by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life. Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.
In this episode of Creative Status, I had a deep conversation about the process of TRANSFORMATION with kundalini yoga teacher and life coach Chris Kalbfleisch.
If you don’t know, Kundalini is the most ancient form of yoga and is a technology for merging your nature with the transcendent/divinity so you can reclaim your natural connection to WHOLENESS. This place of wholeness is where creativity takes place and comes from and so this is a ridiculously powerful approach to transforming your life.
The way that the Kundalini energy is often described is as a coiled serpent resting dormant at the bottom of your spine. When you awaken this serpent it goes from your root chakra (connected to the earth) and the bottom of your spine and shoots up to your crown (connected to divinity).
We cover loads of ground in this conversation but here’s some themes:
-Kundalini itself and what it is
-The journey from fragmentation to wholeness
-How the ego gets in the way of our growth and how we can better manage it
-The different paths to awakening the kundalini and how we can navigate it
-Abundance verus scarcity and how it feeds into this ‘stuff’
-Loads more
This is a really powerful conversation for anybody who is interested in transformation and some of the practical and time-tested ways to change your life.
Listen using the embedded player above or check it out on any podcast platform!
Thanks for checking it out and stay real,
Oli
(Scroll down for full show transcript)
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Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: anchor.fm/creativestatus
Episode Links:
Chris’s website: https://www.theway-healing.com/
Connect with Chris on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-kalbfleisch-9211351b4
Chris’s email: chris@theway-healing.com
Creative Status Links:
The Creative Performance Transformation Lab: olianderson.co.uk/creativeperformance
Follow me on Instagram: instagram.com/olijanderson
My YouTube channel: youtube.com/olianderson
Get my books on Amazon: amazon.com/author/oli
7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose: olianderson.co.uk/systemshock
Free one hour creative workshop to take your creative brand or project to the next level: olianderson.co.uk/creativeworkshop
Free 90-Day Journal Challenge: olianderson.co.uk/journal
The Law of Attraction for Realness (mini-course): olianderson.co.uk/lawofattraction
Show Transcript: Kundalini & Creative Transformation
Intro
Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Oli Anderson here, you’re listening to Creative Status, this is a podcast about using the creative process to transform your life and ultimately the main lesson that we seem to keep uncovering is that if you trust life and you go with it and you get out of your own way then the only transformation that any of us can go through is from a state of being fragmented and disconnected to a state of wholeness.
That ultimately just means that we’re connected to ourselves, connected to other people and connected to life on the deepest possible level. If you’re new to the podcast, welcome. Every episode I interview some amazing inspiring people that have something amazing and inspiring to say about life itself and the creative process.
My view and my understanding of all this now is that because we’re talking about what’s real and what’s universal and applies to all of our lives we can come into this from all kinds of different angles and we can learn to understand it more deeply and more intricately through the nuances of people’s experiences, the theoretical stuff that they use to make sense of life and all that kind of thing. There’s some deep deep learning in today’s interview which is an interview with Chris Kalbfleisch who is a Kundalini yoga teacher.
If you don’t know Kundalini yoga is the most ancient form of yoga. It goes all the way back to the Vedas which are ancient texts basically and the Kundalini itself is often described as being a serpent that is coiled up at the bottom of our spines and if we go through a process of ultimately reconnecting to ourselves in a strategic way, working up our body through the chakra system then we can awaken this energy that is within us and ultimately be more connected and ready to transform our lives by knowing deeply with deep awareness who we are, what life is all about and what we want to do with it.
That might have been a terrible way of describing Kundalini yoga but luckily in the interview you’re going to get some amazing stuff from Chris who can tell you properly because that’s his whole thing. But ultimately this is a conversation about transformation: what transformation is, how it shows up, how we can ride with it, how we can ensure that the transformations we take ourselves through are real and what to expect along the way plus a load of other amazing things. So I’m going to stop rambling but here’s the actual interview.
Chris thank you so much for your time, everybody else I’m sure you’re going to get some cool stuff out of this so thanks for listening and hope you enjoy it.
Here’s the interview, boom.
Interview
Oli Anderson: Oh hi there Chris, thank you so much for joining me today on Creative Status. You’re a Kundalini yoga teacher which is super cool.
Kundalini is something that’s fascinated me for a while and I feel like I might have picked up a lot of misconceptions around what it is so it’s good to actually talk to somebody who knows what they’re on about.
Before I start asking you six million different questions do you want to just introduce yourself, tell people a bit more about what you do and also what you want to get out of this conversation.
Chris Kalbfleisch: Yeah thanks Oli, thanks for having me be here. I’m very very excited to be spending this time with you. Yeah so I am a Kundalini yoga teacher as well as a transformational life coach and as we get into the discussion we’ll see how those two things go together because Kundalini itself is all about transformation.
An interesting story about how I came across Kundalini, an interesting story about how it found me and I’m looking forward to getting and exploring all that stuff with you and in terms of stuff that you know we could cover that’s really interesting.
This idea of tapping into our infinite creative potential which is ultimately the objective of the Kundalini yoga practice to tap into that infinite creative potential that we all have in us so looking forward to this.
Oli Anderson: That’s amazing so just to dive right into this maybe we need to start with a simple definition of what Kundalini is so there’s two things I’ve heard about Kundalini, maybe you can test my assumptions.
So the first thing I’ve heard is that it’s the most ancient form of yoga so if you go back to the you know the the Upanishads and all these old books I don’t know if it’s literally the Upanishads but the older Vedas and things like that Kundalini yoga is mentioned in there but the other thing that I’ve heard which a lot of people might have heard that are listening to this is that Kundalini is a serpent that is coiled up at the base of your spine and if you go through the right sequence or follow the right process of doing what you need to do you can awaken this serpent and it’s going to shoot up your spine go through your chakras and then you’re going to be enlightened or something like that.
Is that what we’re talking about or is there more to it or less to it like how would you kind of dice it?
Chirs Kalbfleisch: Yeah. So Kundalini yoga is a technology. It is a technology of human consciousness. And when they’re talking about yoga in the Upanishads or in the Vedas, they are referring to loosely Raja yoga or Kundalini yoga. What Kundalini does effectively is it takes all the aspects of all the various forms of yoga. It packages them together in, you know, as we describe it as a technology that’s meant to be the fastest path to enlightenment one can achieve. And I think I’ve heard it said, whether this is true or not, it’s folklore that, you know, one year of Kundalini yoga is the equivalent of 10 years of Hatha yoga in terms of what it does to you spiritually.
It incorporates, go ahead.
Oli Anderson: Sorry, so I was just going to say, I think you were about to answer it, but what’s the main difference, would you say, between Kundalini and the other kinds of yoga, the other schools?
Chirs Kalbfleisch: Kundalini, I think, brings all the all the pieces of those schools together. So it takes the it takes bits that together then codifies them in such a way that it has this effect of moving energy quickly through your body. So it’ll have the, you know, the asana positions, the pranayama breath work, the meditation, the japa, the repetition of sounds, and other various forms that will show up and all these other types of yoga, putting them all together with the objective of being the fastest path to enlightenment.
And they used to call it the householder yoga in that you didn’t necessarily have to, you know, leave the village and go off in the jungle for 10 years to find enlightenment. You could carry on in the real world, do Kundalini yoga, and that could also be a path to enlightenment.
Oli: Wow. So I suppose that the obvious question now then is, when we say enlightenment in this context, what exactly are we talking about? Like, what are we aiming for, if we’re aiming for enlightenment?
Chris: Yeah, so it goes to the first question, one of the second question you asked about that coiled serpent that they talk about in Kundalini. And so that, I get that allegory or analogy of the serpent is that, you know, in our, just above our sacrum, down what’s called the lower triangle of our chakras, those first three chakras, there’s this energy, and we call it the Kundalini energy, and we can amortify it as a serpent, that it lies dormant in there, but it’s all of our, I guess, our potential, all of our divine energy that sits dormant in there, and it’s waiting to be released.
And how it gets released is by clearing the blockages throughout our body, throughout our chakra systems, and allow that energy to rise up from the lower chakras, all the way up through the seven chakra system, out the crown. And through that process, we gain a new perspective and a new understanding of what ultimate reality is. And so effectively, you can say enlightenment is potentially having some of the veils of illusion, they call it, torn down about the world we live in, and to tap into something that has greater meaning to it. And that’s the process of enlightenment.
And, you know, I think one or two people throughout history have gotten truly light, light, which is like the Buddha or, or Christ, and the rest of us are just somewhere on this path.
Oli: Yeah. So one thing that I’m always talking about on this podcast is that the creative process is ultimately two things, which are the same thing. So it’s the journey of making the unconscious conscious. But as we do that, we go from a state of fragmentation to wholeness.
Fragmentation is ultimately when we’re caught up in our minds, we caught up in an identity that is just built of conceptual knowledge and ideas, where we’re holding back and hesitating because of our conditioning and all this kind of stuff. And we pick up a version of ourselves, which is very limited at the levels of what we allow ourselves to perceive, but also the way that we interpret life and our ability to kind of respond to it and move with it. What you’re saying about the Kundalini is very similar. So ultimately, what you seem to be saying is as the Kundalini awakens, it travels up our spine.
We basically push through a lot of these fragmentary blocks and barriers so that we can become more whole and reconnect to what was there all the time. Is that a fair way to say it?
Chris: Yeah, I think so. And I’ll state it in slightly different terms is that we are man, man and woman are conditioned being. So we’re born these blank slates with the supercomputer attached to us, which is our psyche and our brain. And we have a bunch of rules and ways to live programmed into us in order to survive. And depending on where we’re born into, what family, what country, what dynamic, we have to develop an ego or persona to survive that because we’re helpless.
And the only way to get to adulthood is to create a set of rules to keep us safe. We then identify with those as that’s who we are. But in fact, that was just basically some type of a program that was dropped into us an operating system to get us to the point where we could then move on, shed it like a snake sheds its skin, and figure out what our true identity is.
What Kundalini Yoga does is And this has certainly been my experience with it, is our mind is a very, very powerful thing. It traps us into this identity, and it’s hard for the mind itself to break out of this identity. We can all read books in the Buddha, and we can intellectualize it, but for whatever reason, that’s often not powerful enough to break that whole the mind has on it, that you’re so-and-so a person that you have these traits, and this is who you are.
That’s really ingrained in us. What Kundalini Yoga does is it’s almost a bottom-up procedure to break the patternering and conditionings of the minds. And how it actually works is, you know, I think it’s beyond our understanding of science right now, but through the movements of the body, through the repetition of sound, through using our breath a certain way, and through meditation, the patterns and the hold that the mind has on us weakens enough that then the mind can be turned on itself to try to let go of all these attachments to our identity.
Oli: I think exactly what you just said is how life kind of works in general. So people are born and they’re in this state of wholeness, but as we go through our early years and through, you know, early teenage years as well, we become conditioned and we pick up this identity which is ultimately a reaction to what we’ve been through and what we think we may need to survive again in the future. And exactly like you said, we become so attached to it that it blinds us to the actual truth of life. It causes friction between us and reality, that friction, consent and frustration.
You can make people miserable the more they cling to it. And this Kundalini thing, ultimately, like you’ve said, it’s technology that is a shortcut to returning to the natural state of wholeness that we’re all ultimately supposed to be in. So I guess the question is, how does the Kundalini awakening kind of happen? Because I’ve heard it can happen in two main ways. One, you know, you can put yourself through a rigorous process of doing Kundalini every day for like however many years you need to do it. But sometimes it just happens organically as well.
Is that right? So you might be, I don’t know, walking down the street one day, going to the supermarket as a way, and then boom, you have this Kundalini thing. What’s happening in that situation if that is something that happens? And how can people kind of navigate that when it does occur?
Chris: Yeah, and that’s a great question. And, you know, those are the bookmarks of the two paths.
The one is you learn about Kundalini, you want enlightenment, so you head off and you start a daily practice of Kundalini yoga, and then over time, hopefully, you get there. I mean, who knows? Others, it’s more of a spontaneous thing.
And I can certainly speak to my own experience there is, as I look back at it now, I did have this spontaneous Kundalini awakening. You know, if four years ago, I’m just, you know, I’m turning 53 today, but four or five years ago in my late 40s, I’m working a job in finance. I’ve got this standard life with the picket fence and coaching sports for my kids and all that stuff.
And suddenly out of nowhere, you know, my life, if I take a look at what my goals were in life, you know, 20 years before, I’m a 10 out of 10 on achieving all the stuff I’ve learned. I wanted about a 10 out of 10 on the scoreboard of society. Inside, I’m starting to feel like a zero. I have no idea what’s happening, but life’s, you know, everything around me is a losing meaning. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t understand why I’m going to work to do this stuff.
Nothing’s fitting anymore. And what I realized is I had this, I was starting to have this spontaneous Kundalini awakening that was, it’s hard to describe where it came from. And I was, you know, searching for meaning of what was happening to me and I ended up going away to a wellness place in the United States. And I came across a psychic that was there was also, it turns out, was a Kundalini yoga teacher. And she looked at me and almost immediately she says, you know, I can tell you’re going through something really, really traumatic. Your life’s going to be about to be turned upside down. You have no idea about what’s coming, but just trust you’re going to be okay. But you literally, when you get back to Vancouver, you have to start doing Kundalini yoga tomorrow.
That’s going to be the answer for you. And I, here’s, I was a guy that’s never done yoga before at this stage, let alone have any idea what Kundalini yoga was. But I did it.
So I had nothing to lose and I needed the answer. So I got back to Vancouver, looked up where I could take Kundalini yoga, found a place close to me. And I went to this yoga class where it wasn’t what I expected. I come into this room and there’s this chanting music on, the teacher has a turban on.
It looks like the island of misfit toys. Like it’s not what at all what I was expecting from yoga. And so I sit down and do this thing. And after at the end of this hour and a half class, I have had the most emotional experience I’ve ever had in my life. Like it’s like a bolt of energy had gone up my spine. I’m tears are rolling down my face and my heart feels wide open for the first time ever. And that, that was my, how my journey of becoming a Kundalini yoga teacher started from this something’s going wrong in my life. I can feel this awakening of the energy in me spontaneously to then applying this technology and rapidly increasing it.
Oli: Wow. Like what you just said is so powerful because one thing that I think kind of defines the modern human experience is that so many people are detached from themselves and detached from reality and detached from wholeness because they’re chasing goals that aren’t really their goals. They’re chasing goals of the ego.
Basically they’re trying to design a life around the kind of conditioning that we were talking about earlier. And when that happens, I suppose as you get a bit older, you reach this kind of crunch point where everything seems fine on the outside, but inside this kind of avoid like a restless feeling where the real you just needs to come up from the shadows to the surface.
And I think like I’ve never really been this connection before, but like ultimately the Kundalini is like. like when coal is getting crushed and there’s so much pressure, it just creates a diamond and it’s a similar kind of thing like the ego stuff living in this unreal way that you were talking about. It eventually puts so much pressure that the real self deep within has to just kind of surge up to the surface and maybe I’m romanticizing it a bit, but do you think there is something there?
So ultimately if there’s enough pressure in your life and you avoid yourself for long enough then something is going to happen to you that basically causes your real self to surface again and at the start of that journey it might seem like your life has been destroyed or that something is going wrong, but really if you can trust the process it’s just about reaching balance again, returning to where you were supposed to be.
Chris: I think that’s a good way to put it, returning to where you’re supposed to be. I think throughout our lives we basically have our authentic self or just call it the self, trying to rise and trying to eviscerate the ego which is only supposed to be their temporarily forced.
We haven’t shed our skin. I think our whole life that’s the process that’s happening within us and I think for me anyways, I think for some people it can be the death of the loved one, it can be some type of intense suffering and what my path was it’s like I think I achieved everything I wanted to from an ego standpoint. All the stuff that I was told or program by society that said hey this is going to make you happy if you have this much money, the house, this kind of stuff, that’s going to be happy and I get there and it wasn’t true. I’m miserable. There’s no purpose in my life. If I can’t see myself going on and doing this anymore.
I started to go into deep depression, alcohol and drugs become part of my story there as I fall into addiction because I’m trying to cope with these internal feelings that I don’t really know how to express anywhere. This is this concept of the dark night of the soul that happens where how I would envision is basically the self’s trying to rise and the ego knows its days are numbered so the ego begins to fight for its life.
The ego wants to hold on and so actually the ego identity tries to strengthen itself further so whatever character flaws and defects someone has at that time they get amplified and that’s why the bottom comes so hard and fast and furious right before you have this spiritual awakening.
Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a case of what goes up and must come down and the ego like you said, I see it as though the ego is constantly in a battle with the shadow self. So when we’re younger and we basically start getting conditioned and we become ashamed of the real self and all that kind of stuff, we send all these different parts of ourselves into hiding but those parts that we send into hiding into the shadow territory, that’s what I call it, they never go anywhere they’re real.
And so when we start living out this socially conditioned, socially programmed life in an unreal inauthentic way, we’re just creating more and more mental tension and it takes so much energy and so much strength to maintain that illusion of the ego being the real version of us because like you said, it’s just an idea, it’s not real, it’s just something that we have kind of created as a filter to keep surviving in the way that we think we need to survive.
It’s not reality itself and so the more we cling to the ego and the more it tells us that we need it because we’ve identified with it, the more vociferously all those emotions are going to start screaming out to us and I think that’s why you said when you went to your Kundalini class for the first time, it was very emotional, you kind of broke down in tears and all that kind of stuff because you just returned to that version of yourself and you kind of accepted it again. So this is getting us onto I guess the transformational part of the conversation. So how has all this stuff taught you about or shown you how transformation works in general for human beings?
And I know that’s a really broad question, but have you learned anything about the structure of just the transformation process for anybody, I guess is the question.
Chris: Yeah, it’s that. We’re right over the target right now as we talk about this stuff where we have this egoic shell on us and it’s got many, many layers to it like an onion and right in the middle of it is like you imagine a heart shape, which is itself. The transformation is so much about letting go of the structure of the ego to just let what’s already there emerge. There’s nothing to become, there’s nowhere to go to. It’s a process of letting go of all the rap we’ve put on this stuff.
When I talk to people about transformation really at the basic stage or people are even interested in it, I ask the question of can you remember a time when you decided that what made sense for your life was to go to school for 20 years, then work for 45 years making widgets and maybe taking a vacation every two weeks so that one day you could potentially retire with the money you saved and relax. I don’t know who actually chose that. I don’t know who’s actually chosen that making widgets and climbing mountains and collecting stuff was the meaning of life. Most people when you start talking about it, it gets them thinking about it, hey, maybe there’s a different way to live my life. It’s hard because the whole world appears to be focused on that first thing.
That’s the way we do it and there’s no other way. Transformation is that process of starting to let all of that go and find that there’s a completely different way to live our lives and we’re meant to be living our lives a different way that will bring far more purpose and meaning and happiness into it.
Oli: So do you think that the natural way of living is kind of predetermined or is the natural way? of returning to something where, you know, we have not infinite, but way more choice than we may have originally been led to believe. Do you know what I mean?
Because sometimes when we’re talking about this stuff as coaches or healers or whatever, it sounds like a lot of the time some people are saying right it’s all predetermined and if you can just let go of your social conditioning, you can return to the path that you’re supposed to be on but that path is your path and there’s nothing you can do. But then the other way of looking at it is okay, you can let go of all the conditioning and blah blah blah blah blah and then you can choose pretty much whatever path you want as long as it’s real and it’s not aligned with the ego stuff.
Which camp would you say you’re in if you’re in one?
Chris: I think I would describe it as that, you know, one of my main teachers who’s not around anymore is Yogi Baajan who brought Kundalini yoga to North America and he has a saying is that happiness is a birthright. All we need to do is claim it and I think our purpose is to alternately be happy and there may be a divine setup and this sort of feels right to me that there’s this idea that we come into this incarnation with a plan that there’s going to be something that happens to us somewhere along the line that creates enough trauma or friction in our life that wakes us up and then we continue our real journey.
That sort of feels right to me but once that happens then it’s about, you know, as you as you talked about all of our conditioning that we have on us and all of our limits are effectively self-imposed. We’ve created this structure around ourselves and these limits to make ourselves feel safe but what it’s done is it simply limited our ability to live life to the fullest and potentially and I can’t speak for everyone but for myself it was actually cutting me off for true happiness and of all the spiritual systems I’ve studied and I’ve studied a lot of them and my own experience the only true route to happiness for me is to be in selfless service to others to be useful to be helpful because when I do that I think what’s happening is I’m understanding that I’m not separate from you. I’m not separate from anyone.
We’re all part of this wholeness and when I go into a service for someone and expect nothing back in return my subconscious is understanding that I understand it and then I’m in a place of joy and happiness.
Oli: Wow. That makes perfect sense to me as well because the main problem in life for anybody is the ego like you said and the ego is the idea that we’re all independent, we’re all separate, that what we do doesn’t affect other people and blah, blah, blah, blah but on a deep level as well the ego is the idea that you don’t need to trust life and you don’t need to trust other people because it’s all up to you like you’re not flowing with life, you’re forcing life through your identity and all of the things that your identity tells you you need to do to reach the goals that your identity is set for you and if you can break free of all that stuff that we’re talking about the ego stuff and all the myriad layers that make it up then you have to kind of submit or surrender or whatever you want to use to the bigger flow of life which is that wholeness.
And if you do that then you’re always going to be connected to other people and so part of the process of transformation I’ve seen in my life and in the lives of other people I’ve worked with whatever is that they go through this process we’re talking about they deconstruct the ego, the integrate the shadow and then they start building a life for themselves that’s real but the only way they can do that is by building something that is going to offer value to other people so it’s no longer just about them you know been in the moment and been hedonistic or any of that stuff it’s about using the gifts they’ve uncovered to help other people uncover their gifts or something like that.
Chris: Yeah I think that’s absolutely right the egoic mindset and we this is part of growing up as we have this egoic mindset it’s all about lack and scarcity there’s not enough and I have to I have to go and accumulate and I have to get more and I have to be different in order to do that and I have to win and I have to achieve and even once we get that we go into fear that it’s going to be taken away because it’s a scarcity mindset which is it’s not true the truth is we are constantly in so much abundance and the surrender part of that and it’s very very hard is to surrender to this idea that I’m going to be given everything I need I have everything I need right now I’m perfect and whole as I am and what I should be doing is working with others helping others and that’s you know the best way to to experience the fullness of abundance is to give because whatever I give I get back tenfold.
Oli: Yeah yeah yeah because ultimately the world is a mirror of what’s going on inside of us right and obviously if we give we can circumvent some of our programming and etc what you just said is really like really interesting to me and quite powerful so you basically said like the natural state which we can become aware of if we kind of wake up or wake the Kundalini up and all that kind of stuff the natural state is abundance and ultimately if we can just trust and go with life our needs will be met pretty much always and things will work out and so on and so forth.
What is it that makes that so hard because if you think about it it’s kind of a paradox like all of our needs are met we can become aware of that but But the hurdle we have to overcome to kind of tune into that is just letting go and trusting. And this podcast always ends up coming back to that, that word trust, because ultimately all we can do is trust the process. But it takes strength to receive, if that makes sense.
So what is going on there, would you say, if that’s not too nuanced?
Chris: No, it’s back to our conditioning. We’ve been so conditioned that that’s not true, that there is an abundance. From the day we go to school, we’re conditioned that we have to have the best marks to be anything, that we have to be good at sports to be important, that we have to do all these things in order to get something in life. And if we don’t get good marks and have a good job, we’re going to be poor and homeless because that’s the story we’re told. And we have all these fears of these awful things happening to us, even though they’ve never happened to us, but we see it on the news, we hear stories about it, and our egoic mind, which I don’t want to be too hard on the ego.
The ego is here to protect us and get us from being a child to an adult. And we have to thank it for creating enough fear for us not to die. But at some stage, we have to let it go. But the problem is, if we take that ego on to adulthood, it’s constantly trying to protect us. The only mandate of the ego is survival, nothing else.
There’s no happiness involved in the ego. It’s a survival mechanism. And so it’s so hard to overcome those lifelong patterns and limiting beliefs and fears that the ego has put around us to keep us safe. We have to surrender to the fact that, you know what, I am safe.
It’s going to be okay.
Oli: Do you think there’s a, there’s kind of a bodily or biological element to the ego as well? So, if we go back to the wholeness fragmentation thing, I think the reason that we tend to perceive and interpret everything as being fragmented is because our bodies are fragmented.
They’re made of molecules and all this kind of stuff. And so ultimately, the apparatus we’ve got, our brains, ultimately, are projecting a fragmented way of being out into the world. And then it is reflected back at us.
And we think that is reality. And so part of the Kundalini transformation you’re talking about is kind of transcending that. Like it’s not, it’s not just about being in the body. It’s almost going transcending the body. Again, I keep using that same word, but is that a good way to say it?
Like, is that right?
Chris: Yeah, we’re really much in the same wavelength. I always just, my thought process is just take me to this place of the illusion of what our body actually is. We’ve created this construct that this solid matter and we’re separate and everything’s individual. But the reality is, and quantum mechanics has finally caught up to Kundalini yoga. Let’s be clear, the yogis knew this thousands of years ago is that everything in the universe is simply vibration. It’s vibration, it’s light, it’s sound, but we’re all a vibrational frequency.
All our body is just vibration. Everything around us is vibration and our consciousness, the consciousness of the universe gives it the form we see. And from a real simple, you know, yogic perspective, what’s happening when we do our work to drop the ego and to connect with the self is we’re changing our vibrational frequency.
The ego likes to dwell in fear, guilt, shame, grief, things like that. These are all aspects or frequencies that have lower vibrational frequencies. Frequency attracts frequency.
We’re in that place, our life is going to attract the vibration we’re putting out. So I think addiction is the most extreme example of it. People in addiction are in the constant vibration of shame, fear and guilt. And as they go further and further in our addiction, you look at their lives.
It is surrounded by shame, fear and guilt. That’s what their life becomes. And then you look at people who have become enlightened and they raise their vibration to that of love and peace. And you look at their lives.
They are now surrounded by that aspect of their lives. So at the heart of it all, these practices are about raising our vibrational frequency, letting go of fear, letting go of disbelief, letting go of our limiting beliefs so we can vibrate from a different place of love, peace and joy. And with time, with the leg, we begin to attract all of that into our lives.
And all the things that vibrate at different frequencies will slowly leave our life. And that’s abundance. That’s how abundance works from a quantum mechanics perspective.
Oli: This is how I’ve experienced it in my life as well. So the law of attraction, ultimately, it’s like a boomerang, isn’t it? So what you put out there is what’s going to come back. And if you have… People make it really complicated, but I think it’s exactly what you just said.
If you can work on your inner state so that you feel peace, you feel wholeness, ultimately, that feeling of realness, then that is what you’re going to get back. And so all these people are dancing through hoops and doing crystals under the moon and stuff like that.
They’re using those rituals as a way of getting into that feeling. But actually, you can manifest or whatever word you want to use, tap into abundance just by realizing that it is you, if that makes sense. And so the Kundalini thing, Again, it’s about rewiring people to their natural state, I suppose, of health and abundance and all these kind of things. And it’s just about removing all the trappings of the world. Is that a way to say it? The problem really is the world and our attachment to it.
Chris: Yeah, like 100%. And you can do all this work of trying to open yourself up to to enlightenment or to love through crystals and rituals and things like that. But if you haven’t let go of the attachment to the world, nothing will change. So it’s this idea that I’ll use it as an example. So I want to have a life of abundance, I’m going to surrender to abundance. But if I have a view or an idea of what abundance looks like in terms of a certain amount of money or a certain lifestyle, I’m just in the ego still.
I’m just attached to an outcome. And the real spiritual secret of abundance is you have no attachment to what that is. The universe is going to give you what makes you happy and what brings you joy.
And that’s where abundance comes from. You don’t know what brings you joy or what brings you happy because your mind is egoic. Your mind is going to always try to gravitate towards the things that the egoic self had equated with happiness through your programming. And that’s the hardest part to let go of is that I can honestly say now that money, title, fame, all that stuff, it doesn’t bring me happiness.
I know this for sure. And so maybe it’s easier for me to let go of that as an idea of something to strive for. For folks who haven’t had that yet, it’s a harder attachment to let go of because it’s almost like, well, maybe I’ll give that a try first.
Maybe it’ll bring me some happiness before letting go of that idea.
Oli: Yeah. I think as well, there’s a thing around, there’s a difference between the symbols of abundance or the symbols of happiness or the symbols of whatever and the underlying process. And the difference between those things is the difference between inner and outer. So a simple example is like a tree, like a tree grows fruit. So you look at the fruit on the tree, the fruit is not the abundance itself. The fruit is a symbol of this underlying process of abundance that is always working.
And so, you know, if you pick that fruit, you don’t actually have to do anything else to get more fruit on the tree, if that makes sense. And the reason is that there’s stuff always going on. It’s a process that is constantly unfolding, is wholeness, constantly moving and ebbing and flowing and undulating. And when you go through these kind of transformations that you’re talking about with Kundalini or just life transformation in general, it’s always the same structure, really, which is that you’re taking your attention away from the surface, from the fruit, and you’re tuning in to the underlying current of wholeness or whatever you want to call it, which is what actually leads to the fruit. And you can apply that to life as well.
I don’t know if that’s too convoluted of a metaphor, but do you see what I’m saying? Like, is that valid?
Chris: No, that’s not convoluted at all.
I think that’s exactly right. It’s, yeah, there’s the fruits of, you know, you harvest what you sow. And so what you sow is what’s important.
It’s your quality of your thinking, your quality of your words, your quality of the actions. That’s who you are in the moment. And the stuff that comes as a result of that are just the fruits of all of that. But your quality of life is only experienced in the present moment. The past is a bunch of electrical signals to the brain.
The future is just a series of present moments. The only thing that’s real is right now. And the only thing that’s real in the present moment is the quality of your thoughts and quality of your emotions. And so that’s the place that if we can bring our attention there and be in the present moment and let go of fear of the future and grief from the past, we can find that abundance because it’s in the now. Yeah.
Oli: And it’s always, always them. Like, if we’re not connected to it, then we’ve distorted our view of reality, basically, either with the ego resistance or just ego distortion in general, because the way we perceive things, emotional reasoning and all that kind of stuff. What you said about, you know, you have is what you saw, you reap what you saw. There’s a similar quote from the Bible where it says something like, a corrupt tree brings forth bad fruit. And it’s the same kind of thing. Like, when you said that, it reminded me of it. So in relation to Kundalini and all the things we talked about in terms of transformation, how does that fit into it?
The idea that in the present moment, if we’re having a bad time or life currently sucks, this idea that a corrupt tree brings forth bad fruit, does it link to all these things we’ve been saying?
Chris: Yeah. Like, at the end of the day, I think it’s quite simple. The only, we have no control over, you know, the outer universe. The only thing we can control ultimately is the quality of the vibrational frequency that we’re emitting into this universal quantum field that pulls everything back into us. And so that rotten fruit is if we’re going to sit in fear, guilt and shame and wishing I had this and being mad at that person holding resentments, that’s the fruit that our tree is going to grow.
If we can do the work to transform all that and to be in gratitude, love everyone unconditionally, forgive unconditionally, the fruit that’s going to come off our tree eventually is going to be beautiful and nourishing. And I honestly believe it’s as simple as that, what is the work we need to do to maximize our vibrational frequency and live in this place of unconditional love? Because that’s fully in our control.
Everything else is out of our control. And once we fully understand that, the whole enlightenment process is what are the quality of my thoughts and what can I do today to transform the quality of those thoughts, whether it be a yoga practice, some meditation, maybe I maybe get into service and help somebody out or maybe do some spiritual reading. But what can I do to maximize the quality of my thoughts? The rest will just come.
Oli: 100%. So as within so without all that kind of stuff. You just mentioned some really practical things that people can do. But just to kind of summarize what we’re saying, I guess, and to make this a little bit more practical, if somebody is listening to this and they currently, you know, they look at their life and there’s bad fruit everywhere.
I was saying that in scare quotes, but if there’s bad fruit everywhere, what can they do to start kind of shifting the picture in terms of, you know, transforming their lives in the way that you’re talking about?
Chris: Right? It’s, you know, there’s this, there’s this picture that’s showing up my mind right now as you asked that question. And there’s these two interlapping circles like a Venn diagram. The first circle is surrender.
And the second circle is a discipline and where the intersect is flow. And the first thing is to have the willingness and the willingness to try to surrender. And, you know, surrender is hard. It doesn’t come naturally because our ego doesn’t want to surrender. Our ego wants to win. So you need a discipline.
What discipline can I bring to this? And it’s, you know, there’s one view from the top of the mountain. I believe this, but there’s an infinite number of paths up the mountain. It’s each individual. So what can someone add to their discipline to try to break down these patterns of the ego? It well, it can be a Kundalini yoga practice. It can be any kind of yoga practice for that matter. It can be meditation. It can be journaling. Um, it can be prayer. Uh, it can be chanting, but it’s something that you say, listen, I want to change my life.
And the only way I’m going to change my life is through some sort of a daily practice or sadhana. And it’s the most important thing in my life. So I’m going to make it my number one priority.
I’m going to set my alarm early and I’m going to get up and I’m going to do this our practice every day before I start my day. And that’s where transformation will begin to take root. And it’s not overnight, but you know, you give that for something like that, 40 days, you will start to see some material changes. You give it 90 days, bigger changes. And you do that for a year.
Your whole life will be different. And it’s, it’s as simple as that, but that’s hard. Yeah.
Oli: Yeah. It’s so true. It’s that continuous action. And then I suppose there’s also the extra level of making sure that actions you take are inspired actions. So we don’t want to just become one of these people that’s doing things for the sake of doing things like a human doing. We need to put our being into the doing.
And I think that’s why the surrender part is so important because then you’re, you are connected to something bigger than just you. Yeah, I’m going to stop talking because I feel like I could open a whole new kind of worms and just keep going for another six hours or something. We’ve covered a lot in a short time, but have you, have you got any final words to sum all this up? Like, yeah, just how would you kind of sum everything up?
And can you also let people know where they can find you as well if they want to check out your website and that kind of thing?
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. I guess I would sum it up is that all of us, we’re, I mean, we’re ultimately all part of this wholeness and all part of the one. We’re all the same.
There’s no real differences. We all have an infinite creative potential that resides inside us to transcend, transcend all of our limiting beliefs and to tap into our divine nature and to live under grace and have the ultimate amount of happiness in our life. But it actually takes work to overcome the ego conditioning that we’ve all been placed under by the virtue of being human beings. And that requires a willingness and a desire to want to change it. Most importantly, a discipline to do something on a repeated basis every day. And that’s the real hard part. You can get yourself into that place of discipline.
I can guarantee you, you won’t be disappointed. And my own story was life hit me so hard and I wanted to change so badly. You know, I walk the walk I’m talking about for seven months straight. I got up at 340 AM, had a cold shower and then did a two and a half hour prayer, yoga and meditation practice for seven months and I changed my entire life. And so I know it can be done and others have done it. I wasn’t the first.
I was following the path of people before me, but we have this power within us to live much happier and much more fulfilling lives.
Oli: Amazing. Chris, thank you.
Chris: You can get a hold of me at the way healing and it’s the website is www. thewayalloneword-healing .com and my email address is chris@theway-healing.com.
Oli: Thank you. I’ll share that link in your email in the show notes. But Chris, thank you so much for this. I think I understand the Kundalini thing way more now and you’ve given me some fresh insight and everything.
So I really appreciate your time and happy birthday as well.
Chris: That’s right. Right. Thanks so much, Oli. And yeah, the time just flew there. I really enjoyed that conversation and look forward to chatting some more in the future.
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