Regarding Spiritual Awakening

Many people in the world are going through a personal Awakening, each in their own way. Awakening simply means just that: waking up. From the collectively accepted dreams, goals, ways of being, and living a life with meaning – a meaning with significance to yourself. It can also mean the exploration and resolution of a deep existential doubt, a question or issue your Soul has.

I’m not referring to more heavily esoteric concepts like Ascension, Enlightenment, and so forth. Ascension roughly means graduating from the game altogether.

I’m taking solely about the process by which one is cruising along in life, on autopilot so to speak, and then decides to shift gears and live differently, more truthful, taking charge of the direction and purpose of its life.

So let’s talk a bit about this thing called Awakening.

Awakening doesn’t necessarily involve spirituality – although it’s often associated with it, or it’s involved in the equation in some way. Because for you to detach from the collectively accepted values, there must be something else for you to hold on to, even if subconsciously, inside of yourself.

But what keeps a person from living a life with meaning?

Mostly, it’s fear. A great fear, one that stifles every movement of most humans, is the fear of not having money. Fear of not being successful. The belief that being different, going on an adventure, taking risks, or simply following your heart, won’t give you money. That this concept is an unrealistic delusion. And surely enough, if you go out into the world to prove this point of view, you won’t have much difficulty with your task.

But there are other fears. Fear of people not liking you. Fear of being rejected by those you love. Fear of being hurt and pursued by institutions for saying different things and behaving differently. Fear of being harmed because of something unexpected, unknown, or uncontrollable.

And then there are also other things. Sometimes, one confuses the choice of living a life with meaning with selfishness. We have this archetype of the free giving saint and the sacrificing martyr, and we got to a point, despite our relative modern wealth and technological standards, that we feel guilty inside for taking to ourselves our own fun, our own freedom, or our own money. We confuse kindness with sacrifice.

Other times, we fear that living a life of being excited and busy, may eventually make the ones you love detach from you because they don’t want to accompany your lifestyle or your choices. Many times we feel that being in our zone makes you automatically a lone wolf, a strong-headed person, or at least someone difficult to live with. There’s this underlying stigma that doing what you want comes at a cost, and that doing things takes you farther away from who you care about.

So what happens is that many people give priority to the family, friends, having children, and the social and emotional aspect of human life. They say that they want that, as opposed as a life of “professional success” but with no Love. And so they choose family and relationships over following a passion or a dream.

It is possible that your actual dream is having kids and prospering in a family. Regardless, Love is a core part of existence, perhaps the only truly important one.

But what people often neglect is that, by forfeiting their dreams, they are giving up on their own Spirit. Hence, once they make that decision, from that point forward, they slowly and progressively die on the inside, often not realizing it. They lose connection with their own Soul. And they often blame their choice, and their growing anxiety and numbness, on others. On the ones they love, on the children they gave birth to, on the parents who didn’t taught or support them enough. And that angst and unspoken frustration then gets passed on from generation to generation.

And at this point, how is your relationship with the ones you love, with your family? How is the level or love or connection with the ties you created? How did choosing human attachment over meaning improved Love in your life? Most human ties are based not so much on love – or not only Love – but also on a great, deep degree of obligation, dependency, guilt, debt, owning, and entrapment. And we adapted and accepted Love that way, because there weren’t many other solutions. But because of it, oftentimes the choice for family and Love ends up resulting in the opposite: having less freedom, being more trapped, limited, and confined.

One of the most common things in Awakening is the willingness to change jobs, or questioning the notion of having a job altogether. Not a temporary whim, a political opinion, or a hypothetical, optional wondering – but the inescapable inevitability of liberation from a suffocating condition. And the first pointy thing turned against you is inevitably the necessity to support your spouse, your children, a family member in need, to pay a debt, your mortgage, your obligations and lifestyle. The things that existed and were built upon your previous life choices. And this is a massive, major challenge all by itself.

So you see, Awakening, and desiring to have a meaningful life, are no simple things. Because doing so often go against this personal complex web of your own modalities of each of these beliefs and feelings. And it’s precisely going up against, challenging, and deconstructing these very beliefs, that the process consists of.

For this reason alone, while there’s not a specific formula, Awakening is most often difficult. Or to use a not so frightening word, challenging. But folks, I’m not going to play around it: it’s tough. Don’t feel alone on that one.

It’s not like you are living your life perfectly well and successful, and one day you try Awakening out of boredom or curiosity. The motivation for you starting to awaken is not being in a state where you feel well and things are good, but quite the opposite: things not working out, problems accumulating, stressful situations piling up, or at the very least, the nagging sensation of things not being quite right. This is what eventually sets you on a quest to find answers – your answers – and to live more free.

Awakening, regardless of how it’s lived, is always spiritual-based at its core.

You have a Soul. Everyone you know does. And wherever someone is Awakening, it’s because its Spirit/Soul deemed it was time.

So things start happening in your life. Things that start going over your head, above your beliefs, your identity, and the things you contructed around you. If you were allowed to think a lot about it, a great degree of the process would be blocked by you. The mind, trained to find security and identity, would think about it too much and attempt to find answers and arrive to compromises, like it always did. But Awakening is not negotiable. So the things happening have a degree of unpredictability, of not being controllable, so your mind can’t grab them cleanly and get a hold of them, you see. It’s a process that, while personal, is in a way out of your control.

Looking back, you will realise the whole thing started because of a part of you that was restless. Part of you was asking for a solution, for resolution, for answers. And because energy, matter, and reality all respond to your consciousness, the solutions, and change, started coming your way. It’s just that the mind doesn’t like to not know things, and the prospect of loosing things. However, since Awakening is oftentimes a process of deconstruction, it goes against the mind, and it can hurt.

Out of the process, comes a promise of a new kind of life, more genuine, more energised, more truthful. It’s happening because something awoke inside of you, and it can’t take it anymore. So there’s a coming in touch of yourself with who you really are, who you are supposed to be, and with you are supposed to be doing.

And while there are no guarantees of a successful-happy end at the closing of that story, you won’t do it for the guarantees anymore. Because that’s part of what held you back before. You’ll do it because you want to be in alignment. You’ll do it because you can’t take anymore of the rest. You’ll do it to be free.

With Awakening oftentimes comes the spiritual realization that life is not random. That things you experience are connected and have meaning to you and your life. And with the realization that there is meaning, comes a deep desire to be in touch with that meaning, being a part of it.

That is Awakening.