This is a delightfully concise and to-the-point description of Kundalini energy,
as taken from the mouth of the teacher of my own teacher, Guru Singh. I first came across these passages when I was doing my training many years ago, and recently came across them again. I have arranged his commentary in the form of a short conversation…
Donna Quesada: What is kundalini?
Yogi Bhajan: It is the whole energy of the cosmos in the individual and beyond the individual. It is the energy of consciousness.
Donna: Why do we need this energy?
Yogi Bhajan: Without the constant flow of that energy, you could not live. With a large flow, your mind begins to flow and awaken. You stop living in imaginary realities, and become very dutiful to the tasks and joys of life.
Donna: What creates this flow? In other words, what is happening biologically, when this flow is ignited?
Yogi Bhajan: You experience it when the energy of the glandular system combines with the nervous system to create such a sensitivity that the brain in its totality receives signals and integrates them.
Donna: And how do we know when we have successfully started this flow?
Yogi Bhajan: A new clarity, accompanies your perception, thought, and intuition… when kundalini awakens, one understands the effect and impact of an action at the beginning of a sequence of action and reaction. He has the choice to take an action or not. In other words, a person becomes totally and wholly aware. That is why it is called “the yoga of awareness.”
Donna: Is it only Kundalini that has the power to awaken us in this way?
Yogi Bhajan: Just as all rivers end up in the ocean, all yoga ends up raising the Kundalini.
Donna: Why do we need a practice like yoga to spark the movement of kundalini energy? In other words, why doesn’t this process just happen automatically, the way people go through puberty naturally and without effort, for example?
Yogi Bhajan: After the eighth year of life, the pineal gland does not secrete fully. Some people think it is functionless in the human structure. Kundalini Yoga activates its dormant potentials in the brain. It needs to tap the reserve energy that is stored near your navel point. There is a pure source of energy at the navel area that is known, perceived, and understood by the yogis.
Donna: So through the practices of yoga, we awaken this latent energy in the navel area to enable its rising up through the body, and ultimately to reach the pineal gland?
Yogi Bhajan: All you have to do is uncoil that energy and make a functional connection with your pineal gland. Once that master gland, the channel of the soul, has started secreting, it will give you the power to reach your self-realization in relationship to the total universal awareness.
Donna: Finally, I have to ask this question, since I have seen that it tends to come up in discussions of KundaliniYoga… Is this process, as you have described it, dangerous?
Yogi Bhajan: Is money dangerous? It is very unfortunate that some people talk that way. It is just an energy. Kundalini is a latent energy that can be used for total consciousness. The only dangerous thing is the person whose kundalini is raised properly. That person is totally conscious. He cannot be lied to, or cheated or politically swayed.
