Anyone who has read this spiritual awakening blog for some time knows that I avoid overly linear, goal-oriented language. Too many people are too stuck in their egos, and they want to turn spirituality into a race to the finish line replete with awards and high-fives.
With that in mind, I’ll offer linear sounding spiritual awakening stages today, but don’t hold onto them.
Ultimately, there is no finish line.
There is the here now.
Waking up from your ego is waking up from the illusion that you are your body, thoughts, and emotions.
You are.
You are here now.
Those are the grand revelations that fix none of the ego’s problems.
You are the one who will have to fix the issues in your life, but you are free to change–that’s the gift of letting go of the ego, which is stuck in its patterns.
What People Want from a Spiritual Awakening
Before I get to the awakening stages, let’s talk about what people really want.
They want
- Their problems to be fixed
- To not have to change any part of themselves or their lives
- To always feel good
This fairy-tale list is why energy-balancing and guru-worship are so alluring. They ask nothing real of you, and the stages of shedding ego to realize you are spiritually free ask a lot of you.
This path asks for ALL of you.
Are you ready to surrender all of you?
1. The Initials
You have an initial awakening.
You have an initial release of an attachment.
You have an initial blissful moment.
You have an initial romantic, sexual tryst that blows your mind about the possibilities of connection.
Welcome to the first stage–the initials. These first moments are kind of like losing your virginity–overly exciting, but in the long-run, not the best.
You know that’s true.
A lot of people get stuck at this phase, particularly if they had a really big, expansive loving bliss experience.
Who wouldn’t want to put that on auto-repeat?
The Bliss State Comes and Then It Goes
Those who have an initial that plummets them right into the darkness decide to blame awakening and hate it. They want to go back to sleep.
Guess what?
You still are.
2. Dispelling the Darkness and the Ego’s Big Tantrum
Next up is facing your ignorance.
That’s what darkness truly is.
It’s the stuff you don’t want to see or can’t see.
It’s a big phase full of backslides, plateaus, and resistance as the ego whines, rails, fights, gaslights, plays dumb, and every other trick in the ego book.
The over-arching theme of this stage is that the person only does what they absolutely must to get out of the pain. They’re typically hoping to get back to the bliss.
They have to lose a half ton of attachments to realize how much suffering they had been trucking around their whole life.
For those with trauma, they have to resolve it.
Awakening is not an escape from trauma.
People in this phase have to rechoose the path over and over before it really sinks in that they are truly better off for losing these attachments.
That releasing of attachments creates a thirst to let go of more.
That genuine spiritual longing moves the person to the next phase.
The Shadow and Dispelling the Darkness Phase
3. Embracing the Light
Moving to Embracing the Light goes more in percentages than a grand leap of faith from one phase to next. Backslides are also common early on.
It’s like you get to a point where 51% of you is Embracing the Light, and 49% of you is still Dispelling the Darkness.
The shift is marked by less resistance to your shifts and greater trust in the process because you see how any attachments cause suffering.
If you are working with a true teacher, you trust your teacher’s recommendations now, as opposed to resisting, avoiding, or doubting them.
How to Find a Spiritual Teacher
In the earlier phase, apathy may arise, but in this phase, the loss of desire is a deeper understanding that all desires feed the ego and/or medicate/numb you from life. The maturing person more actively lets go of desires.
Losing More Desires and Interests After Awakening
Furthermore, people realize what things are are truly important in this world.
This inspires further external world change. Being able to change oneself proactively rather than reactively shows further proof that the person is in this phase.
While the Dispelling the Darkness phase sometimes benefits from stepping back from society, the maturing spiritual person is learning how to live in society. They do not flee it or the messiness of human interaction.
Those who hide in a kind of solitary confinement are typically hiding from their own triggers that get brought up when they’re around people.
This is not wise.
It is immature and limiting.
Letting go of ego unlimits you.
Interestingly enough, the hardest and nastiest issues you face come in this phase.
Now you are joining with the process rather than fighting it and/or trying to get through it.
Fighting our shifts or trying to wait them out makes early work superficial or ineffective. It’s another reason people spin in the Dispelling the Darkness phase and go no where. Most of the upheaval is caused by their resistance.
For example, if a person adds 100 lbs of unnecessary weight to a 5 lb dumb bell, it seems really hard, but 5 lbs is not a lot of weight.
In this phase, when someone faces an 80 lb issue, they may only put 20 lbs of resistance on it. It’s still too much, but they are now dealing with bigger issues.
Eventually, people put no resistance to whatever issue arises in them.
Again and again, the individual must choose to move through whatever attachment arises.
Eventually, they realize something.
The Embracing Your Light Phase
4. Resting in Awakened Awareness
At some point, you realize that you ARE.
You are not your thoughts, emotions, or body sensations. They don’t get to tell you what to do. You can always inquire to find out what is real.
At which point, you’re enlightened.
You have realized you’re free, and you can change because you have changed. You had to along the way.
However, you’re not dead.
Life still needs to be lived, and if there is more unresolved trauma, you continue to do that.
If you are discovering physical distress from poor lifestyle, you change it.
If you want to explore something brand new, you do that.
You are free to live in any way that is possible for you.
But you don’t know everything.
This keeps you humble and curious.
As such, you continue to embrace reality and learn and grow from a space of curiosity in awakened awareness.
You are not a “PERFECT” person. There’s a lot of use of this term in some spiritual circles.
You are.
That sentence means you can be anybody that it is possible for you to be.
Thus, at the end of the awakening stages, you have a renewed life, and surprisingly, you’re likely to find out that you’re only at the beginning of your transformations.
The Art of Personal Transformation
(Updated 6/22/2026)
2 Comments
Such a wonderful article. Thank you!
You're welcome, Katherine.