The path of kundalini yoga is the path of eruption; sudden spurts of energy.  As you can hear in the background, the wind is blowing up here at 10,000 feet. And there is a wind that blows in and through your life, changing you. The wind of time ages us. The wind of life changes its direction, constantly. But there is one constant in life, and that is the energy within your being. How do you tap into it? How do you reach it? What will it do to you? How will it change you? Is it dangerous? Can it be controlled?  Or like these great volcanoes, is it something beyond our control, and we can only watch in awe, when the earth displays itself. 

Its funny how human beings tend to think that they are the masters of the earth because they put in a lot of shopping malls and painted little white lines on blacktop. Never realizing that the earth, for a time, simply tolerates its tenants. Then, when the mood strikes it, it changes. It shifts its continents around, mountains rise and fall.  We take so much for granted.

 

Kundalini yoga is the yoga of transmutation. The principles are simple: At the base of the spine, there is an access point that leads into another world, into another plane of attention. It's possible to access the energy through that secret doorway, that lowest chakra, and bring that energy and power up through yourself into your being. And as you bring it into your being, it will spread and radiate throughout your entire body. But there is a particular path that the kundalini follows: the shushimna. The shushimna, as I mentioned before, is an astral nerve tube. It's the central nerve tube. There are two others, the ida and the pingala, on either side of it.

 

In most persons, the shushimna is closed. It's a highway that has been shut down. And the continuous energy flows that gives us life, that sustains the subtle physical body, takes place in the ida and the pingala. Just as the blood is constantly flowing through your veins, through capilaries, bringing oxygen to the cells, moving nutrients and wastes around, so the kundalini energy is constantly flowing through our subtle physical body, our etheric body. It sustains it, heals it. Without, of course, that energy,  the subtle body grows ill, its injured or it dies and when it dies, the physical body dies. We are completely dependent on the subtle physical body in this world. 

 

The more energy that we have in the subtle physical body, the higher our psychic receptivity is. So kundalini yoga is in many ways, the study of energy, its management, its flow, its highs and its lows. But specifically, kundalini is a flow of power, and when we diagram it, we say that it runs from the base of the spine up to the top of the head.  Now, it isn't exactly running in the physical body, of course.  Kundalini is running through the subtle physical. The subtle physical looks approximately like the physical body, only its composed of thousands of layers of light; light fibers. It is knowledge itself. The subtle physical body conducts light the same way that a piece of wire conducts electricity, but it also reflects light, the way a mirror reflects a visage, a scene.

 

- "Kundalini Yoga, Haleakala, Maui", On the Road with Rama