Spiritual Awakening: Definition, Symptoms and Techniques

What is Spiritual Awakening?

Spiritual awakening is a natural and necessary stage in the evolution of your consciousness and the maturation of your ego. It is the process of evolving your consciousness towards more spiritual states, in which you experience an empowering sense of unity with the greater whole and a higher power and feel a deep, lasting sense of peace in response. Symptoms of spiritual awakening include a profound foundational shift in identity and worldview: it can be as if you are waking up from an illusory, dreamlike reality.

Spiritual awakening can be triggered spontaneously in response to the following:

Inner growth work and meditation.
Mindfulness practice.
Uncontainable inner experience.
Transcendental peak experiences.
Life-threatening or life-changing situations.
Evolutionary crises that require spiritual intervention.
When all things come together over time to show the undeniable spiritual meaning of life.

Spiritual Awakening Symptoms

The symptoms of spiritual awakening can vary depending on the person, but the common theme is a deep foundational shift in identity and worldview involving an empowering sense of essential unity with all things, or an empowering sense of connectedness to a greater whole or higher power. With the expanded sense of identity and an expanded perspective of wholeness, the ego’s narrow, self-centred nature evolves into a more compassionate one, in which a deeper awareness of world suffering gives rise to the impulse for humanitarianism and world service.

Here are 22 signs and symptoms of spiritual awakening.

You question who you really are and search for your true nature.
Your sense of identity starts to transform and expand beyond your narrow ego self.
Your sense of reality starts to shift, as if there is more to this world than material reality.
You feel connected to a greater purpose or higher power that is much larger than yourself.
You experience a sense of the essential oneness and interconnectedness of all things.
You move from a separate, ego-based perspective of life to one of wholeness.
You may explore spiritual paths as you seek to understand spiritual reality.
You question the foundation of your life as you desire to find deeper meaning, purpose and fulfilment.
You re-evaluate your beliefs, values and lifestyle to consider the greater whole and the spiritual component of life.
You question reality and your conformity to social and cultural norms as you seek greater authenticity.
You feel like you don’t fit into mainstream, materialistic society and you start to let go of the people and things that aren’t in alignment with your spiritual values.
You become less attached to material possessions and superficial living as your values become more spiritually focused.
You have a new sense that life is magical and beautiful.
You may search for healing as you recover from the suffering of a non-spiritual lifestyle.
You become more mindful and present.
You experience a sense of inner peace that you seek to maintain and come back to.
You experience greater compassion, gratitude, and love for all life.
Your intuition and inner wisdom increase, and you may receive flashes of spiritual insight.
You may develop a desire and a vision to serve humanity and the planet and to raise the collective consciousness and bring greater light to the world.
You may experience synchronicities (meaningful coincidences).
You may experience altered and expanded states of consciousness, such as mystical or out-of-body experiences, transcendental peak experiences, and unitive states of consciousness, and may have a sense of reality being multidimensional.
You may become aware that you have spiritual gifts or unusual abilities, such as psychic abilities, the ability to sense subtle energies, or the experience of receiving spiritual visions and inner downloads of spiritual information.

Spiritual Awakening or Mental Breakdown?

Spiritual awakening can sometimes be preceded by a mental breakdown, but it is not itself a mental breakdown. The major symptom of a mental breakdown is a sudden, overwhelming, and distressing sense of crisis that disrupts psychological functioning. This breakdown can act as a catalyst for rebuilding and reorganising the self. During this period of rebuilding the personality, there is an opportunity to seek spiritual meaning and purpose in response to deep inner questioning about the foundations of the self and the purpose of life. This can lead to spiritual awakening, particularly when consciously using spiritual awakening techniques.

In some cases, the mental breakdown can be precipitated by a spiritual emergency, which occurs when the personality breaks down due to the need for a new spiritual foundation and greater spiritual health. The psychological crisis that sometimes precedes spiritual awakening is known as the “dark night of the soul”. It is a period when a person feels deeply alone and experiences despair, loss of meaning in life, and existential dread.

Spiritual Awakening or Psychosis?

Spiritual awakening is sometimes confused with psychosis by those who have a cognitive bias against spirituality, particularly when the symptoms of spiritual awakening include a sudden eruption of spiritual experience. However, psychosis is a severe mental disorder that interferes with psychological functioning. It is characterised by an unstable sense of self and an unstable and problematic sense of reality. In contrast, most spiritual awakenings are part of a positive reorganisation of the self upon a more stable foundation—an evolution of consciousness with a healthier sense of reality that results in significantly greater wellbeing.

In rare cases, psychosis can include a disorganised spiritual awakening. In such cases, the disorganised spiritual elements are often pathologised as delusions and hallucinations due to the chaotic instability of the self and the way the mental illness distorts spiritual experience. What is actually happening here is that the self is out of control and is built on unhealthy foundations, but somehow the veils of material reality have been parted to expose the spiritual nature of reality that the disorganised self cannot interpret, process, or integrate healthily. What is needed in this situation is deep psychological healing and a positive and healthy integration of spiritual experience, rather than the pathologising of it due to cognitive and cultural biases. After all, who decides what is reality and what is delusion?

How to Approach Your Spiritual Awakening

Spiritual awakening can be facilitated by adopting an attitude of non-resistance to it and enlarging your perspective of the events you are going through to incorporate the spiritual context. The spiritual context will support your inner growth work and help you to understand the inner experiences and symptoms that require your spiritual awakening for their processing. For example, if your materialistic life experiences are reaching a crisis or are becoming so unfulfilling that they lead to depression, consider how you might need to dedicate your life to your spiritual values and explore what these spiritual values are and what needs to change in your life to embody them.

One of the great questions that you can ask is:

What needs to change for me to grow spiritually and align with my spiritual self?

For some people, there is an embarrassment about being spiritual around non-spiritual people because non-spiritual people can have a cognitive bias against spirituality. The embarrassment will manifest if there is a conformity bias with such people. What needs to change in this scenario is the conformity bias so that the embarrassment can be released and the spiritual person can be authentic.

To clear this conformity bias, it is crucial to acknowledge your conformity bias and to choose to perceive things differently by challenging the perceptions and assumptions involved in your conformity bias. Question the reasoning so that you can clear your reaction and change your behaviour. Mindfulness can assist you in this process, along with a commitment to your authenticity and spiritual truth. For example, if your conformity bias causes you to think, I can’t show them I’m spiritual, they would think I’m mad, then challenge the validity of the limiting belief behind the thought and choose an alternative belief that frees you. For more on this skill, see The Art of Critical Thinking: Key Steps to Free the Mind.

Spiritual Awakening Techniques

The following techniques for spiritual awakening can help you develop the ability to be more present to spiritual reality.

1. Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the practice of deliberately bringing your attention back from your thoughts and anchoring it in the present moment with full awareness. The mindfulness of breathing meditation is a simple technique for bringing your attention back and anchoring it on your breath in the present moment. As you bring your attention back in this way, you can enter a metacognitive state in which you are your observer self and are no longer identified with and entangled in your mental events. By disengaging from the trance of automatic thinking, you can be more fully conscious and at peace, and can create an inner space for attuning to spiritual reality and allowing spiritual insight to emerge in a way that would have been difficult had you been entangled in your reactive thoughts.

2. Meditation

Meditation allows you to enter an inner space for spiritual connection to be made. This technique benefits from the metacognitive state developed in mindfulness, and so can be prefaced with a brief mindfulness practice. While in meditation, you can connect with your underlying spiritual self by returning to it in your centre. My Meditation to Find Your True Self is a good introduction to this, and my Guided Meditation for Spiritual Attunement and Lightbody Activation and Guided Meditation for Divine Attunement and Clearing in the Light are an extension of this.

Another good meditation technique is called sky gazing. This is an open-eyed meditation in which you gaze up at the expanse of the open sky without distraction. A clear blue sky is best. As you sustain your gaze and awareness in this way, and return your attention to it when it wanders, you release yourself from thought so that pure, nondual awareness starts to emerge, along with an experience of your infinite presence. You are then not just gazing with your mind. You become one with your true spiritual nature and experience your essential unity with all that is.

3. Visualisation

Visualisation, like mindfulness and meditation, can be used as a technique for spiritual awakening. The imagination is a doorway to spiritual experience. Through the imagination, and particularly the use of spiritual symbols, you can bridge the conscious, unconscious, and superconscious realms of experience to assist your spiritual awakening. A guided visualisation, such as my Visualisation to Find Your True Self, can take you on an inner journey to explore your true spiritual self.

4. Light Flushing

In my post Activating Your Light Body, I describe how light flushing can be used in meditation for purifying your mind and subtle energetic body and raising your energetic vibration to assist spiritual awakening. The technique involves daily meditation on spiritual light infusing your being to clear and dissolve impurities within it, so that you are radiant with pure light and rising in vibration to match that of your light body or spiritual self.

5. Calling in Your Light Body

Your light body, or spiritual body, has a subtle energetic connection to your physical self. As I describe in my post Activating Your Light Body, you can receive the light of your light body more strongly by consciously attuning to it in meditation and calling it into you through intention and visualisation, while also raising your energetic vibration to match its frequency. The objective of this technique is to integrate your light body more fully with your physical being for your spiritual awakening and self-realisation.

6. Practising Compassion

Compassion is an elevated state of consciousness that you can cultivate as a technique to more easily shift into an awakened spiritual state. Compassion is a heart-based desire and natural instinct to relieve suffering, including the root cause of suffering, which is separation from spiritual being. It enables you to be present to life and to step for a moment outside the reactive stories of living to touch the spiritual being of another. It is the embodiment of the realisation that all of life is one, and that we are blessed when we help the lives of others in a pure, heart-based way. With mindfulness, you can move beyond indifference and judgement and meet another person or being in a space of shared life and interbeing, where compassion can unfold. For more on practising compassion, see my post 9 Powerful Benefits of Compassion.

7. Cultivating Gratitude

Gratitude is another elevated state of consciousness that can be used as a technique to assist you in shifting into a more spiritual state. Cultivating gratitude helps you to reintegrate with the greater whole and to realise—with an attitude of gratitude—that life is a magical blessing that can support you. It involves unwrapping the gift of life so that you can be present to its sacred gift. My Gratitude Meditation can help you harness the power of mindfulness to develop gratitude for the blessings of your life.

Spiritual Awakening is Necessary for Full Health

Spiritual awakening is necessary for full health as it restores your sense of wholeness and establishes spiritual health. Spiritual health is your integration with the greater whole of life and your embodiment of your awakened spiritual nature. By living and embodying this wisdom with greater presence and mindfulness, you can free yourself from the blocks and distorted patterns of thinking and living that cause suffering and illness. Your greater spiritual identity is the greatest whole that you are embedded in, and only by awakening spiritually can you fully serve yourself and others by honouring the true nature of your connectedness within this greater whole.

By embodying greater spiritual wholeness with the help of the spiritual awakening techniques described above, you heal from the isolated sense of self and fragmentary worldview that traps you in suffering. You are able to tap the resourcefulness and support of your spiritual self and the greater whole. By expanding your identity beyond the limits of your local ego self into the greater spiritual whole of life, you free yourself from your identification with a narrow or fragmented self and the distorted, illusory-based thinking that this creates. You heal from the existential separation and egoism that can so easily give rise to conflict, stress, anxiety, depression, and destructive living.

To help focus more on your spiritual health and develop your spirituality, read this checklist for spiritual health and consider how you can awaken more spiritually by implementing its items.

The Role of Spiritual Community in Spiritual Awakening

As I explain in Spiritual Community, spiritual community empowers spiritual awakening through the mutual support of like-minded people committed to exploring and honouring their spiritual nature. In spiritual community, you no longer have to repress your true spiritual nature and can more easily awaken to, accept, and ground your spiritual self into the physical world.

A spiritual community can begin with a spiritual group or network that is committed to mutual support. With this kind of support, you can work with others to awaken spiritually and integrate spirituality more into your physical lives. As a result, you can disentangle from non-spiritual societal norms and live more of a spiritual life, grounding your light into your daily physical activities and evolving them to reflect your highest spiritual values.

Conforming to societal norms that conflict with your spiritual values and potential is counterproductive for spiritual awakening and fulfilment because it leads to the frustration and repression of your spiritual self. It is not a bad thing to break free from the old patterns. What awaits is something more fulfilling than you would ever have known before.

Spiritual Awakening and the Activation of Your Light Body

Spiritual awakening doesn’t stop. When you awaken spiritually and continually work on your spiritual development with the techniques mentioned in this post, you can consciously awaken to your light body, which is your light-filled presence around you and within you. Awakening to and integrating your light body into your physical being is necessary for embodying your spiritual nature as part of your spiritual evolution. Here you are grounding more of your spiritual light into form by being it and expressing it in all aspects of your life. By doing so, you can more easily clear old distorted patterns and imprints, heal in the light, and live with greater love, compassion, wisdom, and peace. You can also become a light to the world, and people will notice your radiance.

Next Step: to discuss your spiritual awakening and what techniques can be tailored to your personal development to safely propel your spiritual journey forward, book an empowering Guidance Call with me.