[00:36] Introduction
Aloha everyone, this is Dr. BethAnne Kapansky-Wright, and you are listening to the Your Heart Magic podcast.
We are talking about spiritual awakenings today; what they are, how somebody might experience or understand that kind of an awakening process, and how to navigate them.
And I will be sharing a little bit about my own experience with awakenings in my life - I have to admit that there's so much material that we could cover that this could easily be part one, part two, and part three. So, we will do a survey course today, and see what we can tap into and learn about in the time that we do have.
[01:24] What Is A Spiritual Awakening?
So, let's start with: what is a spiritual awakening? Spiritual awakening could also be called a disruption of consciousness, or an awakening of consciousness.
Imagine that you have a certain view in which you see the world. And you may or may not even know that you have this view - it has been developed - perhaps by what you've been taught, or maybe what you have perceived for yourself and what you have experienced for yourself. It is a viewpoint that you have created based on who you understand yourself to be, and what you understand your purpose to be - perhaps some of the relationships that you are in and how you understand your roles within those relationships. Maybe how you understand your health, or different factors of your identity.
And so, there's this sense that you have anchored yourself to these things that feel true for you, and certain for you. And when we anchor to ourselves, when we anchor ourselves to things that feel certain for us - without even knowing that we're doing it - we have created a set point, or a grounding point, if you will. And when an awakening process happens, usually something external will happen in our lives that comes along and knocks us off that setpoint.
And we find that just something begins to be challenged with the perspective that we had created. So, an example of this might be somebody goes through a major breakup or a divorce. And it begins to make them start to question everything about their life, everything that they thought was true about the relationship; they might start to question themselves and their understanding of who they were in the relationship. And maybe that brings them to a reflection point of “how did I get in this relationship in the first place?” And they start doing massive inventory about their upbringing, or their family of origin. Or how they understand themselves in a partnership.
And that maybe brings them to this list of “what do I really want? What do I really need? If I could create a bigger life for myself, what would it look like?”
There can be a lot of space that happens when we begin to go through this sifting and examination process. And as we sift and as we examine, often what happens is we really shake up this old certitude and perspective of how we used to see life. And we begin to gain a bigger perspective for looking at the world.
When we go through a spiritual awakening, there's often some form a transcendent component. That's the piece that makes it spiritual: something that is bigger than our limited view of ourselves, our limited identity, and our limited - I guess - our previously conceived more limited notion of how we understood our lives. And when that gets jostled or jolted, nudged or sometimes sledgehammered and cracked wide open, there is this giant sky in this field of possibility that can often open to us.
And it makes us look up. It makes us open to things like asking bigger questions about spirituality, and what might be out there, or maybe questioning the faith that we might have previously had, or what we've been taught. Maybe questioning faith in general. “Do I believe any of this?”.
So, there are these bigger questions that often come through. And what's happening in that process is we are loosening our attachment to how things were in order to create a new way of being, a new understanding of how things are now, which means the process itself usually feels very disorientating.
If you think of a time in your life where you've ever felt between worlds - maybe you have moved someplace new, and you don't know anybody yet, or you haven't unpacked yet, or you're about to move someplace new, so your house or your dorm room or your apartment, or wherever you've lived is half packed up. And you're like, “okay, I don't really belong here anymore. But I don't really know, like what I'm stepping into, and I don't know how I'm going to understand myself, or how I'm going to belong there.”
You're in between worlds. Sometimes we can feel in between identities. Maybe we've decided a relationship or career, or job isn't for us. And yet, we're like, “I don't know what is for me. What's next?”.
There's this uncertainty that comes with it.
[06:24] How Awakenings Can Feel
And psychologically, our brains and our emotional centers - our emotional set points - our emotional thermometer is how I think of it, does not like it when we start to mess with things and change the temperature; we understand ourselves through certainty.
So, there's this strange paradox in life, that even though change is nature's way, and we spend our entire life changing from birth onwards, our brain enjoys a sense of certitude. When you start messing with all of that, what people often experience is feeling like they are disoriented, they might feel out of sorts, they might feel really restless, and dissatisfied with their life, there might be this sense of bigger possibility. “I know there's something more for me. I feel like I should be doing something. But I don't know exactly what that is.”
Oftentimes, we do not have language to describe what it is that we want to create, or what we want to step into. Because we haven't created it yet. And we haven't had the formative experiences, or often the linguistics - the language - to put to our experience of self.
So, when you're experiencing something, a lot of times, we're just immersed in the experience of it; our brain might be thinking about, “wow, I feel really strange right now”, or “I feel really sad”, or “I have these feelings of grief. And I don't know why” or “I feel really excited”, and “I don't know why I'm drawn to this new thing”.
Our brain might have opinions and mental chatter about that. But it's in hindsight that we understand our journeys. And it's in reflection that we can look back and say, “oh, I didn't get it at the time. But now I see I was going through this massive internal transformation”. “And it was kind of the catalyst of that might have been the loss of x. And that led me to feel x and I went through this big change process.”
You know, when we have that perspective of hindsight, we're able to see the sequence of how our transformation happened.
When we're in the thick of it, it often just feels really messy. When I was going through what I would call my biggest spiritual awakening … you can have more than one - there might be more things in our life that kind of knock us into a new orbit and make us expand into a bigger view.
[08:53] My Biggest Awakening
But the main one that I had - that I really felt like - if I could do a timeline, that is my big X on the timeline, where I would be “that is when everything changed” - was back in 2011. And I had no idea I was going through a spiritual awakening; I wouldn't even put those words to it. I didn't fully understand what was happening with myself, I didn't really have a lot of guidance.
And I remember somebody saying to me during that process, “BethAnne, if it was anybody else, I would be a little bit concerned about it, you need to seek treatment - do you need to go talk to somebody?”, and I was working with somebody at the time - I'm a big proponent of mental health, big fan of therapy. Big fan of therapists, seeing therapists, everybody needs somebody to help them sort through their stuff.
But I remember - basically my friend was like, “if it was anybody but you, I might think they were going a little bit crazy. And I would question if this person was losing their grip on reality.” Because I was a psychologist at the time, and I have a lot of insight into myself, I was still anchored enough that she was able to say “I think you're going to be okay, but I'm kind of worried about you” because I was so disoriented and going through so much at the time. It's not always that bad.
But sometimes awakening processes can be really hard on people, because how we understood ourselves is challenged to such a degree that it often might call for some really big life changes.
And that was kind of what was coming for me. And there can be - I said earlier there was a sense of a loosening attachment.
[10:33] How Awakenings Can Physically Feel
And sometimes, these kinds of feeling-based experiences will also show up in our body as somatic or sensory information.
So, at the time, I remember feeling like I was dissolving; I have felt like I've been melting before or was kind of disintegrating - or it was going up in flames. I felt restless in my own skin, somebody might feel really tired.
They might, if they are outgrowing a space, they might feel like they just want to fall asleep every time they're in that space. And that might be the psyches way of letting them know you're really bored here. Like “there's no new life for you here, there's nothing new to experience”, there might be some symptoms that look and mimic some form of a psychological issue like some depression symptoms or anxiety symptoms.
There's not a DSM-5 manual for spiritual awakenings, or some Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for that, there's just this cluster of symptoms that I've experienced myself - and a lot of other people have reported and experienced as well - that kind of gives us some form of an evidence base, I suppose - to look at and say, “these might be common ear markers.”
Things related again, to disorientation, feeling out of sorts, feeling restless, feeling irritated. And again, those symptoms wouldn't be floating around disconnected to anything else.
This is always accompanied by somebody who is sifting through the contents of their life and have had their worldview rocked or challenged in some kind of way, whether that is externally (with a big catalyst of an event that has challenged them) or whether something in them just kind of woke up and started looking at life differently.
I usually find that it's a little bit of both, and that when our soul is ready to stretch its arms out and grow, and it's like “this is the time”, I find that the external events of our life sync up with it. So, we're given the external events to kind of - almost like an obstacle course - to work through these new feelings and skills that are coming to fruition within us.
And which comes first, I don't know, that chicken or the egg? Does it start inwardly or outwardly? I don't know that I can answer that today, I just have experienced myself that usually when something is happening internally, something externally is happening as well.
[13:16] How Do We Navigate Awakenings?
So how do we navigate this? Like I said, spiritual awakenings are innately disorienting, because we are shattering a previous view of self and a previous understanding and limitation of self. So, lose the expectation that you're going to be through it in a certain amount of time or that it's going to look a certain way.
I think, knowing when we know we are in a transformation process, and a process of transforming into something and we don't know what's on the other side, one of the best things we can do is to try and adopt an attitude and perspective that will support our transformation - as opposed to an attitude and perspective where we resist that transformation.
And what I mean by that is when we place expectations on ourselves that “what's wrong with me, I should be feeling better right now. Why haven't I worked through this? Gosh, it's been over two weeks, I can't believe I still feel so out of sorts. What's happening?” or “well, that happened three months ago or six months ago. Why is it still impacting me now?” You know, when we do that, we make it harder on ourselves.
And when you're going through that process, there's the soul’s timeline - you can trust your own process of self, but nobody can really come in and tell you it's going to end on x date.
It’s not a retrograde where we can track it on the elliptical with astrology or the ellipses, whatever that's called, and say, “okay, Mercury's popping out of retrograde on January 18”; it actually did just pop out of retrograde today - I'm recording this on the 18th.
It's not like you're in this retrograde awakening process, and you're going to pop out a retrograde on x date, you have to trust the process.
And a really good metaphor for that, I feel is the idea of being a traveler and being on a journey.
If you were to imagine taking a European vacation, back in, like the 80s, back before the age of cellphones and instant internet access, where maybe all you had was like “I’m going to backpack through Europe and I've got my travel book.”
And you knew that you were probably going to be there for the summer, you hadn't booked your return ticket, maybe you knew you wanted to go to France. And you were going to start out there. And that's where you're flying into. Maybe you knew a little bit of French, or you'd had the foresight to grab a book of Easy French Translation so that you could get around.
But a lot of it might be an adventure - that was the whole idea of backpacking through Europe - to create an experience of adventuring and of travel, where it wasn't all planned out.
And you didn't know where you were going to end up. And you didn't have this instant access to see what hotels or hostels or whatever BnBs were around you.
“Oh, and look, here's an opening here, let's book it for the night”, there was a lot more unknowing back before we had information at our fingertips. And so, people had to be more resourceful, they had to learn to be a little bit more flexible, a little bit more adaptable, a little bit more fluid.
And that is a beautiful metaphor for navigating an awakening process - staying curious, knowing that you are on this journey. Being a collector of information; I highly recommend keeping your version of a travel log, and you know, a journey log.
Keep a journal, write down what you're experiencing, write down the changes that you are witnessing in yourself and that you might be experiencing with yourself.
Make notes of what you're feeling and what's coming up for you - the things that you're questioning in your life. And the big caveat that I have from this is resist the urge to interpret the data too soon.
Again, our brain wants to know - it's going to seek certainty. So, when we are in psychological ambivalence, its discomfortable and uncomfortable for us. But it's not going to kill us.
If we can learn to sit with the discomfort and say, “well, I don't know what I don't know. And I don't know who I'm going to be at the end of this process, I can't guarantee that”, then it allows us to have a lot more grace and surrender for our process of change, for our process of awakening, and coming into this new perspective of self.
[18:06] Be A Collector: Two Things I Recommend
The last thing that I want to recommend for awakening processes - there's actually two things. One of them is to also be a collector of information.
So, you might look for other people who've been through something similar, you might know them, it might be more of an archetype, or a character and a story that you find yourself drawn to or that you really relate to, or that you resonate with. And in that case, doesn't matter that it's make-believe - stories are mirrors that help us identify themes that we might find on our own journey.
And often a theme might really light us up, or we might feel really drawn to something or drawn to a character. And people have a tendency to feel silly, you know, they have a tendency to say, “oh, well, I read, so and so's autobiography, you know, maybe it's a real story”, and “I know I have nothing in common with x. But when she said this, I really related to that.”
Don't feel silly for relating to something that another human being has been through, even if their experience is different. And don't feel silly for relating to something that you might see in a movie, or a TV show or a series that you love. Somebody wrote that those stories – they came from somewhere. They are elements of a real-life experience and real human themes in them.
So be a collector of the things that you feel drawn to - that are giving you vocabulary, and reflecting feeling-states back to you, and experiences back to you, that help you understand your experience.
And you might also find it helpful to reflect back on your own life, when you have been through any kind of change before - and maybe it wasn't a spiritual awakening. maybe you just remember going through the change of adolescence in high school, and not knowing how you would like being a freaked out freshman, and by senior year of being like, “I've got this” or maybe you were scared to go into college and you remember that journey.
It doesn't necessarily have to be something that is spiritually based. But if you can look at any major change that you've already survived in your life, it might be helpful to ask the question, like “how did I make it through? What would I go back and tell myself like if I could go back and tell myself anything as a freshman in college, what would I say?”
It's funny, if you ask people this question, sometimes we have specific advice for ourselves. But a lot of times it is like, “you're going to be okay. I promise you – trust - you're gonna be okay, you're stronger than you think you are, you're gonna survive this”, most of us will give ourselves a form of affirmative messaging.
Many times, we wouldn't tell ourselves “here’s every single thing that's going to come your way. And here's what you need to be prepared for it”, because we understand at that point that we need those experiences to become the person that we're meant to be. So, we would most likely give ourselves some encouragement.
And if it feels helpful to do that, or you want to imagine your future self, who is on the other side, and your future self knows what you don't know, and is able to guide you - what would your future self say to you? And again, it might be just something really simple, like, “you're going to be okay, and you're going to survive this”.
And the last thing that I found is that there's often a gift that comes at the end of this kind of process. So, when we come to more of a completion, and we are kind of settling into this new way of seeing things, I've often found that our intuitive gifts might open - it could be a gift of hope, or joy, or encouragement, or seeing the world through a more bigger lens of light.
There's so many spiritual gifts and talents that are out there. That's a whole other topic. But I've always found that when we allow ourselves to go down into the abyss, to dig through the mud and to develop those roots - and to do that unlearning process - that there is often light that is found on the other side, and there is new life and new growth that is found on the other side.
So, that is our survey course today on spiritual awakenings. Like I said, mine was in 2011. And in a nutshell, I had some things happen in my personal life. And I ended up waking up one day and saying “oh, no, this isn't my life.” It's like this other part of me woke up. And I went through basically everything that I just described to you, in this podcast. And I also had all these visceral kinds of cognitive images of dominoes that kept tripping over and over and over, or houses of cards falling, I kept feeling drawn to images of like the butterfly, leaving the cocoon and birds flying free.
And, you know, if a shirt had a bird on it, I would buy it. If I could find something with a butterfly on it, or an inspirational quote, like, I wanted that. I kept seeing this image of Alice in Wonderland, having like the eat me potion or whatever, the ‘drink me’ one and getting too big and popping out of the house that she was in and kind of outgrowing the space that she previously inhabited.
And so, I had all of those things, and it was disorienting, and it was disruptive. And I had all that physical stuff that I mentioned about feeling very displaced from myself and feeling out of sorts and displaced from my life. And ultimately, it led me to make some really big massive changes where I ended up basically starting all over again.
And when I came out the other side, it definitely marked a point in time where I came out with a bigger spiritual perspective, and intuitive gifts, and the gift of joy. That was one of the gifts that was there for me for about six months. I just felt so joyful. Like I survived, you know, and there is light and it's beautiful, trust and lean into it. I was a believer. So that was me in a nutshell. And with that, we will wrap up for today.
[24:36] Next Episode
Next week, we will be talking about the question, “why can't we be mystic-minded?” and I will be sharing a little bit of my experience with what mystic-minded means to me and why I think this is such an important question for us to be asking at this point in time.
And until then,
Be love. Be well. Be you. Be magic.