Spiritual Awakening: What's Happening to Me?

Spiritual awakening is unique to each person that experiences it. AND it's not necessarily a consistent experience despite some overarching themes. (**see below a limited list of various authors on the topic). To simplify, generally awakening includes some form of realization that we are more than a body with 5 senses. Whether it's coming into pure awareness of the nature of consciousness, understanding we are spirit and or soul, total unity experiences, or full realizations that there is a consciousness that exists outside of our physicality and psychology - there are different experiences and understandings that point to “awakening”.

Generally this is a slow path - and growing awareness is part of what we understand to be integral to spiritual awakening. 

Adyashanti describes it as a "Fundamental shift of identity that leaves its rigid confinement to psychological structures and physical structures. Identity lets go. Although there are varying degrees of how deep and profound that realization goes.” - Adyashanti: Living Realization a conversation with Adyashanti and AH Almaas.  “Waking up is just getting your foot in the door of reality - it doesn’t mean you know what’s in there, and it doesn’t mean you know how to manifest it - it just means you now know it's real.”

For most people awakening is gradual - few people have Eckhart Tolle spontaneous full awakenings, or even spontaneous experiences of oneness. Sometimes there’s a distinct moment, and sometimes we don’t know when it happened - we just know that we are aware of our humanness and that there is a “who” driving the human. An understanding of our sentience and our very existence. 

Often out of nowhere, sometimes without awareness of a beginning, a sort of transcendent impulse arises. An impulse to understand what exists outside of our human experience. To begin to understand the self. Often starting with the personality and ego identity (I am Sara from Montana with friends, family, and a certain set of interests). 

There are ways to disconnect from this identity. Psychedelics, meditation, dreamwork, shamanic work, trances, contemplating the nature of mind, and other practices meant to invoke different states of consciousness seeking to experience “what is” outside of the day to day identity funneling through our human hardware/avatar we call a brain and body. 

This is an ancient study. The transcendent impulse is seen in all the major world religions. These traditions recognize the interplay between our human existence and our non-human, energetic form. Some of those traditions provide practices for seeking realization and practices aimed at accessing this energy that is not the ego identity, often referred to as the soul.

Seeking to connect with this aspect of the self can happen through a process of expanding one’s awareness.

Gloria Anzaldua (see Dee Kaylar’s article on Gloria Anzaldua) comprised what she determined were 7 stages of Conocimiento (Awareness)

1. El arrebato (rupture)

2. Neptantla (torn between multiple ways)

3. The Coatlicue State (despair)

4. El Compromiso (deeper understanding of self)

5. Putting Coyoluxuahqui Together (reconstruction of self)

6. The Blow Up (clash of realities)

7. Healing the wounds

Reflecting on these stages shows a flow that leads to greater awareness. Her stages integrate crisis and suffering as key material for understanding our own authenticity, our own understanding of self, and resolving the suffering through meaning making. 

Where are we suffering? What is our role in our suffering? Where are we in DENIAL that we’re suffering or out of alignment?  Suffering, and then the recognition of being out of alignment leads to deeper understanding of self, flowing into the reconstruction of self. This is a slow path - and indeed it leads to greater awareness - and this awareness is part of what we understand to be integral to spiritual awakening. 

It can be incredibly disorienting. Indeed many spiritual awakenings feel like depression. The identity is loosening and shifting, and we don’t necessarily know “what’s wrong”. Perhaps there’s no event precipitating this “depression”, simply that which used to be tolerable no longer is. A transcendent impulse was activated spontaneously and there is suffering, and that rub may be enough fuel for the search for self, for awakening to our true nature.

All of this is language to describe something that is experiential, and inherently not languageable. If you know you know. Does seeking assist in the process? Possibly. Engaging with awakenings and with the nature of the self and with our own authenticity seems to ease the suffering of the shift. The recalibration to the expansion. And yet it's different for every person, and there is no formula. There is no path. Siddhartha called it the pathless path. It seems to be a process of unfolding and allowing and not-clinging. It's strewn with paradox, and is inherently incomprehensible.  Yet - having a name for it - “spiritual awakening” - can be deeply grounding. And so it is - perhaps you’ve experienced a spiritual awakening. 

**A few authors who discuss spiritual awakening: Ken Wilbur, Adyashanti, A.H. Almaas, Ram Dass, Gloria Anzaldua, Ekhart Tolle, Stephen Bodian, and various other writers of the Indian Vedic traditions, Buddhist traditions, shamanic traditions, and indigenous traditions from around the world.