With Don Lee Daniels
(Swami Jñānānanda)
Kuṇḍalinī Śakti awakening. Advanced meditation. Conscious out-of-body exploration (OBE) — drawing from the ancient tandra state practices of Nondual Śaiva Tantra, the dream yoga tradition of Vajrayāna Tibetan Buddhism, and the experiential work of modern OBE pioneers.
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Table of Contents
Issue 13 — The Living Force at the Center of Everything
I promised a continuation of "The Song of the Divine Heartbeat" — my poetic interpretation of the Spanda Kārikās. That work is not abandoned. It is deepening. The remaining verses deserve the right words, and rushing them would violate the very principle the poem is built on: that you do not force recognition. You create the conditions, and then you wait — honestly, patiently — for what arrives.
What has arrived, in the weeks I have been sitting with those verses, is something larger. A clarity about what I actually teach, why it works, and how to walk someone through it from the very beginning. That is what this series is.
I am calling it Direct Experience Reshapes Your Reality. It will unfold over the coming weeks as a complete walk-through of my teaching — the Three Pathways, the Four Pillars, and the practices that make direct experience not an accident but something you can approach deliberately, and at will. Each issue stands on its own. Together, they form the clearest map I have ever drawn of the territory I have been exploring for over forty years.
The Spanda Kārikās will return when they are ready. For now, we go deeper.
The Awakening
I was nineteen, home on winter break from the University of Florida, sitting alone in meditation in my childhood bedroom. I had no teacher. I had no lineage. I had no framework for what was about to happen.
A golden-white energy gathered at the base of my spine, rose through the center of my body, and exploded out through the crown of my head. My awareness separated from my physical form. I found myself hovering above my house — fully conscious, made of light.
My very next thought was not: What does this mean?
It was: How do I do it again?
That question is the whole of this teaching. Everything I have studied in the forty-plus years since — the scriptures, the psychology degree and master’s, the years working on a psychiatric ward, the initiations in India, the thousands of hours in meditation, thirty-plus years of teaching — has been in service of answering it.
And here is what I want you to understand, because it changes everything: the experience came first. The understanding came second. I did not read about Kuṇḍalinī Śakti and then try to make it happen. She arose on her own — and I say “she” deliberately. In the Nondual Śaiva Tantra tradition, this force is understood as Śakti, the feminine power of consciousness itself. She is not an “it.” She is not abstract energy. She is a living, intelligent, loving presence — and when I sit in meditation, I often begin by invoking her simply as Mother Kuṇḍalinī. That is how she feels, at least for me. That is how she moves.
And here I must be precise, because this is the heart of the nondual teaching: she is not separate from you. You are that energy. You are the Kuṇḍalinī Śakti. In the deepest recognition, there is no division between the one who sits in meditation and the force that rises through the spine. They are one and the same. But because we are human, because we live in bodies and think in language, it is often far easier — and far more beautiful — to address her as “she.” That devotional relationship is itself a doorway. When you turn toward her with love, with reverence, with the simplicity of a child calling to its mother, something extraordinary happens. The love sweeps away all thoughts. The mind empties. And you are left with nothing but this divine presence — which was always your own deepest nature, looking back at you.
And this begins the relationship with Kuṇḍalinī Śakti. The more you experience this, the more this awareness becomes your default nature, your new and true reality perspective — until you yourself realize that you are the totality of Śiva-Śakti, the totality of the energy that moves through the universe and moves through you and is you.
It is not just about having extraordinary experiences out of the body or mind-expanding states of consciousness. It is also about an intimate, ongoing relationship with the energy flowing within you and through you—a relationship that changes your reality orientation from the inside out.
Imagine waking up in the morning, remembering your dreams, your journeys — perhaps you traveled out of body, perhaps you had vivid, lucid encounters with other worlds and other beings. You open your eyes into this human body and still feel the energy flowing through you. And then you begin to recognize something remarkable: it does not stop. It does not stop when you get up to brush your teeth or get ready for work. It still flows through you. And if you begin to tune into this — to notice it, to honor it, to stay with it — it changes your entire orientation to your world, to your relationships, to how you see yourself. You are becoming a vessel of divine energy. And your viewpoint shifts — from the perspective of a small, limited human to the perspective of divinity itself. This is how I live and experience my life.
This direct experience reshapes your reality too.
She arose on her own, in a teenager from a Southern Baptist family in Florida. The search for a teacher, a tradition, a language — all of that came after.
This is the organizing principle of everything I teach. Not theory first, then experience. Experience first — then the framework to hold it.
The Three Pathways
What I discovered, over decades of practice and study, is that the force that rose in me that night is the same force that powers every genuine contemplative awakening in every tradition in human history. In Nondual Śaiva Tantra, she is called Kuṇḍalinī Śakti — the living power of consciousness recognizing itself. In Christianity, she is the Holy Spirit. In Taoism, Chi. In Tibetan Buddhism, the clear light of awareness. The names differ. The recognition is identical.
She is not a technique. She is not one practice among others. She is the underlying intelligence that animates everything — the force that carries awareness deeper in meditation, the power that loosens identification with the body at the threshold of conscious out-of-body experience, the energy that clears every limitation standing between you and the recognition of what you actually are.
My teaching is organized around three pathways, but they are not separate methods. They are three expressions of her movement:
Kuṇḍalinī Śakti Awakening — the living force at the center of everything.
Advanced Meditation — the deepening ground where consciousness recognizes itself through progressively subtler states: tandra, turīya, samādhi.
Conscious Out-of-Body Experience — one of many powerful doorways into the direct, undeniable knowing that you are not confined to the body.
Each one ignites the others. The Śakti is what carries you deeper in meditation. And meditation teaches you meditation. The stillness of deep meditation is what loosens the body’s grip so awareness can separate. And the experience of hovering above your own sleeping form — fully conscious, made of light — is what dissolves the fear of death and shatters the misidentification with the physical body in a way that decades of reading alone cannot match.
The Practice
Over the coming issues, I will walk you through each of these pathways and show you the practices that make them accessible. Not theory. Not philosophy. The actual methods — grounded in a living tradition, informed by psychology, and tested across forty years of daily direct experience.
But we start here, tonight, with something real.
Tonight, give yourself ten minutes.
Sit with a straight spine, on the floor or a chair. It doesn’t really matter in the end. Close your eyes. Let the breath settle on its own for the first minute — do not manage it.
Then begin a slow, deliberate rhythm. Inhale through the nose for a count of four. Hold the breath gently at the crown — a soft kumbhaka, not forced — for a count of four. Exhale slowly for a count of six. At the bottom of the exhale, rest in the pause. Do not rush the next breath. Let it arise on its own.
After several rounds, the mind will begin to quiet. Thoughts will still come. Let them. But instead of following them, notice them from a slight distance — as if you were sitting on a riverbank, watching leaves drift past on the surface of the water. You are not the leaves. You are not the river. You are the one watching.
And here is something that changes everything: learn to laugh at the mind’s thoughts. Or at the very least, smile at them. They are no more consequential than a leaf blowing in the wind. As one of my teacher friends would say, “Don’t believe your thoughts.” Or as I would put it — don’t buy into those thoughts. And then laugh. By smiling at a thought — even one that moments ago felt urgent, heavy, or true — you see it from a completely different point of view. Suddenly it has no power over you. Not because you fought it, but because you shifted where you were standing. This is the beginning of witness consciousness. Not a technique you perform. A place you find yourself when you stop taking the mind so seriously.
When that witnessing steadies, even slightly, drop a single question into the stillness:
Who is it that is aware?
Do not answer it. The mind will try — it will offer names, concepts, descriptions. Let those float past like the rest. Stay with the asking. Feel for the presence behind the question — the awareness that has been here through every state of your life without ever once becoming an object.
That awareness is what this entire teaching is about. She lives there. And when you turn your attention toward her, even for a moment, she begins to move. And when she begins to move, it’s amazing.
As it says in the Shiva Sutras, verse 1.12: vismayo yogabhūmikāḥ, the stages of yoga/enlightenment are astonishing.
Direct experience reshapes your reality. And you can learn how to access these states of consciousness deliberately — and at will.
Dive inward, fly free.
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Take care,
Don Lee Daniels
Swami Jñānānanda