Excerpted from Exposing Portals of Darkness.
Somewhere along the line, humanity figured out you don’t always need mushrooms, ayahuasca, or a sketchy guy named Chad with a vape pen to get weird. You can jailbreak the flesh itself.
This is the new sacrament of the West: DIY transcendence. Take a deep breath, squeeze your sphincter, twist yourself into a pretzel, and voilà—you’re on a rocket ride to the ether. No prescription necessary. Kundalini awakenings, breathwork highs, erotic threshold games—these aren’t brand-new inventions. They’re ancient hacks repackaged in yoga pants and TED Talks, sold on Instagram with a side of organic smoothies. Humanity’s always wanted the same thing: to feel infinite without having to wait for death or deal with God. And now, with Spotify playlists, ring lights, and a few YouTube tutorials, anyone can become a guru in their living room.
This is the hunger of modern man: to get high on his own supply, to bend the knobs of consciousness until the static turns into music. The question isn’t whether the body can be a temple portal. The question is: which god—or which demon—are you letting in when you open the door?
Kundalini Yoga is like finding a secret cheat code in your spine that nobody told you about in Sunday school. You twist, you breathe, you hum, and suddenly your nervous system is throwing a rave. People swear it’s a “natural high”—like God slipped a stash of psychedelics into your bone marrow just to see what you’d do with it. And yeah, you can walk out of class all floaty, flaky, “at peace,” like a hippie who just came back from Carol the cosmic chiropractor.
Reports of kaleidoscopic visions, sacred geometry unfolding like a digital tapestry, and the eerie sensation of stepping outside time and space are common. In yogic tradition, these phenomena are called siddhis—supernatural powers. The list reads like a catalog of forbid-den fruit: astral travel, telepathy, shape-shifting, the ability to manifest desires at will.
And this is where a Christian must pause. The body may indeed be a temple, but the critical question is: who inhabits it? When the so-called serpent fire rises through the spine, it does not lead to the throne of Christ. Instead, it escorts the seeker to a counterfeit mountain, where the adversary whispers promises of power and hidden knowledge. Yes, there are actually supernatural demonstrations within Kundalini, including shapeshifting, teleportation, levitation, and visions of the past and future—but these are not gifts of the Spirit. They are counterfeits, dangerous imitations designed to dazzle and enslave.
Kundalini is not simply sweating, stretching, and ambient music. It is a way of using your body as a system of portals. A deliberate spiritual hack. A baptism that substitutes living water for a poisoned stream. And when you ignite that hidden current within your body, you are not opening yourself to the Spirit of God—you are cracking the door to another presence entirely. Someone will answer that call, but it will not be Jesus.
Kundalini didn’t stay tucked away in the incense-thick caves of India.1 No, in 1968 it hopped a Pan Am flight, slipped through customs, and strutted straight into America wearing a turban and a grin. The man escorting it across the border was Yogi Bhajan, part mystic, part entrepreneur, part rock star without a guitar. He arrived just as the West was cracked wide open—acid tabs melting the suburbs, the Beatles chanting mantras, young seekers desperate for something ancient that didn’t taste like their parents’ religion.
Bhajan knew what he was holding. He wasn’t just teaching the art of stretching without farting. Bhajan was trafficking a coiled cos-mic serpent. And he knew how to package it. Out went the arcane Sanskrit jargon. In came glossy promises: higher consciousness, cos-mic orgasms, a body like a temple, and a temple like a body. He sold Kundalini not as Hindu theology but as a cocktail—equal parts fitness, therapy, and transcendence. A high you could chase on a yoga mat instead of a street corner.
And America drank it down. Hippies, disillusioned veterans, house-wives, celebrities—they all wanted that buzz. Suddenly, Kundalini wasn’t a dangerous fire ritual whispered in ashrams. It was a class on Tuesday nights. It was a studio in Los Angeles. It was Gwyneth Paltrow recommending it between jade eggs and kale smoothies.
The serpent had found a new skin: white cotton pants, yoga mats, kombucha bottles. But make no mistake—the fire inside hadn’t changed. What once belonged to sages and mystics now pulsed through suburbia, disguised as wellness. Kundalini had gone main-stream, and the West was too enchanted, too starved, too naïve to notice that it was buying not just exercise, but initiation.
Kundalini didn’t just survive in the West—it flourished, thanks to a col-orful cast of evangelists who carried the serpent-fire into living rooms, yoga studios, and even Netflix queues.
Yogi Bhajan founded the 3HO organization—“Healthy, Happy, Holy”—and positioned Kundalini as a path for ordinary Western seekers. His protégé, Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa, became one of the most recognizable teachers in Los Angeles, instructing Hollywood elites and branding Kundalini as chic spirituality wrapped in white cotton and crystal malas.
From there, the movement gained celebrity boosters. Russell Brand, the British comedian turned social critic, frequently credits Kundalini with helping him battle addiction and open his “third eye.” Marianne Williamson, spiritual author and former presidential candidate, references Kundalini awakenings in her writings on inner transformation. Meanwhile, Gabrielle Bernstein, the Instagram-age “spiritual influencer,” weaves Kundalini into her coaching programs, selling it as a practical tool for anxiety, manifestation, and “miracle living.”
Music carried the message further. Snatam Kaur, a devotional singer trained in Bhajan’s lineage, brought Kundalini mantras into global concert halls, Spotify playlists, and even yoga studios in Middle America. Teachers like Shiva Rea folded Kundalini techniques into the broader yoga mainstream, blending it seamlessly with vinyasa flow and festival culture.
Then came the household names. Oprah Winfrey and Deepak Chopra gave Kundalini credibility with middle-class spiritual seekers by championing energy awakenings and higher consciousness on tele-vision and in bestsellers. Sadhguru, the Indian mystic with millions of YouTube followers, framed Kundalini as a universal energy waiting to be awakened, wrapping it in TED Talk logic and social media charisma.
Perhaps most surprising are its endorsements from outside the typical New Age sphere. Joe Rogan, through his massively influential podcast, has hyped Kundalini and its crossover with psychedelic states, describing it as a way to access “third-eye opening” without chemicals. And even Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and author, has spoken about Kundalini as a symbolic serpent arche-type tied to Jungian psychology and biblical imagery—an intellectual nod that legitimized the concept for audiences who might otherwise roll their eyes.
Together, this eclectic mix of comedians, gurus, authors, psychologists, and pop-culture icons ensured that Kundalini was no longer an obscure esoteric practice. It became a cultural export, flowing from ashrams to Instagram feeds, from ancient mantras to mainstream media. And in their collective wake, the serpent slithered comfortably into the heart of the Western imagination.
In Kundalini practice, the chakras are understood as more than just symbols of consciousness. They are treated as a ladder of hidden gate-ways—seven portals embedded along the spine, beginning at the root of the body and ending at the crown of the head. At the base lies the serpent, coiled and dormant, waiting to be awakened. Through ritual breathing, stretching, and meditative focus, this serpent energy is coaxed upward, passing through each chakra-portal until it supposedly bursts into higher states of enlightenment.
The mechanics of this process are designed to shock the body into surrender. Breathing techniques—known broadly as pranayama in yoga—often mimic panic breathing. Participants are instructed to flood their system with oxygen through rapid, deep inhalations, then hold the breath, depriving the brain and blood of oxygen. This rhythm of oversaturation and depletion triggers sensations that mimic near-death or fight-or-flight experiences. The body interprets this chemical imbalance as a threshold event, and the mind reframes it as transcendence. But breathing alone rarely defines the full encounter. Many mod-ern Kundalini experiences are facilitated by a guide or “transmitter”—someone who actively directs the energy. In older Hindu and tantric traditions this is called Shaktipat (literally, the “descent of power”), where a guru is believed to awaken Kundalini in a disciple through touch, gaze, or intention. In the West, this has been rebranded into programs like the Kundalini Activation Process (KAP), Rebirthing Breathwork, and other trauma-release modalities.12 In these sessions, the facilitator often hovers their hands above the body or moves them in sweeping motions, claiming to “move energy” through the spine and chakras. They frame it as clearing blockages, releasing trauma, or liberating the spirit, but in effect it is a ritual manipulation of the body as a temple-portal.
The outcomes can be dramatic. People shake violently, weep uncontrollably, laugh hysterically, or collapse into trances. Reports describe journeys outside the body, visions of geometric patterns or cosmic beings, sensations of leaving time altogether. Facilitators interpret these as signs of healing: trauma leaving the body, energy being liberated, portals opening. And it is not uncommon for these sessions to climax in the sexual centers of the body, with participants describing waves of erotic energy and even full orgasm as the serpent ascends. In Eastern terms, this is celebrated as the union of Shakti and Shiva—the merging of feminine and masculine energies. In Christian terms, it is a counterfeit communion: ecstasy without God, intimacy with a spirit that is not the Holy Spirit.
What begins as guided meditation and breathing is in fact a ritual initiation. The body becomes the altar, the chakras the portals, the breath the incantation, and the serpent the priest. And while the participant may walk away feeling unburdened, euphoric, or “reborn,” what has been awakened is not the Spirit of God but another fire entirely.
In Kundalini practice, the serpent does not simply “move upward.”
It ascends through a series of checkpoints—seven chakras, each regarded as a spiritual portal. In Hinduism and New Age spirituality, these are steps toward liberation. From a Christian lens, they are counterfeits: false gateways that parody the biblical truth of the body, soul, and spirit.
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