Spiritual Awakening Signs Subside: You Come Fully to Life

Nothing lasts forever. Not spiritual awakenings, at least not the transitional process. As I like to remind people from time to time, awakening isn’t a process. It just happens. The process comes with integrating it. It’s like a flood. Floods happen, and then they’re gone. The way you can fully absorb them is by preparing the land to receive it, and when they’re unexpected, you have to do your best to channel the waters to be absorbed into the land to grow crops and create a great bounty in your life. People along the Nile did this literally for centuries until recent damming that’s gone on in Egypt.

So much of this blog is about how to prepare the land to receive. For those of you in awakening, you’re kinda doing that at the same time the waters are running everywhere. It can be intense, but then the waters recede. Sure there will be other moments of deluge, but they never are quite like this. You’re changed too fundamentally, and as I often point out, an awakening is different than an opening. The awakening takes over while a spiritual opening into a new space is like someone dropping a water balloon on you. Sure you feel the flow momentarily, but it’s just as quickly gone. With that said, eventually, things settle down, and you are not the same.

Why There’s So Little Talk About After the Awakening

When I write about after the awakening, I’m not talking about immediately after the awakening. I’m talking about when the internal change has come to a normal rhythm and a kind of rest within the movement because we are always in motion. We can also be still within the movement. It’s this kind of paradoxical equilibrium that becomes a daily part of our lives that lends itself to an ease, generosity, and lovingness in our lives that was never fully there before. It is a reward through how we are. It’s the reward of being.

But I don’t really know of so much writing out there that talks about this. Part of it is that when you’re in this space, you just don’t think to share. You’re just not even thinking in that way that you were before. You are where you are, and you are doing and being what feels right and true to you. I suppose that’s why a communicator like myself is important because if I didn’t love writing, I’d probably not be writing this. It wouldn’t be out of a desire to hide this, it just wouldn’t come to mind to do this.

So part of the purpose of this post is to add to the growing number of After the Awakening posts that I have. I’ve been doing what most everyone else has done: writing about how to get started on the spiritual path and writing about what can arise during the awakening shift. The latter doesn’t have a whole lot of great info out there, and much of the info is very contrived, convoluted, and caught up in a lot of strange agendas that forgo individual responsibility, self awareness and focus, and love. I’ve really worked hard to be as clear and down-to-earth as I can with that topic. And with this topic, I hope to do no less.

The Calming of the Seas

Life will always have its ups and downs, but after the transition, you can probably handle just about anything. All those spiritual awakening signs and “symptoms”–which is a term that I hate to use because it suggests that you’re sick; you’re not–are gone. You have come through. One of the important aspects of this process is that when you are doing or being in whatever way that you need to do or be, you will feel bigger, fuller, and more loving after each little shift. I see some people associating awakening with a mental disease, but true spiritual awakening is a clarifying of the internal landscape. The initial parts can be a mess. Think about what it’s like to do a home renovation. There are tools, appliances, boxes, construction materials, and sawdust everywhere. You’re afraid that your house cat is buried under a pile somewhere because you haven’t seen Mr McFluffins in two weeks. That’s awakening’s initial work–to tear up the debris and lies we have filled our lives with. But then, things are re-made. New internal structures are made that are true to you and that can support you. The mess begins to clear up.

It’s Not Easy, But It’s Rewarding

All those people who got interested in spirituality because of a few high-state experiences that titillated them can have a horrible time with a real spiritual awakening. Too much stuff is moving that is making them uncomfortable, and so they try to hide out from the flood or think that something is going wrong when something is actually going really right. In essence, they may try and run away from themselves further. And this goes not just for spiritual high-state seekers, but for a lot of people when they’re faced with the enormity of spiritual awakening.

Because you have to look at all of yourself at once, and most people have just been looking at certain parts of themselves through a peep hole. They can feel lost in the totality of themselves: both their brilliant light and deep darkness. And if you avoid this sacred time enough, you can get through. It’ll be painful, and it will likely leave a place of regret in you later on as you sense that something beautiful had come and you missed it. Maybe you’ll know what happened, or maybe it will just be a sliver in your mind needling through you with that nostalgia. Don’t worry. It will come again at another time in another way, potentially in another lifetime.

For Those Who Embraced the Opportunity

For those who saw what was happening and gave it space to do its sacred work, you will now find yourself perfectly aligned to do whatever it is that you want to do. All the food allergies, sleep issues, and other ailments melt away. You are ready. I really can’t emphasize this enough. The discomfort that comes for many of us is like having a bone set that had been broken. Then we go through rehab. Now we’re ready to run. I think it’s important to say this because so many people can get lost in the discomfort that they create a whole new level of suffering and ego. They can get lost in the idea that they’re somehow evil or are being punished. If anything is punishing you, it’s you. It’s your resistance to the shift. You’re too busy sand-bagging the flood, and it keeps knocking over and overwhelming the barricades that you construct. But as I said, it won’t last. And if you finally stopped sand-bagging and picked up a shovel to help guide the flow while also following it, then some magical things are in store for you. I don’t use the term “magical” in some sort of outlandish sense. I simply see magic in the space of the human heart and doing what we love. In some ways, that’s all awakening has ever been preparing us for–to be love and to act out of love.

“Love” Fills Your Life, But Not “Like”

For those of you who have come through your awakening transition, love is everywhere and everyone. It is beautiful, is it not? Everywhere you look, there is love. But this is not the ego love. This is not “like.” Life still brings difficulty. There may still be pain in your life–a car accident, disease, a lost loved one. But you understand the deeper beauty at work even if it isn’t to your preference. That’s the power of love, and you can forgive more easily than ever before when things that happen that you don’t like. You know it’s not about you. It never really was. Beautiful things come into your life, and they leave you. It is the inhalation and exhalation of life. Where our preferences would be to hold on to things we like and keep out things we don’t, you can accept it all without being a doormat. It is such a powerful place you are, and from this place, there are doubtless things that you are now ready to do, ideas ready to be birthed into the world, and relationships ready to be built or re-forged, as old connections return who are ready to meet you in this new way. But you probably won’t like all the outcomes or connections. That’s just not how life is.

The New Ego in Service of Love

There’s this naive idea that we get rid of the ego entirely in spiritual awakening, but that’s not true at all. We live in a body, and ego serves as a way to be a point of view to manage all the information that life presents us. While an old ego self may be destroyed, a new ego has been birthed from your awakening. This spiritual ego knows what it is. It will still make mistakes. It will still get angry, scared, and many other emotions, but it won’t hang on to them. And if it does, it can see this process sooooo much more clearly. It does not strive for perfection. It simply understands that all life is in service to love.

From this space, the actions you take are now uniform in the sense that you are no longer a divided person. Awakening is a process of becoming whole, you see. Before, you were closed down and divided against yourself. You tried to live by outsiders’ rules that you took to be your own, and you forfeited your own natural intelligence. That division created an insurmountable internal conflict that may have made it seem like nothing ever worked right in your life. But those illusions and divisions have been dissolved, so now you can see what the real rules of life are. You abide by those, and from that space, your actions and ways of being are deeply aligned to the universe’s true code. None of this relays itself well to words because that code is more than words. It is something that has to integrate into heart, body, mind, and soul to truly be known, but it begins with knowing that all is love and all life works in service of love.

Still Sensitive, Callousness Doesn’t Grow Back

You will notice, however, that you’re still very sensitive. Some of the stuff out there misconstrues our natural sensitivity to life and to each other as an awakening sign or symptom. In truth, it’s how many of us naturally are. Everyone has different levels of sensitivity, but I think just about all of us become more sensitive as we go through the process. It’s like a callous is ripped off of our whole body at first, and we’re totally in shock by all the things we can suddenly feel. What follows is a process of acclimation, and then you’re used to it. It’s just the way you are, so if you asked someone who’s awakened about this, they might not even know how to respond.

It becomes like being a fish in water. You can ask the fish what it’s like to be in water, and the fish won’t really know how to respond. It’s simply how it is, and this is okay. It is okay to be naturally sensitive to energy and the stuff going on around you. The more of us who are this way, the more interconnected we become as a greater society and community. In some respects, that’s another way to look at the awakening process. You’ve been re-created so now you can easy connect AND disconnect with others and your environment. Both are important as you don’t need to absorb other people’s pain and disease. You may, however, also be good at grounding this stuff, so disconnecting may not be the exact right word. I suppose the better way of looking at it is that you won’t take on this stuff as your own. It will pass by like a hot breeze, and you will stay in the flow.

All Awakenings Are Different

You may also notice that not everyone has awakenings that are the same. (As I said, an opening is very different than an awakening. An opening is dependent on a situation, and when the situation passes, the opening closes. The awakening is like a house guest that just won’t leave until you realize that that house guest is you. I am re-iterating this because a lot of people confuse a momentary spiritual opening as an awakening.) But we all have different purposes, different levels of awareness, and what-not. What you’ll be able to see and perceive compared to another person will be different. You both have your spiritual gifts, but they’re different. You’ll both be still very much human and subject to making mistakes. One of you may simply have better perception than the other, and you may think, “How can someone who is awake be so blind?” Ah, well, we all have our soul paths. And I know that your question isn’t a cynical one. There is still so much to be learned in this life because life is so diverse. It’s really quite amazing, and now you’re ready to discover it all. With your inner landscape come to the place that it natural belongs, you can move out into the world now. You can let go of your chrysalis and engage with the world in whatever way feels true to you because that’s what this has been about–returning to Truth and to love. From here, your life won’t stay the same. It never was meant to, but now it can be what you really truly want it to be.