What is Kundalini bodywork? What actually happens in a session

How she found it

Erika grew up in Sweden with a mother deeply involved in personal development — pendulums, bells, meditations from childhood. At fifteen she took a three-day energy healing course. Later, working as a sales manager coaching a team, she noticed the part of the job she actually cared about.

Erika: I got to know how interested I was in being part of someone else's transformation journey. Even if it was in sales, I was still coaching them in life.

She went to Bali to find her direction, tried Kundalini for the first time with her mother, and describes the experience as completely mind-blowing. A retreat she booked was cancelled; a friend then mentioned the facilitator who had trained her was coming to Bali in December.

Erika: I felt like — that is my call. It aligned perfectly.

Why emotions get stored in the body

When we want to sneeze but hold it in, it's stuck in the body. It's exactly the same with our emotions. If I want to cry and I'm not crying, the tears are stuck inside — they have to go somewhere.

Erika: Throughout our lives we go through so much trauma, so many unprocessed emotions that we just suppress. We put it under the carpet. We do not look at it, we do not talk about it, we are embarrassed — whatever it might be.

Erika: This is a practice that helps you actually bring forth and feel all these emotions you do not want to feel. And when we feel something, we can also heal it.

Why the past keeps directing the present

MJ: If I had a trauma from childhood, of course I am going to act from that. My patterns are from that trauma. My personality is based on it. So if I want to make different decisions, behave differently, attract different people or situations — I have to clear my body of the past.

MJ: Otherwise you accumulate it all, like a backpack. You keep putting more and more in. At some point you have to say: I am going to clean this out. Otherwise it is heavy, and it holds you back.

Erika is clear that "trauma" here is not limited to any one category.

Erika: It can be anything. Something inside yourself — self-acceptance, self-love, body image. Repeating old patterns. Something from your parents. Sexual trauma. Whatever it might be.

What a session actually involves

Erika: During a session it is extremely important to be inside your body instead of inside your head. Otherwise we cannot surrender. We cannot let go.

On de-armouring

Erika: There are points in the body where we store emotions and traumas. I use pressure on these points to get these emotions to actually start to move and flow. It can be painful, or very uncomfortable — but we use the breath to move through the emotions.

What Kundalini energy is

Erika: Our Kundalini energy is based in our spine. Everyone has it, but we do not have to activate it to function in this life. We can activate it, and that is what I do in a session.

The stated benefits: clearing stored trauma and dense energy, blissful states, sharper intuition, a sense of alignment and flow, and a reconnection with the body both physically and energetically.

MJ: It is a creative sexual energy. When you activate it, the sensation is like something rising all the way up. But you have to allow it — if you think about it, you are never going to experience it.

Why it has to hurt

Erika: Allow yourself to feel the pain. You have to go through the pain to come out the other side, however hard or scary it might be. That is the only way we can heal from something.

MJ: It is like going to the gym. You suffer — it is painful, it is uncomfortable. But after ten, twelve, sixteen weeks you start seeing results. You have to go through the journey.

You're going to suffer anyway. Either you suffer stuck in your comfort zone, or you suffer while you're growing. The second one is much better.

Erika: It is also powerful to actually feel everything, because then you get to know yourself so much better. You see your past from a completely different perspective. It is beautiful and painful at once.

Grounding afterwards

Both note that raising energy without grounding it is its own problem — the sensation of floating, of not being quite present.

MJ: In tantra we recognise that we have energy and consciousness, and the physical body is the base. Sometimes when we raise the energy too much, we feel like we are floating. You have to ground yourself. That is why I meditate.

Why energy doesn't lie

MJ: It is normal to wear a mask — we all do it, and then we feel like we are pretending to be a character. But when you connect through energy, you cannot pretend.

Energy doesn't lie.

On communication, and the thing she found hardest

Asked what makes couples work sexually, both land immediately on communication — and specifically on asking rather than only telling.

Erika: It should not only be my responsibility to tell someone what I want. It is also my responsibility to ask what I can do for you. It shows genuine interest in the other person.

Erika: This is what I have been working on hardest in my own Kundalini journey. Using my voice, expressing myself, setting boundaries. That was my biggest struggle, and now it is so much easier.

On body image, and where insecurity comes from

The episode ends with a card asking what part of your body you worry might put a partner off. Erika answers honestly — and then does something more interesting with it.

Erika: I don't think this would ever be a thing if social media didn't exist. I don't think it's coming from me. It's coming from the outside — I saw all these pictures of girls in bikinis and thought, they have this and I don't.

Erika: I have thought so many times, maybe I should just get surgery. And no. I wouldn't do that.

MJ: It is our body, and that is okay. You have to embrace yourself.

The useful part is not the insecurity, which is common. It is the tracing of it back to a source outside herself — and recognising that the feeling arrived from somewhere rather than originating within.