5. Spiritual Emergency or Desent into the Below?
In this chapter:
When to Get Help
Case Study 1: Oholomo’s Descending Kundalini
Case Study 2: Misha’s Identity Fractures Apart
Case Study 3: After the Meditation Retreat
Case Study 4: Jack’s Dark Night of the Soul
Over the past few decades, the phrase “spiritual emergency” has become widespread among many spiritual communities in the West. Inspired by the transpersonal psychologists Christina and Stan Groff, the term typically refers to a crisis of a spiritual nature, or one brought on by spiritual practice, presenting a severe mental or physical challenge to the experiencer. But exactly what constitutes a spiritual emergency versus the expected or normal kinds of challenges associated with the awakening process has always remained an open question.
Recent studies have shown that whether or not spiritual phenomena are experienced as emergencies is in large part due to the experiencer’s ability to interpret their experiences in positive ways. Extreme spiritual phenomena that happen without adequate context tend to provoke terror, confusion, and dysregulation. However, when one is able to make sense of these phenomena and fit them into a larger framework that is meaningful, they can come to be accepted as challenging — though not necessarily destabilizing — parts of the awakening process.
One of the main purposes of this book has been to identify some of the weirder, darker, more unusual kinds of phenomena that can arise in the course of a spiritual awakening, and to provide a helpful reframing of these. The hypothetical reader I have in mind, the one who I surmise will be most interested in what I have to say in these pages, is someone who has had at least a substantial taste of the Above (i.e., awakening to nonduality, emptiness, universal love, or divinity), but then has unexpectedly found themselves in the midst of a Descent. How this descent happened will be unique from person to person, but I am imagining that such a reader is at present thoroughly confused as to why their experience doesn’t match the Above-based descriptions of awakening shared in their spiritual traditions or communities. Perhaps certain aspects of the Below are completely unknown within their circles, or perhaps they are known and actively demonized. I imagine that they are frightened, and perhaps are even experiencing this all as an existential threat.
What I have attempted to provide here in these pages is a framework for such a reader to reframe their experiences by placing them into a healthy, meaningful narrative that will both provide comfort and deepen their awakening process. Once someone has accepted the Below as a normal part of spirituality, one can transition from interpreting the Descent as a spiritual emergency to appreciating it as a great, mysterious gift.
In this chapter, I will attempt to show this kind of reframing in action through some case studies. Each one takes a series of events that were at the time interpreted as some kind of crisis, and demonstrates how they might be reinterpreted in light of the materials and models presented in this book.
When to Get Help
Before we get into the case studies that represent the heart of this chapter, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the limitations of our approach. It’s simply not the case that reframing one’s experiences can solve all of one’s problems all of the time. The Below sometimes does have real, innate dangers.
In the first place, because of how closely the body is linked with the unconscious mind (Jung argued that the body is actually part of the unconscious), the psychic turmoil you experience in an Awakening from Below almost always manifests physically. It is therefore highly likely that you will experience a range of uncomfortable bodily sensations, symptoms, or actual illnesses as you go through the alchemical and energetic transformations of the Descent and Return.
In my own case, these physical discomforts included insomnia, heart palpitations, and chronic acid reflux. Other people I know have experienced chronic pain, migraines, and other ailments. To be safe, it is always advisable to consult a medical doctor to rule out any serious conditions when such things arise. There also may be particular value in being treated by a practitioner of energy medicine (acupuncture, Reiki, etc.).
Aside from the high likelihood of physical danger, it is a near certainty that you will experience mental and emotional upheaval. It may even be difficult to distinguish between the experience of the Below and serious mental health issues. Confusing overlaps between the two occur because certain types of psychosis can often have spiritual themes or content, and certain types of spiritual experiences can mimic the symptoms of mental illness. It’s not for nothing that Joseph Campbell was once quoted as saying “the psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”
Because certain mystical experiences share a lot of common ground with madness, there are some red flags that are prudent to keep in mind. First and foremost is the inability to distinguish spiritual experiences from the everyday world. Believing in strange things is not a mental illness. Nor is seeing deities, spirits, ghosts, fairies, aliens, or other visions in your mind’s eye, in dreams, during spiritual practice, in a twilit room when you first wake up from sleep, or in other liminal spaces. On the other hand, if you are seeing these in your visual field, in broad daylight, mixed in with your eyesight in a way that you can’t tell the difference between the ordinary world and the imaginal world, that is something to get checked out by a mental health professional.
Likewise, if you’ve become confused about what’s happening within your own psyche versus consensus reality, or if spiritual phenomena are completely incapacitating you, or if you find yourself uncontrollably talking about imaginal events in inappropriate social settings, or if you become suicidal, or if you have strong or persistent thoughts or impulses to harm other people, these are all also clear signs that you need to seek help right away.
It also may just be that one day you realize you can’t handle the intensity of the phenomena you are experiencing without some support. If that happens, don’t hesitate to reach out for help. While it may feel like you are alone, there are many knowledgeable guides and counselors who can help you to navigate this territory. I’ve listed below some organizations I like to point people to, who specialize in supporting people who find themselves in an acute spiritual emergency:
Case Study 1: Oholomo’s Descending Kundalini
So far in this book, I have tended to suggest that the Descent is a gradual step-by-step process of sinking into the Below, with a slow and steady peeling back of its layers. However, for some people, the Descent into the Below can happen quite precipitously. For me, it happened extremely rapidly as a result of a certain type of Kundalini opening.
Kundalini is a generic term that is used in contemporary Western spiritual communities for many kinds of energetic phenomena that arise in the course of spiritual practice. The most common form of Kundalini is primarily a pranic or energetic opening. This kind of Kundalini generally feels like the body comes alive with tingling, electric, bioenergetic, or subtle vibrations. Typically, these sensations begin at the base of the spine and move in an upwards trajectory up the midline of the body to culminate in the head. The experience of this kind of Kundalini is normally associated with Above-oriented spirituality. The ideal is that this moving energy opens up the entire chakra system, culminating in the opening of the spiritual centers in the third eye and crown, which lead to mystical experiences of the Above.
In East Asian traditions, there is a similar notion of the awakening of the body’s qi. Here, the sensations trace a pattern up the backside of the body and down the front in a continuous loop, leading to both spiritual development and physical vitality — in other words, energetically connecting the Above and the Middle.
Both of these kinds of energetic openings are highly valued and much spoken about. However, there’s another type of Kundalini opening that is more rarely mentioned, which is the kind that is more associated with the Below. This also can involve flows of prana, but the primary characteristic is that it feels like the body-mind is fundamentally torn open. The energy system goes completely haywire, the body goes into shock, the unconscious portion of the psyche is suddenly ripped from its slumber and spills out into awareness. This kind of Kundalini feels like something utterly other has taken over the body and mind, something that is at once both completely alien and also unspeakably magnificent. It simultaneously feels sublimely divine and incredibly dark, total ecstasy and also sheer terror.
The result of an opening like this is often that the journeyer is flung down through the Below at lightning speed. There is an explosion of imaginal phenomena of all kinds, spirits, energies, bodily autonomy, sexuality, ancestral and past life materials, nature spirits and elementals, and likely even the Abyss in very short order. What normally might take years of slow discovery somehow all bursts forth in a few weeks or days.
As I have already intimated, my own Descent was sparked by just such a Kundalini event during which I experienced the serpentine goddess I now call Bachué taking over my body. When I say it was a “descending” Kundalini, the downward direction was, for me, a visceral experience. As I was on a meditation walk in my neighborhood, I felt a surge of blissful energy shoot up my back and out the top of my head into the sky. But soon enough, an intense torrent rushed back down through the core of my body. The sensation was like a firehose had been inserted into my mouth. It was so strong that I staggered and nearly was knocked to my knees as I gagged and dry-heaved into my neighbor’s bushes. The accompanying imaginal vision was of a massive black snake rushing down my gullet, and depositing some kind of milk-like liquid into my dantian. From that point onwards, I felt like there was a glimmering, buzzing portal to the Below located in my abdomen. (First, I experienced this as a vibrant black gemstone, later as a dark tunnel down through my perineum into the Abyss.)
Other people I have spoken to describe other kinds of downward-directed sensations. Something that seems to be quite common is strong sensations in the soles of the feet. (In my case, they felt hot for a few months, like I was walking on coals.) However, the main reason I am calling this descending Kundalini is not because of the directionality of the energy flows, but rather to specify a Kundalini event that bursts open the Descent. In my case, after having spent a year in the Above in a blissful state of nondual perception and thinking I was enlightened, I was suddenly hurled into the Below. In the space of about two weeks, I had energetic upheaval, visionary experiences, and spirit visitations of all kinds.
Here’s how I described the Kundalini event and its aftermath in the journal I was keeping at the time, the full text of which I have made public elsewhere on this website. The following is excerpted, condensed and slightly edited as usual:
I’m walking outdoors when I have a vision that all the trees around me suddenly transform into multi-headed snakes spurting up out of the ground. I feel my whole body begin vibrate, and a current of tingling sensations emerges from deep inside my pelvis and flows up my spine. When it reaches the top of my head, snakes spray out my skull, a canopy of cobra heads looming above me. I feel energized and immensely strong.
The feeling expands until my whole body is filled with squirming snakes. They spiral around my limbs, my torso, and my spine, squeezing me tenderly in their coils while gliding across my skin. Their slick, liquid slithering is intensely pleasurable. As they glide beneath my skin, the ecstasy becomes unbearable. I can’t contain the energy. I involuntarily start making grimacing faces, and hissing sounds come out of my mouth.
The feelings of pleasure intensify even further, building and building until my body explodes in waves after waves of shuddering full-body orgasms wrapping around themselves. The snakes and I penetrate each other sexually — in, out, and through every orifice, in every conceivable way.
Then, a black serpentine demon-like goddess fills my body. Her lower body rises out of a dark ocean of serpents. Her scaly legs coil and intertwine. At her waist, a shift from the reptilian to the feminine. A youthful body with voluptuous breasts and skin black as midnight. Her face is the sun. Her arms are raised overhead. She’s holding a golden orb, with rays of blinding light extending in all directions. She is the full spectrum from terrifying darkness to angelic radiance, connecting underworld with the heavens.
We are not one but not two. I am the Snake Mother’s son and also her lover, and she is also my body itself. There’s something about her breasts and nipples. I have an instinctual urge to suck on them. Yes, there’s an obvious feeling of sexual arousal behind this impulse, but also something much, much deeper. A distant muscle memory that is only dimly coming back into consciousness, connecting suckling a breast with warmth, safety, and satiety. With life itself.
I suck, and the breastmilk begins to flow. Warm, nourishing, white ambrosia. But then: a gush, a geyser, an ocean of milk going down my throat. A rushing stream too powerful to contain. Mother, I am drowning.
Her black breast transforms into a gigantic serpent that suddenly descends from the sky and enters my mouth, filling my throat, my stomach, my intestines in a downwards torrent. The snake disgorges a load of the Goddess’s breastmilk deep in my belly. It is overwhelming, and I find myself in a stupor, gagging and retching.
The white milk coalesces to form a fist-sized black diamond in the center of my pelvis. Her seed has been planted. I have been impregnated with her mysterious essence. Some kind of treasure will eventually be born.
Is this a gateway to enlightenment or a portal to insanity? I am filled with panic. She is telling me that I am safe, but all I can do is tremble in fear and beg her for mercy. Ecstasy gives way to a deep well of terror.
For days I hardly sleep at all. I am anxious. No appetite. I feel like I have come down with the flu. I feel exhausted and lack the ability to focus on anything. I question my sanity, my health, and my strength to walk this path. But I do not have a choice. The only way forward is straight into the serpent’s gaping mouth. This is not an invitation; it is a mandate. There is no turning back now.
The intense Kundalini opening seems to have unleashed a ton of fluttering, stinging, and itching across the sternum as well as heart palpitations. My chest feels quite locked up at the moment. I checked with doctor and everything is normal, so I assume that this is all just the growing pains of the energies opening. I am now sitting with the unpleasant sensations and allowing them to pass through.
With the initial awakening, it sometimes felt like I was taller than usual. Like I was seeing things from a location a few inches above the top of my head. These days, it sometimes feels like I’m half as tall as I am. Like I’m looking out at the world through eyes located in my abdomen.
Other strange energetic phenomena have been taking place as well. I feel like my sense of smell is supercharged. I can smell a flower or a person 100 feet away. Is this a siddhi of superhuman smell? I’ve frequently felt like I was not in a body at all, just suspended in empty space. A couple of times when I had this perception, it felt like some other entity might be trying to enter my body. A pang of fear, and I have to stomp my feet around while walking briskly in order to force myself to return back into my body. I’m awake for an hour or two in the middle of the night, every night. A constant burning feeling like fire in my lower abdomen. And, I’ve also developed a serious case of chronic acid reflux.
As I was completely unprepared for this kind of cataclysmic event, I was completely confounded when it happened. I think it’s inevitable that any journeyer who is suddenly ejected from the peaceful serenity of the Above and thrown into this kind of turmoil would find themselves radically destabilized. Someone who didn’t have any context and wasn’t familiar with any of the phenomena we’ve been discussing in this book could understandably assume that they have gone mad — a psychotic break or sudden onset of schizophrenia, perhaps. That certainly was the case for me, and it took a long time for me to eventually come to terms with what had happened.
Of course everyone’s experience is unique, but I’ve provided my story here to give you a general idea of some of the phenomena that might occur in a downward Kundalini, precisely so that you don’t panic and assume something is wrong with you. If you are having a descending Kundalini, I know from personal experience it’s a lot to cope with. You will likely feel like you’re right at the limit of what you can handle, on the razor’s edge of madness.
Being afraid and confused like this is unavoidable. But, if you can somehow manage to surrender to the process, you will eventually gain confidence that you can actually handle it. You can gradually relax into the Descent and start to receive its blessings. Believe it or not, in the end, you will find this hair-raising roller-coaster journey to have been a tremendous gift. One day, you will be grateful for, and remember fondly, every step of this process — even this one.
Case Study 2: Misha’s Identity Fractures Apart
Misha, who we heard from numerous times in the preceding pages, shared with me the following account of the fracturing of her personality into “parts.” Let’s let her tell her story first, and then we can reinterpret and reframe it along the lines we’ve been exploring in this book:
About nine years ago, I was intensively plumbing the depths of the meaning, function, and value of the Twelve Steps, as well as using a homegrown framework for exploring the issues of life, death, and my relationship with those. In addition to engaging in regular meditation, breathwork, and prayer, I was doing a lot of inquiry and contemplation. Increasingly, I withdrew from reality and was experiencing life through the filter of past trauma. I began referring to myself as a collective organism with adult selves, plus child and teenaged parts.
I frequently regressed into a childlike state. At times I could vividly see in my mind’s eye, and energetically feel, how my bedroom window opened onto a castle and a magical land in the yard beyond. It felt to me like this fantasy land was overlaid on the physical world. In its own way it was as real as the ordinary world, and I was the Princess. Other times I would connect with the spirit of Eagle and let Eagle dance with and through me, “flying” around the house.
When I showed up at anonymous support group telephone meetings, increasingly I was speaking in a child’s tone of voice. I began using a child’s nickname, and started insisting that name be used. I’d feel irritated if I showed up in that child state and people called me by the adult name by which they had known me.
In the deepest part of the crisis, when I got triggered, it would take as long as a day and a half to calm down enough to get myself to bed. Due to extreme levels of anxiety, I slept with the room lights on and the bedroom door locked. I slept fully clothed, including shoes, with a kitchen knife under my pillow. My bed was a “scary zone.” I’d visualize Dog curled up under my bed to alert me in case of approaching danger, and Bear curled up behind me for protection and comfort.
Eventually, a person in the group whom I trusted suggested I talk with a counselor. They persisted with increasing insistence until I acted on the suggestion. By then, I was significantly homebound, disabled and incapacitated, so trying to get to in-person appointments on a regular basis was impossible. My once a month grocery runs took the rest of the month to recover from, and I spent most of my time in bed on high doses of prescription pain medication. Eventually, I discovered that a counselor I’d worked with decades before was still in practice on the other side of the continent. I reached out by phone and left a message, hoping to connect.
I received a message in a gentle voice from my old counselor, saying we could “pick up the stitch.” I felt relieved I’d be getting help from this trusted person. Because I lived so far away, I was the first client he began working with over a video platform (this was more than four years before the COVID-19 outbreak). Over several calls, he gradually and gently drew me in, soliciting information about my state along the way.
I don’t recall spiritual emergence being addressed overtly in counseling. So I wasn’t getting any direct spiritual guidance around that part of the crisis. Instead, our weekly sessions seemed to be focused around trauma recovery. However, my counselor was spiritually awakened (though I didn’t recognize that at the time) and was part of the Spiritual Emergence Network. In addition, he had a great deal of clinical expertise working with adult women survivors of chronic, developmental childhood sexual abuse. So I was in good hands in both those regards.
Practices that kept me highly focused on being in the present moment and out of dissociative states helped a lot. Also practices that helped soothe my jangled nervous system and helped me feel safe. Executing mandala art of the symbolic images that appeared in my visions was part of the therapeutic process. Sometimes I’d spend 20-40 hours on a given image, which kept me grounded in the ordinary world while still in touch with the imaginal.
Besides psychotherapy, I continued participating in Twelve Step programs during this time. I also received lots of help and support from my closest friends. I found comfort in spiritual books and recordings that resonated with me. Tara Brach was particularly soothing. Things finally began calming down a lot, and the next round of major awakening shifts began about two and a half years after this one.
Going through the above account in detail, we can recognize a lot of the hallmarks of an awakening from Below. The practices that Misha was working with at the time of the onset of the crisis seem to have provoked the collapse of her centralized, unified sense of self. That, of course, is one of the principal purposes of inquiry and meditation. But, instead of experiencing this collapse of the self as a blissful emptiness or a divine oneness as one typically does in an awakening from Above, for whatever reason, Misha’s system was wired in such a way that she was thrust into the Below.
In the absence of a unifying self to provide coherence for her identity, Misha began experiencing various previously unconscious aspects of her being as autonomous entities (“parts,” in her language). She doesn’t explicitly mention this in the narrative above, but no doubt some of those child-like parts had important messages that needed to be expressed regarding childhood memories, traumas, and wounds (at one point, she mentions having been abused while young). Those repressed parts demanded to be recognized and accepted, for example, by insisting on being called by their proper names.
At the same time that this was happening, Misha’s imaginal world also began to open up with visions of a fantasy landscape with herself as a princess. She also experienced some kind of light trance state or semi-possession by Eagle spirits.
Like most people going through an Awakening from Below, Misha’s system was overwhelmed by the experience and she became energetically dysregulated. She fell into a morass of anxiety, with increased fatigue and pain. She also suffered from insomnia, which is one of the most common energetic side effects of awakening. In the depths of the night, she was accompanied both by fearsome dark energies as well as by imaginal animal companions who protected her.
All of these phenomena we have discussed in detail in previous chapters. But it sounds like Misha didn’t have any context for what she was experiencing at the time. Her therapist wasn’t familiar with the Below, and she had no specific practices in her repertoire that would encourage her to dive head-on into the underworld aspects that were emerging.
Nevertheless, on balance it sounds like working with the therapist on the underlying trauma was enormously helpful for her. I do think that everyone who finds themselves in this kind of situation could benefit from connecting with an experienced counselor. In addition, she mentions finding artistic expression of her imaginal visions to be beneficial. Also grounding practices that helped keep her out of dissociative states and soothed the nervous system. Of course, the specific things that worked for her wouldn’t necessarily work for everyone, but the general notions of support, engagement, and grounding are, in my opinion, universally advisable.
Fortunately for Misha, with the help of her trusted counselor, she was able to navigate her opening to the Below successfully, and it opened doors for her growth along her spiritual path. Others are not always so lucky, as we’ll see in the next case study.
Case Study 3: After the Meditation Retreat
This narrative was publicly posted by a user called HouseOnFire in a forum dedicated to meditation phenomena on Oct. 29, 2020. I’ve made a few edits, just to clean up spelling, fix typos, and add some punctuation for clarity. I also omitted parts of the post at the beginning and end where the author is referencing other materials and posts in the forum.
When I showed up at the Goenka retreat last January I was very much there to try to save myself from the mess I was making of my life. The first few days of Goenka are straight Anapana — just observing the sensations of the breath at and below the nostrils. I had been drinking, smoking weed, and drinking a lot of coffee, so these days were a detox for me and I slept whenever I wasn’t meditating.
Then on day four we were taught the Goenka body scan method and things changed. I picked up each new element of the body scan instruction quite easily and I attribute this to the months of concentration meditation I’d been doing…. I quickly became aware of subtle vibrations all through my body and could “play” with them at will.
The rest of the course was extremely trippy. Each night I slept less but awoke with full energy, immediately aware of the subtle energies. In my non-meditative time I started playing a game I called “what drug does it feel like I’m on.” Sometimes it was acid, sometimes MDMA or mushrooms.
In Goenka language, “I passed many sankaras.” During mediation I would find a dark or painful area in the awareness of my body, hang out with it, and watch it dissolve. Moments or hours later I’d feel some intense emotion, usually sadness, and then cry for a while. Then later still I’d have a memory come up — the time my parents installed a lock on the outside of my bedroom door and how I’d screamed and kicked the door down when they tried to use it, or whatever.
Where in my drinking and depression I’d felt mentally dull, now I seemed to be able to think in complete paragraphs, and at one point I decided to try to make sense of my life. This is where I got into trouble by remembering every important thing that ever happened to me. I had a single thought process go on for 6 hours uninterrupted until the thoughts started to go in slow motion and I found I couldn’t verbally cognate anymore. I could speak and know what I was doing but I couldn’t say words in my head. It was very strange.
So the course ends, I get to finally meet the other meditators, and then go home. It was a long drive home and I didn’t get there until about 3 am. Having woken up about this time the day before, I’ve now been awake for 24 hours. As I look at myself in the mirror before bed, I notice that my eyes and facial expression look a lot like pictures I’ve seen of Ram Dass where he looks totally blasted on bliss. Also — strangely, as I am a dude and don’t normally think about myself this way — I think that I look incredibly beautiful and lean in and give my mirror-self a little kiss. Finally in bed, I make a little bath of love for myself out of subtle vibrations and lay back saying “anything, anything.” It is the most contented moment of my adult life.
This is when shit gets weird. Suddenly my body starts rolling around on the bed all on its own. I kinda feel like I’m being pushed around but I can tell the energy is coming from the inside. I get the sense that I could stop it if I really wanted to, but it definitely doesn’t feel volitional. As I’ve just completed a ten day course where the main focus was letting things rise up as they will without reacting, I decide to go with it.
Pretty soon I’m up off the bed and dancing. “Ok,” I think, “I’ve got the dancing mania, cool.” Then I’m spinning my arms all around and my finger brushes across my chest and in a way that feels… seductive. The sensation at this point is hard to describe but I can only say that I became a sexy woman. I felt that I was a woman and I felt sexy as fuck. I strutted around the room feeling just so hot.
Then I felt strong hands push me onto the bed and begin to ravish me sexually. I went through all the positions of sex as a woman and felt all the emotion if not all the sensation. But I’m talking raucous sex and I moaned and screamed as would be appropriate. When this ended maybe 20 minutes later, I decided I’d better go tell my roommate what was going on as she’d obviously heard me. As I talked to her I kept feeling hands trying to pull me back into the bedroom and I could feel my gender changing from male to female and back again. When I allowed the female version to take over I moved and spoke in a feminine way and was super affectionate towards my roommate.
The problem was it didn’t stop. All night long, I had these bizarre sexual experiences with my ghost lover even though I was exhausted. By the time morning came I was panicking a little. What the hell was going on? Was I a trans woman and this was my subconscious way of letting me know? Was I possessed by a fucking spirit? Was all of this shit random?
I called a friend and he gave me the shitty advice to go see a medium. I did so and thank god she just said that I should call the meditation teacher. His explanation was that my subconscious mind had become too intertwined with my conscious mind and that sleep would fix me. But that night sleep was again impossible, and on the third day I had my friends take me to the hospital.
I’ll spare you the story of the hospital other than to tell you that when they gave me Ativan and Seroquel it felt like I was being blasted through a DMT tunnel and I only slept for an hour or so. A week later, I was discharged with a prescription for a powerful antipsychotic in hand. After a month or so I could sleep without the drugs but I became severely depressed. It’s only in the last few weeks I’ve felt like I’ve come out of the depression and started meditating again….
Did my experience mean something? What the hell was that?
This account really moves me because of the obvious confusion the journeyer underwent. It also is a clear example to me of the potentially dire consequences of misunderstanding an awakening from Below. As before, let’s go through it bit by bit, comparing the experiences described by HouseOnFire against those detailed in this book.
In the first place, let’s note the context in which these events occurred. The meditation retreat described here (which the poster simply calls “Goenka”) is a common Above-oriented variety of Theravada Buddhist vipassana meditation. In these courses, participants are encouraged to focus entirely on Above-based perspectives and there is no teaching related to, or even mention of, the Below. We can also notice that HouseOnFire went to this retreat with the idea of escaping or fixing “the mess” of his life — that is to say, he was seeking to transcend rather than embody his humanity.
As HouseOnFire began to participate in the retreat, he noticed the psychedelic effects of high-dosage meditation starting to kick in. As the defenses of his ego-wall started to become more porous, he began to experience various repressed emotions and traumas arising to be seen and witnessed.
What happens next is evident of a severe lack of grounding. HouseOnFire participates with full intensity in the retreat (which, by the way, requires 10 or more hours of seated meditation per day with exercise or other grounding practices explicitly prohibited). Then, he makes a long drive and deprives himself of sleep even further. Because of the sensitivity of his condition (whether due to the retreat or other factors it is impossible to say), he rapidly plunges further and further into the Below.
The homoerotic moment in front of the mirror, the gender changes, the spontaneous sexual energies, the feeling that this was happening because of an autonomous external entity such as a ghost or spirit, and the loss of control or feeling of being possessed are all things we’ve discussed in detail throughout this book. HouseOnFire reaches out to a friend, a medium, and the meditation teacher, but no one seems to be able to help him make sense of his experience. Like many others who perceive themselves to be in a spiritual emergency, HouseOnFire winds up in the hospital, where doctors treat him for psychosis. He seems to have eventually stabilized with medication, but has lingering depression as well as lack of meaning or context for the experiences he has gone through.
Could HouseOnFire’s experiences have gone differently? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps he has a propensity toward manic or psychotic symptoms that would eventually have been triggered by any kind of spiritual practice. Perhaps his best resort in that moment really was hospitalization and pharmaceutical interventions. But, what if instead of a complete lack of context and support, he was handed this very book and was able to reframe his experiences in a positive and supportive way? What if he had known how to ground himself and engage with the Below, rather than getting sucked away into an extreme experience? We can only speculate, but I would wager that his engagement with the Below would very likely have been much more manageable and meaningful than it was.
Case Study 4: Jack’s Dark Night of the Soul
One last case study I’d like to introduce is that of my friend Jack. We’ve heard a lot from Jack in the preceeding pages, in particular about his experiences of the dark imaginal and his close relationship with deities, ancestors, and other spirits. But these relationships deepened and developed over the course of many years, and, at least at first, his process of Descent was anything but smooth.
The following account is excerpted (also edited and some pieces moved around a bit) from a YouTube talk titled “Heartfelt Support as You Move through the Dark Night” he recorded for his My Rising Rose channel in 2024. Here is Jack’s story about his own Dark Night, including his thoughts on the ultimate meaning of these kinds of experiences:
I went through a quite sudden spiritual transformation that happened when I was 26 — that’s 11 years ago. It started out very spontaneous and easy. It felt like everything was flowing very well, and it felt really clear and open and peaceful. I would go in and out of states of presence and experience deep peace of mind. And I was so uplifted because I’d finally found something that was breaking me free from all of the pain that I’d been suffering through for most of my life before that point.
This continued on for about a year, I would say, until I had a Kundalini Awakening that was similar to a near-death experience. After that Kundalini awakening, my consciousness was radically changed. It was like the volume had just been turned up, or a dimmer switch had just been turned up. I began to see and feel energy, and I had out body experiences where I was meeting all these different beings, angels, and deities and having telepathic communication with them.
That was obviously amazing on one level, and on another it was pretty intense and it sent my nervous system into shock. For quite a while after that Kundalini awakening, I was very ungrounded. In the first week afterwards, my sense of myself was so shaken that I was not coherently inside of my body. That was confusing and disorienting, and I didn’t really have anyone to talk to about it. I had quite a long period out of work, about six months off for sick leave. Just walking out of the house felt incredibly difficult. Just the basics of going to the shop and getting food felt like it was the hardest thing in the world because my energy field was so confused. It was overwhelming to try to do anything.
I went back to live with my mom in the countryside in England. I thought I would be there for maybe a month or two, but what happened was that I really went into the Dark Night of the Soul, and I ended up being there for two and a half years. And what I found was that the more time that I was at my mom’s, the deeper I was descending into some kind of really dark and challenging place. I was meeting all these different parts of myself that I had been running from.
My childhood was really traumatizing. Even the way that I entered this world was traumatizing. I nearly died when I was born, and if you know much about the way that trauma is held inside of the body, then you’ll know that a traumatic birth that is left untreated can predispose one to lots of anxieties and suffering later in life. Especially if they’re in a family that is abusive physically and emotionally, and neglectful, which mine was. And then, when I was in my teenage years, I was using alcohol and drugs to cope with that, to push all that down. But I had stopped drinking and stopped taking drugs, and had gone through this spiritual transformation where my awareness had become much brighter. And what was happening was that my bright awareness that wasn’t being suppressed through drugs and alcohol anymore was now casting a light on everything that was inside my body and my mind: all of those things that I was afraid of, and all the things that I’d been running from for so long.
All of that had a really profound effect on my body. I was absolutely exhausted all the time and could barely get out of bed. But I couldn’t really sleep either. I would have intense nightmares pretty much every night. For a full year, I’d wake up around 3 a.m. and would just be sweating from the nightmares that I was having. I would only get a few hours sleep at night, and then I’d be exhausted during the day.
Also, I was feeling real despair and feeling like I’m a loser because I’m in my late 20s and am living with my mom in this tiny single bed. Seeing other people and comparing myself to the way they’re living their life, I was an absolute failure. I was studying medicine when I was 18. I was going to be a doctor, and I was going to be looked up to by the people around me. By this point in my life, I expected to be married with kids, having my own home and living really well by all the social standards. And I had failed. I’m at my mom’s house, I’m single, I’m in intense emotional pain every day, I’m unemployed. The people around me didn’t understand what I was going through, either. Even family members treated me like I was just nothing.
At the same time, I was having these new openings in my mind where I could communicate with these deities who were telling me that everything was going the way it was meant to be going. They gave me this analogy. They showed me a vision in my mind of this old office building from the 1970s, and they were like, “Look, the carpet’s outdated. The computer is really old and barely works. This office isn’t fit for the modern world. It’s not fit for purpose; it doesn’t function well. We need to upgrade it.” And, of course, the office here in this analogy was me: my mind, my state of consciousness, and all of the outdated things were all those old patterns that were running through me.
And what they were saying was, “Okay, we’re going to update this office. We’re going to get workers to come in with jackhammers, and they’re going to tear up the floors, and we’re going to redo it all. We’re going to rip the walls down because they’re all moldy. We’re going to build new ones, we’re going to get you new computers, and everything’s going to be running fantastically. It’s all going to be running great in a few years, but not now. And the funny thing is, you’re not allowed to leave the office. You have to stay here, which means that you are going to have to endure the disruption of all the noise that we’re making. But just know that this isn’t going to last forever. There is going to be a time when this all ends, and you will be where you want to be.”
Did you know that when a caterpillar goes into a crysalis, it doesn’t just transform into a butterfly? The caterpillar actually dissolves. It becomes a liquid, and it’s from that liquid that the butterfly is formed. So if you’re going through this kind of Dark Night right now, just know that this is what is happening to you. You’re withdrawing into your chrysalis. And as you feel into that and explore it for yourself, you may find you can relax and accept what’s happening. To go with this process rather than resisting it.
Waking up can be a quite sudden thing that can feel like it’s going to solve all our problems. And as it starts to deepen, usually what happens is we realize that it’s not going to. We realize that we’re going to need to get our hands dirty, that we’re going to have to scrub the dishes ourselves. And that can take time, and it can be messy and painful.
For me, this spiritual life, this unification with our divinity and with the world and with life: it’s not about escaping suffering. It’s about learning how to suffer well. It’s about realizing that suffering is our cross, the heavy weight that we carry that is also the vehicle for our spiritual evolution and our maturation as human beings. Suffering makes us wise and compassionate. It teaches us how to let go. It inspires us to greater depths of love and joy and peace. It’s the reality check that keeps us grounded, and it’s the calling that pulls our spirit down from the heavens to embrace the Earth.
Jack’s story has many of the signs of an Awakening from Below. It is clear that he too had some kind of descending Kundalini event: an energetic opening that cracked open his unconscious and led him into a Descent. This opening resulted in his being able to communicate with deities, spirits, and other entities, but it also left him energetically destabilized and hypersensitive. As Jack describes it, the overwhelming Dark Night experience that ensued for several years involved the emergence of many “different parts” of himself that he “had been running from for so long.” These included his birth trauma, childhood traumas, and many of the “old patterns” that he had been employing to cope with these old wounds. He also confronted feelings of failure and self-loathing, nightmares, and other difficulties as the unconscious parts of his psyche were released into consciousness.
What’s different about Jack’s experiences than those of Misha or HouseOnFire is that he had some explicitly supportive messages from his spirit guides that helped him to accept what was happening. His guides explained to him that he may experience discomfort for a while, but that he ultimately had nothing to fear. This message allowed him to surrender to the process for as long as it took to complete the transformation (in his case, about two and half years).
In the story he tells, you can see how Jack is able to reframe his own difficult experiences in order to place them into a meaningful and healing narrative that highlights the importance of suffering in the spiritual life. (In the original video, he also invokes the image of Jesus weeping in the Garden of Gethsemane over the prospect of being tortured to death, a powerful imaginal symbol of the sanctity of suffering if there ever was one.) This reframing is both a product of the darkness Jack encountered in the depths of his Dark Night, and also a support that helped carry him through and out the other side. Now, as a spiritual teacher, he is able to share this understanding with others who are going through a similarly difficult awakening process. In other words, this reframing is one of the elixirs Jack pulled out of the Below and is now sharing with his community.