What Is a Spiritual Awakening?

A spiritual awakening is the dissolving of the illusions that mask the reality of the present moment.

Initial awakening experiences are the start of the falling away of the many levels of known and unknown (subconscious) ego.

Can we have the courage to allow these beliefs and attachments to fall away?

Here’s a video from 2023 where I revisit this topic. Further below is a full spiritual awakening blog post.

I also have a newsletter called, “The Wake Up Call,” in which I regularly talk about this and other topics. Sign up for free below:

If you are starting on the spiritual path or feel like you have gotten lost, my ebook may be able to help guide you:

Everyday Spirituality: Cultivating an Awakening

Table of Contents

• Many Initial Spiritual Awakening Experiences
• Reality Vs Illusion
• I Get It! The Joy of Awakening
• The Dark Awakening or Not Liking Your Realizations
• Spiritual Awakening Signs and Symptoms
• Let’s Talk About Trauma and Kundalini
• How About All that Spiritual Energy?
• Substance-induced Spiritual Awakenings
• Heart Openings, Bliss, and Love!
• My Spiritual Awakening in Eugene, OR
• Letting Go and Unlearning Your Ego
• Spiritual Shifts Beyond Awakening
• Dedicating Yourself to Spiritual Freedom

Many Initial Spiritual Awakening Experiences

There’s no one way that people experience a spiritual awakening. The letting go of illusion reveals all kinds of present moment realities.

However, there are some common trends in awakening.

In general, a spiritual awakening is a moment where something is seen and realized. It can be enjoyable or unenjoyable–that response is determined by how the person’s ego interprets the reality.

So they could realize that they’re in a toxic relationship. They can realize that they are all one. They could feel like they are love or are embraced in God’s love. They could realize that there is nowhere to go. They could realize that they are not their thoughts. They could realize that their thoughts are crazy!

There are many, many ways that reality is discovered.

Sometimes there’s a lot of energy/heat/sensation in and around the spine, which is a hallmark to what many people call a Kundalini spiritual awakening.

But hold on with that one! I have some important things to say for those who feel like they’ve had a Kundalini awakening or those who think they want one.

Ultimately, a spiritual awakening is a kind of collapse of ego illusion. The constant regeneration of the ego pauses (the ego is something we remember to be every day). This may be a time of when someone lets go of something specifically. Or perhaps, it’s a just a generally deep state of relaxation.

Either way, the truth is revealed because the ego can no longer completely project its illusions onto the present moment.

And of course, the popularized use of many kinds of substances is helping people realize that they aren’t just one ego. These substance-induced spiritual awakenings are tricky. The substances can help a person access different parts of themselves and their brains. One of the most common experiences is the oneness experience.

I’m going to talk more about this one too.

People experience spiritual awakenings in many, many ways. However, the arising of truth within you definitively stays. This is different then a spiritual opening where people glimpse something, but then continue on with their regularly scheduled lives.

Instead, after a spiritual awakening, the person is no longer so deeply committed to their ego illusions. They are not enough for you anymore. You see that they don’t work.

There’s a splinter in a person’s mind, and they can’t fully go back to sleep.

Now what?

What Should I Do After Awakening?

Reality Versus Illusion

From the perspective of the mind, a spiritual awakening offers you a clearer understanding of what is real versus what is illusory. You perceive many of the things that are made up, and when you get right down to it, just about everything in society is made up.

However, the most important realizations are about ourselves.

Finding out things are made up or “unconscious” in the world around you is not hard. Plenty of people observe problems in society from the unconscious state. It is a different thing entirely to find out that “you” are made up. You have been identified with a fantasy. It does not exist anywhere.

So who are you then?

A spiritual awakening means giving up and letting go of tons of false beliefs and illusions about who you thought you are and what you thought life should be. This will go as fast or as slow as a person is willing to surrender and engage with what is coming up. Most people, however, resist.

And that makes more than a few people feel really, really crazy.

Feeling Crazy After Your Spiritual Awakening

I Get It! The Joy of Awakening

Truly a spiritual awakening is an amazing moment, and as I’ve mentioned, it comes in all shades and shapes for everyone. I had one friend who says that she went around for a couple of weeks just saying, “I get it.” Another friend quit smoking, and whammo, she got hit with an awakening. Yet another friend had a powerful experience where he simply asked, “Who am I?” In that sincere moment, the glass shattered, and the truth that he did not know who he was was seen. From that awakened moment, the truth erupted and began to re-shape his life.

However, this sense of “getting it” is only the beginning. Many of the experiences that people call a spiritual awakening are like someone’s first glass of water after living dehydrated in the desert. It seems like the best thing ever! That “taste of divine water” may get experienced as:

• Deep peacefulness,
• Bliss,
• A profound sense of oneness and loss of separation that feels amazing,
• Life going into high definition all around them,
• Tremendous inner quiet, and other experiences

But it’s only the first glass of water. It is generally not even the best kind of water. After the desert, any water is better than no water!

There is a real trap in how people can cling to their experience of that first taste of water rather than to become a sincere seeker of the vast endless clean-water ocean of the Divine that awaits them.

How to Let Go of Your Ego

The Dark Awakening or Not Liking Your Realizations

Spiritual realizations are neutral.

They are realizing something that is real.

What if you don’t like what you see?

What if you feel like you’re in a lot of pain and suffering?

I want to add a new term to this spiritual awakening blog post, and that’s the dark awakening. When someone awakens and has tons of pain, they may plunge into a period of deep psychological and even physical collapse. This can be a time of undiagnosable physical ailments and all kinds of emotional pain. They feel totally in the dark and often feel very helpless.

Hence, many people who have a dark awakening don’t even realize they’ve awakened. This is particularly true when so many people present spiritual awakening as a joyful thing or a solution to all pains.

It’s not.

A spiritual awakening is the path to dissolving the ego and seeing reality.

People in these “dark awakening” moments ask me:

How do I make it stop?

How long will it take?

What do I have to do to get through it?

They fight, resist, bargain, and avoid. This makes the darkness feel even more:

• overwhelming,
• endless, and
• hopeless.

If this is you, please come to a class to get support.

Now, we should always talk to therapists, healthcare providers, and others when there are significant issues arising. That’s important.

The spiritual path isn’t a cure-all.

But in terms of this path, it’s time to work on developing your spiritual practice, stabilizing your body with good self-care, and getting into your inner work. This will help you find a true light at the end of the tunnel.

I would add, and we’re about to talk it, that trauma is a very common thing. So this dark awakening may not really be what is going on for you. It may just be trauma.

How to Find and Release Physical Pain During a Spiritual Awakening

Spiritual Depression and Unconscious Resistance After Awakening

Spiritual Awakening Signs and Symptoms

Okay, I’ll talk about trauma, Kundalini, substance-induced awakenings, and energy soon.

Yes, I know! People want to talk about energy.

Hang on a second, awakening is a big topic.

Take a breath.

Come back to awareness.

Returning to awareness is a fundamental tool of the spiritual path and for coming out of the illusions of the ego and all the suffering that entails.

I am very cautious about labeling things as signs of awakening. In general, some real spiritual awakening signs are these:

• Unconditional love
• Being able to clearly see what is real
• Loss of desire or need for anything external to complete you / wholeness as you already are
• A profound sense of calm, peace, or serenity
• A continuing dropping of illusion and the will to believe your own fantasies

The seeing reality and the continued dropping are the central pieces. The others come and go.

Many people have profound spiritual openings and glimpses of awakening, which are wonderful. They feel loving, blissful, calm, and so forth, but it ends.

In an opening or glimpse, the window opens, and then it shuts. When it shuts, a person can go back to the way they were acting before. This happens all the time after people have gone to spiritual retreats or spent time with spiritual teachers. But in awakening, there is this continued dropping whether the person likes it or not. Your perspective, emotions, and physical sensations all seem to move and align on their own.

The lights in the house are all on. Sure, you can close your eyes, but you know the truth. There can be a feeling that there is no going back.

All other spiritual awakening signs that you hear about can arise from awakening if the above ones are present. They’re secondary spiritual awakening signs or symptoms, although I don’t prefer the term spiritual awakening symptom. The word “symptoms” has connotations of experiencing a disease. In fact, you are being cured of the illnesses in which you have been living.

Even more importantly, a lot of people are waking up to deeply stressed, distressed, and diseased bodies. This is the reality that needs addressing. They feel really bad.

Awakening isn’t doing anything to you. This isn’t a “spiritual awakening symptom.” This is showing you the mess you are already in.

So we must be very cautious about what we “blame” on awakening. When it comes to the body pains and discomfort, when in doubt, check in with a doctor to ensure that your body is healthy.

5 Signs of a Spiritual Awakening

Let’s Talk About Trauma and Kundalini

Okay, we now let’s talk about trauma.

There are many, many kinds of awful traumas people experience, 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)

As someone lets go, trauma is seen, and the ego can no longer fully repress or medicate the reality of that trauma. Sometimes, this is what people think the term “dark awakening” is. But it isn’t awakening at all.

It is trauma trying to resolve itself.

In the more extreme cases, people call the attempts of the body to resolve trauma “energy” and “Kundalini” experiences.

For those who are unfamiliar, Kundalini experiences feel like something is moving up the spine. There are jerks, trembles, shakes, and other uncontrolled physical responses.

Could it just be some kind of seizure or neurological disorder? Definitely check with a trained healthcare provider.

However, the body remembers a lot of things, and trauma has a lot of powerful sensations. People also train themselves to unconsciousness resist this pain. This effectively traps it.

When a person has a spiritual awakening AND trauma, they may get a kind of temporary vacation from this pain. Their body, heart, and mind feel AMAZING!

But the trauma is unresolved, and now the ego can no longer fully suppress it. It’s coming up.

I strongly encourage people to find a trained trauma healer and to build a healing network to help themselves through it.

Additionally, spiritual teachers are not trauma therapists. Nor should you expect the spiritual path and/or a spiritual awakening to heal you if you have trauma. Healing trauma is a lot of work, and every level of the person–heart, body, and mind–will need to heal. At which point the person will feel safe in their body again.

Books like The Body Keeps the Score can help you understand more about healing trauma.

Furthermore, I want to emphasize that spirituality is not a bypass or escape from trauma or any issue or attachment. It sends you right into the truth of you. If that is trauma, then that’s where you will go. In which case, it’s time to focus on healing modalities to help you.

So is there truly something called a Kundalini awakening? Or is it all trauma?

It’s tough to say.

But since 2010, every time I’ve inquired deeply with a student who is suffering from Kundalini awakening symptoms, we’ve found trauma.

And when that trauma gets resolved the body becomes peaceful again.

Using a Spiritual Teacher as a Therapist

How About All that Spiritual Energy?

Again, I’ve been a spiritual teacher since 2010. This is not my first blog post after my DMT-induced spiritually opening.

I’ve been seriously exploring this path since 2006.

And I’ve shed tons of ego layers as I’ve truly wanted to know the truth.

This is what I’ve found out about energy (I’m writing in 2023, btw), spiritual energy, and whatever other term we want to use here:

Energy is a placeholder term for sensations and emotions we don’t fully understand.

Again and again, doing SINCERE inquiry is key. Let’s find out if you are feeling “energy” or emotions and sensations in your body that you don’t fully understand.

Let’s find out together! I do work with people.

But if the ego decides that is just wants to believe what it wants to believe, then you will be able to re-justify that what you are feeling is energy and not trapped hate towards your mother, remorse towards your grandmother, grief towards the loss of your first pet, and so forth. You will be able to believe whatever you want.

Which is the nature of ego delusion, and this delusion causes suffering.

Substance-induced Spiritual Awakenings

Substances have taken a powerful foothold in the spiritual world. While they’ve held sacred places in other cultures around the world, they’re not being used in the way that those cultures have used them.

They’re primarily used as:

• Recreational exploits
• Solutions for trauma and other pain
• Bypasses for general difficulty in life

What are some of the substances?

Ayahuasca, magic mushrooms, LSD, DMT, MDMA, bufo, peyote, iboga, and many, many more.

Mixed in here is the very disciplined therapeutic work that is gaining traction as well. So let’s be clear that an hour session with two therapists while doing MDMA is very different than doing it at an EDM concert!

The question here is not the validity of the experiences that people have. People discover access to different parts of their brain and nervous systems through them. In fact, this IS A POWERFUL EXPERIENCE! A person can experientially know that they are not their ego!

But now what?

And were you ready for what you might access?

The answer for many is that they weren’t ready, and now they’ve kicked of a shit-storm of stuff. These people come to me, and I have to point them back to resources to re-stabilize their emotional, psychological, and physical balance. This is always the worst when a person has major, unresolved trauma that is unlocked before the person has the support system to address it in a healthy and safe manor.

Others that have enjoyable experiences think they’ve found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They get stuck in the trap of craving–they just want the good experience back.

And why? Because there is suffering that they want to escape.

Substances can be powerful, but in this work that I share, I want transformation to be sustainable. I’ve found that the breath, inquiry, and coming back to awareness are the most manageable and sustainable ways to dissolve ego and empower a person.

Spirituality and Substance Use

Heart Openings, Bliss, and Love!

I want to come back to the love experiences briefly.

They’re fun!

If you had a big heart opening and felt lots of love, you probably really, really enjoyed it.

Now you want it back, right? What ever way you came to feel this kind of love, the really fun experiences are an easy trap to fall into. People want to hold onto a favorable experience. This is just one of the things the ego does.

The ego

• keeps what it wants,
• gets rid of what it doesn’t want,
• tries to avoid what it doesn’t want,
• and tries to repeat what it does want.

This attempt to get back “awakening” derails many people on the spiritual path. Read on here for more.

Heart Openings Are Intoxicating!

My Spiritual Awakening in Eugene, Oregon

I know. You want to hear my story.

Be cautious.

My path is not yours.

My story no longer even matters to me.

I have had many, many types of spiritual experiences, spiritual revelations, and spiritual realizations, but the one where I really was suddenly “here” was in a motel in Eugene, Oregon.

I love saying this because so many spiritual seekers are running all over the place to India, ashrams, mountains, and sacred sites to find themselves, but really, we’re always right here.

You’re always with you.

You can’t get away from you–even if that’s sometimes what you want to do.

No, no, my awakening wasn’t in any sort of spiritual place.

It was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling of a motel room.

It wasn’t a comfortable bed.

I remember it being stiff/hard and far too small for me.

There was no aromatic incense in the room, and I’m not sure that I’d even meditated that day. In general, I didn’t meditate at all during the time running up to my spiritual awakening.

And then, there I was. All the noise shut off in my head. It was like coming out from a really noisy concert into a silent inner room. I didn’t need to do anything or go anywhere. All desire dropped away except possibly the desire to share the experience, which came later.

But I was here fully in the present moment, and then the inner work began.

This experience was not even close to the level of profound understandings that followed in the years that came. All it did was turn the system on. A whole lot of healing and growth followed.

And boy was I surprised by the healing a non-traumatized, fairly well-cared for person would have to do!

However, my spiritual awakening is now forgettable.

The further you go inwards towards spiritual freedom for yourself, the more your rebirth will be much like your birth–an important moment that happened, but is now something you no longer think about.

Now, what I pay attention to is what is here and now. My awakening is gone.

I just am.

When Your Spiritual Awakening No Longer Matters

Letting Go and Unlearning Your Ego

Spiritual awakening (or enlightenment or many other words) is not a new thing. It is always here with us.

Spiritual traditions have talked about this before.

I am just talking in modern English to help make understanding more accessible.

Ultimately, the awakened state cannot be attained because it is innately part of all of us. Your awareness is always here now. You are consciousness.

As such, spiritual seeking is often a little backwards. It can be useful to get started, but eventually, letting go and surrender is the truest way to realizing oneness.

More specifically, this is a path of unlearning.

Interrupting Your Regularly Scheduled Ego

You are unlearning all the different aspects of yourself that you project onto everything in your daily life. In so doing, you can begin to interact with reality rather than trying to interact with your illusion.

For example, many people eat things for breakfast that their body should not be ingesting. But the ego projects that coffee and donuts is fine for breakfast. The person is so lost in delusion that they can’t identify that brain fog and physical energy crashes are a sign that the body is deficient. Then a person sees through this illusion.

Now what?

In this case, it’s time to change the breakfast.

Other times, there’s not as much to change. We let go of the illusion and no action is needed. It simply depends on the shift.

7-Day Jim Tolles Breakfast Challenge

Spiritual Shifts Beyond Awakening

As you choose (and you have to choose) to let go of ego, you will have many kinds of spiritual shifts.

Spiritual shift is my catch-all phrase.

Many people speak of spiritual awakening as the catch-all phrase for spiritual experiences, and I only point it out so that you’re clear about how I’m discussing this topic. Spiritual shifts can be things like:

• A small spiritual epiphany that someone’s critiques at work are their way of helping you.
• A spiritual realization that you’re not happy with your marriage or job even though you’ve gotten what you thought you wanted.
• A spiritual revelation such as you are not your mind or the thoughts that have been talking to you your whole life.

However, even with a spiritual revelation, people don’t necessarily change. Some do. But despite the powerful push people may feel to accept the truth, resistance is the hometeam. It’s what is familiar. The individual pushes back.

You have to choose to accept your realizations, or you will go back to whatever it is you are used to believing and doing.

Spiritual Revelations and Realizations Roll Through You

Dedicating Yourself to Spiritual Freedom

As mentioned earlier, an awakening is just the start. The real gold at the end of the rainbow is spiritual freedom. In spiritual freedom, we are alleviated from the suffering of the ego, and we are able to think and live in ways that respond to reality to the best of our abilities.

It is no small thing to arrive at spiritual freedom. Many people try to find shortcuts like trying to conceptually go there by intellectually believing, “Yes, I am one with everything. I can do anything I want. Nothing matters.”

The list of misunderstood spiritual truths is long. It is far easier to say and think such things than to really let go of the deep attachments and fears that chain people to the ego.

In short, a spiritual awakening is a break in the clouds that helps point people in the right direction–the inward direction. For some people, the initial spiritual awakening experiences may feel like the whole of freedom all at once, but going back to the metaphor of the first cup of water after the desert, this little taste is only the beginning.

The ocean of freedom is far more vast.

The choice to go further must be decided upon by you because the human tendency is to stay in familiar patterns. And I can only encourage you to embrace your awakening and through dedication, you can find out just how vast spiritual freedom is.

And you will find out that there was no rainbow end to arrive at, it was all already here now.

For more thoughts on spiritual freedom, check out this blog:

How to Find Spiritual Freedom

If you feel like you are awakening, here’s a blog post with a number of tips to help you:

Spiritual Awakening Help and Tips Guide

You can also enjoy my video on awakening here.

edited 3/28/2023