Mental health has skyrocketed out of obscurity and dismissal into the public eye.
Some time ago, I was on a walk. I heard two teenagers giving cheers to “Depression!” “Mental health!” and “Autism!”
Hearing teens cheers to such things is awful.
Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening?
Let’s dive into a common confusion. What is a mental health crisis like psychosis and what is awakening? The distinction between the two is incredibly vast.
One is becoming out of touch with reality.
A spiritual awakening is becoming in touch with reality.
The definition from the American Psychological Association states that psychosis is:
an abnormal mental state involving significant problems with reality testing. It is characterized by serious impairments or disruptions in the most fundamental higher brain functions—perception, cognition and cognitive processing, and emotions or affect—as manifested in behavioral phenomena, such as delusions, hallucinations, and significantly disorganized speech.
Unfortunately, we have very popular bloggers, spiritual people, and content such as the above YouTube video that want to sanctify mental health issues and problems.
They don’t ask “why?”
Why is this mental health issue arising?
They don’t seek to see the reality of the root cause issues and traumas much less to resolve them.
Instead, they try to make a person feel special.
My friends, the reality of trauma is that it makes a person feel endlessly bad and worthless. It is extremely common for trauma survivors to utterly crave specialness.
However, trying to make someone feel special does not alleviate that suffering.
Most of the time, creating special roles for someone ends up creating another ego structure on top of the traumatized ego structure. Now we have two systems (the ego is a system) in the way of liberating someone from suffering.
Conversely, a spiritual awakening opens you to reality.
You’re looking at truth.
If you have physical trauma, psychological trauma, emotional trauma, or any other kind of trauma, spiritual awakening reveals this to you.
This is often why people confusion mental health issues and crises with awakening. A lot of people are waking up to the reality of their trauma.
But an awakening is only a light in the room. The broken body in the middle of the room was already there. The light did not bring it into the room.
Now are you ready to surrender to address it?
Spiritual Awakening and Forgetfulness
Spiritual Awakening Anxiety and 6 Reasons It Arises
Dumping on Spiritual Teachers and Therapists
Unfortunately, Western Culture enables brokenness and woundedness. Even as the last 15 years has seen growing acceptance of therapy and healing, so much of that has been enabling trauma survivors instead of helping them resolve issues.
American Psychological Association Therapist Finder
In many somatic experiences, people have learned how to wallow in their traumas and dump on their somatic practitioners. This gets presented as releasing issues when it does nothing of the sort.
These very same things have shown up for spiritual teachers.
Using a Spiritual Teacher as a Therapist
Actually, it can be worse in the spiritual world because the people coming to it are often in denial of their traumas. They’re looking for a spiritual bypass or escape. So they wallow, dump, avoid, stonewall, and fantasize with their spiritual teachers. Inside, they secretly hope their pain will vanish.
But it doesn’t.
That generates despair.
All of this leads us to the critical first step of
surrender.
Surrender Is Acceptance, Not Complacency
Surrender means to accept the mental health issues that you have.
Surrender opens the door to inquire where these issues originated for you.
Then you have to take the necessary actions to resolve these wounds.
You can’t skip these steps or magically get rid of them.
That’s not what a spiritual awakening is.
Again, it’s a light in your room. It shows you what is there.
The more you address the ego issues that you have, the more clearly that light will show on other things in the room. Then you surrender to their existence and get to work on releasing those attachments.
Spiritual Depression and Unconscious Ego Resistance After Awakening
Doing Self-inquiry
There is so much to say about doing the work to resolve mental health issues.
And they can be resolved.
You don’t have to be stuck in the abyss of suffering your whole life.
You will have to climb out of that abyss, and if you don’t really want to do that work, you won’t change.
With sincerity, self-inquiry leads to inquiring into any
- thought,
- emotion, or
- sensation that comes up.
You ask, “Where does that come from?”
Then you focus on the emotions and sensations in your body. They’ll bring up the memories that need to come up.
Too much thinking ends up being a mind loop where you return to your same ego conclusions you’ve already arrived at.
It really helps to have someone to teach you self-inquiry because of this tendency to reinforce your practiced way of thinking.
Finding the Right Support
The right support for a spiritual awakening as well as resolving mental health issues means finding someone that can help push you as well as to help you to integrate and rest.
Inner work is its own kind of work out. You push these inner muscles, and then you let them rest. They rebuild. You’re stronger.
You can be so much stronger than you’ve ever been.
But first, you have to be honest with yourself and surrender to where you are.
Is Your Mental Health Needing Support?
I’ve encouraged many, many people towards therapy and a wide variety of mental and physical health practitioners. I’ve seen a lot of my students do great work there.
Remember:
A true spiritual awakening opens you to possibilities; it doesn’t say there’s only one way to heal, although healing has very specific steps to it.
Becoming a conscious person also means you don’t say that “someone isn’t spiritual enough” to help you. If you need mental health support, then you go to a mental health practitioner. They don’t need to understand awakening to help you with sexual abuse. They just need to help you heal sexual abuse or whatever issue is present for you.
Healing Sexual Abuse and Trauma
Finding that support so that you’re mentally healthy is critical to living and enjoying life. It is also critical to building a foundation strong enough spiritual rebirth. The deeper ego issues will challenge your mind, heart, and body. It’s a strain, but it’s an incredible journey to go through. You have to be strong enough for that mental strain.
Building a Mind Strong Enough for Awakening
If you feel like you’re awakening, then find a spiritual awakening teacher who can push you to go where you need to go and see what you need to.
I’m one of them, but not the only one who can show you the path to realizing freedom from suffering.
