Modern Accounts of Sudden, Unexpected Spiritual Experiences

Stories of people who experience sudden spiritual breakthroughs or awakenings

This is a followup to my post about sudden spiritual awakening, which describes a sudden spiritual awakening.

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Someone privately messaged me with the question "How many other modern accounts are there of mfers get shaktipat'd?" I'll list a few links and resources I consider relevant.

It's hard to do a systematic survey of this. I am not sure how many written accounts exist, from any historical period, of experiences like the one I described. I've heard a number of personal accounts and rumors in the last few years, but most people I hear them from have little desire to be public about their experience.

I'm personally very interested in a related question: What percentage of the people who have an experience corresponding to descriptions of the Arising and the Passing Away show up there suddenly without any conscious intention (as I did)? I'd love a ballpark estimate on this, and I'd also be interested in pattern-matching among individuals to whom it seems to happen without any conscious intent on their part. I have a suspicion, for example, that people who have doubled down on intense sexual experience in some manner (as I did, with many years of deep BDSM practice) are more likely to have this happen unexpectedly than most; and I'd guess that people who have had run-ins with the Western mental health system (as I did, in my teenage years) are too. But I don't know.

There are also questions about what fits under the definition of "shaktipat," which, I must confess, is a word from a tradition I don't have a good understanding of. As a result, I generally use "A&P Event" over "shaktipat," as I feel more sure that my experience fits that phrase. I've also heard the phrases "kundalini awakening" and "direct experience of the nondual" used to describe some phenomena that might be similar. But sometimes when I dig into descriptions of those phrases, they seem like they have key differences; for instance, kundalini awakenings seem to frequently involve spinal sensations that I didn't experience in 2016.

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Firstly: Please, Please Be Careful

The extremely famous BDSM author/ teacher Janet Hardy documented what happened to her when she began to study tantra in this 2013 article for Salon. I strongly recommend the entire article, but in case it gets deleted or archived somehow, here is a long quote:

My frequent co-author Dossie Easton and I were working on a book called Radical Ecstasy, charting what is known in S/M-land as “spirituality”: the transcendent, ecstatic, deeply connected state that may occur during and after a good scene. We were enacting intense S/M scenes with one another and our other partners, and the scenes were often chosen to illuminate some aspect of the manuscript: edgy role-plays designed to tap into both personal and cultural histories of trauma and abuse, as well as intense, prolonged experiences of bondage and pain. They were risky scenes both emotionally and physically, challenging every skill we’d acquired during our combined half-century-plus of experience. In the spirit of research, we added tantra and other quasi-religious practices into the mix and took classes in those, too.

It was, as we wrote at the time, “a commitment to extreme, exaggerated spiritual openness over a period of approximately two years, an experiment in living without skin over an unnatural period of time.”

As we neared the endpoint of the work, though, I was beginning to fall apart a little. My social life withered and died; I cried for any reason and for no reason. Something deep inside me was apparently coming closer to the surface.

And then, at a weekend-long tantra workshop, it came. We’d been practicing breath, eye contact, movement, visualization and therapy-like exercises with different partners for a day and a half: everything from the one where you picture your partner as a creature of perfect innocence and vulnerability to the one where you say the things to your partner that you would say to your mother if you dared, all mixed with breathing techniques and pelvic motions. Each exercise peeled away another layer of protection, so we were all wide-open and quivering, naked as oysters, as vulnerable as people can be in the presence of strangers.

For the last exercise, on a balmy Saturday night, we rejoined the partners we came to the class with — in my case, Dossie. There was nothing special about this particular exercise. We were in yabyum — the tantra position where you sit in each other’s laps with your legs wrapped around one another and your bodies lined up heart-to-heart, eye-to-eye — and we were breathing and undulating our hips. No special visualization or verbalization instructions, no particular shoulds or shouldn’ts. And then, whatever was inside me decided to come out.

I began to scream, and I kept screaming. I tipped over backward, arched up off the floor, borne only by the crown of my head and the soles of my feet (with Dossie, caught, straddling me in midair). I was utterly out of control, my body wracked with wave after wave of energy.

It was like grabbing a live wire — slower, deeper, more systematic, but with the same inescapability and the same terror. And it was the deepest ecstasy I’ve ever felt, like orgasm times a hundred, from the tips of my hair to the ends of my toenails.

I couldn’t remember how to stop. I thought I might die.

It actually lasted, I’m told, about a minute and a half, but a minute and a half is a very long time to scream at the top of one’s lungs without pause except to suck in more breath, or to lift one’s own 200-pound weight and one’s partner’s 175-pound weight on one’s feet and head.

When it was over, I laughed softly in wonder. And then, with no transition, I began to cry, hard. I cried for a long, long time.

I have since learned that what happened to me is called a “kundalini awakening” (or “kundalini crisis” or “spiritual emergence”). Many tantrikas and other meditators consider this experience very desirable, an important step on the path to being fully evolved. A few also warn that it can be terrifying and life-changing and can cause physical symptoms including unpredictable trance states, vertigo, back and neck pain, changes in sexual desire, etc. (I’ve had all of these and more.)

I’ve never heard of a teacher or class that warns beginners like me about kundalini awakening because it happens so rarely to beginners. Given that tantra is traditionally hostile toward S/M and other alternative sexual paths, perhaps the tantrikas have no way of knowing that many advanced S/M players are already well along the path that they are teaching. S/M teaches one how to find pleasure in non-genital sensations and also how to hang in there when sensations or emotions begin to seem too intense to be borne – both of which, I believe, are ways of opening the floodgates for whole-body orgasm. (One of the things Dossie and I saw as we invited friends to join us at tantra is that our friends from S/M tended to catch on extremely quickly to the exercises and to begin having orgasmic experiences much sooner than such things ordinarily happen.)

Of the little that has been written about kundalini-awakening-or-whatever, the vast majority has been written by people I frankly think are kind of weird. Most of it describes concepts like, from Wikipedia, “two nerve currents in the spinal column, called Pingalâ and Idâ, and a hollow canal called Sushumnâ running through the spinal cord.” This sort of thing has made it very hard for me to figure out what happened to me, or how to recover from it. I am in the position of the hardcore atheist who has received a convincing visit from a big, deep-voiced guy who says his name is “God.”

You see, I don’t believe in kundalini, at least not in the way that devotees do. I went to tantra because I was writing a book and wanted to learn what the tantra people know. And, after my first whole-body orgasm during an introductory two-hour workshop, I discovered that they know a lot — but that they frame their knowledge in a faux-Eastern haze of abstraction and mysticism that makes absolutely no sense to me and does not fit in with the way my world works. Tantra people think kundalini is a manifestation of the Divine, an energy that pervades the universe or a “force that lies coiled at the base of the spine” (whatever that means). I think it’s a simple physical energy like electricity, or perhaps a neurochemical phenomenon, that we don’t yet have the instruments to measure.

Dossie, who was by my side throughout all this and has been unwearyingly supportive in the years since, recovered handily from her “Radical Ecstasy” experiences. I suspect this is because she had been privately doing tantra-like practices for four decades and had a lot more experience of the journey in and the journey back. Maybe it’s also because she does not share my aversion to the language of, well, woo-woo. Dossie speaks of her chakras, for example, with the same easy familiarity with which she speaks of her ears or her knees. I am congenitally unable to discuss my chakras without putting mental quotation marks around the word.

The psychiatrist/researcher Stanislav Grof has written about this issue in words I can at least understand, even if I don’t always agree with them. His metaphor for the kundalini awakening is that of a garden hose that has been subjected to fire-hose levels of pressure: The physical mechanism is insufficient to convey the amount of “stuff” that’s being passed through it, so its sides blow out. That at least makes some sense, and it is compatible with my kundalini-as-physical-phenomenon theory and sounds like the way it felt when it happened to me.

The suggested strategy for recovering from the kundalini awakening is to live a low-key life, spend time in nature and avoid doing things that might bring up more kundalini — sex, excitement, meditation. Tantra instructors tell you to “ground,” a practice that involves visualizing yourself rooted to the earth and sending energy down into it, which I have found to have remarkably little effect. (My tantra instructor, who insisted that I rejoin the circle and continue with further exercises, was apparently unaware of these protocols. Given the long-term, possibly permanent changes that were wrought in my life during that minute and a half, I have not quite forgiven her.)

There has been no advice written, as far as I know, for the practitioner who has her crisis in the months immediately preceding a book deadline — with a pressing need to continue the kundalini experiences, revisit them both bodily and intellectually, get back into the saddle of the horse that threw her. I’d like to think that I would have recovered a lot faster if circumstances had allowed me to follow my instincts, which were to run far and fast from tantra, S/M and sex in general until I felt more like myself again.

For several years after that night, though, I dropped into trance state, and from there into the energy overload that tantrikas call “kundalini orgasm,” without volition, any time I let my attention stray out of intellectual functions and into the feelings in my body — for example, when I put my attention into my fingertips or my thighs or my belly. I still drop into this state quite easily — I can feel it wanting to come up now, just from writing about it — but it’s been a few years since it happened without my permission. This feels like progress: enough, at least, that I feel reasonably safe writing this.

(If you think that being able to have orgasms any time you want and sometimes when you don’t sounds like fun, I draw your attention to the case studies of Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome — a condition that has been known to lead to suicide. Kundalini orgasms are less debilitating only because you don’t have to drop everything in order to masturbate; they don’t require the use of the hands. But otherwise, they are just as embarrassing and distracting and dysfunctional. Orgasms are only fun when you have to go hunting for them; when they hunt you, they are as terrifying as any other seizure.)

We finished the book. It was published in 2004, and I’m writing this in 2013. It has taken this long for me to talk about my experiences to you or to anyone but my closest friends. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I have done anything at all in the realm of sex since then. You will perhaps be glad to learn that I am pondering the possibility of having sex again sometime this year.

Tantra folks would tell you that this happened to me because I went too far too fast and began doing advanced work when I had not spent years in lesser practices, grounding myself and gaining a deep understanding of the nature of the universe. Of the immediate circle of friends who know enough about kundalini to understand the problem, some think I have reached the level of an adept — someone who has mastered a practice (in my case, the practice of sex) so completely that she no longer feels the need to revisit it. Others think I am broken and feel sorry for me. All these theories feel partially true, but none feels like the complete truth.

— from Janet Hardy’s 2013 article, “My Tantric ‘Awakening’ Turned Me Off Sex”

Janet’s article made an impression on me when I read it in 2016. I had already been able to feel (as I document in my piece) a risk of potentially dangerous energy overload when I had my experience, and Janet's report seemed like a good and sobering example of what is possible. A piece of advice I got at the time was that a person who takes spiritual and energetic phenomena seriously, on something like their own terms (as opposed to treating them skeptically or with contempt), while experimenting with those phenomena, might be safer than Janet was.

As a result of my instinct that going slower would be safer and also as a result of stories like Janet's, I tried to go as slowly as I could stand — especially with practices that seemed obviously powerful and dangerous (e.g. energy work, "magic," and so on) — while first building a strong baseline of maintenance and safety practices (e.g. for those of you taking notes: Taking Refuge, Dedicating the Merit, basic meditation and prayer practice, not to mention an emphasis on health stuff like physical fitness and nutrition, getting sleep cycles in order, circumstantial support like having a plan for financial health, and being sparing with mind-altering chemicals).

This was a good call on my part, and yet, in retrospect, I wish I'd gone even slower on all levels than I did. I intend to publish more safety thinking in the future. But in the meantime, and this is important to emphasize, none of this stuff is exactly "safe" even for people who approach it with extreme slowness — and especially for those who find themselves suddenly at the A&P Event like I did: Please, for everyone's sake go as slow and steady in your escalation and practice as you can stand.

Another pattern I've seen is that lack of sleep seems connected to a large number of extreme outcomes, particularly psychotic breaks. Here's an interview I did in 2017 with Ryan Jay Beauregard, one of the founders of the Zendo Project, an organization that counsels people experiencing psychedelic overwhelm. He had a psychotic break a while ago while taking ayahuasca, which inspired his work at Zendo, and he told me the story in the interview. Plus, in the intro to that interview I give some references for different mental health frameworks (bonus: if that's a topic you find interesting then you might be excited about a publication I found recently, Mad In America).

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Other References On This Sort Of Experience

I mention this in the post, but it's worth mentioning again: Larry Brilliant has a memoir called Sometimes Brilliant: The Impossible Adventure of a Spiritual Seeker and Visionary Physician Who Helped Conquer the Worst Disease in History, which chronicles both his spiritual journey and his work helping to eradicate smallpox. Brilliant had a similar initial experience to mine; his was touched off by a guru named Neem Karoli Baba (a.k.a. Maharaji). Brilliant then experienced loss of faith decades later. He is still alive and around today, and the reason I read his memoir is that I met him at a conference and he generously gave me a copy in 2016.

There's a video project called 10,000 Awakenings that I've heard about but haven't watched. I don't know anything about it.

In the wake of my own experience in 2016, I conducted a number of interviews with people who had powerful spiritual experiences. One of these is clearly another example of the A&P Event, although in his case he was actively looking for it: Robert and the Technology of Enlightenment.

There is one example of someone I interviewed who described her own experience as "shaktipat." However, it's worth noting that she had this experience at a school and with a teacher now widely regarded as extremely abusive. I almost hesitate to mention her, because I don't want to encourage anyone to follow this school; for this same reason, my interview with her has languished in a hard-to-find digital format for years while I kept other work up-to-date. Nevertheless, in the interests of shared knowledge, you can find my interview with Ananya the tantrika by scrolling down this page and clicking the headline "EDITED: Agama Yoga Is Probably An Abusive Cult." (I can't link directly to the page with Ananya's interview because in the intervening years Medium made some changes to the domain service toolkit I was using when I posted it, so the direct link is broken.)

I also really like the interview I did with artist and architect Abraham Burickson, but he doesn't report a sudden awakening in quite the same way. There's one particular quotation from his interview that still comes to mind for me on a regular basis:

In a way, religion is the materialization of a metaphysical situation. Like, it’s not just a funky game that you have to go to Mecca [as part of the hajj, the journey that religious Muslims make]. There’s something very powerful about having to enact in a physical way what happens on the spiritual plane.

This is why I became an architect: Because I went into these buildings, these mosques. And something happened that was indescribable.

As I studied, I started to see. A mosque is oriented towards spiritual geography of the earth. And you know it points towards Mecca. What is Mecca? Like the umbilical cord between the Earth and the heavens. It is where God enters.

Religious architecture encodes a worldview. You have these four sides to a mosque, pointing in the four cardinal directions. And then the dome with the Oneness, the point at the center, the unseeable thing. The way you are underneath that dome is in relationship to something higher, above.

You ask: How do I embody that in my life? How can I be related to something of another level?

In that conceptual structure, God’s not here, and then God comes, and there’s one spot where it happens. It sounds like a game — but if you materialize that game, you materialize that search, it’s more than just symbolic, it’s an embodied symbolism.

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May the benefit of these acts and all acts go to all beings everywhere. May the frightened cease to be afraid and those bound be freed. May the powerless find power and all beings seek to benefit each other. Peace.

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Update 5/26/26: I made some formatting updates to this post for clarity, and I added some links to posts I published after this post was originally published. I also decided to include an extended quote from Janet Hardy’s article (not just a direct link to it), because article archives on major websites are getting deleted more and more, lately.

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