GLOSSARY

Spiritual Emergency

The words "spiritual awakening" and "Kundalini awakening" are being used interchangeably; likewise "spiritual crisis", "spiritual emergency" and "Kundalini crisis" denote the same condition.

Spiritual emergency is an awakening process that is unmanageable and disruptive to the life of the individual. It is accompanied by psychological disintegration, chaos, confusion, extreme emotional states, strong energetic phenomena, visions and revelations. From the outside it can look like mental illness and often people experiencing spiritual crisis get pathologized and hospitalized whereby a natural process of renewal gets suppressed. Others can be rendered permanently dysfunctional or chronically ill when the intensity of improperly channeled energy overwhelms their ability to regulate and ground themselves. When properly understood and supported in a safe environment however, these crises lead to deeper psychological integration and well-being, often changing the focus of people's lives into that of service.

It can be triggered by spiritual practice and experience, trauma, drugs, loss, childbirth, or without a known cause. This is a crisis that carries many dangers. Without proper context, it becomes an "aborted initiation," leaving the person in a state of permanent disintegration or dis-ease, while missing out on the task of individuation. Often its true nature goes unrecognized, and the individual is stigmatized with mental health labels while the process is suppressed with medication. Our mental wards are full of spiritual teachers, healers and leaders-to-be who have become victims of the curse of diagnosis.