Kundalini Awakening and Kundalini Syndrome

Kundalini crossed into Western esoteric and psychological vocabulary substantially through Sir John Woodroffe, writing as Arthur Avalon, whose 1919 translation and study _The Serpent Power_ rendered the Sat-Cakra-Nirupana into English and gave the West its first serious technical account of the chakra and kundalini system, distinct from the looser Theosophical treatments that had circulated earlier. Carl Jung lectured on kundalini yoga psychologically in the 1930s, reading its ascent as a symbolic map of individuation rather than a physiological claim, a reframing that shaped much later Western reception.

In the later twentieth century some Western practitioners and a body of clinical literature began describing a "kundalini syndrome" or "spiritual emergency," involuntary movement, heat, altered states and psychological distress reported after intensive meditation or yoga, terms used by clinicians such as Stanislav Grof to discuss the phenomenon without settling whether it confirms the traditional physiology. Traditional sources would recognize the caution in this literature: the texts themselves treat unsupervised awakening as a real hazard, long before any Western clinical vocabulary existed for it.