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It’s 8pm and I’m lying on the floor of a community centre in southeast London surrounded by half a dozen people who are gently convulsing. I wonder if they’re being dramatic or willing it into existence after seeing the trend on TikTok but then Lucie Ataya, the practitioner trained in kundalini activation, puts her fingers on my pressure points and I feel something coursing through my body. It’s like a wave of pleasurable energy moving up towards my head.
Suddenly I realise my head has been spontaneously turning to the left, then right, for a few minutes or more. Why am I doing this? I have no idea. The kundalini made me do it. Over the next 40 minutes, I move through a kaleidoscope of subtle emotions: sad, blissful, free and then sad again. My forehead is hot, and then I feel so cold that it’s distracting. Someone else in the room is crying. At one moment – and I was delighted about this since it was the reason I was initially curious about this trend – my whole chest raised up and down like I was a puppet being pulled up by strings, then released.
Over the past few months, kundalini activation has become enormously popular on TikTok and Instagram reels. If your algorithm has you clocked for an astrology fan or a wannabe biohacker, you won’t have missed it. In the videos, practitioners make swirling hand gestures over people’s resting bodies, which dramatically jerk around. Generally speaking, this is a continuation of a wellness microtrend in everything kundalini-related – kundalini yoga, kundalini breathwork, kundalini meditation – but has no commercial connection to those practices. And unlike breathwork or meditation, this is supercharged for viral visual impact.
There’s no getting around it. If you’re anything like me, you’ll watch these videos and think, in this order: what the hell, this can’t be real, and if it is, I need to try it. Additional appeal lies in the fact that you don’t need to fight with your monkey mind to meditate or spend years contorting yourself on a mat to do it. For the slothful or busy person, it’s an attractive concept.
“Since it’s so Instagrammable, trendy and cool, it’s spreading like wildfire, a bit like what happened with yoga many years ago,” says Ataya, who notes that kundalini activation sessions are widely available all across London and in major cities like Manchester and Leeds. Mere months ago, this was not the case. “Collectively, especially in a place like London, we’re a lot more open for something a bit more out there, a bit more spiritual. We’re far more interested in states of consciousness than we were even two years ago.”
For context, kundalini is the feminine form of the Sanskrit word meaning “circular” or “coiled”, which refers to life-force energy that purportedly lies like a coiled serpent at the base of a person’s spine. Through yoga exercises or breathwork, kundalini is said to travel up through the chakras – energy centres located at points such as the solar plexus, heart and throat – to the top of the head. In this new modality (the wellness term that basically just means method of treatment), the practitioner is attuned to the kundalini and awakens it in someone. Ataya uses the Hindu word shakipat to describe this: the word was historically used for the transmission of a spiritual force from one person to another.
When I spoke to people after my group session, it was evident that everyone had a unique experience. Some described spontaneous movement like me, while others had a mild jaw or throat ache, which had now mysteriously disappeared. Some couldn’t stop smiling and laughing to themselves. One woman even said she felt an otherworldly connection to everyone else in the room.
It didn’t surprise me that a few of them were repeat offenders – they felt that their first experience was a positive one and kept coming back for more. When I met with Ataya for a second one-to-one transmission, the experience was completely different again. I didn’t move around much, which was disappointing because this time I’d filmed the session to jump on the bandwagon and post my own theatrical video. I did have a good cry, though, which I couldn’t connect to any event or thought in particular – again, it just happened.
Kundalini expert Colleen Grady tells me that the long-term effects for people who do kundalini activation can include more energy, better sexual experiences, being clearer in their choices and having a stronger connection to something bigger than themselves. Contrary to how it looks on TikTok, she says, “it’s a gradual and slow process. Each time you [have a session] the energy is going deeper and you’re integrating and processing.” Once people adjust to every energetic shift in their body, she adds, they start making positive changes in their lives to match.
I’m much more familiar with reiki, the mainstream form of energy work that originates in Japan. Ataya, who also offers reiki healing to clients, thinks comparing the two helps explain what kundalini is. “Reiki is an energetic cuddle; it works more with the physical layer of your body. It’s more like cotton wool to wrap yourself up in,” she says. “Kundalini activation is more like putting your fingers in an electric plug socket – it can feel like electric currents.”
If you’re hoping to find a scientific explanation for how and why kundalini activation operates, you might be in for a challenge. The scientific community has long been sceptical of biofield energy work – especially since it’s tough to design experiments to study its effects. After all, the parameters are elusive, invisible, and difficult to measure. But in Why Woo-Woo Works: The Surprising Science Behind Meditation, Reiki, Crystals, and Other Alternative Practices, Dr David R Hamilton offers a more positive perspective. He argues that energetic practices from reiki to pranic healing can be a powerful tool for healing, despite its intangible nature.
Reiki, for instance, is now used in some NHS hospitals and is recognised by medical professionals as a legitimate complementary therapy. Top-tier academic hospitals in the US, including Duke and Yale, offer reiki and other holistic practices alongside conventional treatments. As Hamilton points out, “We’re so used to thinking of things in solid physical terms that the idea of some form of ‘energy’, even if it’s electric or magnetic, having an effect on the body sounds mystical.” At the very least, scientists agree, the practice itself seems to do no harm.
However, kundalini activation transmission is not a wellness exercise like a massage or aromatherapy. Practitioners advise caution for individuals who might be emotionally or mentally fragile. They argue that while the transmission is theoretically suitable for everyone, the experience can be activating and intense in the short term, rather than calming. Since receiving kundalini directly in this way is a new method, its long-term emotional and psychological impacts haven’t been studied so those with unresolved trauma or serious mental health issues should naturally avoid it. Longtime practitioner Sigrid Brelid suggests that the key is personal readiness: “The reason you should go for this is if you feel naturally drawn to it and curious about it. But if there’s any fear, then just wait.”
Some participants report experiencing some sort of spiritual awakening as a result. It’s a lofty phrase (often mistaken for “enlightenment”) for a shift in your identity, like becoming vegetarian all of a sudden because you want to reduce your negative impacts on the planet. Or the realisation that there is more to life than our material reality. An awakening can happen through many different avenues, from experimental use of psilocybin (magic mushrooms) to a significant life event that impacts you deeply, like a bad breakup or period of illness.
Dr Steve Taylor, a psychology lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and author of multiple books, including The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening, believes that it’s important to always be aware before you explore any new spiritual or wellness practice that it might change the way you view life and yourself. “Having a spiritual awakening can be quite disruptive,” he explains. “Usually there needs to be a period of integration as there’s an adjustment to a new way of being.” He compares it to fame: those who become famous slowly can acclimatise to the attention whereas those who have overnight success often become confused and distressed. “We also live in a culture in which any changes of states of consciousness are pathologised, so often when people go through this, their only way of understanding it is in negative terms, like thinking they might be having a breakdown, when in fact, they’re undergoing a positive shift.”
His advice for those intrigued by kundalini activation is to go at a slow and steady pace that’s comfortable for you. “Meditation afterwards can also be really helpful because it’s grounding and helps you to observe and integrate the inner experiences you might have,” he says.
At the end of both of my sessions with Ataya, she told me to drink lots of water and not plunge straight back into my busy life. Over the next few days, she said I might feel emotional as I was supposedly “clearing” feelings held in my body. Interestingly, after the first session, I wanted to reflect and be quiet. I felt a firm desire to go to bed early to read and journal (this is, sadly, highly unusual for me, a typical TV binger). The second time was so different: I came home and felt highly charged and energetic, wanting to stay up late and have fun.
I can’t say, as the weeks have passed, that I’m seeing the sort of results that Grady promised. My continued caffeine intake and alarm snoozing would suggest that I’m not energised at all and I’m not having different or better sex. Nor do I have an improved handle on what I’m doing with myself on this earthly plane on a day-to-day basis. But I do keep thinking about booking another session soon.
When it comes to wellness and spirituality trends, there are so many overblown promises that products, teachers or modalities will change your life, I feel I’ve heard it all before. My critical senses are engaged when I try out everything; I’ll not just “believe it when I see it”, I believe it when it happens to me, personally. At least twice. With these kundalini activation transmissions, I couldn’t deny that something – whatever it was – had certainly happened.
