Following up on my original posting in this thread, after a surprisingly long time (the issue I was writing about had been around for a couple years), I'm past the problem. It'd have been pretty horrific if I didn't have the peace and bliss of yoga practice. But I think what I was going through wouldn't happen to folks lacking sufficient silent witness to pass through cleanly, without getting personally anguished about it too much (not that I didn't have my moments of mild despair).
I spent a couple weeks outside the country, dealing with a lot of people. Lots of engagement, and engagement outside my normal realm and discomfort zone. I was also traveling with a friend, and am not used to dealing with other people 24/7. Different schedule, different diet, different everything, all with lots of the engagement Yogani is constantly urging.
It also coincided with the fruition of the grounding work I'd been steadily working on. As with every opening in yoga, there's "open" and there's "really open"! A thoroughly blocked pipe might seem quite dramatically open if you make a mere pinhole in the gunk. It's all relative! But, thanks to the throat deconstriction (see
http://www.aypsite.com/plus-forum/index.php?topic=3296 ) and the lower abdomen breathing (see
http://www.aypsite.com/plus-forum/index.php?topic=3296&whichpage=2#30474 ) that I'd been working on (plus the chinese herbs mentioned in that thread...a huge but slow-acting factor), I really got some serious flow down from my head, down the front.
I'm not sure whether that flushing ended the Casper The Friendly Ghost Syndrome or if it was vice versa. Abandon hope all yee who try to ascertain cause and effect in yoga experiences.
Now, la-de-dah, people I meet like me. Instead of recoiling, they're attracted. I'm not getting excited about it, nor trying to calculate how to "use" it. I just witness with amusement; more and more of the movie out there seems so bemusedly capricious, at a more and more fundamental level...
Anyway, what I've learned (and I'm posting here for benefit of others who search through this forum in future re: the same dilemma) is that this was merely a "burp" on the trail, not an unspoken-of downside of spiritual progress. It's not that kundalini or silence themselves "smell bad" to people. That had been my suspicion. I'm glad it's not true.
Outwardly radiating energy acts as a magnifying lens for your remaining subconscious bits of poison. So if energy gets ahead of silence, you may find yourself broadcasting louder and louder these tinier and tinier dabs. Per above, I always seemed impatient to cashiers, and the fact of the matter is that I probably still WAS veeeeery slightly impatient, beneath my vastly cleaned-out generally high patience level. And those seeds of impatience were flinging outward on the waves of my energy, nailing them in the forehead at 600 mph!
It's a clumsy metaphor, but I think it's actually kind of sort of like that. To be sure, I still have lots of little holding-back points in the murky swamps just outside my conscious awareness (visualize Gulliver tied down by tons and tons of little bonds![
]). I don't imagine for a minute that I've achieved some sort of squeaky-cleanness (or even that that's achievable by humans). But I've gotten my energy and my silence better into synch. See this incredibly evocative posting by Sparkle which shows the way:
http://www.aypsite.com/plus-forum/index.php?topic=3776#32605In the big picture, those of us with lots of outpouring energy just need to wait for more and more little knots to be worked on by the mantra until a smoother spray is eventually produced. Isn't ALL of practice about calmly soldiering on against whatever background appears while the knots untie? At a certain point, the backdrop can get really dramatic. This one was particularly dramatic. In Christian terms, it was a huge test of faith.
Yoga's real organic, so not everything always happens in perfect synchronization. It's like cleaning an old house's plumbing: the plumbers get the upstairs pipes nice and cleaned up, all the sinks finally work perfectly, and then everything jams again, because the sludge passing through the system from upstairs clogged things up worse than ever as it passed into the main line downstairs. This explains the "3 steps forward, 2 steps backward" effect we constantly experience in yoga. In the end, the cosmic Roto-Rooter system (mantra) will blast through it all, but it does its work teaspoon by teaspoon. There's nothing to do but to let the Cosmic Barber (again: mantra) trim your hair in His own time and at His own rate.