I was inspired to work with sigils, or sacred symbols, on a talk with visionary artists Alex Grey and Allyson Grey. They described how a sigil had supported them in realising their dream of the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors – their astounding gallery in Wappingers Falls, New York. So Nish and I decided to create a sigil together for our relationship. We have been trying to have a wedding since April 2020, and have three times been thwarted by Covid. We set out to meditate with our sigil while chanting the almighty vibration of the miracle mantra, ek ong kar sat gur prasad sat gur prasad ek ong kar.
I was still buzzing with the amazing positivity of ‘ek ong kar sat gur prasad sat gur prasad ek ong kar’ from my previous 40-day meditation. The Maha Gyan Agni Kriya is a totally different exploration of this mantra. This meditation holds the hands in a yoni mudra, so you can imagine that, coupled with the miracle mantra, it cooks up some pretty supersonic manifesting energy. Sprinkle in a sigil, and WOW.
All was going well with the daily 31 minutes. I was holding the sigil in the yoni mudra and experiencing a lovely unfolding with it in my daily morning practice. Until around three weeks in. That’s when I decided to get creative. Rather than focusing simply on the mudra and mantra, intentionally holding the sigil inside the yoni mudra (itself an adaptation), I decided to experiment with sowing the seed of the sigil in each chakra, focusing on one chakra for every one of the eight repetitions. It supported me in counting the eight repetitions as well as embedding the sigil in the subtle body for extra manifesting kudos. Forgive me – I am still swimming through the endless tides of shakti pad and experimentation is an aspect of this particular ocean.
On the second day of my souped-up Maha Gyan Agni Kriya, I was struck with vertigo. I was pottering about my day when there was a glitch in the space-time continuum – it felt as if I lost my footing and toppled into a dizzy crack in reality. Oooft. It happened the day after too, getting slightly worse the day after that. It would catch me off guard during the day. One minute I’d be fine, the next, my head was swimming and I felt myself losing grip. It continued for about five days, getting progressively worse, with the dizzy spells occurring more often, becoming more disorienting. Thankfully it didn’t take me too long to suspect that it may, perhaps, be to do with shifting my attention around my body while doing this powerful meditation, rather than keeping it steady on the mudra and mantra.
The next day, I stapled my focus back to the yoni mudra, to the mantra, and abandoned the sigil altogether. No vertigo that day. Or the next. Or the next. I have not experienced it since.
Lesson learned: I will listen to the advice I’ve heard many times before and not adapt the kriyas – even on a subtle level. These practices are so powerful and need no extra frills. So, henceforth, I am keeping my sigil and kundalini practices separate!
As an aside, the dizzy spells reminded me of what happened during a practice of 120 days of gyan chakra kriya a few years ago… I didn’t read the instructions property and practiced it for 31 minutes for a good portion of the time before realizing this was an 11-minute number. I will forevermore heed the ‘don’t change the kriyas’ advice.
Sat nam x
