What If We're Not Meant to Transcend Being Human? Kundalini, Embodiment & the Divine Feminine with Cynthia Abulafia
There's a moment in this conversation where I turn to Cynthia Abulafia and say I'm "asking all the big questions tonight." I genuinely was — because about ten minutes into pressing record, she'd already dismantled something I thought I understood about spirituality.
We're taught, in one way or another, that the whole point of the spiritual path is to get out. Leave the body. Rise above the ego. Transcend the mess of being human and get back to the light. I've built my life around connecting people to the spirit world through mediumship, so believe me, I understand the pull of that idea.
Cynthia doesn't buy it. Or rather — she only buys half of it.
Who Is Cynthia Abulafia?
Cynthia is the author of the newly released Embodying the Goddess, an educator with a master's degree in religious studies, and someone who has spent years studying Kundalini awakening across cultures and traditions. Her own path started at twelve years old, in a hotel room in Turkey, jet-lagged alongside her identical twin sister, when the room around her simply transformed. Everything she looked at — the wall, the bed, the chair — suddenly felt like one continuous, total awareness.
What struck me is that she doesn't think that kind of experience is rare, or reserved for gurus and mystics. She thinks most of us have already tasted it — in music, in holding a child, on the ocean — and then spent our lives chasing our way back to it through the wrong door.
The Bias We Didn't Know We Had
Here's the idea that's stayed with me since we spoke: Cynthia calls it "the bias toward transcendence." Every major religious tradition, she argues, has spent thousands of years teaching us how to climb the ladder up and out of the body — you are not your thoughts, not your emotions, not your ego, get free of it all. Even the language of spiritual success is the language of escape: ascension, enlightenment, liberation.
What nobody built, in her view, is the other half of the ladder — the climb back down. Coming back into the body, into ordinary life, with the mortgage and the school run and the ache in your knee, gets treated as a failure state instead of the whole point.
She takes it further than I expected, too. When we stop treating the body as sacred, she says, we stop treating the earth as sacred. The same bias that tells us to leave our own bodies is the bias that lets us extract from the planet without a second thought. That's not a lens I usually come at the world through — my own path has been about the spirit world, not politics — but I sat there scribbling notes, because however you dress the language up, it landed.
My Own Long Way Round to Curiosity
I'll be honest: I came to this work suspicious. I spent years looking for proof of the spirit world before I trusted any of it — you could have handed me a sign a hundred times over and I'd have found a reason to doubt it. My granddad was a medium. He did readings for people all over, and as a kid I was far more interested in the poltergeist stories and the tarot cards than in asking him a single serious question about how any of it worked. Then he passed, and it was the grief, more than anything, that finally cracked me open.
That's exactly what Cynthia means when she calls curiosity "the beginning, middle, and end" of the spiritual path. Not blind faith. Not certainty. Just the willingness to keep asking the question instead of accepting the answer you were handed as a child. Religion shut that door for me for a long time — and I think that's true for a lot of people who come to me for a psychic reading or a tarot session. They're not looking to be told what to believe. They're looking for the door to open a crack.
What Actually Happens in a Kundalini Awakening
I said on the recording that I'd heard "Kundalini awakening" thrown around plenty of times and still couldn't have told you what one was. So if you're in the same boat, here's the honest version, courtesy of Cynthia.
It isn't always lovely. It can begin through a direct spiritual experience, but just as often it begins through trauma, grief, surgery, or some other rupture — a moment where the life you knew five minutes ago isn't the life you're in anymore. Sometimes it arrives as energy moving through the spine. Sometimes it's a total reorganisation of how the world looks through your own eyes. Sometimes it opens up senses beyond the ordinary five. None of that, she was clear, is actually the point of it.
The point, as she put it, is a direct, unshakeable understanding that the tight little structure you thought was reality simply isn't. You can't be talked back out of it once it's happened. I recognised that instantly — it's the same wall people hit after a genuinely evidential mediumship reading, or after a near-death experience they can't explain away. Once you know, you know. You just can't always say how.
The Divine Feminine, Sovereignty & Coming Home to the Body
Cynthia connects the rise in Kundalini awakenings right now to the goddess traditions — the Vidya Pita lineages, where Kundalini herself is described as pure sound and vibration, sometimes coiled, sometimes bursting straight out of the heart. Her read on why so many people seem to be having these experiences at the moment is simple: we've built a world of technology and disconnection, and something in us is done with it. We want to hear each other's stories again — which, she pointed out, is also just what a podcast is.
The work, in her view, isn't chasing more transcendent highs. It's reclaiming what she calls sovereignty — not crawling to a guru or a religious authority for salvation, but recognising that you're creating your own reality from the heart outward. Breathwork, chanting, and sacred practice aren't there to get you out of your life. They're there to crack a window open in a house that's been sealed shut, so you remember there's something more — and then come back down and actually live it.
Where This Leaves You (and Me)
Her book, Embodying the Goddess, is essentially a map for that return journey — what it looks like to come back into form after touching something bigger than yourself, and why that homecoming is just as sacred as the transcendent moment itself. Her closing thought has stuck with me: beauty is what happens when stillness and movement exist in you at exactly the same time. A piece of music. The ocean. A child held against your chest. That, she says, is our birthright.
I don't need to agree with every word of Cynthia's framework to know it shifted something in how I think about my own work. Mediumship, for me, has always been about proving there's more than this — that we're not just this body, this grind, this fear. This conversation reminded me the point was never to escape being human. It's to bring what you find on the other side back down here, and let it change how you actually live.
If any of this has stirred something — grief you haven't looked at, a sense there's more going on than the daily grind lets on, or just a pull to understand your own path more clearly — that's exactly the kind of thing a reading can help open up. Whether it's connecting with someone in spirit through a mediumship reading, or working through what's ahead with the tarot, I'd be glad to help you take that next step.
Key Takeaways
Most spiritual traditions are built around transcending the body, but rarely teach us how to come back down into it — which is where Cynthia believes the real sacredness lies.
Curiosity, not certainty, is the true engine of a spiritual path. Deconditioning happens one honest question at a time.
A Kundalini awakening isn't always blissful. It can be triggered by trauma or grief as easily as by meditation, and its core is a shift in understanding, not a sensation.
The rise in spiritual awakenings right now may be less about escaping reality and more about people wanting genuine connection again — to each other, and to their own bodies.
Reclaiming "sovereignty" means recognising you create your reality from the heart, rather than seeking salvation from someone else.
Listen to the full conversation with Cynthia Abulafia above, and find her debut book, Embodying the Goddess, wherever books are sold.