so, you mentioned that you really had no concept of Kundalini or particular interest in it or anything else, but you were doing so you’re sort of a seeker as I gathered you were doing the Weegee board with with your partner and sort of you were showing early interest in mystical things. That’s correct. And so I don’t know if that that’s a cause or an effect or just a correlation, but there’s there was definitely something cooking there with you though. Yeah.
Dorothy Walters: I had, yeah, I was interested in psychic things. I was interested in various phenomena that we think of as psychic. I also had, I had discovered the great mother explained that. What explain what the great mother
Rick Archer: discovered her What did you discover? Well, I
Dorothy Walters: discovered it When I was visiting boulder one time when I was living away, and happened to pull down a book, which talked about and had pictures of the Great Mother, and I discovered that, you know, Merlin stone wrote a wonderful book about that time, she’s called it when God was a woman, and the mother was worshipped. And throughout the Mediterranean world, before it became under the sway of the patriarchy. And 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. And they were very, and then fortunately, or unfortunately, however you want to look at it. At some point, they discovered the role of the male in beginning children. That kind of was that kind of put the mother in her place. But it’s still a very powerful image. And many women today, in particularly in groups, love, love the great mother, she is actually simply a visual form, I think, of the basic, universal cosmic energy. Now, I was just reading a book about that recently, that all the goddesses and gods that as they are depicted, don’t exist in that form. They are just representations of the energy that lies behind them the ultimate energy, the cosmic energy, the life energy. So it’s a wonderful discovery, to find that God was once a woman.
Rick Archer: Can Did you have some kind of esoteric or mystical experience of that as well as discovering it in a book?
Dorothy Walters: Oh, yeah, I felt it very strongly. In my body, I went around to classes and gave talks on when God was wobbling. That was a whole lot of fun in Kansas, and those seven, just loved it, believe me, they were ready to hear that. So they didn’t lead on to other areas of investigation. The divine feminine, the divine masculine. God is both feminine and masculine. All this?
Rick Archer: Yeah. That’s certainly the way the Hindu or the Vedic culture depicts it. Absolutely. That’s fair. They even have some gods that are both masculine and feminine in one body, like one shopping. Yeah, Shiva, Shiva,
Dorothy Walters: shave. A lot of people don’t realize that Shiva is just a representation of the masculine aspect. And the Shakti is just his feminine half. And a lot of depictions show him literally split in two, with feminine on one side and masculine on the other.
Rick Archer: One thing that I picked up on in your book, I started to pick up on it before you even said it, and that at a certain point, you just said it more explicitly. Is that, um, you know, he had been through a series of heartbreaks, that’s correct, yeah, due to Broken Relationships ending. And I, as I was reading that I was thinking, Hmm, she’s getting softened up here and in preparation for this Kundalini awakening. And then you acknowledged that
Dorothy Walters: often, there is some kind of crisis or trauma before Kundalini awakens. It’s like to quote that rascal guru once known as bad one Shri Raj, nice. It’s like an opening is prepared. And once that opening is prepared, Kundalini can rush in. And I think that’s what happened to me because your energies when you’re in emotional crisis, your energies are all shaken up. They’re not solid, they’re not fixed. They’re all kind of Jabberwocky. And things can happen to you that might not happen otherwise. Yeah.
Rick Archer: I mean, I suppose if we zoom out to the big enough picture. And if we if we regard the universe as having a sort of an ultimately benign purpose, and as being the sort of evolutionary machine that has our ultimate enlightenment in mind, so to speak, then we can’t regard the difficulties that befall people as being capricious or, you know, cruel or anything else, they must somehow fit into the whole cosmic purpose that helps us grow over the long term.
Dorothy Walters: Right. I don’t think any of us has the whole picture. No, I think we all get a glimpse or portion or something of and a Kundalini is a wonderful window into possibility.
Rick Archer: Yeah. So let’s get to when you’re what you experienced when your Kundalini first awoke, take us into that particular moment. even take us into that and describe in much in as much detail as it can.
Dorothy Walters: Okay? The year was 1981 As you said, I was a teacher at a university in Wichita, Kansas. I had no 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 the great classics. And I’m not talking to Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, the great Greek plays the great dramas, all of that gave me a fine foundation in Western wisdom. And there is a lot of wisdom in those in those texts, believe me, but I didn’t know one thing about Eastern philosophy or practice or anything, I’d never meditated. I didn’t know anybody who did. I had never, I hardly heard of yoga yoga in 1981. It was a different world. If you want to think about it, some people weren’t even some of you listeners probably weren’t even born in that year. Others of you are probably very young. But in 1981, you did not find a Kundalini yoga studio on every corner as you tend to do today. You did not find even a yoga studio. There was in Wichita, Kansas, no place, even to get a massage, I’d never had a massage, unless you went to the YWCA. That was about it. So all of that, that we are taking for granted today. All this that we’re surrounded where it’s a dailies where we’re inundated with this news is thought did not exist in 1981. I knew one woman who was reputed to do yoga. I didn’t know her. And there was another woman I knew who was a vegetarian. And that was the extent of my knowledge of the new thought. So I was beginner and every, every sense of the word, I happen to be reading a book. About that time, when I was feeling quite devastated, I thought I had been destroyed. With this breakup. I happen to be reading a book. And it wasn’t about Kundalini, but it had two pages on Kundalini. A was a book about World Mythology, actually, but it was written by a Western writer, whose name was William Irwin Thompson. And somehow for me, since I was an academic coming from an academic background, that made it seem more comfortable, a Western writer rather than an Eastern writer. And on these two pages, he mentioned Kundalini, he didn’t tell you how to do it. He didn’t say much about what it was. He just simply said it existed. And he may have quoted the math. You know, the, the myth that comes to us from the east, we all probably know it now is that there is a serpent at the bottom of the spine, and the serpent rises up through the chakras, I couldn’t even pronounce that word. And then it finally would rise up to your head. And after many years of practice, and austerities, and under the guidance of a guru, you might reach what they called enlightenment. And I thought, Gosh, I wonder if I could do? Well, you’re not supposed to be able to do it like I did. I knew, perhaps I’d read a book or something that talked about, you could have your ball of energy in your lower parts in the lower abdomen. So I thought, Well, I’m gonna see if I can feel a warm ball of energy there. And I did. And then I thought, Okay, now what? Now what do I do? I’ve got to get that up somehow. How do that? Well, I started breathing. I called it yogic breathing, maybe it was maybe it wasn’t it was just as deep breathing as all it was. The breathing in out deep breathing and out and concentration, get it up, get it up, get it up. First thing I knew, and it didn’t take long. That energy that had been in my lower abdomen shot into my head. And the rest of that myth is that the head will open the the crown will open, like 1000, lotus petals unfolding. And that is exactly what it felt like. I thought, Well, no wonder they use this metaphor. And I realized later, there are pulsations, that occur within the head. And those pulsations do indeed feel like a flower that’s opening, opening opening. So there I was, with ecstasy in my head. Didn’t even have a name for it. Who, generally who It was about because I’d read that I knew that much about Kundalini. And it was wonderful. And then I began to feel it was as if the beautiful energies of the whole universe were flowing into my head from without. And you think that wasn’t good? Like it was fabulous. But then after a while, maybe a few minutes, maybe five minutes, maybe 10? I don’t know. It occurred to me. I don’t know what I’m doing. Is this good? Is this bad? What’s happening seemed like when I didn’t think about what was happening, it would continue. When I remembered here I am sitting in my living room, in Wichita, Kansas, with all these elm trees lining the street. And having this ecstatic experience, when I thought about what was happening, it would all go away. But then I decided, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’d better try to get this down. And so I did, I did everything I could to bring it down, and it went down. But I had been in a state for which I had no name. I did not know I not only the first thing you’re told, when you have Kundalini awakening is find a reliable teacher. Good luck in Wichita, Kansas, in 1981.
Rick Archer: The Yellow Pages under Kundalini, right? Yeah, exactly.
Dorothy Walters: No, it’s not not in the yellow pages. And I not only did not know where to find a teacher, there weren’t any teachers. I didn’t know where a guru was. There weren’t any. I don’t think there were any gurus in within Kansas. At that time. I was on my own. And I thought, Oh, what am I going to do? I’m on my own. And I can’t have I can’t find and there weren’t any book. There was no internet. Remember that? Oh, yeah. I know that. And, and 1990s. Even when internet first started, I asked a friend who was very avant garde in terms of technology. He said, Tell me something and I’ll put it in, we’ll see, we can bring up something on the internet. I gave him the word Kundalini, we found four references. If you put that word in now, you won’t know what to do. With all the 1000s, literally 1000s of references, you will be overwhelmed, you won’t know where to start. So I didn’t have anybody to guide me. I did keep a journal of what was happening, because that ecstasy was not just a one time thing. It came again, the next day and the next day, and it went on. This was May when it happened. Perfect time for teacher because then School’s out. And you have more time to devote to things like this. So 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 did decide I did decide, okay, there had been this in this book that I mentioned, there had been two illustrations that really impressed me. And one was Shiva dancing. And one was, I guess it was Shiva Shakti and one was St. Teresa of Avila, who was noted for the fact that she had access to see and her spiritual awakening for many years. I don’t know if you know the great statue by Bernini, which is in Italy. And it shows her and she is in deep Rapture. She has a an angel with a lance right there thrusting into her heart. And she is going into fabulous, well, most of us don’t go into ecstasy unless we’re a saint, or something like that. I certainly wasn’t a saint. I didn’t think it was so I didn’t know about. So anyway, I went into ecstasy. It lasted. And I did find one friend. I had one friend who had been up with the fella later known as Oh show because he had a, an ashram in India. And then later in Oregon, she had been up there inside he had talked to her about was that she and I didn’t have a word. And she said you have been into ecstasy. I said, Oh, really is that what it was? Now I have a word for it. I was very grateful. So that did happen. And the summer was beautiful. And I was meditating on shava shava is very powerful.
Rick Archer: How would you meditate on Shiva? Just visualize,
Dorothy Walters: visualize internally. Okay, internally, yeah, just thought of an image of Shiva. And when I did these ecstatic energies became almost unbearable. I mean, our system is not used to carrying this level of energy. We just aren’t. And this level of energy would ramp up. And it would just be so intense either. I don’t know if I can take this. And I thought about it. And I thought, you know, this is like trying to have sex with God every morning before breakfast. And I don’t think I’m up for this. So I asked for somebody or something to send me something not quite as intense because we shave I had just finally laying on the floor, stretched out my arms and said, Here I am, God, please take me. But I asked for something louder, and it did come, and it was in the form of Krishna. Now Christian is the most gentler God and Krista is famous Krishna is very feminine actually in his aspect, and he plays the flute. And the myth is that he makes love to the gopis to the milkmaids, many at one time, well, that’s pretty good. But of course, he’s doing it with mentally I can see why mentally, each one would feel that Krishna was making love with him.
Rick Archer: And he was just a boy at that time, too.
Dorothy Walters: Right. Exactly. Okay, so then what happened? So I felt better now that I had patience. But parking.
Rick Archer: So let me just quickly interject a question here. So you, you know, you are sort of maxed out in terms of intensity, meditating on Shiva. And you say you decided you need something a little bit smoother and calmer. So you switch to Krishna, did you notice when you switch to Krishna, that there was a distinct shift in the in your experience, the quality and the intensity of it,
Dorothy Walters: the intensity, for sure. The intensity for sure, if I can back up just a little bit, when I had this first awakening, I also had an unawareness, a perception, a concept that came to me. And in the throes of that I realized, in my words, I really didn’t exist. That I was a fiction that I had made up for myself, that what did exist was this infinite, indescribable flow of energy, the vast energy of the cosmos. And 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 let’s say, a raindrop falls into the ocean. It’s now part of the ocean. But the ocean is infinitely more vast. So that awareness came to me. And some people connect that with enlightenment. I don’t know if it is or is I don’t know what enlightenment is for sure. But and some people get that far. And they get very upset. They don’t want to be told that they don’t exist. They want to say I do exist. I know exists here. I’ll pinch myself. I exist. So but I got that awareness. And I think that is true. Also believe what we were talking, Rick and I were talking about while ago. There is a subtle body that continues, I think, from life to life. And who knows, I don’t know how long it goes on. But otherwise, our persona in this life, I think, is affection. But we have to have it, we have to have something to operate it.
Rick Archer: Yeah, in order to function. I’m sorry, go ahead. Oh, glam. I was just gonna say I interviewed a woman couple years ago named tree and she was telling me that when she underwent her awakening, she got into this state of I don’t exist, and it was very deep. And not only did she not exist, but I mean, she didn’t even recognize her husband. And, you know, there were a lot of things that she just had to sort of relearn. And but then she, she said, eventually, she came around, and now, you know, things are much more integrated. And she of course, recognizes her husband, and oh, but the ability to sort of function well yet remaining in that profound state is regained and sometimes it’s never lost very much. But other times it you know, you really get blown out. Yeah, Irene said she can relate to that not recognizing your husband. You know, it’s like we were saying in the beginning, some sometimes this is a gentle, incremental, slow process, and sometimes all stops are pulled out, you know, and so obviously, the person’s orientation to practical life can be across a whole spectrum from dysfunction entirely dysfunctional to still being able to hold down a job.
Dorothy Walters: Well, I called it walking in the two worlds. Yeah, you have to learn to walk in two worlds. One is the ordinary familiar Well, you have to have a job. You have to have friends you have to have be able to recognize your husband or whoever. That is one world. But there’s another world that can be a very private world. And it’s it can be where you have these mystical, fabulous experiences. But you see, one of the problems I had, not only did I not have a guru or a teacher, I didn’t have anybody really to talk to, I had to be in almost total isolation, going through these extreme awakening, ecstatic experiences, and I even have a friend, you know, you’d like to tell your friend, hey, guess what happened to me, that’s very important to have a spiritual buddy. That’s one of the things I tell people off the bat, 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 just wrote a journal. And ultimately, that journal became the basis for this Spiritual Autobiography. So if you want to know what it’s like, to be awakened in that way, and Kansas in 1981, and be all by yourself in the journey, that’s a book that will describe it in great detail.
Rick Archer: It’s nice that your experiences were largely ecstatic, though, you know, because they could have been more pleasant
Dorothy Walters: like, well, I get to the next next segment here. Okay.
Rick Archer: Actually, before we get to the next segment, there was a little thread that I wanted to tie in here. And that was that in your book, you mentioned that prior to the awakening, you went through a phase of a lot of dread and anxiety that seemed to be mounting up to the point of that experiential breakthrough. So what why do you think that was what was I
Dorothy Walters: think that all had to do with the breakup, they that was like falling, like the hole, there was a platform underneath you, and that opened up and you fell into a dark pit, it was very, very, very intense.
Rick Archer: So you had a sense of security and normalcy, and everything is, is hunky dory, and then that was pulled out from under you. And that, that kind of left you vulnerable and perhaps open to this experiential breakthrough?
Dorothy Walters: I think that’s exactly right. Okay, okay. But, Rick, before I get to this, to the downside of Kundalini, for me, I want to mention that during this early awakening section, I literally was obviously in a very altered state of consciousness. So much so that I had inner sort of inner guidance. And I and I did some things which I later recognized, which were a kind of initiation process. Yeah, I wanted
Rick Archer: to ask you about that. In fact, it’s quoted in your book, a prolonged initiation directed by unseen guides. That’s right. Let’s talk about that.
Dorothy Walters: Okay. And Thompson’s, but he mentioned something about Tibetan Buddhist initiation. And he talked about how the aspirant would hold a buzzer, and a bell, and the Bondra for those who might not know, is simply like, think of a wand with a ball at either end. That’s a visor like a little barbell or something little barbell. It’s like, yeah, yeah. I want to do that, because he talked about it in his book, where was I going to get about you? What it was, well, I looked around. And in my house, believe it or not, I found a visor, but it’s not an authentic Tibetan Basha. It was made of glass. And it did have the bulb at either end. So I held that and I said, that was my visor. Then it said, you had to have a bell, of course, they’re talking about, about those wonderful Tibetan, large Tibetan bells. I certainly didn’t have one of those. But I only wanted to hold a bell. Well, I bother had collect, collected bells. And somehow I found one of hers. And it was a little bitty Bell. It was only about this big. But I thought a bell is about. So I held the bell in one hand, my visor and the other. And I went through this kind of an association. And I did various unusual things. One of the later I found out that I had in my way as best I could pretty well followed what is called the first level Buddhist initiation ceremony. First level and what did I do? Well, I held the buzzer and the bell. I experienced the opening of the crown. Now in the authentic ceremony I read that often the student actually receives a crown and that crown is actually put on their head during this initiation, while I didn’t have a crown to put on the head, but but after I had went through this, I did ask, whoever I was inner voice talking with, I said, was did my crown open? And the answer came in an image, and the image was of a crown. So I decided, well, it must have been a crown opening. One of the parts, sometimes is, I believe, the vase ceremony where water is poured on the student. Well, I didn’t put any water on my head. But showers became very, very important. Water became very important to me. And so that was kind of my water opening. And there were other aspects that I experienced. And later, it was much later, when I read about the first level Buddhist initiation initiation, I realized I had pretty well followed all of that, just intuitively. And that’s why I say, under the guidance of unseen guides, you
Rick Archer: mentioned during the end of your book that you had a cognition of Padmasambhava, who you can tell us about who he is. But that was one of the five, I guess, criteria of an initiation. And it was the one that had been missing. But he eventually had that cognition as well. Did I get that right?
Dorothy Walters: I think so. Yeah, I think so. I had some other things that weren’t necessarily part of the negotiation, per se. But during that period, I did look at myself in a full length mirror, and I did see the light around the body. And I saw my lips move. Now that was the only instance where I saw something external, saw something external, I thought it was I didn’t know what a body saw was. And I thought I would love to be a body shot for because I thought of a body Samatha as someone who simply dedicates their life, to the betterment of betterment of humanity. So I saw my lips move, but it didn’t say bodhisattva it said Bodhi Dharma, full of light. What was a Bodhi Dharma? I had no idea. I did no idea what it was talking about. So I looked up Bodhi Dharma, and I read what I could about Bodhi Dharma. And I finally translate it and discover that Bodhi Dharma was a great spiritual master. And he took the Buddhism to China, I guess it was, was it China? And maybe, no, I
Rick Archer: know, China.
Dorothy Walters: I think he took it all the way to anyway, he was great, one of the great masters. Well, I thought, for heaven’s sakes, I know I’m not an incarnation of the Bodhi Dharma. That’s going too far. But I tried to translate those syllables, which I did not understand. And when I finally came up with Dharma, I translated as truth. And I translated that term as truth, speakers, speaker. And I think I did become a true speaker. Because later on, I did become a writer and I said, things that most people had not thought of at that time, I had tried to talk about the inner truth, rather than accepting what the received truth from elsewhere. So I was the truth speaker, I think I could say that.
Rick Archer: You have any idea who or what these unseen guides were? What these what these unseen guides? Do you feel like there’s a sort of a group
Dorothy Walters: I sense? I sense there were guides around, I did not see them. I think we all have guides. Some people name their guides, you know, Tom, Dick, or Harry or Mary, Mary Jean, or whoever they are, I did not name my gods. I sense me being in touch with guides from time to time, I think that they set this whole thing up for me, because it was confluence of many parts, many impacts. And it all happened there at the same time at the right time. And it was almost like, Okay, we’ve got her. Let’s take her now, before she knows what’s happening. And that’s what happened. They took me quickly. And after that, my life was never the same. Believe me, it was never, ever, ever the same.
Rick Archer: I like what you’re saying, I really have a sense of that myself. And it fascinates me. But it’s sort of like, I get the feeling that, you know, there is this whole level of guidance that oversees the earth and there are probably many, many, many guides involved, and there’s probably a hierarchy of them. And, but that, you know, they kind of keep an eye on who’s right. And who’s, who’s a collaborator is ready.
Dorothy Walters: Who’s ready? Yeah, yeah. And the moment is ready, if moment is ripe, and I was 53. years old. You know, I’m not like a kid who just been to an ashram and had a blessed experience. I wasn’t that way at all. I had a good foundation. I will say that from my work, reading and so forth. So I just think that the guides decided whoever those guides are. I think they like it that we’re talking like this. Yeah. Give it to him, kid. But you have to remember in 1981, when this happened, this was not ordinary experience at all. That was very, and even now, you don’t hear too many. You’re having anything quite that spontaneous?
Rick Archer: Yeah. Although, as we’ll discuss today, there does seem to be some sort of epidemic happening on the planet. Yeah.
Dorothy Walters: Now. Just think how, how long have a 1981 is almost 40 years, and Jung said then that Kundalini would not be known in the West, from another generation? Well, one day that occurred to me, we’ve passed that generation we’re here, we’re done. This is it.
Rick Archer: We’re touching upon it. Now. We might as well get into a little bit, and a few questions have come in from listening. So when asked those, but um, I, you, I’ll print it my own words, but you more or less said in your book. And I think Andrew, you and Andrew Harvey and your conversations, were also saying that there seems to be some kind of upsurge of upwelling of enlightenment or consciousness or awakening happening in the earth in the world, which were going through some kind of birthing process. And the Kundalini awakening is one aspect of it on features,
Dorothy Walters: I think is the main extract myself. Yeah, I really do. I think it’s behind this whole process that we’re all in. And I call it evolution, human, other human humans, human being a species, I think, is evolving. And I think that is happening now. And of course, that’s a lot of people think that now they can’t make up different things, but it’s happening. And Andrew, Chad didn’t meet Andrew till the middle of the 1990s. And he was the very first person who listened to my story, and sympathized with it and encouraged me, I had Rick, I had tried to tell a couple of people who should have known better, what was going on with me. I told a guy who was there in Wichita, and he was an energy teacher. He was teaching us how to walk and how to focus on our energy in this setting the other and I told him that I was experiencing all this ecstasy. He looked at me, he said, if you’re lucky, you’ll get over this. Ecstasy. And then later, I told a teacher in San Francisco, a very well known and authentic teacher of chigan. She was married to a Qigong master, he could previous from China, he could stand on meat, cleavers, he could stand on uncooked eggs and not break the shells. I thought, well, Shay, well, no. I told her what was happening to me. And she said, No, she said, nothing like that said, your energies can be hot, or cold, or lack electricity. There’s nothing in the literature like you describe.
Rick Archer: People have their own little world of understanding.
Dorothy Walters: Well, that was again a long time ago. Yeah. And I think there’s a lot more awareness now. And a lot more going on. That’s what I hear from people.
Rick Archer: Oh, yeah. That I run into it all the time. I interviewed all these people your pardon. I said
Dorothy Walters: that your business? Yes,
Rick Archer: my business. And even I mean, you were in Wichita. I was in Connecticut, when I first learned to meditate in 1968. And two years later, I started having Kundalini experiences. And then was it TM? Yeah. And then I became a teacher. And I taught for 30 years. And believe me, I’ve met a zillion people in that context, who were having Kundalini awakenings and symptoms and all the whole deal. So it’s been out there, but it’s just obviously not public knowledge.
Dorothy Walters: Well, let’s say Oh, over.
Rick Archer: That’s all over now.
Dorothy Walters: epidemic. But that’s good. I think that’s part of our process. I think you and I would say me, we’re kind of early models. Yeah. We kind of were pilgrims. We were kind of breaking ground for people who were going to come later. And it was harder. It was tougher. For me it was that if you had TM if you had a community that was helpful to you? Yeah, I didn’t have
Rick Archer: a bunch of knowledge to go with it and everything. But that’s an interesting idea about the breaking ground thing. I mean, I’ve sometimes brought up the point in these interviews that, you know, maybe back in the Buddha’s day, there was a very sick meme that had to be penetrated to break through to awakening, and that it took kind of a Superman to break through it. Whereas these days, there’s there’s been so many holes punched in that membrane, that it’s getting more and more porous, you know?
Dorothy Walters: Oh, that’s a good way to put it. And there’s so much more help now. Yeah. Anybody read it, whether you meet people with Boulder is a hot spot. Once? It really is, and you just run into people all over having all kinds of wonderful experiences.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Well, here’s one. Let’s talk about this guy’s experience. He just sent this in. Tom Davis from Bethesda, Maryland, asks, I had a profound Kundalini experience decades ago, during which I experienced cosmic consciousness guide consciousness in unity consciousness with great clarity lasting several hours, decades later, after 40 years of TM and a few other spiritual practices with deeper understanding of life and consciousness, I continue to remain solely confined by the waking state. So you had those experiences momentarily, but it seems to have awesome what to do. I’m close to the end of this body.
Dorothy Walters: Let’s just his question
Rick Archer: was question is 40 years ago, he had a cognition, sir. Yeah, clearly experience, he was experiencing higher states of consciousness. And then he kind of like got locked back into ordinary waking state, and he feels like that it’s just a memory. Now he’s coming close to the end of this life. And he never managed to sort of stabilize it, apparently.
Dorothy Walters: So what does he want to know?
Rick Archer: I guess he’s wondering what to do. You know, he’s, he feels like he’s so just stuck in the waking state. And he had this beautiful experience. Well, I
Dorothy Walters: think he should do what all of us do. If we’re wanting to move to a deeper level, we should give time to it. If he doesn’t give any time to it, it’s not gonna happen. And by time, I mean, a practice whatever his practice is, community is good reading, reading is good, poetry is good, music is good. All of those, you don’t just be there because you think you want to be there, you have to give, attend to it, practice it, give it a chance. Who knows? If it’s any comfort, I have read that many, many people. And when they’re dying, the Kundalini resent, releases, and then they go into that, what the near death people call, unconditional love. And that, to me, is the full color. Many, many people like to state of the sense of vastness, I’m not myself, I’ve not had that exactly. Not even sure what that is, I myself do not wish to go in 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 Archer: Interesting. I would say to Tom that a lot of progress can take place. It’s like when a train is going through a tunnel, you don’t see the progress necessarily, but the train is progressing, you know, and then eventually it comes out the other side of the tunnel, and you realize you’re in a different place. So you know, if you’ve been doing spiritual practice for 40 years or more, don’t think that you’re just stuck. And also don’t think of this whole enlightenment thing as some kind of fireworks kind of display that you should be experiencing. You can actually be in in a higher state of consciousness and yet be so accustomed to it, that it really doesn’t seem extraordinary in any way. It seems ordinary to you.
Dorothy Walters: They could well be Yeah,
Rick Archer: if you suddenly snap back to where you were 40 years ago, and contrast that to where you are now it might be dramatic in an unpleasant way. So you’ve just kind of grown into remember not
Dorothy Walters: everyone would the one thing I’ve learned is everybody is different. For sure. There is no common path. There is no common experience. I’ve known people who went into ashrams, and they did everything they did the practices, they did the meditation, they did the chanting, they did the diets for years, and they never felt the bliss. Why? I don’t know, why do some feel the bliss instantly? Some never do? I don’t know. I don’t have answers for those unless just past life, something about the past
Rick Archer: one little point to just throw in as we all have different nervous systems and correct, yeah. And which gives us all different experiences. Right? That’s right. And regarding bliss and vastness, there are different different sort of goon as they call it in the Indian tradition which can predominate in the nervous system and according to your constitution, you could have the sort of enlightenment experience but for one person it’ll be predominantly bliss and for another person, predominantly vastness and for another person, predominantly emptiness and so on. That’s true. So it just depends on your makeup. Um,
Dorothy Walters: I feel very lucky that I got the bliss. Yeah, you got I love the bliss prize. Yeah. I think the bliss to me, it’s like when you do reach a sense of union with the divine, that’s what bliss is. It’s a visitation of the Divine, which comes into you and your body and you experience a bit a glimpse a taste of this, I think bliss, which is the best cosmic field of energy, which I think is love, which is, which is bliss, that you get to taste some of it.
Rick Archer: Have you ever heard the objection that some people raise that these sort of transitory experiences like sitting there in ecstasy, but then next, you know, next week, you’re not an ecstasy, that these transitory experiences are somehow not to be taken too seriously, or given too much importance? Because
Dorothy Walters: grapes myself, I think it’s sour grapes. Yeah, I think ecstasy is marvelous. Whether it comes daily, whether it comes once in a while, whether it comes and goes, but when it comes, it affirms that connection, your connection with the divine reality. That’s my feeling about it. I don’t think, what did they know? Have they ever experienced it? Probably not. I think this is somebody who hasn’t had the experience. Now, it may be that some of these famous gurus who have these great magnetic fields, and people pick up on that and get Shakti pot and so forth, they may have a nervous system that will allow that to happen. But I certainly don’t. And I’m but I’m very happy with the portion that is given to me. And I will add this wreck because I think people to know it, I still have visitations of ecstasy, I had one just the other day, I just come in here wasn’t even thinking about it. I was going to work at my computer, I felt energy running in my hands. I thought, hmm, something’s happening there. I put my hands up around my head, and I felt the most exquisite energy come into my head. And for me, now, I work with my hands to expand the aura. And I think what I’m doing, at times is literally caressing the edges of my own aura. That’s what it feels like. And your arms go out farther and farther. And ecstasy continues, and then I move my hands kind of up and around my body, never touching, never touching, just feeling this energetic edge, I think is wonderful. I feel very blessed to have that experience. That’s my answer. And if, if people I know people love the vastness, but that is not my path, that I know, that is not my path. My path is an energetic path of feeling path, a nervous system ecstatic path. And I think that’s right. For me, it feels right. Yeah, that’s
Rick Archer: a good way of putting it. In fact, there were a few precepts that you wrote down at one section of your book, and I copied them down because I thought they were discussing precept number one was be satisfied with the level of attainment we can comment on each one if you want as they go through them. But I think that’s a good one. Because you can drive yourself crazy comparing yourself to other people and bemoaning your suppose that lack of attainment, and so on and so forth. And you’re kind of the you build upon whatever you got. So you have to at least be satisfied with what you’ve got in order to where you are. Yeah. So that’s a good one. You want to say anything more about that before I read the next one?
Dorothy Walters: No, that’s, that’s okay.
Rick Archer: The next one is be open to progress and attainment.
Dorothy Walters: Yeah, I think we have to be open. That’s the main thing. You’re not going to get very far. If you close down. If you say, Oh, that’s too much, or I can do that or that’s scary. Just be open and let the process naturally it’s a natural process. Let it unfold. Yeah.
Rick Archer: And it will. I mean, you mentioned in your book that you don’t quite, you don’t so much like the word enlightenment because it has this static superlative connotation. And that, as far as you can tell, there’s always going to be some kind of further progress possible,
Dorothy Walters: I think, I think so. I think it never stops. It’s amazing.
Rick Archer: I’m of the same opinion. I mean, and having interviewed all these people, I don’t think I’ve met anyone for whom it has stopped.
Dorothy Walters: You know, and and in terms of the energetic quality, but I’m intrigued by is they whoever they is, keep taking up different things that you can experience yet. Yeah, in a different way. And it’s just fascinating. Can I tell one little experience I had please? Yes. Well, I met somebody that I had the internet, but I hadn’t ever met. And there was an instant love actually for him. And we were talking and setting and he was interviewing me and he said Sometimes when I do this, I get little tingles around my head. I thought, Well, that’s nice. And then pretty soon I started feeling tables around my head. I thought that’s interesting. It was just tingles, it wasn’t blessed. Well, pretty soon I began to fail, literally vibrations, not blessed vibrations in my body. And pretty soon I felt like I was sitting in a vibrating chair. And I was just, I wasn’t outwardly vibrating. But inwardly, I felt like I was sitting in this vibrating chair. I have never had such an experience in my life. And once the interview is over, it was gone. And I think I got it from him. I think I picked it up from my friend. And but that was new. I’m just saying, for me, that was a new experience. Now other people may have a lot of experiences like that, but I never had.
Rick Archer: Yeah, well, you actually you mentioned in your book, sort of, in training with others experiences, because you’ve you’ve been such a sensitive person all these decades, as a result of this awakening, and, you know, kind of tuning into the flavor or the nuance of what other people are experiencing.
Dorothy Walters: Yeah, yeah. Sometimes as a good thing, sometimes not so good. Yeah. Because I pick up on other people’s energy fields, I always wanted to be an energy healer. But I didn’t think I was meant to do that. Because I’m also an empath. And whatever that person feels in their energy field, I tend to just absorb it and reflect it right back. Yeah. And sometimes I don’t want to, sometimes I don’t want to feel their energy field,
Rick Archer: really, with strangers, definitely saints on the
Dorothy Walters: line at the grocery store.
Rick Archer: And here was the third point on your three precepts, which was remember that the path slash way is the goal. That’s right. Yeah. How would you elaborate on that?
Dorothy Walters: Well, we’re all in process. And I don’t think we want to set some goal. And I’m not even I don’t know about enlightenment. I don’t, I don’t know anybody that I would call really enlightened. I’m very, very skeptical about that. But unless we redefine it, but I think what we’re doing now what, what stage is that we’re all climbing the mountain. We’re all at different points along the way. And that, that’s, that’s what that’s the goal is to keep on climbing, keep on progressing, keep on opening. Let it take you where it will take you.
Rick Archer: Yeah, we were talking about these guides earlier. Some people are of the opinion that once we’ve progressed as much as we’re going to progress in a human body, that we then sort of dwell on some subtler level or higher level or something and serve a function there. And that perhaps is maybe his guides are that we’re, you know, guiding, we don’t
Dorothy Walters: know. But I do know that. I just think we continue to serve as best we can, whether and on this level, or on from a higher level. I think that after we go to the other levels after a body, we dropped the body. Maybe we’ll be allowed to serve from the other side. Yeah, I don’t know. I hope so. Yeah. Maybe we come back. And we’re probably going to need this more than ever, if the world is still here.
Rick Archer: True. Well, I mean, we’re kind of looping back a little bit, some you discussed earlier, but I think it’s personally I think it’s important for people to understand this. Not that everybody should believe what I believe or any such thing. But if you think that all you are is this physical body, and that your existence is going to cease once and for all, once this body dies, imagine your perspective in life compared to the understanding or the feeling or the experience that the you know, it’s a law, there’s a you know, continuum, and that this is like one suit of clothes you happen to be wearing today and tomorrow, you’ll probably put on a new suit of clothes that just gives you a completely different orientation to life.
Dorothy Walters: Beautifully. But you flip that. That’s right.
Rick Archer: Um, well, here’s another question that came in. And it refers to your poetry, which we haven’t discussed at all yet, and we can talk about a little bit, and this is from someone named Erica and Philadelphia. She asks, Dorothy your poetry not only embraces the beautiful and poignant aspects of awakening, but seems to fully embrace your humanity, meaning the experiences that have created pain and suffering in your life. How do you believe challenges and painful moments act as potential catalysts for Kundalini awakening?
Dorothy Walters: Well, I think we’ve already talked about this a bit. Have you ever thought about when we said you go through trauma or you go through challenge, or you go through chaos or whatever, that will shake up you and your nervous system certainly will be rather chaotic at that point. So in that sense, it can pair it can prepare for could or as Osho said, when there is a blank space, Kundalini can come in, I don’t know, about people will say, what is the purpose of pain? What is the purpose of suffering? I don’t know the final answer on that, certainly. But I think part of the reason we’re here, this is again, my just my philosophy is to learn how tough it is to be a human being. And it is very tough, because we’re just thrown down here in all this chaotic world, and who knows what’s going to happen to us good things and bad things. So I believe that they these things tell us, it’s not easy to be human. I think that we’re here, we’re subject to all kinds of conflicting forces, some good, some bad. And I think we learn lessons. And one of the lessons we learn is not to put ourselves in those positions, again,
Rick Archer: the positions that are gonna make us suffer, you mean, are gonna die, that are gonna make us suffer?
Dorothy Walters: Yeah, like, if you get in a relationship, and you forget to preserve yourself, and your integrity of the self, and you give everything you’ve got to another giveaway your power to another person. That’s not good. And And finally, you will learn the lesson. It sometimes takes several go rounds. But you will finally learn that you mustn’t do that you mustn’t give away every aspect of yourself. That would be one example. I don’t know if there’s physical pain and suffering. Some people say, report that they make great spiritual progress. By having gone through pain and difficult illness, pain is suffering. And I’m sure that they do. But I do not necessarily believe that we all have to suffer horribly in order to have these awarenesses come to us.
Rick Archer: Well, it’s like you said in the very beginning, you know, some people might have a lot of blocks, and they might be very solid blocks. And there’s going to have to be a lot of dynamite used to blast through those blocks. And other other people, maybe the path is pretty clear.
Dorothy Walters: It’s true, I think. But these are great mysteries. I don’t. And I might add that I would say just what you got through saying, I don’t really expect anybody to believe anything I say just because even Buddha said, he said don’t believe anything, because I say it tested in the end, as if it were a coin that you wanted to test the authenticity of. So I, I often have said I wouldn’t believe any of this stuff I’m talking about if it had happened to me. Look, I believe it. Yeah. And also the ideas this one’s I’ve come to, but I certainly don’t expect anybody else to believe this just because I have come to these conclusions.
Rick Archer: Yeah. I remember one time Oprah Winfrey was interviewing her totally adjusting what he believed. And he said nothing in particular.
Dorothy Walters: That’s a wonderful. That’s a great answer. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Because, you know, right.
Dorothy Walters: History, I think we live in this in the heart of mystery. I have one friend wrote just recently, she didn’t want to do all this, if it didn’t have a goal. And then she wasn’t going to learn the explanation for the whole thing. Well, good luck is all I’ve got to say.
Rick Archer: On this point of suffering. I have a dear friend who has been a friend of mine for many decades, and he’s been ardent spiritual practitioner and lover of God, and has had some beautiful cognitions of God actually, in the form of Krishna. But he, he was but a year or two ago, he was diagnosed with stage four throat cancer. And, you know, the doctors said, No, you’re in bad shape, but and they put him through a course of chemotherapy and radiation, which he said was the most difficult six months of his life. He said, It was absolutely horrible. They wanted to do this radical surgery on him and he wouldn’t let them. But finally he said, that’s, that’s it. I’m not doing any more of this stuff. If I die, I die. It’s like, and so far lately, he’s been cancer free. And he’s just started a beautiful podcast, which I’ve been listening to. But he said that he had this sort of, we can speculate on what level took place, but this communication with God, and God said, I just put you through that in order to enable you to work off a really big chunk of karma. And now you’re sort of much more able to, you know, express what I the knowledge I want you to express and so he’s embarking on this podcast project. Yeah,
Dorothy Walters: wonderful. However, Rick, I would add on myself do not accept this theory that people suffer in this life because they’ve done bad things in a previous life. I don’t like that at all.
Rick Archer: Yeah, it’s a big thorny topic. I mean, we could spend hours talking about I
Dorothy Walters: don’t want to blame the victim. I don’t want to say you did that because you were a bad person in some of that. No, I don’t I can’t accept that. Yeah, I’m not interested in that. But I guess people have different opinions.
Rick Archer: Well, one way I heard it put was, you know, whether or not it’s somebody’s karma to go through some suffering, it’s our karma to try to alleviate their suffering. So of course, what’s your emphasis there?
Dorothy Walters: Oh, of course. I certainly agree to that. Yeah, I certainly did.
Rick Archer: Of course, a question came in from Joyce in Temecula, California. She said, I’m following up on something we were just talking about. If bliss and Kundalini AR and spiritual awakening are all one of the same thing, then what does that mean for moments when you’re not feeling bliss? For instance, when you’re feeling a lot of pain in your body or mind? Does that mean that in that moment, you are no longer spiritually awake?
Dorothy Walters: Oh, thanks. So let me to answer yes, please. You know, the fact that you’ve had, even if you’ve had big time Kundalini awakening, you’re not free from human pain and suffering. And you can go through to some really tough times, because your body is not perfect. You for a moment or for an experience, you had a certain awareness. But your body is still a human body. And things can happen to you, which are not good things. But on the whole, I think it’s better to live a life where you at least have glimpses of this than no glimpses. And I don’t think it means that you no longer a spiritual person, don’t think it means anything. It means me you’re a human person, you’re still in a human body. And as you get older, you’re going to have more aches and pains of age, you’re going to be more susceptible to things that come along. Now, I don’t think that means anything about your spirituality is still just as spiritual as you always were. I that’s my that’s my view.
Rick Archer: Sounds good to me. Yeah. Do you feel like, you know, it’s been about 40 years since you had this Kundalini awakening? And? And you’re getting older, obviously. And obviously, you’ve had your fair? How can you say that obvious? But, like all of us, as we get older, we have our fair share of aches and pains and difficulties. But do you feel that somehow all those aches and pains are, have been buffered by this sort of inner spiritual awakening that is taking place such that, you know, they’re happening, but on the other hand, you know, you have a kind of a reservoir of something that prevents them from being so all all consuming as they might have been, or RSA tend to be to the average person?
Dorothy Walters: Oh, I think so. I think that’s exactly right. I also I don’t have the answer to this. But I tend to suspect that going through Kundalini for years and years and years, probably gives you a stronger and healthier body than you would have had otherwise. The problem is, you can’t compare the body you’ve got now that you’ve had Kundalini with the one you might have had before you had crazy, you don’t know if you’re better off or not. But it seems to me that you are stronger. You have fewer, perhaps serious ailments. I don’t know. It’s all part of the mystery.
Rick Archer: Well, you mentioned that you were smoking and eating meat at the time of your awakening and smoking and eating meat. I think he said in your book. Oh, yeah. Time of your awakening. And, you know, I mean, I know, in my own experience, when I got on to spiritual practice, it really changed my lifestyle. And I don’t think I’d be alive. Now. If I hadn’t changed my lifestyle, I would you know, because it was rather unhealthy, the one I was living, so I mean, it does sort of this, this formulate this into a question, do you kind of feel that Kundalini guides you in a practical way? You mentioned your body becomes stronger? Does it guide you in a practical way to make better decisions with your body? Well, yeah,
Dorothy Walters: I think these some of these decisions are simply made for you. Because I was not addicted to anything. But for example, when I was younger, we did drink alcohol, you know, and have standing parties and stuff like that. I just didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to drink anything. I did smoke at one point in my life, but that just fell away. I didn’t have to go through any process or struggle with it or this, that and the other. It just felt away, and I no longer wanted to eat meat. And so for the most part, I don’t eat meat except I do eat fish.
Rick Archer: So you fell away after the Kundalini awakening? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Dorothy Walters: I just didn’t want to eat meat. And I was a total vegetarian for a while, but then I did start eating fish. I mean, shrimper fish or something like that? Yeah. But these things just happen naturally. I didn’t have to struggle with anything.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Well, that’s that’s a good point. That’s the point I was kind of making is that, you know, this kind of awakening as it progresses. It’s like, you don’t have to drop bad habits they drop, they drop you kind of
Dorothy Walters: exactly. Well, yeah.
Rick Archer: And that perhaps also pertains to sensitivity, you mentioned that you’re an empath you’re sensitive. If you you know, you see some of the things that people do to their bodies, and you think they couldn’t have the least bit of sensitivity, or they wouldn’t be, you know, inflicting those influences upon themselves. But if you become more acutely aware, and more sensitive, then naturally, you’re going to have an aversion to things that you once might have been numb to, to try.
Dorothy Walters: I think that’s right.
Rick Archer: So you went through a TM phase. And I, and you had a lot of headaches during that phase. And, you know, he saw auras and stuff like that. You mentioned that in your book. I had a comment on your TM phase, if you if I might suggested I was a TM teacher for a long time. Yeah. And that is that, you know, you, when you learn TM, we’re already at a very subtle level. And there’s a thing in TM about effortlessness. And that includes effortlessness, and effort, we’re not making effort, okay. And that includes not trying to think the mantra clearly not even trying to persist in repeating it or keep on remembering it, that it’s just a really faint idea. And one of the standard instructions that TM teachers are given is that if a person doesn’t do that, if they try to think the mantra too clearly, they could get a headache. And so I don’t know what you were doing. But it could have been that you were kind of trying to make it more concrete than it naturally
Dorothy Walters: couldn’t real. Rick, I don’t know. Now, I have all respect for TM. And I know it’s done wonders for many, many people. But for me, I was on a path of energy, energetic awakening. And the teacher that I had gave me this mantra, and suddenly, my focus was switched from Shiva or Krishna. And those marvelous energies flowing, flowing Floy to these to this word. And it was, as somebody put it, and I think that was correct. It was like putting a lid on a boiling pot. And just for me, yeah. And it and it was terrible. But I had agreed to do it for six months. And I kept trying to do it and trying. And finally, I was getting not just headaches, I was getting acute migraine headaches. And I never had migraine headaches. And my doctor announced that I had a brain tumor, because no one at my at my age would begin to have headaches if they did not have a history of headaches. And I finally said, Enough is enough. I don’t think I have a brain tumor. I went back, I had I had I had an MRI, there was an at bay brain tumor. And I thought I’m going to go back and do my former practice, but you can’t step in the same river twice. And things have changed. And so I had to kind of start all over. And I’m not sure I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t got off course for me with the TM stuff. Because at first I’d had all this vibrant natural energy and I could do this and I could do that. That wasn’t that way when I started again. I never have gotten to that level of energetic stuff. I don’t have a huge fund of energy. I’m normal. So anyway, that was my path. And for me, it was a disaster if you will know the truth. But it wasn’t for me not Yeah, no, no, I totally agree that this is for everyone. You know, God is
Rick Archer: not a one trick pony, as they say. Speaking of speaking of ponies as a Dan Fogelberg song where he says changing horses in the middle of a stream, you know, he advocates not doing that. So it sounds like you changed horses in the middle of the stream. They’re switching
Dorothy Walters: fell off and almost drowned.
Rick Archer: Yeah, exactly. For me. Yeah. Yeah, that’s an Anything I mean, I see that interviewing so many people from so many different areas and traditions and backgrounds and all. It’s like different that speaking of song Sly and the Family Stone had a song had a line where they said different strokes for different folks. You know, so it’s just like, exactly. You got a sort of
Dorothy Walters: each unique.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that is it reflects the diversity that we see in nature itself. You know, this is Oh, yeah, such a huge abundance of, of creativity and diversity in nature. Oh, yeah. Well, that that reminds you of a beautiful thing, as very often in your account of your experience. Over the years, you talked about how beautiful everything became. Yes, yeah, beautiful trees, everything just to take on this beautiful
Dorothy Walters: luster, this beautiful elimination from within. And also the sense of oneness. Because I literally felt at that time, if I looked at you, and then I went and looked at the mirror your faces when I would see I felt oneness with others, oneness for the lens with everything. So I so I did have that deep experience of oneness. And what I call the beauty beneath the beauty world was beautiful. And I’ve read that that’s the way saints are. Everything is beautiful to them Apollo trashy at the corner, could be just as beautiful as a painting or Mona Lisa. And I, I was kind of near that state for a while, not now.
Rick Archer: Oh, yeah, you said the divine and everything because the Divine is omnipresent. And so you you acquire the capacity to appreciate every little thing, you know, in its fullest value. But why do you think it’s not happening now? Because the TM thing screwed you up.
Dorothy Walters: I was I was in a very different state of consciousness. And I, as I said, I had to learn to walk in the two worlds. And I think some of those gifts they are blessings are given to us. And I think I got switched off into writing poetry. Andrew Harvey was the one, he was the only one who understood what I was telling him. And he encouraged me said, You’ve got to write a book of poetry. And I did, and I wrote a first book called marrow of flame. And also, I started writing a blog, and a Facebook page, and writing other books. And I have now published several books, getting ready to publish a new one next month. And it will be the prose. It’ll be it’ll be called Kundalini splendor, the god goddess inside your body. Because for me, this unfolding has been as though there was a God goddess, within the body, I call it the beloved within. And so and I had my own process, and I continued to work on and let unfold. And I don’t know, maybe I just wasn’t intended to be at that state. Forever. I don’t know.
Rick Archer: Yeah, well, maybe you derived from that experience, everything that you were meant to derive from it. And then it was time to move on to a new phase. Yeah, you know, writing poetry,
Dorothy Walters: writing, focus more on life and people and meeting people and loving people. And, and, and I love one. I love people’s stories, as obviously you do. And I love what one friend said once he said, We must be teachers to one another. Because we really still don’t have. I don’t know, teachers who can teach us but we are yearning to know all that I’m not yearning, because I’m only willing to live in the mystery. But I love the idea. I think the way we learn is by hearing each other’s stories. That’s how we learned because I’m very skeptical. And if I find a so called enlightened being, I read what they write and I read with a skeptical eye, that they grow maybe or possibly, or this that, but I’m not going to believe it just because they say some very skeptical.
Rick Archer: My attitude is I take him, I give him the benefit of the doubt. But I also take them with a grain of salt and you know, and proportions may vary according to who I’m hanging
Dorothy Walters: out with hundreds of people, hundreds and rejiggered hundreds of stories,
Rick Archer: but I’m open to all possibilities. I mean, sometimes people razz me for like taking channelers seriously, for instance, how could they
Dorothy Walters: I can channel Hey, go.
Rick Archer: Channel. Sure, go ahead and channel.
Dorothy Walters: I can channel a little bit. Well the other day, I thought, wondered if I could channel? I don’t know. So I asked the question, what’s going to happen to us in future? And this is the answer that I got hard times ahead hard times ahead, stay together, stay together, you can weather hard times ahead.
Rick Archer: So not only came in, and that evatik voice, but it used a little bit of rhyme in there.
Dorothy Walters: Yeah. And then I asked another time, I asked, Where should we go for safety? Because no place seems safe these days? And the answer was the same voice and it was go to the island, the island that has Ireland, go to the island, the island that has Ireland, well, that’s probably good advice. But I’m not going to pick up move to Ireland just because she said that. But that less so my channeling. But I think that one, we all could learn to channel if we wanted to. I don’t particularly want to. But I might add that Ireland has a special place in my heart, because I was born on St. Patrick’s Day. And I’ve been to Ireland several times. And I love it there.
Rick Archer: Well, there were several spots in your book where you did a little q&a kind of thing where you you, you would ask certain questions, and then answers would come to you and you would write them down. That’s I guess that you could say it’s a kind of a channeling or the gnarliest. Yeah.
Dorothy Walters: Let it come through. And they were
Rick Archer: quite, quite wise. I thought the answers you got?
Dorothy Walters: Yeah, that’s good. Yeah. But um,
Rick Archer: what more can you say about this hard times ahead thing? And okay. Yeah, please talk about that.
Dorothy Walters: Well, I don’t want to talk about our future in hard times. But I would like to talk about more about what happened to me. Yeah, and why my bliss was broken, and why I had to go through some difficult times. Well, after school started way back, when I had this business, I was an extra say, all summer long. And then school started. And I had to go back to teaching. And it was hard to focus my mind. And then I started having symptoms. And one of my symptoms was pain in the eyes. And that’s very pressure. That’s very common Kundalini symptom. But other things happened, such as my mother got what seemed to be quite ill, one day, she couldn’t get up from her chair, she couldn’t feed yourself, all of a sudden, what was going on with her, she had to go to the hospital. Well, they finally found out that she had lost her, he lost her potassium. And that can happen to people potassium is what drives the your strength, gives you strength, and she had lost her potassium. But that was where a seminar was living about two and a half hours away, and I would drive down try to do what I could, then my father was trying to help her. By then my father was 91 years old. And he was basically in good health, my dad was a big strainer fell, to try to take care of an invalid. So So I had these stresses coming into my life. And there was a stress of teaching, there was a stress of my parents being ill, so forth. And then different symptoms started showing up in my body was trying to get through. And so I didn’t feel so hot, I didn’t feel hot at all. And there wasn’t bless it was pain, there was psychological, and also what community will do. If you have any unresolved issues of any time, psychological emotional, it’ll bring them up, they’ll be right in your face. And I got some that were leftover childhood issues. They weren’t terrible. They weren’t nearly on the level that many people have. But nonetheless, there were some issues. And those issues demanded to be attended to. And what you have to do or what I had to do was in effect, relive those early feelings and how I felt and why they caused me pain. And I relive them and I got to the bottom of it. And I figured out why I had had this kind of sad childhood I was very lonely and very depressed as a child. So I just read books all the time. Read, read, read, read, read, that was my escape. So I got to the bottom of my issues and I felt much better after that. But you will have to deal with your issues. Whatever they are, they will be right where you cannot ignore them. Then because kindly makes you totally sensitive, much more sensitive to everything, including what’s going on in your body.
Rick Archer: So so the collective often recapitulates, or mirrors the individual and, you know, if as Kundalini rises in an individual, they are confronted with things that they have to resolve. Do you think that that’s happening also on a collective or societal level? I
Dorothy Walters: do, don’t you, we’re certainly getting to see our Shadow. Shadow is just so prominent, so obvious. And we have to deal with it or go under
Rick Archer: it, we have things that are being, you know, racial things, and sexual things, and all kinds of things that
Dorothy Walters: are shadow or shadow, or shadow. And we’ve always thought of nice Americans, sweet America and give me your poor, and so forth. And guess what, we’re being forced to look at all of this and see what really has been going on in our history, and how we’ve ignored it, and have a favorite view. And even the middle class were among the favorite few. They were not confronted, where at least we weren’t, I was indoctrinated with all kinds of terrible stuff. When I was a kid, because we just took it for granted. That’s the way things were. And you have to deal with that you have to come to terms with it, you have to wake up, what is really going on, and live in America, for certain groups, certain minority groups certainly was happy, as happy as, although I wouldn’t say I had a happy childhood, but at least it wasn’t. I wasn’t forced to confront some of the issues some other people did. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Do you have any sense whatsoever? of I mean, I guess this can only be speculative. But do you have any sort of intuitive or mystical insight as to, you know, how things are gonna go over the next, whatever, 1020 years, and
Dorothy Walters: I think it’s a nip and tuck race, I just think it could go a good tip. Either way. There is, I believe there is worldwide bake awakening, I fully I believe fully that we are headed into the next stage of human consciousness, human development, but at the same time, all this negative stuff is coming. Who knows, which is gonna win out? I can’t predict. I don’t know, it could go either way. I think it could go either way. Yeah, we I don’t think there’s any guarantees.
Rick Archer: Maybe as you just said, the negative stuff is coming so that we can finally confront it. And hopefully, you know, Eradicator ameliorated. But it is nip and tuck, because the the powers behind it are quite powerful. So that’s,
Dorothy Walters: that’s correct. Yeah. And, you know, some people get so discouraged, they just give up. And they say, well, there’s no hope, you know, we’re never going to make it through all this mess. But I think that there is hope.
Rick Archer: I think I feel that way, if I weren’t aware of the spiritual dimension, that’s right. Getting lively. If you just read the watch the evening news and read the paper, you have every reason to be discouraged.
Dorothy Walters: That’s right, don’t read. Well read, just read what you have to try to keep up, but not let it just pull you down, because then you’re just part of the problem. And I just am not willing to let the news or what’s happening and so forth, throw me into a state of total depression. I just think, you know, Rumi has that poem. And it’s very stark, the way he puts it, we must dance in our own blood. And in a way, that’s true. We must not give up. We must not give up hope. We must not give up joy. We must not give up play. We must not give up happiness. Because that’s what’s fun. And also my motto is consider your friends as life jackets. They’re your hope they’re yours. They’re what will secure you they will help you get through them. I think.
Rick Archer: Well, it’s good. You mentioned poetry, because, yeah, a question just came in from Susan in Burlington, Vermont. She asked Hi, Dorothy. Why do you think that mystics, when they do speak at all, so often speak in verse in poetry, rather than in prose?
Dorothy Walters: I don’t know. I see. For me, it’s a little different. I have been a word person all my life. I joined my first poetry group. When I was in the first and the first grade, they had to send me to the second grade, because first grade didn’t have a poetry circle. Second grade dead. I’ve been writing poetry all my life. I have written books of poetry that never got published. Andrew Harvey told me I must write poetry, spiritual poetry. I followed his advice. Now, there’s an interesting phenomenon, which is that sometimes people who are very spiritual do resort to writing in poetry. I have read. I don’t necessarily say this. Well, I do. A lot of people who think they can write poetry, write poetry, but it’s not very good. It’s not necessarily very good. I don’t
Rick Archer: even try it myself.
Dorothy Walters: And so, if you want to write some poetry, but poetry is an art like anything, and you have to practice it for years and years and years, to get the right hang of it. And as you get as you do more, it gets easier, and you write more. And I’ve written many books of poetry. And then as you mentioned, this light book called some kiss we want, and that is aligned, taken from Rumi, and he says, there is some kiss, we want the touch of spirit on our bodies. Well, that’s beautiful. That’s what we all want. We want the touch of spirit on our bodies. And I think poetry can take us very close to that, as music can is art can, when we are doing what he call making our soul. Those are ways we make our soul. And poetry certainly can do that. And in fact, this person that wrote to me just yesterday, Said, he listened to a YouTube reading by me and Andrea, we read our sacred poetry. And he said that that gave him answers to questions that he had had all of his life. And he hadn’t had anybody to explain them to him, I was very moved by that very move, I thought, This is why we do it, is to try to help others who are trying to see the light moving, like, become light.
Rick Archer: Well, I’ll just embarrass you a little bit here by saying that, you know, Andrew Harvey, praises your poetry to the skies. And he’s, I know, he is qualified to comment on it, he really appreciates poetry is taught courses on Rumi and everything. And he regard you as you know, one of the greatest mystical poets of our generation. So um, you know, I’ll see if I can make you blush, but it’s, it’s a recommendation for those who would like to read some beautiful mystical poetry, check out your books?
Dorothy Walters: Well, what I have found the test always on my pods, is do you like Rumi. And if the person says, Oh, I love Rumi, then I suspect they’re gonna like the poetry that I write. If they say, Now, who is Rumi, I think I’ve heard that they’re not gonna like my poetry. But if they’re on the same path, if they’re on the same frequency, it can be very meaningful to them. They, it’s almost like they need to be at a certain level of development, in order to respond, what I’m writing about. I’m not writing for the most part about the personal level. And we have a lot of wonderful levels, with a lot of wonderful poets who are writing, but it’s still about the personal level, they might take you to the portal, but I am writing about what was called the transpersonal level. And that’s a spiritual level. And the fullest sense of the word now tell you he’s a great poet of our time is Fred Lamont. Read about he’s, I think, the greatest poet that
Rick Archer: we have a motto like LA Motiti. Uh huh.
Dorothy Walters: Lol, Mo TT, okay. And he has a face a wonderful Facebook page, you can read his poetry there. I’m a great admirer of Fred Lamont. He’s got a great gift,
Rick Archer: right? I want to tie up a loose thread of something we were talking about five minutes ago, you quoted Ilya Prejean, in your book, who I once saw speak at a conference. And maybe you’re paraphrasing him here. But you said that evolution occurs at times of acute stress and crises, great evolution occurs. So the thing you and I were talking about about the hard times ahead. It doesn’t just mean things are gonna get bad. It means there’s great evolutionary progress potentially to be made.
Dorothy Walters: I think we are naturally and collectively and collectively, I really do. That’s my firm connection, firm conviction. That particular Insight was given to me at the moment of my awakening, I was told that I knew when there were other writers before our generation, have worked upon this idea of perfecting the human make turning the human into the divine human. You know, there were the alchemists of the medieval times. There were people, other saints who talked about this, the capitalist admin can add, what did you call Adam Kadmon. They were trying to perfect the human. But I think this is the time and I think we are moving into a time of great evolutionary progress. But it’s tough. It’s not easy. You don’t just jump from point A am at this level to point B I’m over here. It’s you go you go through all the stages in between, but we’re doing it it’s it’s not going happen. It is not happening. Yeah. And it’s happening in tough times. And evolution is difficult. Birth is difficult. Birth isn’t easy birth, birth is hard. We’re being reborn. I really believe that. Yeah. I really believe it. I’m committed to it.
Rick Archer: One kind of final question is, you know, you’ve been cooking along here for 40 years now, or so since your Kundalini awakening. And there have been all sorts of, you know, blissful times and difficult times and, and everything else do you have a sense that you’ve kind of come to rest, or come to some kind of completion, or things still rather turbulent at times?
Dorothy Walters: Or not turbulent? But there’s no never completion? Never completion,
Rick Archer: right? Yeah. But it’s got smoother, has it not? Oh,
Dorothy Walters: my Yeah. See, for me, it’s like, I don’t have those intense bliss outs, like I had early on. No, not that intense. I don’t want it to be that intense. The image I use, no, I could, I couldn’t take these image I use at first it was like having a big brass band. prayed through your living room. full blown brass, you know. Now it’s like hearing a flute. Play in the distance is beautiful. It’s soft, loving, and I’m so glad that it’s softer. But my awareness, my nervous system, literally has gotten much more sensitive. The subtle body has gotten much more sensitive. And now when I do I practice some, but I can’t do yoga. I can’t get up and down from the floor. Let’s face it. I’d like to, but I still consider myself a yogi even though I tap the the floor awesomeness.
Rick Archer: But there are many types of yoga besides the Hatha Yoga, you know?
Dorothy Walters: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But but even movement, okay, this is what I can do sometimes. And I can bring the bliss. Can you see what I’m doing?
Rick Archer: Oh, you’re just with your hands. Yes, slight little twitches of your fingers,
Dorothy Walters: little tiny flexing flexion or, nav on a few times, I can’t do this every day. All I’ve been asked to do is moved my eyeballs left and send it down the left side, right and send it down there. Now that’s pretty good. Let’s face it. That’s pretty advanced. But but the subtle body, as I said, now I can literally feel the edges of my aura. And it is, believe me, they’re exquisite. They’re just exquisite. I mean, everybody says I think but I can do this just like this. And feel the, the edges of the aura. Or I can be sitting at the computer as I was the other day. And just suddenly it will happen it will come in that day through the head. It can come in anywhere. It come in through your ears, it can start see I don’t do the up the spine kind of yoga. They were taught you’re supposed to do I never did learn to do that. I just like to go right to it. Just be in the bus be in the bliss. But the bliss can start anywhere.
Rick Archer: Well sounds like it’s already up the spine for you. And you don’t need to go through that again. You know you
Dorothy Walters: I don’t I don’t usually feel it in the spine. I feel it. As I said here, here and your elbows, everything. I have this wonderful quote Can I read it? Please? Not not from me. But this is a book you know this book I’ll anyways one of the ancient texts. He’s talking about yoga. He says the 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 our whole body mind event involving every fiber cell and tissue. And then later, he says that the final goal, final goal of yoga is to turn the physical into light. I think that says I love that quote. Yeah. That’s Kundalini. Yeah. The poem is turned the physical into light.
Rick Archer: I think it’s an important understanding. I mean, cuz obviously any neurophysiologist will tell us that any anything we experience has, you know, even though it’s a subjective experience, it has its physiological correlate. Yeah, yeah. And if enlightenment is is as Awesome as it’s cracked up to be, then there should be. Yeah, I mean, if it says, you know, radically different from ordinary waking state as it said to be, then there should be a radically different, you know, physiology supporting it. Oh, and that should be measurable.
Dorothy Walters: Well, I’ve had a lot of people are trying, yeah, there’s
Rick Archer: been a lot of research and and indeed, they see very different structures in the brain. Very different brainwaves very different. Oh, yeah. neuro chemistry and so on. It’s
Dorothy Walters: absolutely, yeah, it changes everything. Yeah. In your body, as well as your consciousness in your awareness. Absolutely. And the
Rick Archer: flip side of that is, be careful what you do to your body or put into your body. Oh, yeah. You know, drugs, this and that. Be careful. Because you know, your, that was a big realization I had when I was about 18. And I had not been taking very good care of my body. I thought, you know, I’m really sort of, there’s my body’s like an instrument, and it’s the instrument through which I’m going to live my life. And if I damage this instrument, I’m going to have to go through life with a damaged instrument. So I had that. Yes. Okay, I better start taking care of it.
Dorothy Walters: I know. And that’s why it’s so sad. That many of our young people, they are not taking care of their bodies. And I’m sorry, but I’m surprised how bad you found as to how many young people are having their Kundalini awakening so young. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s amazing.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I interviewed a young girl. Oh, my God, what’s your name? Courtney Amundson, a few months ago, she lives up in Minneapolis, and she had a big Kundalini awakening at the age of 16, or something like that. And now she’s like, 21, but, um, and she’s been through a lot of intense would you say now she’s about 21 or 22? Yeah. But she’s been through a lot of intensity. But now it’s she, she, she she does a lot of Qigong like you have done and it’s
Dorothy Walters: really helped her helped her smile. A lot, but I’ve done some Yeah, you
Rick Archer: mentioned a lot in your book. That’s been very helpful, too.
Dorothy Walters: Yeah, that’s, that’s good. I think there’s, but you have to be careful not to overdo it. You don’t do too much chicken or tai chi or meditation. Because you can overdo Oh, yeah, with anything. And you can overstimulate you don’t want to stimulate your nervous system more than it’s prepared to take.
Rick Archer: Right and don’t try standing on meat. cleavers. No,
Dorothy Walters: I wouldn’t recommend I didn’t go that far. I didn’t try that. Oh, yeah. Are you gonna let me read it?
Rick Archer: Oh, yes, please, not only let you but please do ask you to read as many poems as you like.
Dorothy Walters: Well, we’re kind of getting to the end here. But I would like to read a couple if I may. Yeah. This poem I wrote in April of this year, and it is a fitting to our conversation. It’s called the transition. And this is what I believe. 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, or 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. Now, that’s the transition. That is and I found my poem as my other. Well, this is interesting. Because I wrote this in March of 1981. And I had this experience I’ve described in May of 1981. So this is kind of a predictive form. And as I said, I was aware of the great goddess and I was feeling good I was in touch with the Goddess. And it was a powerful experience. When I was in Greece later, I, earlier I guess it was even then I could feel those wonderful energies in the land in the earth. I can do that sometimes when I’m traveling in Greece, certainly I got it in Ireland, at this Holy Wells, the sacred places, I can feel as bless the energies coming up from the earth. That’s why I think the earth is blessed when I think that reality is bliss. And if you want to feel bliss, as far as I’m concerned, go to Tara, the place were the kings of Ireland used to be crowned. But our local guide said she was a very strong feminist, she said, but before that, before the patriarchy took over, this was the body of the Great Mother, and you are now standing on her Root Chakra. Well, that’s pretty good. And I felt those energies come up. There’s like, Okay, this 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 bow 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. Do not speak her name. Until you have said goodbye to all your familiar treatments, your mirrors, your bracelets, your childhood iterations from now on, you are nothing a ghost sighing at the window of voice singing underwater. And that was a precursor of my awakening experience. And that is what it felt like. And I don’t know if I need to keep reading poetry. But I do want
Rick Archer: is a great. I say you can if you want these are great.
Dorothy Walters: Well, I think that’s enough. But I did want to mention again. My new book upon is the one called the Kundalini by God in here. Well, it’s behind me.
Rick Archer: Maybe your friend there could grab it. If he’s in the room.
Dorothy Walters: He’s going to grab it for me. Yeah. Thank you. Very good. Well, anyway, this is the newest but oh, look at that. It’s called the Google
Rick Archer: hire. There you go.
Dorothy Walters: And you see that you Kundalini points.
Rick Archer: And this is that this is published now?
Dorothy Walters: Oh, yeah, I was published in January. Oh, good. Okay. And this is kind of the culmination of all the poems I’ve ever written. I think these were more channeled than crafted that often. And this book, this picture here, if you can see it, I can that expresses the horse and power and energetic in the dynamic quality of Kundalini. And I think Kundalini is behind all creative processes. I really do. And so I think it is a great source of our creativity. It’s a great source of the great creative force of the universe. So anyway, that’s the one it’s on. All my books are on Amazon, as well as the publisher of this wonderful poser called emergent education press. They are the light, they are dedicated to publishing books about the future. They were willing to publish this book of poetry. Although today I don’t know if you know this, but most publishing houses will not even look at poetry. Unless your name is really or Mary Oliver. They will consider publishing your book. But if your name is unknown, if you’re an unknown port, forget it. Here’s one I’ll read to you. Called Sanskrit chanted by Swami in Sanskrit is a powerful language as you know, it’s a sacred language. And it can awaken the energies just by listening to a Sanskrit chanted by Swami they wear their beards and turbans, darkened scans. My face is naked, my head and bound, they speak in strong deep voices. This language is theirs I listened intently, understand nothing. Yet, Shiva Shakti are at play in my body pulsations of delight. I am one with whatever this is. That’s one is great. 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 pot primal innocence, of what has always been you. The hallmark of your special being, even as now, the wind speaks at 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. That’s great sudden turns.
Rick Archer: But I’m really enjoying that.
Dorothy Walters: And that way for another one. Sure. Okay. Called sudden turns. It’s a quote starts with a quote from Mary Oliver. I don’t 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 and 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 move to the mountains. Even if the snow blocked the door and 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 all give up all the things you did in exchange for what you refuse surrender 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. So thank you, Rick. Thank you, sir. Thanks. Everybody said, oh, have fun with Rick. And I did
Rick Archer: need to. It’s such a treat for me to do these interviews every week and get to know a person each time and it’s really been a treat to get to know you. Thank you. Yeah, you’re saying
Dorothy Walters: thank you for having this as a wonderful thing that you’re doing. Because otherwise how will we find each other? All of us here, having these weird experiences and nervous systems are being changed whether we like it or not. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Rick Archer: I always have like to connect people in my life. It’s always been one of my things is sort of well, that’s your gift. Yeah, kind of us spiritual Yenta these days or something? What you’re what you enter, you know, that term from Fiddler on the Roof? Yeah, there was the one who arranged marriages.
Dorothy Walters: Oh, okay. Yeah, well, I hate to pay to leave now that we’ve got started. Yeah,
Rick Archer: well, well, you’ve gone the distance. We’ve done a full two hours your voice held up. And I was worried about that. Fantastic. You did great. Um, So I’ll be creating a page for you on that gap. com, and I’m telling the listeners as well as you, and I’ll have links to all of your books, and your bio and link to your website and everything so that people can just go there and then easily, you know, jump off to your job.
Dorothy Walters: And how did I get the replay? Oh, well, it’s
Rick Archer: going to be up on in about a week, it’ll be up on the internet in a permanent way. And I’ll send an email out to all the people who are on the subscriber list. So if people are listening, and they want to, you know, be notified of that they should join the subscriber list on BatGap comm. And then in order to hear the replay, no, just to be notified, it’ll be up anyway. And we have to do some post production work on the video before we can post it. Yeah. And also, I encourage people to subscribe on YouTube, you know, just subscribe to the channel, because then YouTube notifies you whenever anything new is posted? Well, I’ll let you know. Anyway, I’ll send you an email when it goes up. So you can tell your friends and, you know, put it on your website if you want to.
Dorothy Walters: Okay, and will you include the YouTube presentations that I have done with Andrew Harvey?
Rick Archer: Um, I could I could do a linked list of
Dorothy Walters: people find find their Okay, and just person I’ve referred to. That’s where he found me. And I might add that I’m happy to hear from people. And my my email is very simple. It’s just Dorothy Walters seven two@gmail.com.
Rick Archer: Okay, and I’ll I put that on your BatGap page also, so they can just click on it. Dorothy Walters seven two@gmail.com. I expect you’re going to get some emails.
Dorothy Walters: Okay. And also, as I mentioned, I do Facebook and I often put new ones up there. And as I write them, I often put them there. So that’s a good way to kind of keep in touch with me.
Rick Archer: I’ll link to your Facebook page also. Okay,
Dorothy Walters: good. And blog. It’s it’s on a blog as
Rick Archer: a blog. Great. Okay. Well, thanks, Dorothy. And thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching and we will see it for the next one.
Dorothy Walters: Okay. Thank you. You’re welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
