What Is a Spiritual Awakening?

Are you waking up to reality?

What is a spiritual awakening?

What do you do when you have one?

Let’s dive into this down-to-earth discussion of the power of your choice to realize spiritual freedom.

Human-powered, Non-AI Summary of Awakening

Here’s a quick summary written by me—a human being with real awakening transformation experience—rather than an AI bot who has not walked the spiritual path.

A spiritual awakening is a realization of reality and an internal sense that you can no longer tolerate your illusions. A process of letting go of ego suffering and attachments commences. Any kind of experience or symptom can arise because awakening embraces everything.

You’ll have to choose to accept the reality of your life, or eventually you’ll numb out/distract yourself back into unconsciousness. You’ll have to make this choice again and again and again. Additionally, accepting trauma is critical for those who have it and need significant help in healing.

Arriving at emptiness is a stepping stone on the path to truly realizing your freedom from all attachments. Reimagining and repatterning a conscious ego leads you further until the spiritual path ends. Then there is simply life to be lived in whatever way it is possible for you to live it.

And I’m Jim Tolles. I woke up in 2007, and life has been so much fuller and richer because of it.

Want to know more? Read on for more about this topic and links to associated topics.

What Is a Spiritual Awakening?

A spiritual awakening is discovering reality.

No magical, woo-woo, spiritual fantasy.

Just reality in all its beauty, ugliness, and everyday truth.

This reality has always been here, and it will always be here. But until someone awakens, they believe their illusions are reality.

What Are Illusions?

Illusions are ego attachments and body responses that create an experience that you believe to be the same as the reality around you.

You project these internal experiences onto the world.

You assume that reality is how you feel about it.

For example, you’ll project good feelings onto a day, and say, it is a good day. Or you may say it is a bad day. Those feelings inside of you are not the day. The day and life around you are their own things. Your feelings are inside of you.

In moments of awakening, the projection of your experience onto life is shaken enough that you see another aspect of reality. You may still sense your experiential projection, but you also perceive elements of actual reality. It can make you feel torn between

two worlds.

In really powerful awakening moments, all projection seems to momentarily wash away.

The question remains:

Do you accept this reality?

Or do you go back to your original understanding of yourself and life, aka go back to sleep?

If you have a spiritual awakening as I define it, it feels like you have no choice but to wake up! However, the awakening is a flow in the river; you have to paddle to flow with it and not end up beached or drowned.

In a spiritual opening (which is far more common), the moment ends, and you go back to your ego dream.

Spiritual Awakenings, Openings, Revelations, Oh My!

Who Am I?

If you’re brand new to this blog and wondering who I am to talk about this topic, I’m Jim Tolles. I’m speaking from experience.

Experience is the only way to truly know this path.

I had my own spiritual awakening in a boring place in a boring motel on a boring day in 2007. For me, the chattering mind stopped, and the sense of desire went away. I could see reality in a clarity I’d never perceived before.

Not that I really understood what was happening at the time.

This led to a sloughing away process. Ego issues came up and out of me without my choosing.

This continued for the first several years until I had to make a deeper choice to keep going into deeper, more subconscious attachments.

Eventually, I realized spiritual freedom—freedom from attachments—in 2023. Unlike what people expect, that didn’t change that reality Is what it Is.

The main thing I want you to know is that realizing freedom/enlightenment/nirvana is accessible to everyone who is psychologically strong enough to deal with their emotions and sensations.

You can walk this path too.

But you have to choose it. You have to choose to be free.

About Jim Tolles

Signs of A Spiritual Awakening

The Internet is full of lists of spiritual awakening signs.

My definition of a sign of awakening is simple.

Some part of you wakes up and a process of letting go of attachments unfolds on its own.

Every other kind of symptom and human experience is possible in awakening, including:

• Bliss
• Love
• Profound Peace
• Feeling torn between two worlds
• Apathy
• Sweating
• Anxiety
• Physical pain
• Grief
• Oneness
• Physical shaking/Kriyas (aka a trauma release that isn’t going well), and any other emotion and sensation you can conceive.

Why are all of these signs and symptoms and more possible in a spiritual awakening?

Because being awakened embraces ALL human experiences.

This is the reality that makes spiritual bypassers upset.

They’ve heard a lot of spiritual fantasy about feeling good all the time. That’s not the reality of the human experience. Being free of suffering means we don’t make ourselves suffer, and that requires learning all the ways you make yourself suffer and unlearning those processes.

7 Signs of Spiritual Progress (and 7 Signs that Are Not Progress)

Spiritual Awakening Energy?

People also talk about “energy” as a sign of awakening.

Energy is a label for unknown emotions and sensations. In this state of ignorance, people feel like energy is pushing them to change.

It isn’t.

These are perfectly knowable parts of your body that are DEMANDING your attention.

In my work I show people how to attend to these unknowns to feel empowered in a process that can feel daunting and overwhelming.

Learning to Sense Your Energy

Preparing for and Making a Spiritual Awakening Happen

Some of those reading today want to know how to make a spiritual awakening happen.

Nothing is guaranteed, but if you find the appropriate spiritual tools, the river of awakening opens up. It will take you into some rough waters.

You have to be able to paddle.

In short, you can and should do a lot of things to prepare for a spiritual awakening.

You need to know how to truly be the witness/come back to awareness so that you don’t get swept away by the current.

That also means learning how to regulate your nervous system with simple breathing techniques.

There’s more to it than that. It’s very individual, and it has to do with what is meaningful for someone and helping them to address key blockers in their lives. A lot of people avoid central issues (family, living situation, job, etc.). Those key blockers stop any attempt to get moving. Unfortunately, sometimes, a bypass attempt works, and that gets people into a real sorry state.

Because there are really intense spiritual tools. People use activating breathwork, substances (plant medicines and psychedelics), long retreats, and so on to make a spiritual awakening happen.

Sometimes this works. Mostly it does not. Sometimes it shows people things that they aren’t ready to process. People with intense traumas can go into a tailspin into a dark night of the soul.

There’s a lot more to say about preparing for an awakening and what it means to make one happen, and I prefer to discuss this with people one-on-one in my sessions.

What Causes a Spiritual Awakening?

Ironically, anything can show people an aspect of reality, not just a “spiritual” tool.

Anything.

You could be eating a burrito on a couch, and for whatever reason, there’s a break in your regularly scheduled ego. Some bit of reality shines through your fog of illusions, and

You Are Here Now.

As you’ve always been.

(That’s a true story, by the way).

It could be a spiritual book you stumbled upon in a bookstore, an underlying feeling of dissatisfaction with your life, a remaining blandness after having achieved success in your life, and so much more.

With that said, most people really need to be shaken up to see that they’re creating their own suffering.

That typically means intense suffering often is the instigator of an awakening. That includes:

• Ending of relationships (break-ups, divorces, death of a loved one or even a pet, etc.)
• Ending of jobs (loss of a business, being fired, etc.)
• Major health issues
• Eruption of unresolved trauma

A near death experience (NDE) can make people feel more in touch with life than they’ve ever been!

Already mentioned above, the use of all kinds of substances can shake people up. The best thing that I’ve seen out of psychedelics is the understanding that there are other ways to perceive reality.

However, many people become psychologically addicted to pursuing altered state experiences. This distorts the spiritual path for them. Most think it is about feeling amazing in a particular way all the time.

Some few people get enmeshed in plant medicines and hammer their bodies and nervous systems to try and work out all their issues. This intense inner worker person creates dangerous and unnecessary situations for themselves.

Walking the spiritual path is simple: surrender and come back to awareness.

Staying as Awareness

Overwhelmed by a Traumatic Past

One of the most common paths to a spiritual awakening is trauma. In this instance, the person’s nervous system and physical well-being degrade past the ability to manage the trauma.

Things start coming out.

The person is typically unprepared and doesn’t want this. That leads to many people entering a dark night of the soul. The person has no idea what is happening and how to be with it.

They just want it to end.

This is a very serious situation, and in this day and age, we have a lot of

dissociated spirituality.

These spiritual systems are completely out of touch with reality.

They’ll tell you to balance your chakras, find your purpose, meditate longer, pray to a deity or saint, and so forth and not truly understand what is happening for you.

Another subset of the modern spiritual world will have a trauma survivor doing intense inner work practices like Holotropic breathing or Ayahuasca when the person does not have the mental or emotional capacity for such things.

In my time as a spiritual teacher, here are some of the awful traumas that brought people to the spiritual path, including:

• Incest,
• Sexual abuses outside the family,
• Physical abuse,
• Emotional abuse,
• Severe neglect and abandonment,
• War trauma,
• Psychological gaslighting, manipulation, and brainwashing, and plenty more awful things. (Narcissistic abuse is all too common)

Unfortunately, spirituality is often presented as a quick fix to these things and other issues. Western Society loves to promise the perfect pill to fix our ills. Spiritual paths and religions tend to be no different.

The reality of many people who awaken is that erupting trauma needs a healing network and a safe space to do so.

Finally, healing is a common first phase for virtually everyone on the spiritual path. They have to see how they’ve harmed and carried harm from their past in their minds, hearts, and bodies. A person may not be overtly traumatized, but acting out illusions and ego attachments still causes suffering. Surrendering to healing means learning how to release things from the head, heart, and body.

The Process of Releasing Pain

How Do You Get Rid of Awakening?

For those who are waking up to trauma and significant issues, they want to go back to sleep.

Ignorance is bliss, right?

Wrong.

If your house is on fire, pretending that it is not burning to the ground does not save you from the consequences of that fire.

If you wake up to serious issues, dealing with the issues will resolve them. That’s the way out.

Awakening is a light in the room, not the cause of the trash pile in the middle of the room. The trash was already there. Distractions, avoidance, numbing, and other forms of willful ignorance put the trash in the darkness of your mind.

Additionally, this culture already has given you five thousand ways to distract and numb yourself from reality. You don’t need tips on that.

In short, the ego is resisting dealing with reality, and that will make you suffer more. You can’t get rid of reality; you can only go back to your misery pretending that it isn’t miserable.

How Long Does a Spiritual Awakening Last?

How long can you resist doing a thing you need to do?

Time doesn’t apply the way the ego thinks in this work. It’s about sincerity in the work. It’s about your own internal process. It’s about choosing to do the next thing you need to do (when your ego is screaming at you not to).

It’s also about having a teacher who has actually walked this path.

You don’t need some wannabe guru who had an LSD trip once or the yoga mom who is parroting what she learned in her 500-hour yoga teacher training.

Walking the path as I have since 2010, I understand how to help you avoid many pitfalls, which speeds up the time to the point you realize that you’re spiritually free of attachments.

At which point, awakening ends.

But life continues on.

BTW, I’m not talking about the end of learning. Some people confuse awakening with learning about life (self-improvement). The universe is vast. There’s always more to learn, but are you driven by your ego and biological attachments in your explorations?

Or are you free?

How to Find Spiritual Freedom

Choosing Spiritual Freedom Again and Again

For most people, the outcome of a spiritual awakening is going back to unconsciousness after a shitty several years. A few more will do just enough work to find a spiritual plateau.

However, if you are ready, you are going to have to choose to go within and build a practice and lifestyle that supports freedom from attachments.

You’ll choose once.

Then you’ll choose twice.

You’ll choose hundreds of times as your ego looks for hundreds of ways to get out of this transformative process.

And you’ll evolve your spiritual practice again and again.

Or you’ll quit.

Say you’ve done enough.

Decide you’re enlightened when you’re not.

Or give up this spiritual enlightenment thing entirely, calling it a fraud.

Because the initial push of awakening subsides. To truly walk the spiritual path, you will have to choose to do so not because of pain caused by an internal or external force, but because you simply want to be free.

Dropping into Spiritual Emptiness

I’m jumping ahead. There’s a lot of work that happens before realizing this part, but if you do that work, you come into a space of spiritual emptiness.

Such an amazing place.

For many spiritual traditions, they think that being empty is the endgame.

It isn’t.

Awareness has always been empty of anything. It is the observer and nothing more.

However, there is a quality of having emptied out enough ego patterns and reactions where you no longer feel reactive.

You are neither pulled in a direction nor repelled.

This emptiness is natural—no substances involved or extensive meditations. It is also not the moments some people have of peace after letting go of an ego issue. In those situations of feeling emptied, the ego soon returns with this very revealing question:

“What do I do now?”

That question doesn’t exist in this space.

Which is why it is ironically so important to now answer that very question.

Opening to Emptiness

Reimagining and Repatterning Your Ego

Here’s a huge step that you need to know about that, and I don’t know of any spiritual tradition that discusses it. If you do, leave a comment.

Now that you’re empty of old issues and attachments, you need to create new patterns based on reality. You have to explore and practice and then do the new patterns repeatedly. Eventually, the new patterns are easy to access, and old patterns have a weaker impulse or disappear entirely.

This is what it truly means to create a conscious ego.

If you do not do this step, you will return to the patterns that you know. There’s no way around this.

Human beings can only do what they know.

If you had a lot of unhealthy relationships growing up, you need to create a new inner basis for what a relationship is. In so doing, you’ll create additional understandings of what relationships are and can be. In the conscious space, you’re not attached to these new behavior patterns.

You’re like a tailor.

You can make all kinds of clothes for all kinds of moments instead of being trapped in the same dirty, smelly overalls you were forced to wear as a child. With these new clothes, you can take them on or off at any time.

Now you can live in empowered freedom. Now you choose the clothing of the business networker, friend, community connector, leader, romantic lover, student, parent, and so on. When they’re not needed you can let them go.

Because you’re free.

The End of the Spiritual Awakening Path

As mentioned earlier, this path does end.

Life continues.

Awakening Ends

I can help you if you truly want to realize your spiritual freedom/freedom from ego suffering/enlightenment.

But you’ll have to work.

You can reach out to me via my newsletter to get in touch if you want to choose to be free.

Until then, I have around 1,000 blog posts on this site and more than 260 videos on YouTube.

You will be well taken care of.

In freedom,

Jim Tolles

edited 12/15/2025