It happened 25 years ago. It took me 5 years to write. The memoir of my strange, anomalous spiritual awakening experience is finally here. This is the story of what led me to become the healing and wholeness guide I am today.
When Raphael Cushnir’s marriage fell apart, he decided to stop running away from the pain and embrace it. This led to an unintended explosion of “Kundalini” energy, as well as a spiritual awakening. Yet his awakening was anything but typical. At first it was chaotic, terrifying, and even sometimes demonic. With his life in danger, struggling to distinguish between madness and legitimate energetic attack, Cushnir chanced upon a seasoned guide who helped him restore his spiritual and literal safety. But even afterward, he still found himself sharing the space of his body and consciousness with a force that wasn’t part of his previous identity, and which had an overpowering will of its own.
Over the ensuing five years, mostly on his own, Cushnir had to navigate this confounding terrain along with the ordinary challenges of daily life. Through vivid journal entries from that time, as well as commentary afforded by three decades of subsequent reflection, he offers a searingly intimate portrait of experiences usually relegated to secrecy. While such secrecy has often served a valuable purpose, especially for seekers in unsupportive environments, Cushnir believes that now it does more harm than good. He’s sharing this story now to support the growing numbers of those who struggle with unconventional openings, and also to shed new light on the more perilous parts of the perennial mystic path.
Writing about ineffable experiences inevitably falls short. It’s an attempt to describe the indescribable. With that in mind, Cushnir employs poetry, as well a recurring chorus of dissenting selves, in order to best capture the nature of his awakening. All the while, his storytelling remains grounded in earthy details, such as an ever-shifting array of physical symptoms, the need to hold down a job while in between worlds, and the nature of intimacy and sexuality once new channels of perception have been activated.
Cushnir’s awakening merits particular interest in part because of what followed – his new life as a spiritual teacher, an emotional intelligence facilitator, and the author of seven books about how to thrive amid great adversity.
From the Introduction…
There are many descriptions across different cultures for the first spiritual spark that began my journey. There’s ruach from Judaism, loa from Voudoun, tummo from Tibetan Buddhism, Holy Spirit from Christianity, and, with the most extensive body of accounts and scholarly research, Kundalini from the Hindu tradition. There are numerous symbols that depict it as well, such as a serpent, a cross, and serpents wrapped around a cross.
But all of those are just names and images. They don’t come anywhere close to capturing the experience itself, whether for me or for any other individual to whom it actually happens. Plus, no two people experience it the same way. For the sake of convenience, going forward, I’ll use the term “Kundalini awakening” to refer to it. Sometimes I’ll just call its manifestation “the energy.” But whatever I call it, I’ll do so with reluctance at the inevitable diminishment of mystery that results.
One thing I want to make clear at the outset is that I’m not talking about God, if that term is meant to suggest the Absolute, something beyond form, emptiness, and comprehension. Instead, the spiritual spark I’m describing seems to blast through the barriers of ordinary consciousness that keep us distant and disconnected from God—or Source, Pure Awareness, True Nature, whatever designation we prefer.
This breach may take the form of an invitation, an initiation, or even a brutish intrusion. Suddenly we’re closer to God, or rather an emanation of God, and somehow it’s not just happening to us but it’s also relating to us. It’s both the message and the messenger all at once. In the throes of this relationship we’re also stripped of almost everything familiar. Our lives still unfold as before, but in a whole new universe as baffling as it is beatific.
Engaging with this new universe changed my most basic perceptions of the previous universe I had inhabited for thirty-five years. And it changed me too, fundamentally, in ways that took till now to fully comprehend, accept, and share.
Another challenge I faced in presenting my story, even before the very first draft, was how in the world to approach it. I couldn’t write the book in a self-help style, because that would flatten the events beyond recognition. I also couldn’t just present the events in straightforward prose, because that would seem to make sense out of what remains for me, to this day, something entirely nonrational.
What finally broke the stylistic logjam was the idea that I could match the messiness of the experience with an equally messy rendition. I could address the reader, myself, and also the energy directly. I could include prose and poetry both, letting them portray the same events from vastly different angles. I could present unedited journal entries from that time, and also surround them with commentaries from today. I could relate what happened from the viewpoint of not just one coherent self but from the many selves that actually vie within me. And perhaps most important, I could share the doubts and struggles about presenting this material that came up for me while writing it, therefore creating a full circle that includes not just my subject but also my process.
From Chapter 5…
Journal, March 11, 1996:
Yesterday’s complacency is gone. I’m scared to death.
This morning I wake up late and plan not to meditate. Figure it’s good to skip since I don’t want to rev up the big engine with a long workday ahead. Last minute, as I’m crossing the room to leave, a little session spontaneously occurs. A standing one. Hands shoot above my head and there is little to be done but just charge up with it and watch all the energy shoot me skyward and hold me up until a break in the action and chance to fall into regular mode and regroup.
So I do, and hit the road. On the way I’m aware that the charge is right there, and I wonder if it will overtake me. I feel like I can keep it at bay until near the 101 when a few tremors rock my body and a few breaths overtake my calm. I think of the term, “Pull over and pray.” I think of the phrase, “Driving under the influence.” Only, influence of what?
I get on the freeway and for a while it’s just fine—there’s two of me. The one driving and the one spilling all over the place. Whenever the spiller bucks my body and tries to take over my breath, I just veto the effort and move on. But then I notice that a few times the energy comes up and is full of a destructive feeling. I shout things, angry things with the force of that energy. I wonder if this is rebuffed energy gone bad or something demonic or just proof that the primal force is filled with equal parts light and dark.
This is a philosophical question until I arrive at the Richmond Bridge. Suddenly the energy inside me is so huge that it needs to escape any and all limitations imposed upon it. Literally, this means that it wants to drive off the bridge. Kill me. I would be dead not out of my own pain or desperation but because something within me needed to get out of me and this was the only way.
[It would be impossible to actually drive off that particular bridge. It would be possible, though, to swerve into the guardrail or other nearby vehicles.]
Needless to say, I freak. Hold onto the steering wheel for dear life. And a shouting match ensues. I shout, “I won’t do it!” over and over. And then the other side takes those words and spins them back at me, yelling, in my same voice, “Do it! Do it! Do it!” Then I just find myself shouting at the top of my lungs—no words, just primal screaming.
The rest of the ride is filled with smaller bouts of the same. I finally make it to the office. Before, I’d fantasized about all this joy I’d arrive with, tossing everyone gleeful hellos. Now I’m totally shaken and confused.
When I first attempted to take mindful merging further, however, the effect was astonishing. By further I mean letting go of the hover state, relinquishing all separation, and instead staying raptly attentive as the energy and I fell into one another. This entwining thrilled the energy, supercharged it. It became a fuller version of itself and something different altogether. It met my merger with a palpable response that translated into “Yes! Yes! More! More!”
Together, we took off like a rocket. It felt like science fiction made real, and holy. Like warp drive, on repeat, through escalating dimensions of bliss. The quickening vibration of my body soon took me beyond my body. We were ever-expanding, limitless. Sexual but not carnal. Cosmic. To a degree from which I couldn’t imagine returning. Yet I did. The propulsion slowed of its own accord, came to an end, and jettisoned me back into the life of an ordinary guy with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome whose wife had recently left him.
As that guy, I shuddered, cowered almost in the reverberations of the voyage. The rubber band of my being, it turned out, had been stretched way too far. It hurt like hell to come back to my body. Hours later I still hadn’t found my earthly bearings. I wanted to, and I didn’t want to. I fell asleep in that tussle, between worlds, until the phone rang and woke me up.