Chapter 7: The Serpent Years

August 2011 – November 2013 
Austin, Texas, Big Bend National Park, and Sacred Valley, Peru

The human self tends to think everything is happening in linear time—like the human is a little black dot moving along a timeline in a history book. However, the experience of the soul expands in all directions. Instead, the soul, or the master self, is the fixed point with many lines extending from its central point. The soul can expand in one or more directions for an experience and contract back into itself at will.

For the purpose of this book, I aimed to write my experiences in layers, keeping some sort of linear timeline. However, often too much occurred at any given moment to put into one chapter designated for the point in time. This chapter goes back to the time when my father was in a coma, his death, and my marriage falling apart to describe what was going on in my soul evolution, rather than being focused on my physical human reality as I did in the previous chapters.

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My consciousness began to expand inexplicably and uncoaxed when I sat next to my comatose father as he hung onto life by a thin thread. His soul hung outside his body as he made the decision whether to live or die, and it thinned the veil between the physical and nonphysical realms so much, I found that I existed in both again, like I had as a child.

It was then that the life force energy some call kundalini—others simply call it spirit—began to stir in the base of my spine and fill my womb with a pulsing electric energy. It felt as if someone had hooked an electric cord into my uterus and the base of my spine and turned up the voltage to high. What a strange scene to think about now. Me, sitting in the most unsacred of places, holding the swollen, freezing-cold hand of a near-dead man who was hooked up to every machine possible, having a metaphysical experience.

At the time I had no idea what it meant or what the feeling was, and I was too exhausted from trying to take care of my father, be somewhat of a good employee, and fulfill the bare minimum of my wifely duties to figure out what was happening to me. The intense electric pulse would come and go over the coming months and years as I watched my human life unravel.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the then-unknown force was driving my decisions, which seemed entirely insane and reckless to the outside world and the human voice inside of me, which was almost completely unaware of what was going on. I only knew what I could not do. The longer I stayed in situations not in alignment with my soul, the sicker I got. It made me ill to go to work. The last four months of my marriage, I was swollen, lethargic, and appeared to be allergic to everything I put into my mouth. I saw doctor after doctor, and none could say what was wrong with me. I avoided gluten and then meat. I drank only juice, and nothing seemed to work. Eventually, when I moved into the Sunny Shack, my health dramatically improved without medical care or the box of supplements I took during the last months of the marriage. I could eat again without it swelling me into oblivion. The nearly twenty pounds I could not lose no matter what I tried suddenly fell off my small frame. The daily patterns of my marriage and my job had been making me ill—this energy activating inside of me seemed to act as a repellant to things not in alignment with my soul.

As I began to clean up the rubble of my wrecked life, snakes—or the proverbial serpent—began to impose physically in my life. On a walk with my dog in October 2012, right after I told Brian for the first time that I did not think I could be married anymore, I came across a thick, solid-black snake coiled tightly on the sidewalk. I had lived along Shoal Creek in central Austin for six years and never seen anything like it. I would have shrugged it off as a coincidence, but snakes continued to appear in record numbers.

​A week later a snake slithered through my fingers while I was gardening. The next day a snake fell out of a tree and wrapped itself around Brian’s arm. A silver snake would cross my path on trails, and then a water moccasin would swim across the surface of the water where my dog swam—all within the same week. By April 2013 Brian was so used to my snake attraction, he did not even bat an eyelash when a six-foot rat snake came into my mother’s house through a dog door on Easter Sunday.

The following month—May 2013, one year after my father’s death—Brian and I headed to Big Bend National Park with friends. Once again, a six-foot-long, black-and-white-striped snake slithered across our path. The last night of the trip I experienced a dream that would change everything. Over the last eight months—or the year of the snakes as I jokingly called it—I dreamed of snakes nearly every night in addition to seeing them while awake.

That final night in my West Texas dreams, I found myself in some sort of shamanic Native American ceremony. The drums rhythmically pounded while the people danced and sang. In the middle of their circle, a mythic, almost cartoon-like cobra began to uncoil. At the height of the drumming, the cobra reached its full height, and its hood reached full width. It stared directly into my eyes, stuck out its split tongue, and hissed with an indescribable intensity. I woke up in a panic and a sweat. I knew undoubtedly it was time to leave the marriage. As much as my human did not want to, I knew the natural and undeniable soul evolution I was experiencing could not take place within its walls. It timed exactly with Brian telling me I either needed to have a baby or he was going to find a new wife. No joke.

By late summer and early fall 2013, I was finally living on my own in the Sunny Shack. Brian and I had almost finalized the divorce. Freeing up the energies I’d needed to work in an unfulfilling job and exist in an unfulfilling marriage, I was able to redirect them to my soul’s evolution. My human self continued to be pretty much blind as to what was occurring, yet that was all about to change.

On October 11, 2013, I attended my regular Friday night yoga class, as I often did before going out drinking with my friends. At the end of class, I sat in silent meditation with the others when I began to feel my spine move involuntarily, slithering and spinning clockwise. The electric current was no longer active only in the base of the spine and the uterus but was slowly, yet with increasing intensity, creeping up my spine. Once it reached the base of the neck, I began to experience a high like no other—and I’ve done a lot of drugs in my life—yet felt completely sober, aware and observing.

With my eyes closed, I saw every color in the rainbow and colors I didn’t have a name for. Time and space no longer existed. My human self was aware enough to be thankful to be sitting in a dark room where people could not see my jarring movements. Even though my eyes were closed, I felt as if they were open, and I was seeing the world for the first time. I felt my third eye open to a 360-degree view, expanding like the hood of the cobra that had visited me in the West Texas dream. I observed the experience both from inside my body and outside it. This was not like observing my body from outside like after my father died. It was an expansion of SELF. I expanded so much from the point of the I EXIST, I could see in all directions. My soul was not detached from the body. Everything was in alignment—soul and human as one.
The yoga instructor began talking again, something about controlling the fluctuations of the mind, which made me want to laugh out loud and flip him off at the same time, and just like that, the experience was over. My body, led by my spine, spiraled counterclockwise as the electric current swirled back down into the base of the spine, exactly like that tightly coiled black snake that had first appeared to me one year before.

One month later—November 2013—I found myself in a beautiful retreat center in the Sacred Valley of Peru, where I was completing an advanced yoga teacher training. This time the training was not to find answers, but rather to enjoy the experience of new friends and lots of physical practice in a beautiful location. On a break between sessions, I sat in a lush, green garden meditating when I heard some fellow students playing music—various drum and tambourine beats accompanied by guttural sounds of the women dancing and chanting wildly in a circle. I stood up from my meditation and went to sit in the middle of the dancing women, who were uninterrupted by my presence. The electric current begin to rise up the spine as my body moved rapidly in a clockwise motion. This time after my “hood” expanded and I came into my third-eye vision, the energy shot up through the crown of my head for the first time, rather than becoming stuck in my neck like in the yoga studio.

With it, my consciousness followed. I was in a snake’s body as it jetted into the gardens. I was clearly seeing out of the eye slits of a snake. At the same time in my body, I felt an incontrollable urge to allow the spine to create a wavelike motion, mimicking the slither of a moving snake. Then I moved my awareness back to the snake I simultaneously embodied, slithering and writhing through the grass outside the room where the music was taking place. Again, time and space were suspended as I traveled through the lush gardens in my snake body. It was as concrete as I describe, and the only thing I have to compare it to is a psychedelic-drug experience, which I will add is completely subpar to this completely natural one. After what seemed like hours but was really probably about five to ten minutes, I came back into my slithering human body and felt the electric current slowly recoil back down into the base of the spine.

Later, I learned the experience was what some call a kundalini awakening—I had never heard the term before, and it was not covered in my yoga teacher trainings. Kundalini is a Sanskrit word meaning “coiled one” and is often represented as a sleeping serpent that lies at the base of the spine, waiting to be awakened. In yogic theories, when kundalini or primal Earth-force energy awakens, it moves up central channels along the spine to the crown of the head through energy centers called chakras. A kundalini awakening is often considered part of the spiritual enlightenment, or self-realization, process in many cultures.

While this is a gross oversimplification of kundalini in the context of yogic theory, I must state that while it is one way to describe my effortless and unplanned experience, my views vary widely from those of the yogic community’s members, some of whom try to activate this energy, when to me it is about allowing it to awaken. Now I understand the experience as simply an infusion of energy—a massive integration of my soul, my spirit into the physical body. Really, the label on the experience didn’t matter; the effect it had on my reality did.