One of the powerful and powerfully uncomfortable feelings that some people have during an awakening is the feeling that God has turned his back on them (Please understand that “his” is a conceit to English language–I don’t believe in any gender for God). It typically comes after the bliss stage of awakening. People tend to crash land into their issues, and it is very human to think that if we are feeling bad in some way, then something is going wrong. If we feel really awful, there is even this tendency to blame the Divine for our pain.
Spiritual Awakening Crash and Burn
But who/what is God? And what does this idea of feeling abandoned really mean? Both of these questions are powerful ones, and they involve powerful elements of human life. So let’s engage in this topic of feeling abandoned by the Divine and explore it together.
Getting to Know Your God
I know that the term “God” is a charged one, but hopefully, you can let go of your issues with the word to engage with this spiritual blog post today. If not, I encourage you to get out your journal and write down what God means to you. You can complain about what others have said to you and who tried to force their beliefs on you, but please spend more time engaging with what God means to you and how you are defining God. If you don’t know what you are believing in or not believing in, you are stuck in a level of ignorance that is defining your actions and keeps you cut off from others, including the Divine.
For me, God is quite simply All. That’s it. God is everything. God is your comb, chicken nuggets, other life forms, the Andromeda Galaxy, you, me, her, him, them, and everything else. God simply is, and while we can give God different titles (Allah, YHWH, Brahma, Source, Divine, the Universe, and so on), they all point to a profundity that includes but also exceeds any human reasoning.
For more of my thoughts on God, check out the below video.
But all of my thoughts on God don’t matter. What matters is what you think of as God, and if you’re having a feeling of abandonment on your spiritual path or after awakening, then you also need to figure out what this really means.
A Long History of Blaming God
Human beings have a long history of blaming God, typically when something goes wrong. If invaders take over our country, it’s not because of their better technology, it’s because God hates us. If disease kills people, it’s not small pox’s fault, it’s God’s fault. If a tsunami hits, that’s on God’s shoulders too. We human beings seem to love to play a blame game, but this is ultimately a fruitless exercise.
As we mature on the spiritual path, we learn to look at what is really going on. We remove superstition and fear-based assumptions to find the truth of the matter. In so doing, we can better engage with life, including invaders, disease, or environmental phenomena.
Confusing Pain With Error
In general, we are quick to see any kind of pain as a problem. Any time something doesn’t go the way we want or doesn’t feel good, we think something is wrong. Then we want to fix it or have it fixed for us. But the spiritual path is actually a very rational path. It’s rational in that we learn to engage with the things we can work on, and we learn to let go of the things we cannot change. We learn to appreciate spiritual truths such as there is pain in this world, and we will die. There’s no way around this, and it’s not some angry deity’s fault that you feel pain from time to time. By and large, pain is just a communication tool from the body and other parts of us that call our attention to something. That’s it.
In the context of a spiritual awakening, a lot of pain comes up to be processed when you are no longer holding it down. Oftentimes, the bliss state will kind of accentuate as well as illuminate upset emotions inside. Once you know how good you can feel, going back to the old way of being much less dealing with trapped pain can be truly uncomfortable to down right excruciating, depending on the amount of pain locked inside of you. This intense pain is why someone can feel like they’ve been abandoned. They don’t really feel abandoned by God. They feel abandoned by good feelings, and they want them back.
Giving Up Good Feelings for Peace
Another sign of a maturing soul is that we stop looking for the high state experience and the good feeling. We see a greater and greater value in peace. Most good feelings are still a kind of agitated state, and any place where we are agitated, there is energy being exerted to maintain that state of awareness, even if it is just a little. That ultimately means that they are untenable. They cannot last unless energy is going towards them and that eventually becomes exhausting.
Seeking the Elusive Spiritual High
As we let go of these good-feeling experiences, we can drop more and more into a resting peace state that is always underlying all states and experiences. It doesn’t mean that we’re always peaceful. Human beings tend to move in and out of different levels of agitation, swapping between action and rest on the mental, emotional, energetic, and physical planes. However, a lot of losing our sense of peace still has to do with holding onto pain and making different mental choices about whether you should feel happy, sad, or mad.
For many people early on their paths, those choices are completely invisible. So the idea that you are choosing to be sad when your romantic partner breaks up with you seems like nonsense at first. But if you investigate it, you will see that you are making the choice based on a whole load of unconscious beliefs. Those beliefs need to be brought to light and released, and that’s exactly what has started happened in these moments where people feel like God has turned his back on them.
Un-abandoning Yourself
The truth is that we have abandoned ourselves. We abandoned ourselves for ideas of who we should be, and in so doing, we have been forcing ourselves to avoid a lot of different things, which often includes our greatest joys and deepest pains. When bliss comes, no one worries. No one thinks that perhaps this feeling isn’t part of the divine plan, but when pain comes to be processed and met, most people think that something is wrong. In the space of a spiritual awakening, you have started the un-abandonment process. You are finally meeting the whole of yourself, and parts of you have been in and are in deep pain and sorrow. The only way to heal this part is to meet it instead of turning your back on it.
Whenever we turn our backs on an issue, that issues stays. It does not go away. It may go into remission for some time, but eventually, someone or something will trigger that pain again. Then it’ll come roaring back. It’ll keep coming back until you address it or you die. It’s that simple. It’s that simple logic that makes it so clear that we have to face these issues if we truly want to embrace our lives. In facing these issues, we can unlock all kinds of inner energy that we’ve been using to trap and bury these issues. The energy of these issues also is released back into your inner flow. In this way, facing and releasing issues while painful is immensely rejuvenating and enlivening. With that added energy flowing, more issues get churned up and brought to light. This moves you into your cycles of expansion and contraction that help you to fully heal.
Understanding Releases and Relief on Your Spiritual Journey
The End of Blaming and Self Abandonment
If you embrace your inner work and find the support you need, the idea that any part of the Divine has turned away from you will go away. In truth, most of us find that digging into our darkness is probably one of the greatest gifts and opportunities offered to us. It is the path through our pain to freedom. There is no path around that pain to get to freedom. Because it’s the nature of God to embrace all of you.
And God has been embracing all of you the whole time. God will take you back at the end of your journey in this life. It is us human beings who have been attempting to abandon parts of God and parts of ourselves. In our reckless and unconscious nature, we have cut off ourselves. We have gotten into great pain because of this, and we have done a whole lot of work to numb ourselves from pain and blind ourselves from the Truth. It is precisely why people wonder if God has turned his back on them. They’re so blind that they cannot see the truth. They cannot see that they turned away. They closed their eyes, but in awakening, you’re finding out that the only who has ever attempted to turn away is you.
