Serpent isn’t Sleeping: Rewriting the Story of Spiritual Experience

But what sets this work apart is its refusal to privilege any one tradition or geography. Although Kuṇḍalinī has its textual roots in medieval South Asian tantric literature, the book insists that, in its modern global form, Kuṇḍalinī is the product of colonial-era exchanges between Indian and Western esotericists

November 08, 2025 | Daanish Bin Nabi

In a publishing landscape saturated with spiritual self-help manuals and pop-yoga glossaries, Kundalini: A Stirring, Churning, Rising Journey by Columbia University Press is a rare and rigorous intervention.
Written by a scholar-practitioner of Śākta tantra, the book represents at once a deeply personal excavation and a sweeping intellectual inquiry into one of the most misunderstood and mythologized concepts in global spiritual discourse: Kuṇḍalinī.
The prologue sets the tone with a striking admission: this is not a book that will tell you what Kuṇḍalinī “is.” Instead, it offers a layered, historically grounded, and culturally pluralistic exploration of how Kuṇḍalinī has been imagined, experienced, and transmitted across centuries and continents.
The author refuses to reduce Kuṇḍalinī to a single model—whether the serpentine energy coiled at the base of the spine, the sexual force of Neo-Tantra, or the branded techniques of Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga.
Each of these, the book argues, is but one strand in a tangled web of symbolic systems, ritual practices, and embodied experiences.
But what sets this work apart is its refusal to privilege any one tradition or geography. Although Kuṇḍalinī has its textual roots in medieval South Asian tantric literature, the book insists that, in its modern global form, Kuṇḍalinī is the product of colonial-era exchanges between Indian and Western esotericists.
These conversations were often fraught and asymmetrical, fusing physiological metaphors with evolutionary theory, alchemical symbolism, and Christian notions of redemption.
The result is a hybridized serpent—fiery, feminine, and elusive—that slithers through yoga studios, social media feeds, and academic footnotes alike.
The voice of the author is at the same time scholarly and intimate. As a woman initiated into the Kāmākhyā lineage when she was eight, and later trained as a scholar in the United States, she brings to the subject a rare double lens.
Her fieldwork in Assam and West Bengal, extending over decades, opens up ritual communities largely invisible to mainstream academia. Yet she is no less critical of her own positionality, grappling with the insider-outsider dilemma that haunts religious studies.
"I define myself as an insider with an outsider's lens," she writes, well aware of tensions between personal experience and scholarly detachment.
This is not only a methodological tension, but also a thematic one. Kuṇḍalinī, the book suggests, is herself a liminal force, operating between binaries: sacred and profane, masculine and feminine, East and West, text and experience.
The serpent becomes a symbol that both reveals and conceals, a gnostic cipher that resists definite interpretation. Based on the work of Jeffrey J. Kripal, "The Serpent's Gift," the author argues that religious symbols are simultaneously true and false, poetic and political, experiential and constructed.
One of the most compelling parts of the prologue is the section on alchemy. Indian and European traditions alike utilize mercury and sulfur as metaphors for spiritual change, the author indicates, but the gendered symbolism of those elements is flipped between cultures, which leads to interpretive clashes-most famously in the lectures that Carl Jung gave on Kuṇḍalinī, wherein he insists that the Indian sources must be wrong about their own symbolism.
This anecdote sums up, fairly well, the broader critique of this book: that Western frameworks have too often misread or overwritten indigenous systems of knowing in a search for universal models.
What emerges from this prologue is not a theory of Kuṇḍalinī but a methodology for approaching it. The book invites readers to treat its sources—textual, oral, experiential—as ingredients in an alchemical laboratory.
Rather than seeking a pure or authentic model, we are urged to witness the stirrings, churnings, and risings that produce new configurations of meaning. Sometimes these combinations explode. Sometimes they heal.