Female Kundalini

Female Kundalini is first and foremost the true story of my spiritual journey, my Alpha to Omega. I have striven to make it as authentic and true as possible. It’s entitled Female Kundalini because Shakti is female, and even though Shakti is female, each of us – male or female – share this energy. I am a female and have experienced Kundalini so “Female Kundalini” is an appropriate title.

The book describes my experiences, and it is only through experiences that I am able to summon the authority to speak on this topic. I don’t offer techniques or methods to awaken Kundalini because I don’t advocate using techniques or methods beyond attending Kundalini yoga classes. I don’t guarantee that if someone were to do the same things I have done, either intentionally or unintentionally, that he/she would achieve at the same results. What I do know, and would stake my life on, is the universality of the life force energy that lies within.

I didn’t recognize that I was on a spiritual path until Kundalini rose. The book reflects this perspective, me, looking back over the events of my life: where I started and where I am now. Since 1998 when Kundalini rose for the second time, I have been much more aware of this path. Up to that time, studying Buddhism and pondering continuously was more like a hobby than something that I was ever going to experience.

Nevertheless, because a part of me committed unconsciously to this path when I was young, I have always taken jobs that haven’t exhausted my energy. Maintaining my integrity and paying my way in life has always been important, but not at the expense of spiritual pursuits. I recall speaking with a friend who told me how much she wanted to achieve material success. I remember thinking “I want to get off.” It was by detaching myself mentally from the material, while, at the same time, remaining in the material world, that triggered the shift of consciousness in me, which led me to Kundalini.

Female Kundalini offers much to analyze and evaluate: fertile ground for opinion on me, my upbringing, and the events of my life. All of that is valid. However, the actual Kundalini-rising experience, and my awareness during those events, stand on their own. I am forever grateful to have had the Grace of that awareness and am thankful that it has given me the material for Female Kundalini.

Experience changes knowledge into wisdom. That said, I hope people will compare my account to other Kundalini accounts in order to become more discerning about the many accounts made on the spiritual path. Because the spiritual supermarket is so lucrative, the need for discernment has never been greater. Before we uphold a work as a paragon of wisdom, we need to test its actuality against other criteria, including our own experience.

Female Kundalini is very much an account of a stage in my spiritual journey. It is by no means the end, but it does serve as a signpost for the early stages of Kundalini, cognizant that, once Kundalini rises, “doing” on the individual’s part is very much done…because that’s when Kundalini takes over and, as my publisher and editor says, “IT does YOU.”

The inner event that awakens Kundalini remains a mystery. In Margaret Dempsey’s case, years of Buddhist meditation, galvanized by a traumatic contact with an attractive man, triggered the “uprising of Shakti.” Her honesty in not attempting to glamorize the awakening attests to its authenticity. The author’s real Self, to which Kundalini eventually brought her, is in evidence from page one, as she describes her upbringing in Catholic Ireland, her days in a boarding school run by nuns, her training as a nurse, and her escape to London, New York and India.

Kundalini is nourished by sexual energy. The fundamental polarity of male and female is at the heart of the cosmos. The polarity of male, Siva, and female, Shakti, is also manifested in the human body, in the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and the left and right sides of the brain, a subject on which Margaret Dempsey speaks with great insight.

The polarity is also revealed in her life story. Her father’s favoring her over her mother, a young priest recovering from a nervous breakdown who speaks to the hearts of the teenage girls in his congregation, her meeting with Mooji, and the “gorgeous” man who rejected her, are a potent male presence, round which the author’s spiritualized womanhood dances. There is a marvelous moment when she speaks of surrender: “I had no idea what I was letting go of... I couldn’t have surrendered to nothingness. Somehow I knew there was something to surrender to.”

In Tantra, the male god, Siva is both the “Destroyer” (of illusion and ego) and the “Immovable Stillness” of transcendence. The goddess, Shakti, is the energy of creation and manifestation. Kundalini is Shakti’s presence in the human body. The book’s title, Female Kundalini, is therefore apt, not just because it is the document of one woman’s Kundalini experience, but because Kundalini Herself, is fundamentally female, even in men.

In her single-minded focus and her honesty in pursuit of self-actualization, Margaret Dempsey reminds me of a distaff Siddhartha. A steadfast explorer, she has accomplished much in a short time, investigating and practicing many techniques and methods, not as a sycophant, but as an actualizer, a person who tests everything in the laboratory of her body, while remaining true to her ultimate goals, so aptly described in the pages of her book.