Last Updated on October 10, 2024 by Kelly Ashley
The Ultimate Guide To Spiritual Awakening: Everything You Need To Know
The Enlightenment Myth
Contrary to the calm, centered imagery we’ve gleaned from most spiritually enlightened gurus (and the message they often share), spiritual awakening can be a confusing, reality bending, emotional mess. Most of those leaders portray an ‘I’ve got this’ aura, which, when we compare our own awakening to theirs can seem as though somehow we’re defective. We’re doing it wrong. We’re failing at it. We should be enlightened, at peace, at one with ourselves and our environment, radiating compassion, love and light and fulfilling our soul’s true purpose.
But we’re not.
That doesn’t mean that ascension won’t happen for you, but it does mean that it wont happen in the rainbows and butterflies way we’ve been taught to expect. Awakening is hard. Ascension is a climb. And if anyone ever tells you that their awakening was easy, they haven’t awakened at all.
What Awakening Is REALLY Like
Awakening is stormy and full of conflict, disorder and overwhelm. Its perfectly normal for your awakening to be full of unanswered questions, doubts and fears, and intense emotions. But in contrast, its also normal for it to have meaningful experiences, signs and synchronicities and a sense of destiny. The clash of those two polar opposites can be very confusing and often make us wonder if we are losing our minds (sometimes we even get lost IN our minds for a while during awakening too).
I know that where you are right now is likely making you feel unstable, insecure and uncertain and wondering how you’ll ever get through this (don’t worry, that’s understandable, and perfectly normal too). Unfortunately, spiritual awakening doesn’t come with a handbook, but using everything I’ve learned from how this all began in my own spiritual emergency (an awakening that hits crisis level) and my experience in successfully helping hundreds of clients in their own ascension process over the last few years, I’ve compiled this guide which I hope will comfort, inform and assist you further in your awakening journey. (P.S If you need more support in your awakening process I’ve created an advanced 7 day energy healing course to help your soul and body heal, clear and prepare for the awakening process through a series of energetic activations, but more on that at the end).
The REAL Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening
Lets start by taking a look at the most common symptoms of awakening (the ones that no one ever really talks about):
- Highly sensitive and emotional
- Feeling anxious or panicked
- Extremely high empathy – picking up everyone else’s ‘stuff’
- Feeling completely overwhelmed
- Feeling crazy or questioning your sanity
- Psychic senses out of control, intrusive or frightening
- Mental health concerns
- Physical difficulties – aches, pains, fatigue, brain fog
- Unable to ground your energy
Everyone wants to make out like awakening is easy. Everyone is pretending that they are doing it ‘right’ by making it look like awakening requires no effort whatsoever, and that perception does us a massive disservice. Of course its challenging. Of course its hard – its the process of healing the pain of our learning process throughout all of our incarnations while retaining the knowledge and wisdom we’ve gained – I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like any easy feat to me!
If your awakening is CHALLENGING you, you’re doing it RIGHT.
Please note that everyone experiences awakening differently and you may not have every symptom listed here (most people don’t). You may have one or two that are more exaggerated than the rest as this indicates the area you need the most healing in order to move forward.
The Stages of Spiritual Awakening
Ok, so now that we know the most common signs of awakening, lets take a look at the stages. This should help you better understand your current symptoms and when you realize how natural they are, should bring a sense of relief too.
Stage #1 – Awaken
You planned for awakening to happen at a specific time in your life, long before you incarnated here. At your chosen time a huge influx of high vibrational energy floods your system. You sense that something is different, but you might not be able to identify what it is yet. You psychic centers are opened (usually quite abruptly) and suddenly your feeling, sensing, seeing or hearing things that you weren’t aware of before (this is to help you access painful emotions from past lives that will need to be released in stage #2). Your psychic senses are so much more acute – you may even begin having powerful spiritual experiences or sensations and you’ll feel more sensitive than usual too. Due to the heightening of these psychic senses you’ll likely feel the need to retreat – to pull back from people, places, and things. That is entirely normal.
Stage #2 – Healing
Now your senses are extremely heightened, which they need to be for stage #2. Energy is thrust (quite powerfully) up through the chakra system from the root to the crown. The purpose is to dislodge any blockages that stop that energy flowing smoothly straight through your system (giving you a purer connection to Source). There are old emotions, heart breaks and trauma from past life times that the soul needs to heal and the force of this energy purges it all up. This is when we begin feeling emotional but our feelings seem to be disproportionate to the situation at hand, or worse, have no seeming cause (because we can’t consciously remember these past life experiences, only the associated emotional responses).
During this phase you’ll feel REALLY emotional. Your emotions will be intense and erratic. You may feel you have no control over when or where or how strongly they come up (and you don’t because your soul is remembering things that you consciously can’t). You could be triggered by watching a relationship tragedy in a movie, or interactions with your friends and family, or even the way a stranger looks at you. It can be a very difficult and painful stage, but rest assured that it will PASS, and that once these issues are healed from your energy, they will be cleared once and for all, and you’ll experience much healthier relationships and much happier life experiences as a result.
Stage #3 – Life Purpose
Phew! By the time you get to here, you’ll be feeling inspired, creative, excited and ready to start a new project, embark on a new career or fulfill some form of purpose. The Universe needs to be sure that you’re well and truly healed and clear to be a reliable and steady vessel for channeling unconditional love and light (in whichever form that takes for you – healing, writing, helping, creating), and so, it will test you one last time. You might find some old patterns, issues or pains surge again. And when they do you’ll probably feel exasperated, and irritated at yourself, and question if you’ve made any progress at all. But they’ve been inflated and intensified for a reason – so that you’ll clear out every last tiny bit of that low self esteem, lack of assertiveness, or fear. You’ll finally be free of it!
This stage can be a little unnerving, simply because you are stepping into your true role as a light worker and fulfilling something that is not only meaningful to you, but that also expresses who you truly are as a divine being. Doubts and worries rear their heads as you wonder if you really can complete this mission, or finish that project, or even just be happy. If you’ve never really had any lasting success or joy it can take a little while before you can accept it, and that is entirely normal (I felt that way too). But what I can tell you is that when you finally do step into that energy and create your dream in reality, you’ll feel a sense of contentment and joy that you’ve likely never felt before in your entire life.
Stage #4 – Divinity
Most people consider divinity to be the finish line, but I’m here to tell you that its not. Yes, you have come through the darkness. Yes, you have fulfilled your purpose and yes, you may be fully utilizing your spiritual gifts and abilities. Divinity is about being so clear of old pain, negative beliefs and assumptions about life, that you are truly pure in your energy. You are true to who you are. You are in your divinity because, much like a beautiful diamond is encrusted in dust and dirt, you have removed and cleared everything that is NOT who you are. All that’s left is a beautiful polished diamond (that’s YOU by the way). That part is all wonderful, and you will have a balance to life that you’ve probably never experienced, but its not over yet.
And I say that because you’ve still got a life to live. You still need to uphold your values and there will still be times in life where challenges will come up and you will be tested. I say that not to disappoint or dull the ‘divinity’ stage, but to realistically prepare you so that you are not let down by the normalcy that life goes on. Granted, it is a much fuller, happier and more well balanced life, but life goes on none the less, and you haven’t checked out of the human experience yet. You’ve still got a lot of wonderful things to come.
Build on your dream. Lift others up. Enjoy life and be free in who you truly are. And keep going, because this pursuit of enlightenment has no real finish line. For the entirety of the time that you are here on Earth you will be learning. Continue that process of continual growth. Continue to learn even simply so that you can share. THAT is the journey back to our true divine selves, and the moment we stop maintaining who we are, we risk becoming blind again.
The Cause Of Challenging Awakening Signs And Symptoms
In order to understand the cause of any difficult signs and symptoms of awakening, I refer right back to the beginning of the process. It was the initial influx of light coming into our systems that caused us to become highly sensitive, deeply empathic and psychically opened. But the truth is, that the initial influx of light (that was really ungrounding) is only needed to kick-start the process – if we stay ungrounded we are going to continue to intensify our emotions, heighten our empathy and open psychically even more, and THAT’S when we start to get really difficult symptoms. That’s when it starts to get out of control because then we are TOO opened, TOO emotional and TOO empathic. It can make normal daily life practically unbearable, and our human bodies are not designed to handle that level of light energy just yet.
Grounding is the KEY to TRANSFORMING challenging spiritual awakening symptoms
We don’t want to stop the process, and we don’t want to shut off our abilities or our compassion, but we do want to make it compatible with living a normal, happy life. So, now that we know that these symptoms are a result of being ungrounded during our awakening, we know we need to ground our energies, but there’s a problem…
Traditional Grounding Methods Often Don’t Work For Us During Spiritual Awakening
The truth is, it’s REALLY hard to get grounded during awakening, particularly because of that initial influx of high vibrational light. In fact, we might find that grounding either doesn’t work, doesn’t last or makes our symptoms much worse (like I did).
Traditional energy grounding methods DON’T WORK for us.
The reason is that we are so incredibly charged and highly sensitized by that high vibrational energy that ANYTHING that affects our energy in ANY way actually tends to charge us. Its like an electrical charger, plugged in to the socket. Unless it has something to channel that energy into, it tends to charge further and further, heating up, over heating and could eventually go on fire. Its like that with spiritual awakening. Our bodies just can’t handle that level of energy (yet).
This means that simple grounding methods like meditation, yoga, crystals and essential oils will actually have the OPPOSITE effect. Every time they affect our energies they inadvertently stimulate us further. And that’s a problem because if we can’t ground ourselves using our usual ‘go-to’ methods, our symptoms continue to get worse and more out of control and harder to handle (particularly anxiety). We need some help with it…
Want Some Help With That?
Then check out our FREE masterclass here where I’ll share EVERYTHING you need to know to reduce your awakening symptoms, ground your energies and TRANSFORM your awakening experience – FAST.
Hey! If you liked this article you might also be interested in these other popular related resources:
* 6 Reasons Why You Need Energy Grounding For Ascension
* 6 Ways Grounding Can Transform Your Spiritual Awakening!
* Grounded Awakenings
If you enjoyed this article – save this PIN for later on your spiritual awakening board!
