Permission to be a Hot Mess on the Spiritual Path

For most of our lives, a lot of us try to put a good face on things even when we feel awful.

We use all kinds of things to let out pent up frustrations and emotions. Complaining, challenging work outs, intense recreation (think mountain biking or rock climbing), sports, and more are some avenues to let things out. They’re like steam vents; they let the steam out, but they don’t take care of the fire that’s burning inside.

And of course, there’s so many ways that people numb, distract, and suppress emotions.

When spiritual awakening strikes and even as you move along the spiritual path without a major awakening, emotions come up.

After a Spiritual Awakening Unleashes All Your Emotions

It’s often very involuntary. They arise, and you find yourself face-to-face with anger, sadness, shame, guilt, fear, and more. The old inclination to repress, avoid, or do something else to remove the feeling may kick in, but this is precisely the moment when we need to surrender.

This is precisely the moment when things get messy.

It Ain’t Pristine on the Spiritual Path

Because there’s this image of starched white robes and serene silent retreats that gets stuck in people’s heads, I write a lot of blogs precisely to help you re-humanize spirituality.

We’re not escaping the muck of life.

When we’re following the path of transcendence; we’re going right into it.

And because life is messy and we’ve got a messy inner space, things get messy around us.

We cry.

We scream.

We get intensely scared.

We rage.

We shake.

Energy-caused Involuntary Muscle Spasms or Kriyas

We get so scared it makes our teeth hurt.

Now it is important to make a differentiation here. Clearing emotions on the spiritual path goes through a couple phases:

1. The emotion rises to your consciousness.
2. You experience the emotion.
3. You release the emotion.

This is not an emotional tantrum.

You certainly aren’t using your emotions to manipulate situations and people. If this has been your path, you’re going to re-experience those moments and how it feels to be manipulated.

It’s a wholly different thing than just having a nervous breakdown because one of the key things is that after you release the emotion, you feel clearer and cleaner than before. You feel a little less weighed down. You feel more expansive and grounded.

And you probably are feeling pretty raw and/or exhausted.

The Process of Releasing Pain

Finding a Safe Space to Be a Mess

Unfortunately, most of our lives aren’t set up to make space for messy breakdowns. Sometimes, spiritual shifts are misdiagnosed as psychotic breakdowns. Additionally, some things are being diagnosed as spiritual that are psychotic breakdowns.

It’s been to talk to professionals than to self-diagnose.

I’ve really appreciated the conscious dance circles because when people have emotions come up during dance, there’s a lot of permission for people to have those emotional out-pourings. I don’t know that I’ve seen this allowed in many other places.

Even meditation groups don’t really understand such things. They think that if you can’t be quiet, then you aren’t meditating “right.”

With that said, you need to develop places in your life where you can be a mess–if only for 15 minutes.

Whether you have time set aside in your bedroom away from your family or whether you actually can get away to a retreat or even a camp-out, it’s crucial to have this space in your life.

When it comes to work, a 15 minute fear shake, crying into hand towels, or whatever needs to come up in the bathroom or in a nearby park works.

Waiting until the end of the day for this process to be convenient does not. The ego is always seeking convenience.

It’s Never the Right Time for the Ego

Even if you aren’t experiencing what I call a spiritual awakening, the process to realizing spiritual freedom requires the same inner clean out. You have to actively choose to do this because it all has to get washed out. Not one attachment, emotional wound, or biological fear/desire is going to be left untouched.

How to Find Spiritual Freedom

Finding Comfort With Intense Emotions

Because so few of us are taught how to be with intense emotions, there’s going to be an adjustment period where you have to consciously give yourself permission to have these feelings.

It’s not going to be easy.

You’ll feel it through your whole body. One of the feelings that I’ve had is this feeling of dying. I really don’t like it. Some old emotion, false belief, or deeply held physical experience is dying, but it is intensely tied in to who I think I am.

It feels like I’m dying.

Without giving yourself permission around this, you can manifest phantom diseases or even real diseases through the sheer level of stress you create in your reaction to what is arising. That reaction is part of what I call the “electric fence.” These are the emotions that arise to protect you from going into a new way of experiencing life.

Ironically, they make you feel ten times worse.

The Other Side of the Electric Fence

So when it feels like you’re dying (abiding you are actually in good health and get your regular check-ups with a training health practitioner), you’ll have to learn how to make space to detach from the feeling.

You have to breathe and come back to awareness.

Watch the arising and be with it. Let it go. Let it die to you.

5 Posts to Help You Let Go

Cleaning Cycles: Wash, Rinse, Twirl Around Like a Goofball, and Repeat

These cleaning cycles will come and go. You’ll go through one of these cleanses, and then you’ll come out of it.

You’ll usually feel a lot better.

Depending on your path, you can feel really amazing shortly after one.

It’s how some of us get to be spiritual workaholics.

Once you find out just how amazing you can feel when you clear out old junk, you want more of this inner work so you can find out just how much more awesome you can feel. This is one of the addictive qualities of the spiritual path, which has it’s own challenges. But initially, it feels damn good.

Relying on Your Spiritual Support Network

Depending on the intensity of the clearing or awakening, you could be a real hot mess. You may not be able to do much of anything. This is when a spiritual support system is so important. The people who are in it may not even seem to be very “spiritual.”

They just may really love you (which is about the most spiritual thing I can think of).

And you’ll need to let yourself be supported to turn your attention to the fullness of the experience. That’s the only way to fully release it.

Don’t do this nonsense around being independent.

It gets you nothing.

Being a helpless victim gets you nothing on this path either. Permission to being a hot mess doesn’t mean wallowing in sadness, anger, guilt, anxiety, or any of the things coming up.

You have to breathe, come back to awareness, and receive this experience, which then may knock you on your ass. It will work itself out if you surrender fully and accept it in all of its truth.

Finally, these experiences have been in you your whole life. You’ve been so normalized to them that you didn’t realize how unconscious and unhealthy they are. Or you’ve been too numb and distracted to even feel them. But they’ve been sitting down in the basement of your soul for too long. Now they need to come out.

You need to be free of them.

You can be free of them if you surrender.

Need help realizing freedom from suffering? Here’s information about one-on-one work with Jim.