The Woman Reclaimed

What Is Spiritual Awakening: Stage One

There comes a moment in life, sometimes subtle and sometimes seismic, when the life you built around yourself no longer feels like it fits. It rarely arrives with clarity. You begin to question yourself, your actions, your goals, and your definitions of success. The structures through which you built your identity and your life meaning begin to collapse. Questions arise such as “why does success no longer feel fulfilling” or “why do I feel disconnected from myself”. Pursuits that once felt engaging begin to feel hollow or devoid of meaning. There is a marked loss of interest in activities you once enjoyed. Your perception of yourself and the world around you begins to shift and this shift can stir a sense of deep self-doubt. This often surfaces as the unsettling question, “what is wrong with me?”. My dear, there is nothing wrong with you. In both mystical traditions and modern-day psychology, this moment is recognized as the beginning of spiritual awakening.

Simply stated, spiritual awakening is a process whereby you begin to suspect there is more to you than what you do during your day. You begin to question who you are behind the roles that you play, and this can be deeply confusing. For me, a practicing attorney with a successful long-term career, I felt I had done everything right. I achieved. I endured. I adapted. But I was unhappy. I was tired. I no longer felt the desire to practice law. In the recesses of my mind, I began to wonder what was driving this dissent. I spent my life operating as a mother, a wife, a girlfriend, a fixer, a caregiver and a hardworking career minded woman. But somewhere along the way, I began to sense there had to be more to me than the “acts” and “roles” I played day to day. As I began to wonder “who am I that resides behind those things”, a gateway opened to something far greater than I could have ever imagined. 

For a while, I felt lost and untethered. If I am not “an attorney” then who am I beneath the title? The question shook the foundation of how I understood myself. As a child, becoming an attorney was the only dream I could name. As an adult looking back, I have no idea where that desire arose, only that it felt unquestioned and absolute at the time. Perhaps I felt I had something to prove. After all, I could never be good enough unless I became “somebody”. When you become “somebody”, people will love and respect you, I told myself, not understanding until much later that my need to be that “somebody” was driven by a deep-seated lack of self-love and self-esteem. The more I questioned my patterns and behaviors, the deeper I descended into myself and into what is known as “ego destabilization”. This process is often triggered by life-changing events. My triggering event was an amalgamation of long-term chronic illness, severe career burnout, and becoming an empty nester. No longer having children in my home that needed my care, my thoughts and emotions naturally turned inward. This didn’t happen out of compulsion or boredom. It happened quite naturally as a result of finally having the space to listen and care for myself. 

A spiritual awakening is a deep shift in awareness. It is a movement beyond the ego and conditioning into the recognition of the truer, more authentic self that has always existed within you. This truer version of you has always been there. It’s simply been wrapped and disguised as something you believed you needed to be. Your ego is the identity you constructed for yourself to navigate the world around you. It is a blend of your personality traits, behaviors, and habitual thought patterns that were shaped by the conditioning of your parents, society, family members, teachers, and even television and social media. It is the “socially acceptable” version of you formed by your conditioning that guides your actions so automatically that you rarely pause to question them. Your reactions to difficult situations, your recurring patterns, your habitual actions, and the beliefs you hold about yourself and the world around you…all of it is shaped by your ego. When your spiritual awakening begins, the beliefs you’ve long held about yourself, and your life start to unravel and crumble.  

Modern day commentary often portrays spiritual awakening as illumination, transcendence, clarity and bliss, and yes, those moments do eventually come. But awakening is not a single breakthrough or a one-time epiphany. It is a layered, years-long process of unfolding. More often than not, it begins with a dark downward decent before it leads you into genuine clarity and lasting inner peace. Spiritual awakening is a disintegration of the old you, and all your stored beliefs, hopes, wounds and thought patterns. Before the beauty of true expansion can emerge, the ego (the who you believe that you are) must begin to dissolve. It requires us to depart from our familiar ways of thinking, being and acting, often long before we feel ready, and often before we are willing. Every false belief you hold must fall away. Every wound you once bypassed must be fully felt and released. Every tear you held back, must loosen and find its way down your face. The scaffolding of your old belief system collapses, and you are left standing in the aftermath of what was once your life. This is Stage One of spiritual awakening. 

The ego, understood here not by its definition of arrogance, but as the organizing framework of who you believe yourself to be, relies heavily on the consistency of your thoughts, behaviors, external validation, and the core beliefs around which you have structured your life. You have carried these ideas about yourself for so long they operate automatically, unquestioned, and deeply ingrained. Spiritual awakening interrupts this autopilot feature within you and your world begins to change. For those of you who may be questioning whether this is happening to you, a few common signs of being at this stage of development include a growing sense of misalignment with the things normally do, heightened emotional sensitivity, existential questioning, disillusionment with previously motivating goals, or experiencing feelings of grief or sadness with no identifiable cause. For me, the desire to continue litigating (something I had loved for more than 20 years) completely dropped from my life. It no longer felt aligned with who I truly was inside. This left me panic stricken and frightened. How will I pay my expenses if I am not practicing law? Who I am at my core if I am no longer a practicing attorney? What will others think of me? What drove me to become this version of myself in the first place? These are only a few of the questions that consistently swirled in my mind. In the early stages of awakening, distress often emerges alongside an intensified search for meaning in your life. 

Anxiety and depressive symptoms are hallmark signs of spiritual awakening. When core assumptions about success, identity, relationships, or mortality are questioned, anxiety and/or depression often appear. The familiar narrative through which you understood yourself begins to dissolve, while a new, more integrated framework has yet to take shape. Awakening often comes with a fear of losing yourself, a loss of belonging, increased awareness of the body’s mortality, and a desire for meaning that transcends ordinary material metrics. A kind of internal purging takes place and the identity you once clung to slow begins to fall away. The ego relies on structure and continuity to sustain itself, yet it is this very dismantling that creates the conditions for a more integrated and authentic self to emerge. 

Stage One of spiritual awakening is not enlightenment. It is simply your “call to action”. It is your initiation into the process. It marks the beginning of an inner reorganization; a realignment between your internal truth and the external structure of your life. Though it may feel like senseless chaos, it is in fact your first and most essential movement towards becoming and reclaiming who you truly are. If you find yourself in this stage of awakening, it may not feel holy or beautiful at all. It can be disorienting, lonely, and highly disruptive to the rhythms of your everyday life. You may question your resilience, your choices, and even your sanity. But understand this, from the psychological, spiritual, or mystical perspective, this is the first and most important act of true personal transformation. It begins with the courage to ask yourself the hard questions and to listen quietly for the response. It requires the courage to release those parts of you that no longer align. But remember, this too shall pass. Spiritual awakening is not a single moment of realization. It is a process that unfolds in stages. Each stage presents its own challenges, but if you remain committed to the journey, enlightenment, love, honor, unity, peace and bliss await you on the other side. I can assure you, from someone who’s made it, that it will happen for you as well. 

If this blog resonated with you, the next installment will explore Stage Two. You are welcome to subscribe for continued discussion.