Spiritual Awakening – What is it?
Known as nirvana, enlightenment, or awakening. The word awakened can be defined as “spiritually aware of the universe and its direct metaphysical connection to one’s own being and the connection it has to all life forces” spiritual awakening begins the moment a person can step back and “awake” to their life with a new sense of being in this world. This consciousness happens when you stop being the observer, and instead you ask yourself, who is observing?
awakening happens when you are no longer living in a dream world where you filter everything through your ego and focusing on the future and the past. Instead, you have an almost simultaneous awareness of your individual self and the connection between that and everything else.
Not being spiritually awoken is ignorance which shrouds your true nature and keeps you operating in the dark of lower levels of consciousness. Without experiencing a spiritual awakening, we go throughout life pursuing the emptiness of money, fame, power, and respect in an attempt to find “happiness.”
What causes it?
Spiritual awakenings are usually triggered by major life changes or traumas – ultimately, anything that encourages (or forces) you to “look at your life from a more spiritual perspective” can set you on a path toward awakening.
Why do spiritual awakenings happen?
Spiritual awakenings happen as a natural product of your Soul evolving, expanding, and maturing. Just as everything in life grows, so too does our connection with our Souls.
The more you connect to your Soul (whether accidentally or intentionally), the more you experience transformation. The more you come to embody your Soul, the more you taste true and lasting joy, peace, fulfillment, freedom, and love.
While the spiritual awakening process can feel painful and disturbing at first, it ultimately helps you to live a more meaningful life. The sensation that your life doesn’t make sense anymore is the product of having all of your former beliefs, desires, and paradigms challenged and often disproven. This is traumatic, but a necessary part of your expansion.
The Dark Night of the Soul & Awakening
Before seeing the light (i.e. spiritually awakening) we must “walk through the valley of the shadow of death” in order to prepare our minds and hearts for the conscious upgrade. This is essentially hitting rock bottom and coming to a very low point in your life.
This means that the suffering you experience during the Dark Night of the Soul is for a purpose – and that is the destruction of the old (outdated beliefs, identities, habits) to pave way for fresh ways of being.
This life is a cycle of birth and death. As such, going through the Dark Night is not a pretty or manicured experience – at its core, it’s raw, primal, and the most difficult experience known to humanity. Everything is stripped away from you.
Signs you are going through an awakening
- You feel disconnected or detached.
- You’ve reevaluated your beliefs.
- Your dreams are more vivid.
- You experience more synchronicities and déjà vu.
- Your relationships begin to shift.
- You feel spirituality becoming an important part of your life.
- You’re more intuitive.
- You can sense inauthenticity and manipulation.
- You realize everyone is on their own path.
- You want to be of service.
- Your teachers find you.
- You feel alone.
- You feel more connected to the natural world.
- Your senses are heightened.
- You may have more bodily sensations.
- You may have physical symptoms.
- There’s a sudden change in your habits and routine.
- Your outlook on the world feels different.
- Increased empathy.
- You display more compassion.
- You have a newfound curiosity.
- Feeling a Sense of Connection
- Letting go of attachments
- Finding inner peace
Practices to Assist in Your Spiritual Awakening
Meditate
Spend time outside
Laugh
Dance
Connect with your community
Volunteer
Practice gratitude
Slow down
As Eckhart Tolle says, “You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.”
Spend time focused on becoming yourself fully.
The stages
- Glimpsing Spirit: The Call to Adventure
At the start of any hero’s journey is the primary pushing off point known as the call to adventure. The call to adventure represents a break from everyday life, a signal that bubbles up from the subconscious, catches your attention, and leads you in a new direction. A call to adventure is the spark that triggers a spiritual awakening. Every life has a moment, if seized, that will change that life forever. The call to adventure is an awakening incident, a new perception that compels you to look at life differently. This spiritual experience can take countless forms—a trip to a faraway land, the loss of innocence, an illness, a challenge, the death of a close friend, a near-death experience, or the loss of a job. Regardless of the particulars, the experience shakes your worldview and you see the world with new eyes. You are called to live the ordinary life in a non-ordinary way.
- Closer Examination: Choosing a Path
At this point, you may set out to find a new way—a new philosophy, a different tradition, or practice that will help to contextualize or re-map your worldview. This is when many begin spiritual exploration in earnest. Often marked by a period of information gathering, self-study, and delving into world religions or psychology, you are drawn to practices and methods that align with your unique personalities and dispositions. According to Vedanta, there are four paths or yogas back to the unity you seek:
Bhakti Yoga: The path of love and devotion
Jnana Yoga: The path of science and the intellect
Karma Yoga: The path of action and selfless service
Raja Yoga: The path of meditation and all its related disciplines
- Seeking: Following the Path
The next stage calls you to be a spiritual seeker. Having found your path, regular practice, study, and discipline serve to take you deeper toward the greater vision of expanded awareness. The Sanskrit term for the discipline of spiritual practice is sadhana. Sadhana is the spiritual routine that takes your practice from an isolated exercise to a way of life. You are dedicated travelers on the path, familiar with its twists and turns, up and downs. As your practice deepens, you become increasingly more adept and more knowledgeable, not only of the tradition or practice you follow but also of yourself.
- Loss of Sight: Losing the Path
The spiritual path is not without struggle, however. By its very nature, the path of awakening confronts you with your shortcomings, self-deceptions, cognitive biases, and resistance to change. Growth can be an uncomfortable process at times. As your chosen path challenges you to change thoughts, emotions, speech, or behavior to be more expansive, compassionate, forgiving, or kind, it is not uncommon to struggle with being in this world but not of it. Worse yet are the external influences that assault the spiritual seeker with temptations to give up the quest for awakening and return to a conventional life.
- Seeing: Merging with the Path
At last, the seeker breaks through to a new stage; visionary, transcendent, and sight beyond sight. At this level you have gone beyond sadhana; you have become the practice. No longer striving to see, you exist in a state of unity in which seer, scenery, and that which is seen merge. A permanent shift has taken place and you awaken fully to your true identity—the infinite, immortal, unbounded, God-force existing everywhere and in everything. You wake up fully to being the divine observer—the ever-present witness-self of the entire universe.