Safety & Boundaries
Excerpted from "Awakening the Below" by Oholomo, available now from Aeon Press!
I like the concept of “spiritual sovereignty,” which I got from my friend Misha, who got it from the spiritual teacher Adyashanti. This means that no one else can decide what spiritual path is right for you, but also implies that you must accept the consequences of your own choices. The bottom line is that if you decide to engage the Below using practices such as the ones I identify in this chapter, you must accept that there are dangers and take full responsibility for what happens.
Navigating the Below is a high-risk activity, and there are no guarantees of safety. This process will demand that you fully surrender to your worst fears — to madness and even to death itself. You may feel like most of the time you’re walking blindfolded on a tightrope over a chasm without a net. During the Descent, you will be working out a huge load of your past karma, traumas, and complexes. This is messy work that will give rise to mental agitation, emotional turbulence, and general instability.
One important way to attend to your safety and wellbeing is to reach out for help and support when you need it. That support might take any number of forms. It might be a knowledgeable teacher or guide who you meet with on a regular basis. It might be connecting on an ad hoc basis with someone who seems like they might have something helpful to say about what you are going through right at the moment. It might be a group of like-minded spiritual travelers who are going through the Descent together.
Whatever form of support is most helpful and feels nurturing is probably right for you. If you ask me, though, you should seek out people who are deeply familiar with the kinds of experiences we’re talking about in this book. It makes no sense if you need help with your motorcycle to call a plumber. Likewise, it makes no sense if you need help with the Below to seek advice from an Above-based priest, monastic, or spiritual teacher. At best, their advice could be off-base, at worst, quite harmful. Another thing I would suggest is to seek out a range of different guides or supporters. Since experiences of the Below are so variable from person to person, it is often beneficial to hear from a wide range of opinions and perspectives.
Even while I am encouraging you to establish a network of support that works for you, it is crucial to guard against over-reliance on other people. Always remember that any kind of supporter who undermines your autonomy, integrity, or freedom as an individual agent — even if unintentionally — is counterproductive. Any kind of supporter who makes you feel unworthy or ashamed — even if unintentionally — is potentially damaging your process. It is equally harmful to place a supporter or guide on a pedestal, to see them as infallible, or to become infatuated with them. Don’t give away your power, energy, autonomy, or wholeness to others under any circumstances. Doing so may completely derail your process.
Another important safety concern is the need to ground yourself. Being familiar with grounding practices is a critical skill. It means that you have a tool at your disposal whereby you can soothe your system physically, mentally, and energetically. If yours is an authentic Descent into the Below, you will undoubtedly encounter moments in your journey where things get extremely difficult, out of control, or even completely terrifying. When those moments come, it will be too late to start learning to ground yourself then. You will find it far easier if you already have several grounding practices that you have been doing daily all along. That being said, if you’re already traversing the Below, your only choice may be to develop or strengthen your grounding practices as soon as possible.
Grounding means your mind relaxes, your energy level settles down, and your body sensations connect with gravity and the earth. Common grounding exercises include qigong, martial arts, yoga, breathwork, visualization, and many other traditional spiritual practices. Physical exercise — ranging from going for a gentle walk to heart-pounding interval training — is nearly always grounding. A Kundalini teacher I know advocates gardening, making pottery, and eating meat and heavier foods. Other people I know are into playing music, creating art, masturbation, salt baths, making physical contact with the earth, or lying down on it and visualizing themselves melting into the ground. Whatever works for you that down-regulates your system and gets you back into your body (particularly the lower portion of it) is grounding for you.
As you become adjusted to the Descent, you’ll find that you can “turn up and down the volume,” so to speak, on the intensity of your experiences. All the other practices I outline in this chapter help you to enhance your connection with the Below, but grounding is what smooths the ride. If things start moving too quickly, you can slow them down a bit by increasing the percentage of grounding you are doing. If it still feels like it’s too much, you can switch to doing 100% grounding for a while.
Here’s a story from Misha about how a grounding practice helped her to turn the volume down on an overwhelming spiritual experience that arose at an inopportune time:
A few months ago, I was coming back over the mountains after having done a retreat. There was inclement weather, and I was going up into elevation on a twisty road that had pretty steep drop-offs. It was probably not a good idea to drive with such low visibility and a slick highway!
As I drove, I had to stop a couple times because there was something going on inside of me. It looked like I was driving up into a cloud. Everything was so magical, so divinely beautiful. I don’t think it could have been more awesome. I felt this pressure building in my cardiac heart area, which turned out to be Christ energy expanding. Eventually, I pulled over and spent maybe 45 minutes there in my car, twitching and moaning, and like, you know, being Christ.
Eventually, it calmed down enough that I could get back on the road. And so I’m driving carefully and slowly and really glad there’s no one coming behind me tailgating or whatever. Then when I was maybe 20 or 30 minutes away from the first town, and I just had a cringing feeling like, “I just can’t go there.” It was almost like I can’t be in that energy of civilization.
Earlier I had passed this place where there were signs for a nature area or campground or something. And I was like, “Let me go back and pull off there.” As I’m on a narrow mountain pass, I’m literally driving in the middle of the road because the drop-off is too close to where my lane is. And the snow is coming down, sticking on the road. By this time, I’m not in the Christ experience anymore, I’m in the God experience. Everything is magnificent, you know, the snow, the air, the mountains, the drop-off, everything. When I reached a safe enough place, I parked my vehicle and just let that experience overtake me for another 45 minutes or so.
Finally, I’m like, “Okay, I only have so much gas in the vehicle. And I’m really not good to be alone in a car that I’m not sure I can keep warm when it’s snowing. And it’s going to get colder tonight, so there is an actual real danger of freezing.”
Fortunately, there was cell service. So I called my Tibetan Buddhist temple, the local place. And I get their office manager administrative person. Now, a qualification for that position is that they have to be devoted to the rinpoche’s teachings and be skilled with all kinds of states, because she’s the point of contact when there’s in-person retreats, and people are going to be going through all kinds of stuff.
So I told her, “I’m having some kind of awakening experience, very blissful, but still, I’m not able to be functional, to do what I need to do. I’m in the mountains, it’s snowing, I need to get myself home.” And so what she suggested I do was to breathe in and out of the hara. And she asked, “Do you have a chant?” I said, “White Tara always works for me.” And she’s like, “Great, do that.”
So that’s what I did, and I was able to get home in one shot. I practiced this intensive grounding continuously for like another 50-60 minutes while driving. And I didn’t get hijacked either by bliss or by cringing. It kept me present and focused and grounded in my body and in ordinary reality. I wasn’t overtaken either by the blissful God experience or being unable to navigate through the places that energetically felt yucky. It gave me some space from the awakening process that was happening, which I needed because I wasn’t in a setting where it was safe to just surrender to that completely.
To me, Misha’s drive home from the retreat is a good metaphor for the whole journey through the Below. You’re headed off into the unknown along a treacherous mountain road with steep drop-offs. There will be tremendous ups and downs, intensely blissful and unpleasant experiences at every turn. You’ll probably find yourself to be overwhelmed, and even incapacitated at times. There’s a real chance you won’t make it back home in one piece unless you can ground yourself when you need to.
In Misha’s case, she was lucky to have cell service and the presence of mind to call for help when she needed it. But what if her phone didn’t work? It would be much better to already have that grounding practice in your toolbox, part of your regular repertoire of practices, wouldn’t you agree?
Navigating the Below in a way that is both safe and responsible also requires a strong commitment to ethics. As we have been discussing throughout this book, surrendering yourself to an Awakening from Below process involves the ego totally giving over control to the autonomy of your body, ancestors, the natural world, and a host of other agents. What these facets of your being present to you can be quite surprising — shocking, even. It is therefore advisable to have strong ethical commitments in place in advance, which can act like guardrails on the Descent.
In my view, a firm line should be always drawn at the point where your new-found freedom may possibly bring harm to another being. Awakening from Below leads to the liberation of every facet of the cosmos, and there is no way that is compatible with you harming another being. If, in the course of Descent, there arises an impulse or a desire to harm another, there is no way that this is your soul speaking to you. It is surely a corrupted or twisted element of your ego.
To give a concrete example, let’s come back to the topic of sexuality. As part of the Awakening from Below process, you want to be able to completely give over control of your sexuality to your body deva (or your body’s intelligence, If you prefer that terminology), and allow it to show you how it wants to experience pleasure and intimacy. However, this under no circumstances gives you free license to engage in sexual activity that is harmful or hurtful to others. In other words, you need to figure out a way to totally surrender to the Below while also maintaining some firm lines that you refuse to cross no matter what. This may seem like an impossible paradoxical task, but it’s a balancing act that you simply must do.
That being said, if you do experience impulses to harm others, you shouldn’t bottle them up or push them away either. The surrendering process is about including, not denying. The proper response is to sit with the feeling and allow it to unpack itself, to express what it is trying to say, and thereby to untangle itself. But even as you welcome the potentially harmful impulses to move through you, you must have a strong resolve to never, ever act upon them. Experiencing passing feelings of rage, greed, lust, or of wanting to lash out at or control others is a normal part of the Descent because these impulses are normal parts of everyone’s unconscious. However, if you ever feel that such thoughts are becoming compulsive, or you question your ability to resist acting on them, that is red flag indicating that you need to talk with a therapist or spiritual counselor.
Uncontrollable compulsions to harm yourself or others are in many cultural traditions around the globe considered to be examples of possession by an evil spirit. This brings us to another kind of boundary that you need to have firmly in place. Entering into the Below, you will certainly encounter many energies and entities that seem autonomous and external to you. As we have discussed, nearly all of them will eventually turn out to be parts of your own awakened being. They only seem external to you because you have repressed or denied them. In the end, they are revealed to be previously unconscious parts of you that, once fully awakened, become integral parts of your majestic wholeness.
However, it is possible that during your time in the Below you may encounter energies or entities that you truly believe are not part of you. For example, you might run into a ghost, spirit, or other entity or energy that you feel does not have a positive intent toward you. One of the lessons you need to learn in order to navigate the Below safely is how to clear such negative entities/energies out of your space. There are many ways of doing this using ritual, incantations, prayers, invocations, visualizations, and other techniques. You can find many specific techniques if you look into the books in the further readings section.
In my view, however, it’s critical to balance setting boundaries or banishing rituals with a compassionate concern for the wellbeing of all. Wishing for the utter destruction of any being is an unhealthy and unenlightened form of violence. Also, it’s important to keep this door open because, in the end, you’ll probably come to recognize that this unwelcome presence is actually just another aspect of your unconscious you have yet to accept. Therefore, look for techniques like “compassionate depossession” and others that focus on helping malevolent spirits to transform rather than on destroying them.
Another type of boundary that is critical to uphold is what I call your “energetic bubble.” The idea here is to minimize collateral damage when working out your traumas and complexes in the Below. You must recognize that your feelings, reactions, and egoic dramas that arise in the course of doing this work are all projections of your own mind, and you must work hard to not involve other people in them. If you find yourself working out some past trauma or situation that involved another person, you do not need to contact that person and drag them into your process. If you find yourself feeling regret for past actions, you do not need to reopen someone else’s wounds in order to heal yours.
The same goes for positive feelings or even blessings. To give you a quick example, just a few weeks ago, my wife was approached at work by a total stranger who claimed she had a dream about her. The woman was emphatic that in her dream she had received a message from God and she simply had to share it with my wife, and she was quite insistent that my wife had to allow her to do a blessing for her. She made these pronouncements right in the middle of an office where my wife was surrounded by co-workers and was trying to do her job. The woman would not go away, waited until my wife was on break, and then accosted her with the insistence that they meet privately somewhere so that she could perform some kind of ceremony.
In this encounter with my wife, the woman clearly breached her own energetic bubble by pushing her spiritual agenda in a way that encroached on my wife’s freedom and comfort. Now, she may just have been delusional, but for argument’s sake, let’s say that she had an authentic imaginal experience in which she legitimately had received an important message from God. Even so, surely there would be a better way to share this, right? Could she have written my wife a quick note and left her phone number inviting her to speak about it? Could she have delivered the blessing silently and unobtrusively from across the room, without involving my wife at all? My intention here isn’t to dictate how the encounter should have gone; my point is to encourage you to reflect on how to maintain your own energetic integrity without heaping it onto others who might find your overtures unwelcome or uncomfortable.
I will mention one last boundary that’s important as you navigate the Below. As we’ve said many times, the Descent can be terrifying and dangerous. You therefore need to exert your spiritual sovereignty and discernment when it comes to determining how much is too much at any given moment. Here’s Misha talking about her experience exploring her limits:
In my case, it’s taken a lot of healing with skillful guidance for me to develop the capacities that make surrendering likely to result in becoming less, rather than more, broken. If trauma activation is too intense, it can result in exacerbation and retraumatization rather than healing. At the same time, part of the healing process has been about realizing that I can go through flashbacks and other kinds of dysregulatory experiences, and successfully come out of them. Part of the learning for me has been that these experiences can feel like “it will be like this always,” but I’ve learned that this is not objective reality/truth.
Since my most recent retreat, part of the shifting has been around allowing myself to experience trauma reactivation. It’s been difficult to let go of the resistance to the experiences that generate unpleasantness. Many times in my past I’ve been hijacked by PTSD activations, yet recently there have been times I’ve been able to surrender and let the dreaded experience happen. One time, after feeling pierced through as if by multiple small projectiles, what showed up was vulnerability and a lovely, pure innocence.
As time went on, however, I ended up in a PTSD flare-up, and for a couple of weeks I was floundering. I had to significantly shift how I was practicing. I had to stop diving in to any activation that was happening and instead intensively practice mindful witnessing, noticing sensations, staying out of the mind and thoughts, and doing lots of grounding. At first this was on and off for most of the hours of the day, particularly at night. Over a three week period, the activations gradually reduced to a much more manageable level. Interestingly, allowing what was showing up — even resistance — to be present was key during all the parts of the retreat and post-retreat experiences. It’s the other forms of skillful engagement that changed.