20 Signs That You May Be Having A Spiritual Awakening
“Some people awaken spiritually without ever coming into contact with any meditation technique or any spiritual teaching. They may awaken simply because they can’t stand the suffering anymore.”
Going through a spiritual awakening is scary, isolating, challenging, confronting, and at the same time a beautiful and exciting experience. The process of spiritual awakening is the beginning of truly living versus trudging through a conditioned, limited, and fearful existence. Until something in life shakes up our world enough to make us ask some tough questions, we wander through life searching for happiness and fulfillment in the outer world through achievement, money, fame, power, and the accumulation of possessions.
While it is not usually a happy event that triggers our awakening, it is extremely beneficial that we have in fact begun to wake up, whatever the cause. Most of the time, we hit up against something painful in life that serves as a catalyst for our awakening. Something very disruptive happens that shakes us from our slumber, disrupting everything we know to be true. Suddenly our world is completely turned upside down, and we don’t know where or who we are anymore.
Some examples of events that might trigger the spiritual awakening process are the death of a loved one, job loss, a major illness, an accident, a breakup, or bankruptcy. Other major life transitions that could trigger awakening are menopause, childbirth, retirement, or the loss of a parent. These painful events have a way of creating upheaval in our lives on many levels. These challenging times are times of initiation. They offer us an opportunity to become more of who we truly are and to come into our true power as spiritual beings.
We suddenly become hyper-aware of the fact that the way we have been living simply does not work for us anymore. We wake up to the fact that we have felt unhappy, unfulfilled, depressed, anxious, and perhaps even miserable, but we distracted ourselves so well that we didn’t notice until the current catastrophe made us stop and take stock of our lives. We know that we cannot go back to the way we were living.
A doorway to a new path has appeared to us and with it, the opportunity for a new way of life is being offered to us. Our spirit is crying out for us to take notice and change our lives and become more alive. We can accept the call to this new adventure or we can choose to continue to live in the way that we have been living, which is not LIVING at all. The old way was one of merely existing. Now we know that there is far more for us and that it is possible to actually thrive. We must choose wisely even though it means that we must venture into the unknown.
As we stand at this crossroads, we recognize that this is a very important decision we are about to make, and while we are afraid, we know that we must choose wisely. We know that to go back to the life we have known, the life of fear, limitation, and consumption is the same as choosing spiritual death. We know well what that way holds for us, and that fulfillment and inner peace are not on the menu. It is just more of the same -more striving, more fear, more feelings of not-enough-ness, of separation, of meaninglessness, more belief in limitation, and more merely surviving. We know there must be more to life.
Don’t Go Back To Sleep
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you,
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the door-sill
Where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open
Don’t go back to sleep.
~ Rumi
Indeed there is so much more to life than we realized before our awakening. A whole world begins to open up for us, and more is to be revealed. Once we say “yes” to the spiritual journey, it offers us a constant unfolding of a new world. In this new world, everything we have been taught begins to be illuminated as being false. Ideas of separation, of lack, of not enough-ness, of believing that life struggles, of having to strive and push for what we need…all of these fear-based ideas about life begin to fall away. We start to see through the illusion.
We wake up to the truth of life and to the truth of who we are. We start to understand that separation is a misperception, and that we already ARE everything we need…it all exists within us! This is an exciting and scary time, as there is work to be done. Years of conditioning and belief in lack must be transformed so that we can begin to live in the way we were meant to live.
As we fully commit to our spiritual awakening journey, we start to ask completely new questions that we never before thought to ask, like “who am I”, “what is the meaning of life?” and “Is this all there is?” You may be searching for a connection to the divine and to learn why you are here. Our curiosity and the asking of completely new questions that were just recently beyond the scope of our understanding now are begging to be answered. Our search has begun.
20 Signs of Spiritual Awakening
There are emotional, psychological and sometimes physical signs of spiritual awakening. Here are twenty of the most common signs.
1. You Feel Like Your Life is Empty
Everything that felt so fulfilling to you before suddenly seems empty and devoid of meaning. Now you feel as if you are just “going through the motions” and receiving nothing back.
2. You See Through the Emptiness of Our Society
You start to tune into the fact that the way we are taught to live and be is essentially empty and meaningless. You feel lost and like there must be more to life than what you have been told.
3. You Have Anxiety
There is a constant undercurrent of anxiety in your day to day life. You know that something is deeply wrong, but you don’t know what it is. Everything feels off and it is scary because all of your typical ways of handling life no longer work at all.
4. You Feel Stuck and Like Your Life Is No Longer “Working”
You keep trying to do things the way you always have and yet nothing works the way it used to. The things that you used to find fun and enjoyable now seem empty and without meaning. You feel like you don’t know what to do, so you feel stuck.
5. You Have a Desire To Declutter Your Home and Your Life
You find yourself feeling irritated by all of the things around you. You realize how much “stuff” you have accumulated in the process of trying to feel happy, and that it never worked. Now you see it as clutter that is blocking your ability to feel at peace. You may also realize that habits, past times, and even relationships have now become “clutter” and do not add any real value to your life. Whatever is not nourishing to you has to go.
6. You See That What You Have Been Taught Is A Lie
You see that what you have been taught about yourself is all a lie based on limitation and fear. While you still feel caught in these old limiting beliefs, you see clearly now that they are in fact false. You want to learn how to live in a different way.
7. You Feel Like You Are On a Never-Ending Hamster Wheel of Striving
You start to see through the goal-oriented nature of our society that has us endlessly striving for the next thing that will supposedly bring us everlasting peace and happiness. You awaken to the fact that this is the ultimate lie that just keeps us grasping for more and never actually satiates us.
8. You Crave More Meaning In Your Life
Your life feels void of any real meaning. You feel as if you are wandering from hour to hour, day to day, almost on autopilot, doing the same mindless tasks over and over. You start to wonder what it is all for. You want more depth and meaning in your life and desire to bring deep meaning to all that you do.
9. You Start To Wonder What Your True Purpose Is
You realize that if you had some higher purpose that you were committed to that your life might be more fulfilling. You have a new desire to help others or to bring beauty to the world.
10. You Feel More Sensitive
You feel everything more than ever before. You are sensitive to the moods and emotions of others. You feel their feelings as if they were your own. You feel things in your body in ways that you never did before. You feel like a sponge, soaking up the energy that is all around you.
11. You Can No Longer Stand Your Bad Habits
You wake up to the fact that you have habits that have kept you distracted from your emotional pain and feelings of separateness. You know that these habits cause you more suffering and you are ready to let them go and face what you have been trying to escape. You are ready to accept responsibility for your life and happiness.
12. You Long For A Connection To the Divine
You have an innate sense that there is a sacred essence to life, but you feel disconnected from it. You crave your own intimate connection with the divine.
13. Your Conversations Seem Shallow and Pointless
You are bored with surface-level conversations. This way of communicating that once was something you considered fun is now empty and pointless. It feels like a waste of time. You yearn for deeper conversations about things that matter to you.
14. You No Longer Resonate With Your Friends
You feel cognitive dissonance when you spend time with your friends. You feel like you are on completely different wavelengths and like you have grown apart. You long for deeper connections with like-minded people that are meaningful and deep.
15. You Feel Isolated and Alone
You feel like you are alone in your new perception of things. You feel like there is nobody in your life you can talk to about the things you are learning. You long for a spiritual community of like-minded people on the same journey.
16. You Feel Depressed
You feel chronically sad and depressed and hopeless at times. You have lost any joy that you may have once had. Life seems pointless and dull.
17. You Realize That You Don’t Like Who You Are
You don’t like yourself and who you have become. You may feel like you failed somehow, like you missed some crucial thing you were meant to do or that something is inherently wrong with you, like you need to be “fixed” somehow. Instead of looking at the beliefs you have held as being potentially false, you blame yourself.
18. Your Intuition Is Increasing
You are receiving more and more ‘hits’ from your intuition. You have symbolic dreams, hunches, you feel energy from others and have a strong sense of what direction to go in the moment. You want help in learning to navigate this new sense more consciously.
19. You Start To See Through the Illusions of the Material World
You begin to understand that the pursuit of money, power, and success in the material world is not fulfilling at all. You see that even as you get one thing that you thought would somehow fulfill you, another gets added to the list. These things never satiate you for long.
20. You Want To Help Others and To Make the World A Better Place
You recognize that there are people in pain in the world, and you want to help somehow. You have a deep desire to bring love, and beauty into the world in whatever way you can.
Spiritual Awakening Is An Ongoing Journey
The spiritual awakening journey is an ongoing one. It does not end. Once we set foot on the path of spiritual self-discovery, life continues to illuminate more for us all the time. We are given opportunities to continue to open more deeply to ourselves, to life and to new perspectives as we go along. We are given the chance to release all that no longer serves us on our path, to choose new goals and desired outcomes. We start to become conscious creators, creating our lives on purpose. The path of spiritual awakening is a journey of creativity – of creating ourselves anew in a way that works for us, a way that brings us lasting peace and fulfillment.
Support
Support on the spiritual awakening journey is key. Think of it as you would any journey into a foreign land that you’ve never visited. You don’t know your way around this new terrain, so you need a map and a good guide to show you the way. There are many wonderful spiritual paths and teachers to assist you in doing the personal healing work necessary to transform any false beliefs and ego constructs that would block you from full integration that spiritual awakening can be such a vital part of.
