How to Find and Release Physical Pain During a Spiritual Awakening

For my awakening friends and others on a more gradual path to realizing spiritual freedom, you probably have found some surprising pains stuck in your body as you’ve gone through your spiritual shifts and realizations. It can be quite a shock to discover how much pain you’ve been living in, and of course, physical pain is one of the hardest things with which to come to peace.

This blog post can help you if you feel like awakening has immediately brought up physical pain:

Spiritual Awakening and Pain: The Torment of Internal Resistance

Everything in our anatomy says that we should fix physical pain as soon as possible.

But the fixer ego is fraught with problems.

It rarely takes the time to truly understand why a physical pain is in our bodies. The fixer ego just wants the problem gone!

As such, deeper rooted issues are never fully understood, and we tend to find temporary remedies that offer relief, but not release.

Understanding Releases and Relief on Your Spiritual Journey

Simply put, relief is when the pain is numbed, masked, or sent back into remission. Release is when part or all of an issue leaves your mind, heart, and body.

Clearly, the better of the two is obvious, but most people don’t know what releasing an issue is like. We live in a world where people have become masters of self-delusion, numbing, wallowing, and denial.

Furthermore, ost people don’t know how to release a mental issue, much less a body issue. Which brings us to the topic of today, and one which I hope to leave you a little more emboldened to find the roots of all your pains and to realize deeper peace in your heart, mind, spirit, AND body.

If you want support in releasing ego issues and attachments, you can get in touch via my newsletter:

Tracking the Many Trails of Physical Pain

Let me be honest, if you haven’t worked with your mental and emotional issues, you’re unlikely to be ready to dig into the physical pains you may be feeling.

Additionally, everything is interconnected.

Fear isn’t just in your mind.

It’s in your heart and body too.

I want to be clear that we’re not talking about broken legs. That’s easy to figure out what happened. You fell out of a tree, and now a trip to the ER is in order. We’re not trying to meditate away a fracture.

What I’m discussing is more along the lines of this spiritual awakening blog post:

Phantom Physical Pains and Spiritual Awakening

You’ve had a spiritual awakening and have some strange leg pain.

Why?

Is awakening doing something?

No.

This isn’t some magical spiritual pain. A mystical mantra or prayer does not fix the very real physical pains people have.

Many of these pains are revealed because we were too numb and unconscious to feel our own bodies.

Even if you don’t have an awakening, the process of releasing ego attachments brings you into greater understanding of your body. You notice things that were already here, but you’d been too distracted to know that you felt these things.

Old emotional pains and especially traumas are stored in the body.

Don’t believe me?

Here’s a book to help you.

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk.

The physical memories of any pain or abuse received or given is remembered and held onto in the muscle memory of our bodies.

In so many ways, our physical body has become a warzone of dis-ease. Is it any wonder that some human beings end up breaking down?

Focus on the Specific Physical Pains

Before I go further, one huge mistake is this:

Looking for a special spiritual meaning to your physical pain

Stop.

Breathe.

Come back to awareness.

The ego wants to make things special in hopes to avoid them.

Physical pain is a communication from your body.

It’s time to start listening.

I understand for those in a sudden spontaneous spiritual awakening, it can be difficult to focus on anything.

An Unexpected, Spontaneous Spiritual Awakening

Stabilizing yourself with great nutrition, meditation, breathwork, and other tools are critical to be settled enough to focus on specifics.

If you’ve never really paid attention to your body, this will be a very unsettling time for you. All kinds of stories in the language of the body–which is often pain–come bursting into your awareness. You may feel incapacitated.

But don’t let the mind’s overwhelm cause you to give up on yourself.

Too often people allow themselves to shut down by this feeling of overwhelm.

For instance, you feel exhausted by your life. You say over and over about how tiring everything is. You feel like you can’t handle anything. In turn, your body replays this message. “Well, she said we’re tired. So I guess we’re tired.” That means you can make yourself physically feel tired and create a nasty repeating loop.

Your body does feel tired, and you’re justified in what you say.

Additionally, you probably have found ways to over-exert yourself, sleep deprive yourself, under-nourish yourself, or other things to further self-sabotage.

You are out of balance.

Some of your physical pain is simply a statement of poor lifestyle.

Healing Your Mind

One of the preliminary steps to address any pain is getting your mind right. You have to see internal self-defeating stories like the one mentioned above and do the inner work to let that go. And this blog has plenty of posts about working with the mind and then the heart.

Building a Mind Strong Enough for Awakening

Ultimately, you’re kind of working on everything all at once, but different things come to the foreground. If you haven’t worked with your mind and heart, you’re not going to be ready for the raw experiences and pain of some of the issues held in the body.

If you’ve worked with the mind, you can then go deeper into the body pains. You can focus on what this discomfort tells you and see what the body wants to show you to heal or come into better physical alignment, which usually means you become healthier.

Working Through Waves of Discomfort

One of the hallmarks of spiritual shifts is that when a wave of intensity settles down and the pain/issue seems to vanish.

The immature spiritual person thinks that the issue is gone.

But it’s just gone into remission because the triggering situation is no longer driving it up into your consciousness.

If you are in awakening, don’t worry. It’ll get driven up again.

And sometimes, it feels like you can’t unsee all these internal pains that have you in knots.

But you’ve been this way a long time.

Remember that Western Culture has turned most people into masters of distraction. People distract with work, sex, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, media (phones, movies, music, etc.), and so much more.

That means, if something has disappeared, you probably went back to an avoidance pattern. It’s time to cease the distractions. Then you need to be more focused and dedicated to finding the pain and surrendering to it.

Now that you’re refocused, you’re like to find a lot more issues than just the loudest and strongest one. People hold onto an innumerable number of issues. It’s humbling.

But they can be resolved.

When another wave of realizations comes up, you can choose to go more deeply into the physical pain or discomfort you are working on. If you are doing your inner work, you grow in this process and find greater courage to go more deeply inside. Your inner “eyesight” gets better at focusing on the source of the physical pain.

Remember that the discomfort is temporary. It’s just your body calling for your attention to resolve an issue. As an issue unfolds and releases, some of these physical pains dissolve because either the mind was just making them up and/or the stored emotional wound has been released.

5 Tips for Pinpointing Physical Pain

Having the space in your life to be with physical pain is a challenge. For one, modern culture doesn’t make it easy to have space for much of anything other than work. Secondly, it doesn’t feel natural to be relaxed and in pain at the same time.

It’s kind of like cold plunging.

Pain shocks the system.

Keep breathing to let go of your initial resistance to the pain.

Making space for this process is critical, and relaxing into discomfort is one of the most important skill-sets any of you can develop on the spiritual path and in life itself.

This isn’t sitting with back pain for three hours of meditation.

Healing physical pain on the spiritual path is understanding where the pain is in your body and what it is trying to tell you. This is done without any attempts to change the pain. You simply allow it, speak tor express memories, sensations, and emotions, breathe, come back to awareness, and allow things to unfold. With that said, here are tips for pinpointing the true source of a physical pain:

1. Sit still. Moving and doing lots of things keeps the body too agitated for us to discern much. Oftentimes, it makes physical pain worse, and other parts of your body are stressed more because they are compensating for the deeper source of pain.
2. Take your time. Patience is key. Remember that a lot of this pain has probably been with you for years. A half hour of meditation is unlikely to resolve a physical issue overnight even if you’ve had big mental and emotional break-thrus about what it is about.
3. Work through outer layers. Don’t be fooled by the initial or loudest source of pain in your body. Your body is interconnected. The initial pain or the seemingly worst may simply be the place that has compensated the most for some other pain or lack of physical alignment. Use this first pain as the beginning of a thread to follower deeper.
4. Relax into the pain. This is soooo important, and it can be soooo hard. It is counter-intuitive to relax into physical pain, but it’s important so that you don’t create additional tension on top of the pain that is coming up. The relaxation helps you to further see how this pain is interacting in your body and go deeper.
5. Bring touch to the deepest layer you have found. Adding touch can be a nice way to focus your attention, but you’re not trying to make it better. You’re trying to UNDERSTAND better. Once you are here, breathe and let go. Breathe and let go. Remember step number two. This can take some time. Having a partner who is emotionally mature to physically hold you can be really helpful.

The Process of Releasing Pain

However, sometimes it needs help from a practitioner. If you’re really listening, you can get an idea of what mental, emotional, or physical imbalance is there, and then reach out for more help.

Chronic Pain and Anxiety Disorders (Anxiety and Depression Association of America)

The Profundity of Physical Releases

The easiest way out of physical pain is the way through it. Feeling that pain and acknowledging it are so critical. Then, things often release.

Sometimes, it will be a memory stuck in your body of a past pain or personal transgression.

Sometimes, it’s simply how out of alignment your body became from being stooped over a computer, and now it’s telling you to focus on ergonomics.

Sometimes, it’s how you physically hid your heart–stooped shoulders and a concave chest–and that led to all kinds of back pain.

Whatever you discover, the conscious changes you are going to make after a discovery will be physical ones. They will require physical action because that’s how the body behaves. It wants action.

If a part of your body is really out of whack (you’ve been living on corn chips and ice cream your whole life and need to radically change your diet, for instance), physical changes may be huge.

Take it one little step at a time.

For other releases, the ease and openness we feel immediately in our bodies is unmistakable. They can be profound along with the shock of how much more pain we’d lived in than we realized.

The Arising of Physical Enlightenment

In a healing process like this, we begin to really appreciate this house we live in our whole lives, and we come into deeper appreciation of body wisdom.

Along the way, it may take time for a physical pain to unwind itself. It is the body, and the body lives in the world of time.

Some issues dissolve immediately. Some may not and may require you to make changes to how you interact with your body in your daily life to further the healing.

The openness created by a release leads to greater wisdom about your body, and it opens a doorway for deeper discoveries of other things inside your body.

The “enlightened” body is a reality, and a whole other topic in and of itself.

An Easeful, Flexible Body

A body at peace and free of pain is full of ease and flexibility.

You can have issues release so deeply that parts of your body immediately regain a renewed flexibility.

It depends on the type of issue and what was being held in that part of the body.

As I said, generally speaking, you don’t want to expect big changes like that for the body overnight. This is especially true for chronic pain caused by an issue you’ve carried most of your life. But sometimes, it does clear this quickly, and that is a true gift. If you’ve felt this kind of physical release, you know what I’m talking about.

The great thing about physical releases from the body (or any part of us) is that we are done with that issue or that part of the issue.

We don’t have to deal with it again.

We have greater physical freedom in how we move and sense all of life!

How to Find Spiritual Freedom

A Light on Even Deeper Physical Pain

But as we come into greater health and integrity, other parts of our body that aren’t in integrity have new light shined upon them. In some spiritual awakenings, it may seem like the ease and openness last briefly before the next issue is hit. The raging flood of awakening does not like to wait around.

Still, each time you release a physical issue, the body becomes more at ease and more open. This creates a very relaxed space from which to interact with the world.

You become more confident and courageous in facing yourself.

That has amazing impacts on how we interact with others, how we touch others, how we receive touch, and how we touch ourselves. It impacts our food choices, our sleeping habits, and pretty much any other physical part of our spiritual journeys. To be sure, a peaceful, pain-free body makes this lifetime an absolute joy to live.

Being at Peace With Pain

It’s why this part of the spiritual healing that we do–which can be quite challenging–offers us some of the greatest rewards we can ever experience as a human body.

I hope this post was helpful. For more of my thoughts or to get help with your physical pain post-awakening, you can sign up for my free newsletter:

Updated 1/7/2026