Trusting the Process of Spiritual Awakening

As I like to repeatedly remind people, spiritual awakening isn’t a process. I use the name of the Web site to speak to making changes in our lives to reflect our inner divinity. If you’ve buried yourself in your work as a sales person, but your heart is in art, your life and everything around you probably doesn’t reflect the true you. You’re going to have to make changes. That’s the process of embodying and living your spiritual awakening to which I’m referring.

Spiritual awakening happens in a moment. It happens in whatever moment you fully let go, and then you spend the rest of your time adjusting your life to meet that deeper truth. It’s this interesting little paradox of knowing that everything is perfect and beautiful in your life as it, and you also know where it’s not in integrity with yourself and with the divine. That knowing impels you to make changes because to stay trapped in those old ways of acting and living in the world become increasingly uncomfortable. And that change can happen very suddenly and rapidly, or not at all…that’s the thing about spiritual awakening as well–it will be unique to you.

Rooting Out the Remaining Fears

I’m making a pun here. I’m punning off the term “root chakra” or “first chakra.” This is the home to our basic needs. It’s the bottom of Maslow’s Pyramid. This is where safety and family issues live. If there’s one thing that likes to stick around, it’s fear about safety. We’re often frozen into immobility because we’re afraid of doing something and not being okay. The not being okay often is a veiled fear of dying.

While the following progression may seem absurd, I’d challenge you to look at some fears you have and really go back to the root cause. Here’s the progression:

• FACT: I need to leave my apt.
• Problem: I can’t leave because I don’t know where to go.
• Question: Why does that matter?
• Answer: Because if I go to the wrong place I won’t be supported.
• Q: What happens if you’re not supported.
• A: I’ll get tired, sick, or run out of money.
• Q: What happens then?
• A: I’ll have to ask for help, but I don’t think there will be any.
• Q: What happens if you don’t get help?
• A: I won’t be able to support myself?
• Q: What happens if you can’t support yourself?
• A: I’ll die.

I know. I know. I’m being melodramatic and making more than a few assumptions, but that’s where many of these issues go towards. I think you can substitute something like “I can’t leave my job” for the starter point and run through the questions for yourself. You may hit on big issues like fear of failure or social rejection, but I think they’re still upper level issues for the issue of personal survival.

Trusting Your Awakening and Your Intuitions

I’ve already talked about trusting your inner guidance in an earlier blog. Overall, trust is important in your awakening. When you’re in awakening, you’re so full of love and connection at times that I’m sure those are easy moments to fall into the depths of that trust and faith. You know that everything will work out just fine. It’s a profound space of knowing. It’s a profound space to be in while everything shifts.

I want you to start to think of this as a shift and nothing more. A lot of the ways it looks to the older version of yourself–that old ego–is that everything is going to crap. It’s a god damn mess, and you’re trying to pick up the pieces. That’s not going to work. You need to come to a place of acceptance in your more difficult moments. You’ll need to accept that something new is being born. The old stuff is being cleared away so something new can be built. You are going down to the very foundation of yourself, and you are pulling out the old supports. You’ve got some new stuff coming in, but you’re going to have to trust that it is coming.

Most of all, you can’t force it. This shift that comes into our lives has its own timetable. We can choose to put ourselves into a place of service to it, but we can’t make it go any faster or slower than it wants to go–believe me, I’ve tried. ;p

Active Trust Versus Passive Trust

I suppose I could use the term faith as easily as trust, but I’ll keep going with it as it is for now. For many of my regular readers, you know that I’m all about living your truth. I think meditation is great. But meditation without taking that space of peace into the world is very limited in its effects. I’m not much for the people who just want to separate themselves from everything and chant and just be. That, to me, is a fun thing to do while you go through a shift or charge up your energy to be an agent of change in this world. But there’s a lot of stuff that needs to change; that’s not a denial of the ultimate perfection in which we all truly live. That’s an acceptance of the imperfect world that we do live in and the demands and responsibilities we have as human beings to be better shepherds and tenders of the garden of humanity and the resources and creatures in this world.

With all that said, if you feel like you need to make a change, then DO IT. (I know, I’m sounding like a shoe commercial ;). Waiting around for some perfect moment to materialize will only make you feel more desperate and out of sorts. All that energy in you is being bottled up. You do know what direction to go in. You just have to trust that you do. And you have to trust your mistakes. They’ll be greatest teachers. It’s something that I talk about in my circle of friends, and we all know that sometimes we learn the most when we make a mistake.

But There Are No Mistakes

I’m wishy-washy on this, so I’ll let you decide if there are mistakes or not. In higher truth, no, there are no mistakes. In this world, I think there are. However, I think that when you do the best you can, whatever happens, happens. You can only do the best you can with what you’ve got. You can do no more. Then you have to trust. Just as you have to trust your spiritual awakening. In all the ways that you feel out of sorts or strange, you have to trust that the process is attending to itself. I urge you to trust yourself and your intuitions about what to do and when to do it. Just as important, I encourage you to trust yourself about when to not do something and when to drop into spaces of profound patience (or not so profound–whatever you got in the patience bucket at the time will work).

Because if there is any kind of mistake that you can make, it’s not trusting yourself and your own beautiful awareness that’s coming into the fullness of being.