My Kundalini Awakening Story

Two days before this photo was taken, I was lying on a yoga mat in Costa Rica, roaring so loudly the facilitator had to turn up her sound system.

I had never done anything like that in my life.

No plant medicine. No psychedelics. No drugs. Just me, my breath, a jade egg, and somewhere between five and fifty minutes that I honestly cannot account for. Because my soul left my body.

Let me back it up…

It started, of all places, at my 25-year university homecoming.

Queen's University, October 2024. Engineering class reunion. Old friends, a familiar campus, the particular comfort of people who knew you before you knew yourself. I fell into a conversation with an old classmate and something cracked me open. I drove home feeling more alive than I had in years, a vibrancy I didn't have a word for yet, a voice that felt suddenly louder and more my own.

I didn't know it then, but my kundalini had just been ignited.

For the years before that night, intimacy in my marriage had been low. Chronic nerve pain had made me not want to be touched. My husband had started a business and his stress had slammed the brakes on his desire. There were times I felt unwanted. Unsexy. Unseen. I don’t blame him anymore. After that conversation at homecoming, I started reading, researching, questioning, for the first time, love, sex, desire, marriage, and everything I had just…accepted.

That rabbit hole led me to Layla Martin. Within a week of finding her coaching certification program I had applied. The Harvard standard of this kind of work. Within days of being accepted, I jumped in. Both feet. A week late. I was doing this!

For the first four months, the program was pure self-discovery and embodiment. I was the best student I have ever been in my life. Every lecture. Every call. Every reading and practice. Something was shifting inside me, slowly, quietly, and then all at once.

In June 2025 I signed up for the Embodiment Retreat in Nosara, Costa Rica. It felt like trying to get Taylor Swift tickets. Spots filled fast. Only half the class could attend each of the two weeks offered. My friends kept asking, what is going to happen down there? Are you nervous?

No. I was so excited I could barely stand it. The program quality had been exceptional so far and I couldn’t wait to learn and experience more.

I arrived with one intention and one intention only.

To surrender.

It was my mantra that week.

I got a shuttle from the airport with eight other women from all over the map. They were talking about shakti, divinity, Burning Man, eros, tantra. I sat there in awe, knowing almost nothing about any of it, curious and completely open. We settled into Blue Spirit resort, off the grid, beautiful, private. I had a room with an outdoor shower on the balcony. It was exquisite! The schedule was rigorous and I cherished every moment of rest I could find in my sanctuary.

Every day held three to four deep practices, healing wounds, opening hearts, bringing us closer to our wild, primal selves. The way I describe it: we went back in time five thousand years, to gather the way women once did. To heal. To nurture. To mourn, grieve, celebrate, and worship together. Like nothing I had ever experienced, yet it felt so familiar. I was slowly remembering. 

Clothing was optional in certain settings. Until that week, I had spent most of my life uncomfortable in my naked body. Very quickly, that changed. When you are surrounded by women being completely real and exposed, you see it so clearly, every dimple, curve, scar, softness, line, every body is breathtakingly beautiful. I will carry that knowing with me for the rest of my life.

On day two, we had a jade egg morning practice. If you don't know what that is, reach out, it's work I do with my own clients now.

I settled onto my mat among a hundred other women. I dropped into my body through breathwork, shaking, sounding - this is tantra. Then I laid down and placed my jade egg inside of my yoni as the meditation continued. My body was shaking. My breath was deep. I was making sounds I had never made before, primal, from somewhere deep that I couldn't name. I was in my body completely, not in my mind at all, just letting it express whatever was inside.

Then one of the healing guides leaned down and whispered in my ear.

"Sound it louder, honey."

I came into my head for just a moment. I don't know if I can do that.

Then I dropped back into my body. And I let it go.

The roar that came out of me was unlike anything I knew I was capable of. The facilitator had to turn up her sound system. I was unleashing something within me that was so profound. So deep. So ancient. I was gone. Completely, utterly gone. I don't know if it was five minutes or fifty. You may think this sounds crazy, but……my soul left my body and connected with everything, the trees, the leaves, the ocean, the stars, the moon, the galaxies. I was all of it and none of it and I was completely at peace. I became Love. Not felt it, became it. A wholeness, a oneness with everything that exists. I had never understood this before. I did not even know this was possible. It is difficult to even explain in words. It wasn't a thought. It was a knowing. It was a feeling. It just was.

I later learned from others what had actually happened in my body. It was like I had created my own MDMA. I’d made pure ecstasy from within. I awakend my life force. My Qi. I had a full body orgasm. Call it what you want. This is the kind of feeling people take substances to access, and here I was, having generated it myself, naturally, through ancient tantric practices. I had no idea our bodies were even capable of this. That we carry this capacity within us all along. So wild. So humbling. So completely life changing.

Then I heard: "It's time to come back now."

I opened my eyes. Three or four healers were around me. My hands and feet were tingling intensely. They told me to press them into the ground and let the energy release. It took time. When I was finally more settled, two people walked me out to the balcony. I needed the support. I felt like I had just come out of general anaesthesia.

And then a bright yellow butterfly flew past the balcony.

I stopped breathing. My jaw dropped in complete awe. I remember thinking and moreso feeling “I had never seen anything so beautiful in my entire life.”

It took two hours or more to fully come back into my body. Two days later, this photo was taken.

Look at it. You can feel it, can't you? That is not a pose. That is a woman who has been liberated.

My chakras were cleared. My ego shattered. My fear, gone. My creativity, unleashed. My self-love, deeper than I knew was possible. Every inch of this body, every so-called imperfection, absolute perfection.

I was liberated. And I will never be the same.

No drugs. No plant medicine. Just breath. Sound. Surrender. This is tantra. Ancient, potent, and available to every single one of us at all times.

I bring this energy into every coaching session now. My kundalini awakening was the greatest gift of my life, and it is still settling into my bones, still expanding. It has changed my marriage, my family, my friendships, my business. There is a softness in me now. A playfulness. A confidence and a boldness I did not have before. I am more myself than I have ever been - my heart, my body, my mind, my soul. And it made me want one thing more than anything else: to help as many people as possible feel this alive. This free. This home in themselves.

I am not a very religious person. I never have been. But in that moment on the mat, I handed my body over to something. I have come to call it God. Goddess. Spirit. The universe. Love. I don't think it matters what you call it, because I don't believe it is a person or a place or a doctrine.

I believe it is everything. It is one. It is the force that moves through the trees and the ocean and the stars and, if you get quiet enough, through you.

I felt it. Completely. And now I cannot unfeel it.

In love and wildness,

Mary — The Rewilding Coach 💋💋