When It Is Too Much: Spiritual Emergency and What the Research Says

When the ground gives way

Some awakenings arrive gently, like dawn. Others arrive like weather. Heat pours through the body at night. The heart races for no reason. Old memories surface with the force of the present. Sleep thins out. The sense of who you are, which seemed so solid a month ago, begins to come apart at the seams.

If this is happening to you, or to someone you love, the first thing we want to say is that you are not the first, and you are not alone. The old texts knew about this. Abhinavagupta, writing in Kashmir a thousand years ago, listed trembling and a sudden leaping among the signs of the rising. And in the last fifty years, a small but serious body of clinical and research work has grown up around exactly these experiences.

The second thing is just as important. Sometimes what feels like a spiritual crisis is also, or instead, a medical one. This article tries to hold both truths with care. We do not diagnose anyone, and nothing here replaces a doctor. But we hope it helps you find words, find your bearings and find the right help.

A name for the storm

The term spiritual emergency comes from Stanislav and Christina Grof. He was a psychiatrist who had spent decades studying non-ordinary states. She had lived through a dramatic Kuṇḍalinī awakening of her own, which began during childbirth in 1968. Their play on words was deliberate: a spiritual emergency is a crisis, but it can also be an emergence, a stage of growth that has become, for a while, too much to carry.

In 1980 they founded the Spiritual Emergence Network to connect people in crisis with therapists who would not automatically treat their experiences as madness. Their books, Spiritual Emergency (1989) and The Stormy Search for the Self (1990), described several forms that such crises can take, and Kuṇḍalinī awakening was one of them.

A little earlier, the psychiatrist Lee Sannella had published Kundalini: Psychosis or Transcendence? (1976), later revised as The Kundalini Experience (1987). He gathered case reports of people with intense bodily and emotional symptoms who did not seem to be mentally ill in any ordinary sense, and he gave the pattern a clinical name, the “physio-kundalini” syndrome. His book also included a physical model by Itzhak Bentov, which proposed that tiny vibrations of the body could set off these symptoms. That model was never validated, and we would treat it as an interesting idea rather than an explanation.

What Sannella and the Grofs did, above all, was to say out loud that these experiences exist, that they can be survived and that many people come through them changed for the better.

Measuring what is hard to measure

Once there was a name, researchers began to look for ways to count. The psychiatrist Bruce Greyson built a nineteen-item questionnaire, the Physio-Kundalini Syndrome Index, based on the symptoms Sannella had described. In a 1993 study in the Journal of Religion and Health, he found that people who had had near-death experiences reported more of these symptoms than comparison groups, on average 7.6 against 4.6. He also used the index in studies of psychiatric patients.

In 2008 Sanches and Daniels published the Kundalini Awakening Scale, a longer instrument of seventy-six items grouped into five subscales. Neither tool is a diagnosis. They are ways of describing a cluster of experiences so that they can be studied.

A quieter but very important change happened inside psychiatry itself. In 1992 David Lukoff, Francis Lu and Robert Turner argued that the diagnostic manual needed a place for religious and spiritual difficulties that were not mental disorders. The DSM-IV, published in 1994, added a code for “Religious or Spiritual Problem” (V62.89). It is listed among conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention, and it is explicitly not a mental disorder. The category continues in DSM-5.

That small code matters. It means a clinician can recognise a spiritual struggle as real, and work with it, without having to call it an illness.

Try it: Map what you are feeling in the body, and read what the tradition and the research say about it. What You Feel →

What recent studies show

The research is still young, and most studies are small surveys. But a few findings are worth knowing.

Woollacott, Kason and Park, in a study published in Explore, asked people about Kuṇḍalinī-type awakenings. Most respondents reported energetic aspects, and the awakenings were often triggered by intense meditation or by being near a teacher. The after-effects people described included more creativity, greater sensitivity and a wish to serve others.

Corneille and Luke, in a 2021 study in Frontiers in Psychology, surveyed 152 people with spontaneous awakenings. Awakenings with Kuṇḍalinī features brought more physical symptoms and more involuntary movement. But they were not more negative than other awakenings, and 98 per cent of participants rated the long-term effects as positive.

Lindahl and colleagues, in the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study (PLOS ONE, 2017), interviewed nearly a hundred Buddhist meditators and teachers. They documented a wide range of challenging experiences, some of them impairing, lasting anywhere from days to more than a decade. This study is an important counterweight. Meditation is not always calm, and difficulties are not always brief.

And Maxwell and Katyal (2022), studying eighty meditators at Ananda Marga retreats, found that 19 per cent reported sensations rising in the spine, often with strong positive feeling.

Put together, the picture is balanced. These experiences are more common than many people think. For most they end well. For some they are hard and long. Both deserve to be taken seriously.

Telling one thing from another

How can anyone tell a spiritual crisis from a mental illness? Honestly, sometimes they cannot, at least not quickly. But clinicians have proposed some useful signposts.

In 2009 the Brazilian psychiatrists Adair de Menezes Júnior and Alexander Moreira-Almeida reviewed the literature and suggested nine features that point towards a non-pathological spiritual experience:

• little psychological distress;
• no impairment of daily, work or social life;
• no other mental disorder present;
• the experience is brief or comes in episodes;
• the person keeps a critical attitude and can question it;
• it fits with a cultural or religious tradition;
• there is some control over it;
• it contributes to personal growth over time;
• it is oriented towards others, not only the self.

Earlier, in 1985, David Lukoff described signs that a mystical experience with some psychotic features is likely to have a good outcome. Functioning was good before it began. It started suddenly, with an identifiable trigger. There is no disorganised thinking. The person is curious and open about what is happening. And there is no risk to self or others.

These are guides, not tests. And there is one more thing to hold firmly. A spiritual crisis and a psychiatric illness can happen at the same time. An awakening does not protect anyone from depression, mania, psychosis or a thyroid problem, and an illness does not mean nothing spiritual is happening. Misdiagnosis cuts both ways: real awakenings have been treated as madness, and real illness has been missed because it was called awakening. The kindest stance is to keep both possibilities open and to get help that can see both.

When to seek help urgently

Please read this part slowly, and come back to it if you need to. Contact a doctor, a psychiatrist or your local emergency services straight away if you, or someone you are with, has any of the following:

• thoughts of suicide, or of harming someone else;
• several nights with little or no sleep, or signs of mania such as racing thoughts, great excitement, grand plans and very little need for rest;
• speech or thinking that has become confused or hard to follow;
• being unable to eat, wash, stay safe or otherwise look after yourself;
• new physical symptoms such as chest pain, a racing or irregular heartbeat, fainting, numbness, weakness, severe headache or seizures.

The last point deserves emphasis. Many bodily sensations that people associate with Kuṇḍalinī can also come from the heart, the nerves, the thyroid or a vitamin deficiency. Checking is not a lack of faith. It is simply sensible. If the tests come back clear, you have lost nothing.

Seeking help is not a failure of the path, and it does not mean you have to give up your understanding of what is happening. A good clinician can work alongside a teacher. If you can, find one who is respectful of spiritual experience. But in an emergency, any help is better than none.

Coming back to the ground

Outside an emergency, when things are hard but manageable, the most reliable support is grounding. Stop or greatly reduce intense practices: strong breath work, long retentions, the bandhas and long hours of sitting. Eat warm, regular meals. Protect sleep. Walk, garden, touch the earth. Spend time with steady, kind people. Avoid alcohol, cannabis and other drugs, which can make an unstable state much worse.

A simple practice many people find helpful: sit with both feet on the floor, one hand on the belly and one on the heart. Breathe in gently, and let the out-breath be longer, around seven or eight counts. Feel the weight of your body going down into the chair and the floor. After a while, name a few things you can see and hear. It is modest. It often works.

Two more things, said gently. If you take prescribed medication, please do not stop it suddenly because you have decided your symptoms are spiritual. Stopping some medicines abruptly can be dangerous, and any change should be made with the doctor who prescribed it. And if you have a teacher, tell them honestly what is happening, including the frightening parts. A good teacher will usually advise you to slow down, not to push through, and will not be offended if you also see a doctor.

It can help, too, to keep a few notes each day: how you slept, what you ate, what you practised and how you felt. When you are in the middle of it, the days blur. A simple record shows whether things are slowly easing or slowly getting worse, and it gives a doctor or teacher something solid to work with.

Try it: Choose the grounding focus for a short, gentle guided session. Practice Builder →

Standing beside someone

If someone you love is going through this, your calm presence may be the most useful thing in the room. Listen more than you speak. You do not have to agree with their interpretation, and you do not need to argue with it either. Ask what they are experiencing, and what would help right now.

Help with the basics: food, water, sleep, a quiet room, fewer visitors and fewer screens. Gently discourage more intense practice. Stay with them if they are frightened.

Try not to frighten them further, and try not to flatter them either. Telling someone they are going mad rarely helps. Telling them they are becoming enlightened, and so should ignore their body, can be just as harmful. Something simpler is usually better: “This sounds really hard. I am here. Let us make sure you are safe and looked after.”

Know the warning signs above, and act on them. If they speak of suicide, take it seriously, stay with them and get help immediately. Offer to go with them to a doctor. That small offer can make all the difference.

And look after yourself as well. Supporting someone through a crisis is tiring. Ask others to share the load.

For most people, the storm does pass. What it leaves behind, with time and good support, is often a life that is wider, kinder and more awake than before. Until then, the task is simply to stay safe, stay held and keep your feet on the ground.