- from Kristi on this thread

As a young child born into a hurtful and dysfunctional family, I had a deep yearning for peace, happiness and understanding. I wanted to know why the world hurt. Now, I had very little concept of God growing up, only dearly believed and hoped that my prayers were heard and would be answered.

Answered, they were, when I was about 14 years old, and thrown powerfully into the midst of a kundalini awakening - I was continually being catapulted into varying spiritual experiences, as a then "born-again Christian" (energetics, charismatic channeling, seeing of auras, inordinary states of consciousness, etc.) that I simply could not integrate. This, I thought, I did not ask for. Hindsight, being 20/20, I do know now that my young heart craved for and was "open" to spiritual truth. When the healing started then, I was not at all ready for it, it scared me greatly, and was absoultely too much for my young psyche to be able to deal with. I prayed, and prayed, and prayed fervently to God that it be removed from me. My prayer was answered.

I went on to associate heavily with the practical world and cannot say I followed any particular religion. But as they say, what God starts, He finishes. And so, twenty years later, my heart never too far away from the same level of desire for spiritual truth, She returned to me - again, in a powerful way. Initially with a state of bliss, and when the powerful cries first began to bellow from me, I knew I had entered the state of healing that I ran from as a child. And during the first few months of the cries which visited me frequently, tugging at my heart, for cleansing, I felt a very tangible presence with me, acknowledging my pain - promising me that I would one day find the peace my heart so desired. Soon though, this presence left me to "work through" these issues on my own. This is where it began to get scary. Meeting myself is not something I wanted to do, as it has been/is hurtful and ugly. But do it I know I must - as I cultivate faith in this process of renewal to realize my true nature, be that called an awakening to the self or Christ Consciousness - to me they are one in the same.

As far as kundalini and the Holy Spirit being one in the same, or different, I am not yet convinced either way - but tend to lean to the side of believing that they are one in the same. I seem to disagree with the idea that the Holy Spirit reaches down while the self reaches up. Seems to me that the Great Divine exists everywhere in the universe, that we all are intrinsically a part of it (as I "knew" this to be the truth during a very powerful and enlightening experience), that our openness, willingness, and desire to know this is what causes us to manifest it inside of us.

So, in my own experience, did the "Holy Spirit" come down to me, or did I reach up to it? I think it was always right there, touching me and I it. And I tend to believe that many differentitate between the two in that there are many different sorts of experiences that the Holy Spirit/kundalini may bring, some full awakenings, others not. And too, in the course of a full awakening, some more blissful and some not. Historically, the Holy Spirit, is a "soothing" concept, so it seems apropro that many would assign it to the less than "easy" tasks of integrating this primordal (yet forever new and expanding) energy into our lives.

Kristi