by Dr. Valentine Leonard, Ph.D
"We shake to enter the vibrations that create, perpetuate, and move life" - Bradford Keeney
"People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning of life. I dont think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we are really seeking is an experience of being alive." - Joseph Campbell
In my longtime personal and professional practice of Kundalini Yoga and improvisational dance, I have been exposed to Shaking often, be it intentional (e.g., at the end of a powerful kriya in Kundalini Yoga it is often instructed to shake) or spontaneous (I often find myself “trembling” when I relax). Also, when I fully surrender to the high vibe rhythm of a dance, I’ve noticed that I can raise my vibration into ecstatic bliss by shaking wildly every part of my body–a bit like Elvis Presley.
Elvis’s Shake took over the world like wildfire in 1954 with That’s All Right, and has been credited with marking the birth of Rock’n Roll. We know he got his shake, and the ecstatic delight that came with it, from Black Pentecostal church services in his native Mississippi. What is less known is that Shaking is one of the oldest medicines on Earth, as witnessed by the ancient shamanic traditions still alive today among the Bushmen of the Kalahari–the oldest living culture in the world.
Zest Rather Than Rest
We know that relaxation and rest help us heal–a paradigm that Harvard Medical School Dr Herbert Benson calls “the relaxation response” (Keeney, 3). What is less known is the other half of the picture: that the complement to relaxation is arousal. We could call that, “the arousal response.” We are suggesting that heightened arousal, whether through wild dancing, spontaneous jumping up and down, or body shaking, is as valuable a healing and transformational practice as sitting quietly in lotus position. When we look closer at the Shaking traditions from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, it becomes clear that the most powerful form of healing and well-being comes when BOTH hyperarousal and deep relaxation are cycled together. When we shake ourselves to the fullest height of ecstatic expression, and then fall into the deepest state of quiet, we set the stage for a powerful realignment and evolution of our whole being (Keeney, 4).
Western scholars have too easily dismissed shaking and quaking as signs of mental distress, neurological disorder, psychopathology, or possession by spirits. We in the West have cultivated a reverence toward “being in control” and a fear or avoidance of experiences that feel “out of control.” The paradox being, of course, that the more we try to control ourselves, or others, or our environments, the more out of control everything becomes. But what if we were in fact born to shake, to be fully excited about our aliveness, just as we were born to have moments of rest and quiet stillness?
When I feel the biggest joy and delight life has to offer, I cannot avoid to start trembling, quaking, and shaking with happiness–or relief. I have felt it in love-making, in praying, and in dancing; on sweaty picnic grounds in the Mississippi Delta and in the cool shade of Italian cathedrals; on the streets of New Orleans and in the jungles of Mexico. Because this divine bliss of fully realizing the fact of being alive, and as such of being one with every other being, visible and invisible–this bliss is available to everyone on the planet, rich and poor, well and sick, educated or illiterate. Call it the Big Love, the Grace of God, Nirvana, Samadhi. In any case, it appears that shaking and the holiest experiences are inseparable.
In these realms of experience we are attuned, calibrated, freshly inspired, converted to a mission, and reborn anew. It is that which we most deeply long for when we feel something is missing in our lives. Shaking is the skeleton key that opens the doors to the wild–a place where vision and imagination run free. This place has many names–the unconscious, the collective unconscious–a matrix of infinite patterns of never ending elaboration and collaboration, evolution and devolution, death and rebirth.
It is no accident that traditions that seek wild experience also honor the wild in nature. The devoted observation of ecological truths and sensuous experience of nature in its wild splendor opens a portal into the inner wild: the raw, naked mind. In the wild we more readily lose ourselves to find ourselves. We surrender to the wild’s higher wisdom. We are cooked–i.e., shaken and baked–to become fully integrated parts of the greater community of all living beings. (Keeney, 8).
According to depth psychology, this kind of psychic integration is essential for the process of individuation, of becoming our fully realized authentic self. It is, in short, the key to optimal mental and spiritual health.
In Shaking Medicine, Bradford Keeney gives numerous examples of cures attributable to the proper use of Shaking medicine–be it in the desert of the Kalahari, the fishing villages of Japan, or the plains of Minnesota. He describes the cure that a properly guided Shaking medicine brought about for a young gymnast who could no longer compete after a knee surgery and all traditional orthopedic medicine had failed to help her recover. In her first session, Keeney gently shook her knee and showed her an exercise that would bring spontaneous movement into her body. The movement immediately brought tingling sensations, as well as the image of a box her grandmother had given her. The next night she dreamed of a voice telling her to open the box. She continued shaking the body, and her dreams continued to provide her with guidance, until with Keeney’s help she constructed a sentence gathering the insights into a personal affirmation. She agreed to focus on her affirmation immediately before performing her gymnastics routine, and for the first time in three years she was able to perform, and lead her team to first place (Keeney, 19).
The word cure usually refers to remedies and treatments that help make us healthy: It refers to a transformational process. When we say we are cured, we mean that our health has become stronger, more enduring, and more usable in everyday life. Shaking medicine cures us in that regard: it stimulates health and it transforms us to be more capable of full-spirited participation in life (Keeney, 20).
Shaking Your Shakti
Gopi Krishna taught that the extraordinary ecstatic experiences of the Christian mystics, yoga adepts, expert shamans, and Sufi masters were essentially the same. He saw them as examples of psychological transformation brought forth by Kundalini. These sages of the ages were well experienced with the vibrations, jerks, quakes and shakes that transform one’s entire being, bringing untold spiritual gifts along the way.
The Sanskrit word “Kundalini” literally means “she who is coiled,” and is often visually represented by a snake. According to the tantra yoga tradition, Kundalini contains a power, an energy called Shakti–the creative force of the Universe. This force is said to lie coiled like a snake at the base of the spine, mostly dormant until awakened (through meditation and yoga practices, or other devotional experiences). Once awakened, Kundalini can progressively rise up the spine through the chakras or energy centers, activating specific gifts and potentials at each stage. Ultimately, when Kundalini reaches the top chakra at the crown of the head, it can find expression in the form of mystical visions, psychic powers, and enlightenment.
As a long-time practitioner and teacher of Kundalini Yoga, I am struck by the similarities between Shaking and Shakti, both in the theoretical descriptions and the experiential effects in my body and spirit. Both practices bring about a sense of integration, balance, arousal, aliveness, fulfillment, and heightened awareness that converge in ecstasy.
I didn’t know what to call it then, and it’s only in the last few years that I realized that that’s what “it” was: a Kundalini awakening. I had not yet discovered Kundalini Yoga and I prided myself on an extreme Nietzchean world view in which all religion and spirituality were seen as moralizing and life-denying–thus to be avoided at all costs.
It’s August in Senatobia, Mississippi, at Othar Turner’s (locally) famous Memorial Day picnic. Every great blues musician in the Mississippi Delta is here, sitting on rickety chairs on the crumbling porch of a shack. A whole goat is being roasted, the smoke adding to the sweltering heat of August in the South. Behind the shack there are pigs happily rolling in the mud. The small mixed crowd–neighbors with their whole families, old folks and kids included, hipsters from Memphis, Japanese Blues aficionados–all bouncing and swaying in the dirt like one big paleolithic animal to the irresistible riffs of the shrieking guitars and cicadas. As it gets dark the lightning bugs sparkle in the thick air. Suddenly, the chant of a fife, like the snake charmers play in Bombay. The drums, telluric, make my feet pound the earth. The small crowd peals open to let through a marching band, only 5 or 6 of them. Old Othar Turner walks in the front playing his fife. His 10 year old granddaughter Shardé keeps in step with him. Behind them a small percussion section–a very large black man on the bass drum, a snare drummer, a couple of tambourines. They snake their way through the dirt. The crowd folds itself back over the band. Magnetized by the drums I elbow my way through, half delirious already from the heat and the groove and the cheap beer. This is before cell phones but there are a few cameras there–the Japanese folks especially. People are clapping and dancing and hooting, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I feel the shake coming on like a Mustang, and I decide to let go of the reins. My spine arches and flexes, my feet stomp on the ground, the dirt feels soft and safe, I see fireflies or maybe it’s sparkles from the fire pit, sweat dripping off black foreheads, my neck and head are starting to feel unattached to the rest of my body. Now I can see the whole scene from above and yet I am more alive in my body than I have ever been. The bass drummer stumbles in the uneven grass and falls to his knees. He keeps playing. Someone pushes me and somehow I find myself astride the drummer’s broad back. My spine keeps shaking and flexing like a mad boa. The music, the drummer, and I become one. I ride him like a rodeo until the end of the tune. For the rest of the night I’m electrified. I dance with everyone who comes near, twirl from one partner to another, completely unashamed of the proximity, the sweat, the lust, the totally unapologetic rapture I share with every dancer and musician there. This is God, I thought. I am God.
The Physical Body as a Vehicle to Spiritual Enlightenment
Harvard Trained Physician Mauro Zappaterra has dedicated his research to the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). He explains that the CSF bathes our brain and spinal cord all the way down to the sacrum, providing buoyancy to the brain.
He observed that in an embryo, the tiny developing brain was surrounded by a lot of “empty space” and upon further inquiry he realized that that “space” was filled with CSF. He then asked, why so much CSF? What does the CSF provide to the developing brain? He found that the CSF informs and instructs stem cells to proliferate and differentiate into neurons. He compared these findings with his parallel experience with Tibetan Buddhism and Kundalini Yoga, which describe a hollow canal in the center of the spinal cord where the Kundalini rises. In Yogic scriptures this central channel is called Shushumna Nadi, and culminates at the third eye–the cave of Brahma, the eye of the Soul–i.e, the third ventricle of the brain where the CSF is being produced, held between the pineal and pituitary glands.
Now, Zappaterra continues, CSF is a fluid. We know that fluids are able to store and transmit energy, light, vibration, and flow. And the CSF can do this without the mediation of any synapses since it bathes the whole brain, going to all control centers of the brain at once and thus having this whole synchronized effect, producing a sense of beingness, of “I am” so familiar to meditators.
As Zappaterra puts it, we know that Melatonin, synthesized by the pineal gland when the sun goes down, induces a state of sleep (i.e., an altered state of consciousness). Melatonin then goes into the CSF and the CSF distributes it to the brain so we fall asleep. Couldn’t the CSF, then, store Source energy from our conception and transmit that energy to our self, allowing for that sense of pure beingness within us, or other altered states of consciousness, such as heightened creativity and vitality, nonlocal vision, or instantaneous healing? In other words, could the CSF be the biological basis of spiritual enlightenment–the medium of the Spirit?
If that is the case, then I would like to suggest that activities of heightened arousal like Shaking or Kundalini Yoga are particularly efficient at leveraging CSF so it may rise up the spine and lead to the rapturous, mind and heart expanding experiences that the Bushman Shamans, the Rock Stars, the Christian Mystics, the Ecstatic Poets, the Saints and Sages of the ages and the Ecstatic Dancers around the world can induce. And what’s more, I’ll conclude with Robert Keeney, this kind of vibrating encounter is a strong form of medicine because it cures through tuning into the highest frequencies that affect the soul. These frequencies, in turn, recalibrate the mind and body (Keeney, 201) so we may fully embrace the stupendous experience of being alive.
References
Bradford Keeney, Shaking Medicine (Destiny Books, Vermont, 2007).
Gopi Krishna, Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man (Shambala, 1997).
Mauro Zappaterra, “Cerebrospinal Fluid, Medium of the Spirit”
Othar Turner and the Rising Stars Fife and Drum Band - Shimmy She Wobble
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