Dear Julia:
About 18 months ago, I experienced a profound spiritual awakening. I found myself totally caught up in exploring spiritual matters, and began to have a lot of psychic and mystical experiences. Around the same time, however, all sorts of things began to fall apart. Before this time, I was healthy, basically happy, in a good marriage, had a good job, a number of friends, etc. After this, I suffered a number of health problems, some crazy experiences with friends, growing dissatisfaction with my job, and now my marriage is strained to the breaking point. I've read that things often fall apart when you're going through a spiritual awakening. If being "spiritual" is a good thing, why would it have such negative effects?
- Becky
Dear Becky:
I think we'd all agree that "growth" is positive in nature, but that doesn't mean it's always easy or pleasant. I like to call what you're dealing with "spiritual growing pains."
It's natural for everything in your life to change as YOU begin to change on a fundamental level, but this doesn't have to be painful or unpleasant. Any pain that arises is due to resistance of change. For example, if a girl bound her feet to prevent them from growing, it would be painful. If, however, she let herself go barefoot or bought new shoes whenever the old ones became tight, the growth process would be painless. The key to a smooth, pleasant journey is to allow ourselves to grow and let our lives flow in new directions.
The reason so much is changing so fast is because you are basically renovating your life from the ground level up. Imagine your life is a house that you built some thirty or forty years ago. At that time, you installed all the newest appliances and windows, chose a floor plan that was in vogue then, and selected a very hip color scheme rich with earth tones and shades of gold and avocado green.
Now, however, you're waking up to a new era, and are renovating that house completely. You're feeling drawn to a whole new look and feel, one that is light with blues, greens and purples, higher ceilings, and lots of light. This shift is happening naturally as you awaken spiritually; the colors of your life are changing, your space is growing lighter. However, you still have those old furnishings and appliances from the early 70's, orange shag carpet, and all sorts of other "stuff" you've accumulated over the years. The more you change on a fundamental, spiritual level, the more the contrast between "who you really are" and all the stuff in your life will grow.
You have this wonderful, light new space, but you still have lots of dark, heavy old stuff in it. Things no longer feel so right, and they certainly don't "match" who you are becoming. The more attached you are to what you already have in your life, the more painful awakening will tend to be. If you resist letting go of anything that is no longer a good match for you, you'll find yourself struggling to adjust, either by holding on to what you're attached to, or holding yourself back from becoming someone new.
This creates a lot of inner and outer tension. When we're not conscious of this tension or we have resistance to letting go, we often begin to subconsciously act in ways that will ultimately set us free. For example, let's say you really love that couch you bought 40 years ago, and you don't want to give it up, or you don't believe you can "afford" to for some reason. One day, you may "trip" and spill red wine all over it, or "accidentally" set the whole house on fire. As you might imagine, this feels like quite a crisis.
If this metaphorical couch is a long-time relationship, you may begin to feel inexplicably dissatisfied with it, begin to pick fights, or "forget" to call this person back, etc. If you're more conscious, you'll realize that you feel a an urge to set yourself free from this relationship, but you may still feel guilty for doing what you want to do out of some sense of obligation. Until you can honor your true feelings, the tension continue to build toward eruption.
To complicate things even further, your friends and loved ones will be feeling a shift in you too. Some will feel very threatened by this, like you are "growing apart" or they are losing you. Some may even feel angry or rejected that you are changing on them. This is understandable. Imagine that you hate the color purple - it just isn't you - and you come home to find your spouse has redecorated the whole house in shades of lilac, plum and mauve. You would probably feel pretty upset - like your whole world was being turned upside down, and no one had even bothered to ask your opinion about it.
Because spiritual growth is a natural process of shifting into a higher vibration, if you resist going with the flow, things of a lower vibration may begin to break down on you. By way of our ongoing metaphor, if you're nostalgic about those old avocado green appliances and you resist buying new, as you shift into a higher vibration, they may start breaking down, which will create a sense of crisis. If instead you replace them when it "feels right," you'll always have things that "work" in your life. (Instead of "appliances," please remember we're talking about obsolete relationships, activities, beliefs, etc.)
On a physical level, people are often dismayed by the health problems that erupt just when they begin to seriously work on "healing" their lives. While focusing on problems is never wise and can indeed spark more of them, we are always making progress on some level. By becoming conscious of what is happening on subtler levels, we naturally begin to release issues we've been lugging around for years and sometimes for many lifetimes.
We are all carrying lots of old wounds with us. We might say these are "repressed" issues, though sometimes, it's more like they were simply pushed aside because we were not prepared to fully deal with them when they occurred. As we become stronger and wiser, these issues will rise up to be healed and released. If we panic or resist these experiences, we lower our vibration, which slows down the healing process and leads to struggle and pain. If we trust that whatever is happening must have a positive purpose and we stay in a high vibration and expect good things to follow, we can quickly move through these shifts and into new well-being.
It's important to note that not everyone experiences a sense that everything is falling apart when they go through a spiritual awakening. In fact, some people are positively exhilarated by all the changes that unfold at such times, and that is because they wisely make a habit of embracing change. Since spiritual growth is evolutionary in nature, it's only reasonable to assume that things will get better and better and better. If we expect that whatever comes our way will somehow prove positive, it's easy to trust and go with the flow.
Faith is the key to a smooth, easy journey. Relax. Trust in life as a natural journey of positive change. Trust your own feelings to safely guide you to whatever you need. If you no longer like your career, give yourself permission to follow your bliss. If a certain relationship brings you down, let it go. If you embrace the changes sweeping in now as ultimately beneficial, instead of feeling like your life is falling apart, you'll see that it is actually being rebuilt to better serve the ever more wonderful spiritual being you are becoming.
- Julia