What to Do When Your Body Moves on Its Own in Meditation (Kundalini Kriyas)

You sit down to meditate and your body starts moving on its own. Your head sways side to side. Your hands begin to move. Your spine twists. Your first instinct is to stop it, or to think that something is wrong. I want to tell you what this actually is, and what to do with it, which is almost nothing.

What is actually happening

When the body starts to move in meditation, it means that kundalini, the cleansing shakti energy, is active in your system. It is moving through your blockages and bumping up against them in order to release them.

These blockages are not really physical. They are energetic, emotional, and mind-based, and they get expressed and shown through the body. As the kundalini energy moves, it is waking up to its own nature, the pure, full self, expressing itself through the body. It is a genuinely beautiful process, even when it does not feel that way in the moment.

The involuntary movements that come with this have a name. They are called kriyas. They are not a sign that something has gone wrong. They are the system cleansing itself.

When it gets intense

Kriyas become intense in only two situations. The first is when you fight them. The second is when the energy simply gets too strong and you are too ungrounded.

That tells you most of what you need to know about how to relate to them. The work is not to control the movements. It is to allow them, and to stay grounded enough that the intensity stays manageable. I’ve included a list of my favorite grounding exercises in my free guide: Stabilizing Awakening.

The core instruction: allow it

When this happens in meditation, the biggest thing is to allow it. You let the movements happen, because this is the kundalini awakening naturally expressing as you. It is not something you need to work with, or fight against, or treat as a problem. It is not a problem. It simply changes your approach.

For many people, before any kind of awakening, meditation is something you do. A practice you apply, often something the mind has taken over: I should do this technique, this teacher said that, this guided meditation said something else. But when the body starts to move on its own, that whole approach has to soften. Now is the time to let the process work, rather than to impose an agenda on it.

This is the misunderstanding I most want to clear up. You do not want to do something with this energy, because trying to manage it usually scares it off. This is a nervous system awakening, and the key with awakening is that it does itself. You allow it. You can still investigate, still look at what might be in the way. But every time you try to technique your way out of the energy, that is usually when it gets more tense.

You do not want to resist the kundalini that is naturally bumping against your resistance. You want to allow it.

For some people this goes quickly. For others it unfolds slowly over time. Both have their advantages. Either way, it is something to allow rather than force.

A practical refinement: zoom in or zoom out

When the energy bumps against a particular location, often somewhere along the line of the major chakras, you have a choice. If it wants attention and it feels workable, you can rest your attention there directly. That is completely fine.

But sometimes focusing on one spot makes it too tense, because concentrating attention tightly tends to create tension automatically. When that happens, relax your attention to the whole body, the whole field, instead of the single point.

One thing worth clarifying. When I talk about something getting too tense, I do not mean the sensation in the body. I mean your attention. Keep the rest of the body relaxed, and emphasize the relaxation and allowing, rather than gripping the experience.

When grounding becomes the priority

If the energy gets really intense and you feel ungrounded, floaty, not quite present, then the most important thing to turn to is grounding. I wrote a free guide on stabilizing awakening that walks through this in detail, including simple practices like putting your bare feet on the ground, which genuinely helps the nervous system regulate kundalini energy.

When to be careful

If you get a lot of pain from this, that is something to investigate with a doctor or a practitioner who works with kundalini in a medical setting. Some people do exactly that work.

But for most people, the invitation is simple. Be here. Allow the resistance, allow whatever happens in the body, and allow the process to cleanse you naturally when it arises in meditation.

I made a video walking through all of this. You can watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYNRwqRlYxg

If you want one-on-one support from someone who has walked this path, you can book a free call with me here: 👉🏻 https://calendly.com/keesblok/gratis-kennismaking